Imprinted Life discussion

Going Home by Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing is the author's perceptions of an altered Zimbabwe to which she has returned after six years away.

Beginning - Ch 4:
Set in the mid-1950s during the period of Central African Federation of Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia, and Nyasaland, the memoir is partly drawn from her writing for the newspaper "African Weekly". Lessing nevertheless displays an appreciation for the natural landscape of Africa, evident in the first paragraph, a description of dawn as she flies over her childhood home of British colonial days. After having stayed a long stay in England, she, now a journalist and Communist, finds a political tension among the British, the African nationalists, and the Afrikaner settlers, an emerging industrialization, and an entrenched apartheid. Her detailed description of the construction of her family's mud-walled, ant-etched, thatched home on a windy hill is marvelous. She remembers dialogues with family, friends, and strangers and recounts experiences in Umtali (Mutare, Zimbabwe) and Salisbury (the capital city Harare, Zimbabwe). To what extent the mores of Central Africa have altered occurs to her during her readjustment to everyday African life. Education, interracial social relations, bureaucracy, advancement, and civil liberties come within her purview.

I love Lessing's work & her life-especially her attitudes & choices-is fascinating to me. I'll get the book within the next few days & begin reading.

Yes; I read Doris Lessing's sci-fi Shikasta a long time ago and admired the story. Going Home is completely different.

For me, I came at her the opposite way: all her realistic fiction first & then Shikasta. Quite a shock for me at first!

Chapter 5-End:
In 1956, the political journalist, then Communist, Doris Lessing (now age 91) revisited Central Africa (Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia) after six years away in England to get an insider's, updated view of the apartheid society in which she grew up and, if Prohibited Immigrants are allowed, to visit South Africa. The biggest problem, the Land Apportionment Act, transferred lands near the urban centre and urban employment from natives to europeans as well as mandating other hardships. She compared the society, economy, education, and stability in those countries. Eleven years and twenty-six years later before each reprint, she reviewed her beliefs from those years, changing some, clinging to others, such as this one:

The price of liberty is, more than ever, eternal vigilance, which is why I think the most valuable citizens any country can possess are the troublemakers, the public nuisances, the fighters of small, apparently unimportant battles. No government, no political party anywhere care a damn about the individual. That is not their business. So I believe in the ginger-groups, the temporarily associated minorities, the Don Quixotes, the takers-of-stands-on-principle, the do-gooders and the defenders of lost causes. Luckily, there are plenty of them. So--to the barricades, citizens! If we don't fight every inch of the way, we'll find ourselves with our numbers tattooed on our wrists yet...1967

I wonder whether Lessing still agrees with that statement?