Shikasta

The cutting edge of her indictment was not the expected one: that the white barbarians had conquered by arms a defenceless and hospitable people who did not expect treachery and guile, but on the contrary offered their country freely and willingly to these tricksters - only to find themselves butchered, massacred, and then enslaved. The point that concerned her was this one; and the fact that it would have been better made in more modest surroundings conducive to such moderate reflections, should not prevent us from actually considering it in more modest surroundings.

In this vast territory, the whites had been given "self-government" by the home country Britain in 1924, except, that is, for two aspects. One was Defence - which did not concern her. But the other was "Native Affairs," and this was reserved by the British government on the specific and expressed ground that they, the British nation, had the responsibility to protect the conquered native populations, to see that their rights were not infringed, that they were not to suffer hardship as a result of their "tutelage" by the whites. For it goes without saying that the whites saw their rule as educational and benevolent. (I inscribe this second word with reluctance, with the reliance on your understanding, and the reflection that one word may have to stand for a variety of shades of circumstance.) From the very moment the white conquerors were given "self-government" they took away the black people's lands, rights, freedoms and made slaves and servants of them in every way, using every device of force and intimidation, contempt, trickery. But never did Britain protest. Never, not once. She did not raise her voice, even though throughout this entire period of ill-treatment by the white minority, the black peoples were expecting to be rescued by their "protecting" government overseas, and believed that this rescue did not occur only because their white friends overseas could not really know of their situation. Not that they desisted from sending every kind of representation to the Queen and to Parliament as well, and through every sort of intermediary. But why did not one British governor ever notice what was happening and protest and report to his home government that the main clause in this famous agreement giving self-government to the whites was not being honoured? Why did not help ever arrive to the enslaved and betrayed people of the then Southern Rhodesia? It was because of a very simple fact. Because the government in Britain, the people of Britain, did not remember, had not thought it important enough to take in, the key fact that self-government had been given to the white minority on condition the blacks were not ill-treated, and that they had the obligation to step in. And they had been able to forget, simply not to take notice, because of their inherent and inbred contempt for peoples other than themselves. Worse was to come. When Africa began stirring in her chains (a phrase which gave particular pleasure to Agent Tsi Kwang), when a small section of "liberal" whites began to protest in Britain about the treatment of the betrayed blacks, even they did not seem to know that all this time the government of Britain had the legal right to step in at any time in pursuance of duty. They did not seem to have absorbed the fact that during a period of several decades when the blacks had everything taken from them, Britain had had the legal and moral responsibility to step in and forcibly stop the whites from doing as they liked. And more, when the blacks began fighting back under the rule of the infamous Smith and his cohorts, and the British government was at last forced into some attitudes of responsibility, even then no one seemed able to remember that the culpable one was not Smith, nor even his predecessors, but Britain herself, who had betrayed the blacks for whom she was supposed to act as guardian against the whites. For Britain it was who had co

"And how was this possible, this extraordinary state of affairs?"

"I will tell you," called up this young soldier into the morning sunshine above the amphitheatre. "It was because the British people and their government could not see us, they always had a blind spot for us, we blacks did not count. If we were dogs and cats they would have seen us but we were black people. In the War of Liberation these philanthropists cried out when a white person got killed, but if fifty black people got killed, and even if they were children, they did not notice it. We were always nonpeople to them. Why should they care about broken promises?"

I describe this in more detail than perhaps is necessary for you who have always taken such an interest in Africa and who indeed as a young man spent two years in Mozambique with the Resistance Forces. I describe it because it has caused me to reflect on the extraordinary persistence of certain phenomena in a given geographical area. (I rely on our old friendship, hoping you will excuse a slackness of thought or of phraseology or perhaps even an apparent irrelevance to the true and real issues of the Liberation of the People, but it is nearly four in the morning, and outside H.Q. I can hear the sounds of our patrolling soldiers, our own, as it happens - but who can rely on the permanence of anything in these stirring times.) There is no end to the indictments against the white man. I say this and need say no more: one has only to mention any country and the stark facts and figures spring to mind. We did not need a "Trial"!

But this young woman was making a point others had not. "Stupidity," "ignorance," "arrogance," the crude self-satisfaction we have so often discussed - these are one thing, and these words or similar ones ended every one of the "indictments." But she was saying something more. How was it possible for a tract of country the size of Honan Province to be conquered by a handful of adventurers, and thereafter to be forgotten by the empire? Because that is what happened here. Brutality, yes. Ignorance, yes. Yes, yes, yes. But these have not been exactly unknown in history. But it was possible, in the British Empire, for a vast part of Africa to be physically conquered, put in the care of one hundred thousand whites - and the number of these never rose above half a million - and thereafter forgotten. Oh, governors were sent out - the type we know so well. I don't doubt that from time to time the British government was reminded by its financiers that there were interests there that needed guarding, but that was all. Serious undertakings, promises, obligations, were not reneged on so much as overlooked. To the extent that the Rhodesian crisis when it finally matured could be discussed for years and years, and the key fact never mentioned.

And now to my point about a continuation of a trend, a strand, a factor in a place, or among a people.

This "Trial" took place - as far as the participants were concerned - for only one reason: to air grievances and complaints against the erstwhile colonial oppressors. The Imperialists. That was its function. This girl made her case for four hours, calling in the aid of her white lawyer, and she was listened to with great attention. And yet her case got lost. It was because of the general atmosphere - that there was so much to listen to, to work through, in conditions of such discomfort. Her point, that a great empire was able to conquer and then to forget, or overlook, a territory the size of Honan was not taken in. Is not that extraordinary? In fact, what happened was what had always happened to that particular territory. Yet a few hundred miles to the north, in Northern Rhodesia, shortly to be Zambia, uprisings, and successful ones, took place among the black peoples against the whites, and the key emotional factor was precisely that the British people, in the person of Queen Victoria, had made promises which had not been kept. There, effective. In Rhodesia, not.