The Golden Notebook. Doris Lessing

better than others because of their race. The mass of the Africans up and down the continent were sardonically amused at the sight of their white masters crusading off to fight the racialist devil—those Africans with any education at all. They enjoyed the sight of the white baases so eager to go off and fight on any available battle-front against a creed they would all die to defend on their own soil. Right through the war, the correspondence columns of the papers were crammed with arguments about whether it was safe to put so much as a pop-gun into the hands of any African soldier since he was likely to turn it against his white masters, or to use this useful knowledge later. It was decided, quite rightly, that it was not safe.

      Here were two good reasons why the war had for us, from the very beginnings, its enjoyable ironies.

      (I am again falling into the wrong tone—and yet I hate that tone, and yet we all lived inside it for months and years, and it did us all, I am sure, a great deal of damage. It was self-punishing, a locking of feeling, an inability or a refusal to fit conflicting things together to make a whole; so that one can live inside it, no matter how terrible. The refusal means one can neither change nor destroy; the refusal means ultimately either death or impoverishment of the individual.)

      I will try to put down the facts merely. For the general population the war had two phases. The first when things were going badly and defeat was possible; this phase ended, finally, at Stalingrad. The second phase was simply sticking it out until victory.

      For us, and I mean by us the left and the liberals associated with the left, the war had three phases. The first was when Russia disowned the war. This locked the loyalties of us all—the half-hundred or hundred people whose emotional spring was a faith in the Soviet Union. This period ended when Hitler attacked Russia. Immediately there was a burst of energy.

      People are too emotional about communism, or rather, about their own Communist Parties, to think about a subject that one day will be a subject for sociologists. Which is, the social activities that go on as a direct or indirect result of the existence of a Communist Party. People or groups of people who don’t even know it have been inspired, or animated, or given a new push into life because of the Communist Party, and this is true of all countries where there has been even a tiny Communist Party. In our own small town, a year after Russia entered the war, and the left had recovered because of it, there had come into existence (apart from the direct activities of the Party which is not what I am talking about) a small orchestra, readers’ circles, two dramatic groups, a film society, an amateur survey of the conditions of urban African children which, when it was published, stirred the white conscience and was the beginning of a long-overdue sense of guilt, and half a dozen discussion groups on African problems. For the first time in its existence there was something like a cultural life in that town. And it was enjoyed by hundreds of people who knew of the communists only as a group of people to hate. And of course a good many of these phenomena were disapproved of by the communists themselves, then at their most energetic and dogmatic. Yet the communists had inspired them because a dedicated faith in humanity spreads ripples in all directions.

      For us, then (and this was true of all the cities up and down our part of Africa), a period of intense activity began. This phase, one of jubilant confidence ended sometime in 1944, well before the end of the war. This change was not due to an outside event, like a change in the Soviet Union’s ‘line’; but was internal, and self-developing, and, looking back, I can see its beginning almost from the first day of the establishment of the ‘communist’ group. Of course all the discussion clubs, groups, etc., died when the Cold War began and any sort of interest in China and the Soviet Union became suspect instead of fashionable. (The purely cultural organizations like orchestras, drama groups and so on continued). But when ‘left’ or ‘progressive’ or ‘communist’ feeling—whichever word is right, and at this distance it’s hard to say—was at its height in our town, the inner group of people who had initiated it were already falling into inertia, or bewilderment or at best worked out of a sense of duty. At the time, of course, no one understood it; but it was inevitable. It is now obvious that inherent in the structure of a Communist Party or group is a self-dividing principle. Any Communist Party anywhere exists and perhaps even flourishes by this process of discarding individuals or groups; not because of personal merits or demerits, but according to how they accord with the inner dynamism of the Party at any given moment. Nothing happened in our small, amateur and indeed ludicrous group that hadn’t happened right back with the Iskra group in London at the beginning of the century, at the start of organized communism. If we had known anything at all about the history of our own movement we would have been saved from the cynicism, the frustration, the bewilderment—but that isn’t what I want to say now. In our case, the inner logic of ‘centralism’ made the process of disintegration inevitable because we had no links at all with what African movements there were—that was before the birth of any Nationalist movement, before any kind of trade union. There were then a few Africans who met secretly under the noses of the police but they didn’t trust us, because we were white. One or two came to ask our advice on technical questions but we never knew what was really in their minds. The situation was that a group of highly militant white politicos, equipped with every kind of information about organizing revolutionary movements were operating in a vacuum because the black masses hadn’t begun to stir, and wouldn’t for another few years. And this was true of the Communist Party in South Africa too. The battles and conflicts and debates inside our group which might have driven it into growth, had we not been an alien body, without roots, destroyed us very fast. Inside a year our group was split, equipped with sub-groups, traitors, and a loyal hard core whose personnel, save for one or two men, kept changing. Because we did not understand the process, it sapped our emotional energy. But while I know that the process of self-destruction began almost at birth, I can’t quite pinpoint that moment when the tone of our talk and behaviour changed. We were working as hard, but it was to the accompaniment of a steadily deepening cynicism. And our jokes, outside the formal meetings, were contrary to what we said, and thought we believed in. It is from that period of my life that I know how to watch the jokes people make. A slightly malicious tone, a cynical edge to a voice, can have developed inside ten years into a cancer that has destroyed a whole personality. I’ve seen it often, and in many other places than political or communist organizations.

      The group I want to write about became a group after a terrible fight in ‘The Party’. (I have to put it in inverted commas because it was never officially constituted, more a kind of emotional entity.) It split in two, and over something not very important—so unimportant I can’t even remember what it was, only the horrified wonder we all felt that so much hatred and bitterness could have been caused by a minor question of organization. The two groups agreed to continue to work together—so much sanity remained to us; but we had different policies. I want to laugh out of a kind of despair even now—it was all so irrelevant, the truth was the group was like a group of exiles, with exiles’ fevered bitterness over trifles. And we were all, twenty or so of us, exiles; because our ideas were so far in advance of the country’s development. Yes, now I remember that the quarrel was because one half of the organization complained that certain members were not ‘rooted in the country’. We split on these lines.

      And now for our small sub-group. There were three men from the aircamps, who had known each other first at Oxford—Paul, Jimmy and Ted. Then George Hounslow, who worked on the roads. Then Willi Rodde, the refugee from Germany. Myself. Maryrose who had actually been born in the country. I was the odd man out in this group because I was the only one who was free. Free in the sense that I had chosen to come to the Colony in the first place and could leave it when I liked. And why did I not leave it? I hated the place, and had done so since I first came to it in 1939 to marry and become a tobacco farmer’s wife. I met Steven in London the year before, when he was on holiday. The day after I arrived on the farm I knew I liked Steven but could never stand the life. But instead of returning to London I went into the city and became a secretary. For years my life seems to have consisted of activities I began to do provisionally, temporarily, with half a heart, and which I then stayed with. For instance I became ‘a communist’ because the left people were the only people in the town with any kind of moral energy, the only people who took it for granted that the colour bar was monstrous. And yet there were always two personalities in me, the ‘communist’ and Anna, and Anna judged the communist all the