"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.
Well, I at least find myself reflecting on this point. A geographical area keeps a certain flavour, which manifests in all its happenings, its events, its history. I cite for instance the lamented Soviet Union, or Russia, where events occur and continue to repeat themselves, over and over, regardless of whether that vast land is called Russia or the Soviet Union, or its dominant ways of thought are this or that or the other. And of course there are other examples we may easily think of.
I sometimes wonder if this thought may not be usefully taught to children at the start of their "geography lessons." Or would one call it history? If I seem to ramble, put it down to the long night of anxious wakefulness. The" dawn is here and I shall not rest yet, for I wish to finish this long letter to you; the courier will leave this evening.
I return to the amphitheatre: Africa was the agenda for several days.
Meanwhile, in the camp itself, it is clear that the organisation was suffering.
Everyone was really hungry, lacking sleep, hot, dusty. By now nearly all of them flocked to the coast for the midday hours, and of course this made them even more tired.
There was by now a feeling of urgency. With the full moon blazing down, so that the thousands on the tiers were fully visible to each other, and the torches almost unnecessary, the contenders dealt fast with: the ruining of the Pacific, the imposition there of alien ways on ancient and peaceful societies, the forcible imposition of Christianity, the destruction of islands in the interests of western industry and agriculture, the use of the Pacific for nuclear weapons tests as if this ocean belonged to Europe. They dealt with: European rule over subjugated peoples in the Middle East, the irreconcilable promises made to Arabs and Jews, the arrogance displayed... "contempt, arrogance, stupidity, ignorance."