The Colonial Legacy

Abstract

Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) was Doris Lessing’s home for twenty-five years, and her feeling for Africa has deeply influenced her work. In Going Home (1957) she describes the house she lived in as a child. It was a ‘pole-and-dagga’ house, made of indigenous materials: a skeleton of wooden poles, mud walls, earth floor and a thatch of wild grasses. The walls were uneven, the roof leaked, and every year during the wet season a young tree grew up through the floor. When, after twenty years, her parents left the house, it became overrun with antheaps and then by fire, and subsided back into the bush. But it remained ‘home5 in Doris Lessing’s imagination. She writes: ‘I worked out recently that I have lived in over sixty houses, flats and rented rooms during the past twenty years and not in one of them have I felt at home…. The fact is, I don’t live anywhere; I never have since I left that first house on the kopje’ (Going Home, p. 37). The primitive nature of the house, the unceasing war against destructive ants and insects, the talk of the adults on the veranda, the sense of space and isolation — all these were potent factors in Doris Lessing’s childhood.