Winter in July [Paperback]

Nobel prize winner, Doris Lessing has written extensively about Africa and I keep alighting in charity shops on new editions of various of her collections of short stories. These are mostly related to Africa under colonial rule. She spares no one in these stories. The cocktail set are mercilessly exposed, but the quieter, less easily parodied people of Rhodesia as it was, are equally well delineated. In one story in this collection `Little Tembi, a kind, well-organised practical woman opens a clinic for natives on her farm, and treats a baby, bringing him back from almost certain death. She has yet to have children of her own and little Tembi becomes special for her, for a while - until she has her own children to look after. But Tembi doesn't understand. The missus was always his missus and he cannot go back to being just another child on the farm. The relationship between them is now all one way - Tembi appealing for the love he has always been given, and the white people seeing only a child who has forgotten his place. As Tembi grows, his heart-break turns to resentment and there are incidents that the whites cannot ignore.

These stories are have a kind of merciless truthfulness about them that often discomforts or unsettles the reader and they are often about the incongruity of white-black relationships, but also about well-meaning people getting everything wrong. Not because of unkindness, or not often that, but a kind of incomprehension that black people have their own ways of life that are incompatible with the regimes the whites want to impose. In Tembi's story the white farmer wishes to punish him, for falling asleep and letting the calves roam into a vegetable patch. The farmer knows he cannot leave this to the boy's father, for, as Lessing has casually informed us, the Natives do not beat their children.

In the title story of this collection, a strange relationship has grown up between two half-brothers and the wife of one of them. When the husband enlists to go to war, the half-brother and the wife become lovers. There is a good deal of complaisance, easy morals, in some of these stories, as if out here, in a strange, hot land, one's blood is also heated and one is allowed to slip, yet not fall. Methods of child-rearing, marriages that have grown stale, marriages kept alive by other liaisons (though I for one have never understood how that's supposed to work), children's restricted lives, tensions between employees and employers - the stories are deeply involving, deeply intriguing about the now, thankfully, lost time in history. It's important that we remember what a mixed blessing was created by some elements of colonialism, and because of it, how impossible it seems to do anything decisive with the aim of helping to bring freedom, prosperity and peace to Africa.