I'm now reading the Lessing book, Going Home (1957). I feel the book has the quality of being a bit dated, ideologically, at least from my perspective. She really is very enmeshed in identity politics, and it seems to come across as a concern for 'authenticity' in the Sartrean moral sense, which I feel is incredibly dated, too. 'Authenticity' = one must obey what is true to one's essence (which, suprise, surprise, is defined by ethnic identity).
But where does this ideology lead but to an entrenchment of roles along the lines of ethnicity.
"Africa belongs to the Africans" and Europe belongs to the Europeans is a rather savage line of thinking.
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There is another problem with Lessing's approach. Whatever it might have been strategically designed to do, the approach that objectifies and positions groups of people to experience the moral contempt of the rest of the world creates a class of untermenschen. This outcome could hardly be other than deplorable.
If you give a generation of readers the idea that the situation and experience of those whites living in Africa necessarily falls under the rubric of "self-pity", then you do exactly what is required to dehumanize them.
Any emotions they have, any sense of sadness, regret, terrible loss, will only be viewed henceforth as meaningless self-pity.
To put two and two together: it has been my common experience to find a lot of people behaving like robots in my company. I'm the colonial in their midst, to whom they are required to show little empathy. Therefore, they are devoid of human sensibility, the human capacity to empathise, and above all, pity. Whereas they act as if they already know me as well as they would like to, they do not take time to find out what I actually think. My introduction to the world of those who think in morally correct terms has been an introduction to a world of zombies.
This is what it is like when somebody doesn't empathise with you as a human being. You don't see the humanity in them, either. (And neither can you, for humanity is not there to be seen.)
After a lot of years of this, I joined the military with the desire to kill somebody -- anybody, as long as I could get the accumulated tension of being so dehumanized out of my system. (This is the effect of being dehumanized over a long period of time - you learn to expect very little from others apart from a basic principle of kill or be killed.)
I became rigidly rational and aware of my dire circumstances. I would save myself at any cost to anybody else at all.
I also knew, by this time, that I had experienced a lot -- a lot of stuff that was considered meaningless or trivial. It wasn't -- and my certain knowledge that I had experienced a great deal of subhuman treatment made me hold others to the standard at least to which they had held me.
Whenever tears emerged, I would look at them, having learned to tolerate pain by being harsh-faced-- and apply to my enemies the same principle I'd learned to apply to myself.
Having adjusted to stoicism as a cultural norm, I would say, "What idiotic self-pity!"
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Should this surprise you,?
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