Shikasta

They wondered, they marvelled, and at evening they saw these sticks of people, so encumbered with their clothes, standing stiffly upright, their arms down by their sides, and emitting sounds... but what sounds could these be? There was no music in it, no rhythm, it was like the howling of hyenas.

But. There were the horses. These people did not know horses except by rumour. The variety of "deer" used to pull the wagons intrigued them, and the way they were ridden made them wish to do the same. And there were guns, which could kill at a distance. First they laughed, then admired; and only later were they afraid.

When emissaries from the invading column came to ask for the use of their land, permission was readily given. The concept of ownership of land was unknown to them: land belonged to itself, was the substance of the people and animals who lived on it, was saturated by the Great Spirit who was the source of all life.

And within a couple of years, they found their traditional lands and hunting grounds gone from them, and themselves being chased away, like animals. But above all, they were treated with a coldness and contempt which they did not understand, had no experience of, and which shrivelled the spirits of these amiable and warmhearted people. They had as little defence against this withering thing as "primitive" peoples in other parts of the world had against the diseases the white people brought with them.

Their wise men and women did not agree about what course was to be taken, or even about the probable outcome. That they had to fight for what had been stolen from them was clear. It was as if the invasion of these aliens had stu

The subjected ones, seeing that they would shortly have nothing left, rose in rebellion. The intruders, using the technology of their foreign culture, suppressed the rebellion with extremes of cruelty and ruthlessness.

It is necessary to describe the cold distaste and dislike felt by the whites for the blacks, which remained their characteristic until the time came - shortly, but not until the culture they dominated was smashed, in ruins - for them to be thrown out again. Nothing is more astonishing than this characteristic, contemptuous dislike, described again and again by the conquered, and by many, too, of the conquerors, for not all the whites despised the blacks, some liked and admired them, though these were thought of as traitors by their own people.

We may perhaps find illumination in the work of one of Shikasta's own experts. (Marcel Proust, sociologist and anthropologist.) A servant of a rich family is ordered to prepare a fowl for the evening meal. She is chasing this fowl around a courtyard, muttering Filthy Beast, Disgusting Animal, and similar imprecations, while she catches the bird and kills it.

So, too, a torturer new to his job, who has to inflict pain and humiliation on some person he knows nothing of save that this is the enemy: there in front of him or her stands, or lies, or sits a puzzled frightened creature, just like himself, but there is a remedy: the torturer will work himself up to the task by calling the victim all the frightful things his tongue can come by. Soon this individual exactly like himself is a disgusting beast, a filthy animal, and the work can begin. One might describe this process as a tax exacted by fellow-feeling (SOWF) on natures not yet entirely brutalised.

And thus with the conquerors of a country, who will persuade themselves that these people whose land they are in the process of stealing from them are dirty, primitive, cruel, communists, fascists, capitalists, nigger lovers, white trash, or anything else that comes to mind.

Thus it is that seldom in Shikastan history has any race or people conquered a pleasant civilised and amiable race of people quite competent to manage their own lives.

The white people who overran Southern Continent I, using every kind of trickery, lie, brutality, barbarity, cruelty, and greed to grab everything in sight, could never speak to a black person without a cold cutting edge of contempt, due to him or her as a backward and unenlightened person.

Their religion reinforced their disabilities. Of all the major religions the most self-righteous, the most inflexible, the least capable of self-examination, this religion of the Northwest fringes, imposed often by force on peoples in perfect rapport with themselves and their beliefs as children of the Great Spirit, was officered by individuals incapable of doubt as to their own capacities and rights. To add to the confusion and damage they caused, some were often of great bravery and dedication, with the utmost probity, and capacity - not to say thirst - for self-sacrifice. That they, too, were victims, of a religion as bigoted as Shikasta has ever seen, does not aid the chronicler of these events.

But whatever the reasons, whatever the motives, whatever the excuses and the rationalisations, the dominating characteristic of these conquerors was their armour of righteousness, their conviction that they were in the right. Because of their empire. Because of their religion.

Thirty years after this particular geographical area was subjugated, this was the scene: land that had been the home of people whose living on it had left no mark, no signs of depredation, had been parcelled out among white farmers there on favourable terms for the specific purpose of keeping it out of the hands of the blacks, who had been moved, by gun and by whip, into special reservations of the poorest land, from which they were forbidden to move unless to seek work. Great farms of many thousands of acres were in the hands of single families, and were already largely denuded of trees often cut for mine furnaces, were scarred by mine workings and prospectings, threatened by erosion, swept continually by fires.

On each farm were "compounds" of black farm workers, forced out to work by the imposition of taxes. The black people could be only labourers and servants.

Their masters represented extremes from their own countries in the Northwest fringes. They might be the most enterprising, who needed more scope for energy and talent than an increasingly overpopulated area allowed them. They might be criminals hoping to escape notice, or people with criminal tendencies knowing that there would be room for these here. They might be too stupid or disabled to compete among their own kind. All these people, good or bad, competent or not, lived at a level higher than they could possibly have done in their countries of origin, and many became extremely wealthy.

Let us eavesdrop on a moment of peculiar clarity among the subjected.

The place is a white farm, and the black compound on that farm. This is a haphazard collection of mud huts thatched with straw, leaking, tumbledown, squalid: a pathetic version of the villages used by these peoples in their natural state.

A big fire burns in the centre of this compound, as burns always in the villages, but there are subsidiary fires as well, and not only for the purposes of cooking: it is not one tribe here, but several, for workers have come from over a wide area containing many tribes. A dozen languages are being spoken, and this compound, based on the village whose nature it is to hold people together in a whole, is riven into factions, sometimes hostile. By one of the subsidiary fires a group of young men crouch, listening to an older man, who before the white man's coming was a chief. A young man on the edge of this group softly taps a drum. Other drums sound from other parts of the compound. From the bush all about come the sounds of insects and sometimes animals, but the process is already well advanced that will shortly clear the area of its stock of natural animals and birds: species are becoming extinct.