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348 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1950
"People did ask, cursorily, why the murderer had given himself up. There was not much chance of escape. But he did have a sporting chance. He could have run to the hills and hidden for a while. Or he could have slipped over the border into Portuguese territory. Then the District Native Commissioner, at a sundowner party, said that it was perfectly understandable. If one knew anything about the history of the country, or had read any of the memoirs or letters of the old missionaries and explorers, one would have come across accounts of the society Lobengula ruled. The laws were strict: everyone knew what they could or could not do. If someone did an unforgivable thing, like touching one of the King's women, he would submit fatalistically to punishment, which was likely to be impalement over an ant-heap on a stake, or something equally unpleasant. 'I have done wrong, and I know it,' he might say 'therefore let me be punished.' Well, it was the tradition to face punishment, and really there was something rather fine about it. Remarks like these are forgiven from native commissioners, who have to study languages, customs, and so on; although it is not done to say things natives do are 'fine'. (Yet the fashion is changing: it is permissible to glorify the old ways sometimes, providing one says how depraved the natives have become since.)Here we have the assumption of white authority and expertise, exotification of 'native tradition', followed by a confession of ignorance that must be diffused with assertions of indifference and contempt.
"So that aspect of the affair was dropped, yet it is not in the least interesting, for Moses might not have been a Matabele at all. He was in Mashonaland; though of course natives do wander all over Africa. He might have come from anywhere: Portuguese territory, Nyasaland, the Union of South Africa. And it is a long time since the days of the great king Lobengula. But then native commissioners tend to think in terms of the past"
"Like most South Africans, Dick did not like mission boys, they 'knew too much'. And in any case they should not be taught to read and write: they should be taught the dignity of labour and general usefulness to the white man."and
"She said again sharply, her voice rising: 'I said, get back to work.'Mary's steadily disintegrating mental health is the dynamic moving the plot throughout. Lessing keeps the focus on her and most often takes her perspective. She carefully and cleverly marks this foregrounding, for example by suddenly giving Moses a name for the first time when Mary is shaken out of her lassitude by the sudden, deeply uncomfortable awareness of his humanity, when he waits for her to be out of sight before completing the task of washing himself. Mary is unable to process this pivotal revelation. Although she is deeply unsympathetic, the reader is able to empathise with her and see her as a damaged personality locked into a situation that is hostile to her fragile, confused sense of herself.
At this he stopped still, looked at her squarely and said in his own dialect which she did not understand, 'I want to drink.'
'Don't talk that gibberish to me,' she snapped. She looked around for the bossboy who was not in sight.
The man said, a halting ludicrous manner, 'I... want... water.' He spoke in English, and suddenly smiled and opened his mouth and pointed his finger down his throat. She could hear the other natives laughing a little from where they stood on the mealie-dump. Their laughter, which was good-humoured, drove her suddenly mad with anger[...] most white people think it is 'cheek' if a native speaks English. She said, breathless with anger, 'Don't speak English to me,' and then stopped. This man was shrugging and smiling and turning his eyes up to heaven as if protesting that she had forbidden him to speak his own language, and then hers - so what was he to speak? That lazy insolence stung her into inarticulate rage[...] involuntarily she lifted her whip and brought it down across his face in a vicious swinging blow."