Nobel prize-winning novelist Doris Lessing, who died in 2013 aged 94.
“Classrooms without textbooks, or an atlas, or even a map pinned to a
wall. A school where the teachers beg to be sent books to tell them how
to teach, they being only 18 or 19 themselves. I tell ... how everybody
begs for books: ‘Please send us books.’”
These were among the late Doris Lessing’s opening remarks when, aged 88,
she became the oldest person to accept the Nobel prize for literature.
The novelist was recalling a visit in the early 1980s to a school in
Zimbabwe, a country where she lived for a quarter of a century, which
she explored in vivid prose and to which she will now bestow a
posthumous gift.
More than 3,000 books from Lessing’s personal collection are to be
donated to the country’s leading public library in Harare. The bequest
includes biographies, histories, reference books, poetry and fiction. It
has been welcomed by public services strained by years of underfunding;
many libraries in Zimbabwe have no budget to buy new books.
Bernard Manyenyeni, the mayor of Harare, told the Herald newspaper: “It
is most heartening to hear that Doris Lessing, with this magnificent
gesture, has taken her love for this country beyond her death.” Lessing
was born in Tehran but grew up in Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia),
where she lived from 1924 to 1949 after her family settled there to farm
maize. She returned in 1956, but was declared a prohibited migrant
after speaking out about the white minority regime. She was allowed back
in 1982 and after 1988 she nurtured two initiatives for reading and
learning through libraries. Lessing referred to the people of Zimbabwe
as “the most passionate readers anywhere in the world”.
In 2007 she famously came back to her home in West Hampstead, north
London, carrying heavy bags of shopping, to find her doorstep besieged
by camera crews. “Oh, Christ,” she said, on learning that she had won
the Nobel prize. She died last November aged 94, having written more
than 50 novels. Her first, The Grass is Singing, is set in Zimbabwe.
Earlier this month staff from her publisher, HarperCollins, and the
charity Book Aid International spent a day sorting and packing up her
library. They described finding books not just in every room but in
every space +where shelves could be fitted, in hallways, under stairs —
“there were books everywhere”.
A member of her family, who did not wish to be named, said: “The
donation is being made by various beneficiaries under the will. The
estate and the beneficiaries have responded to a request from the Africa
Community Publishing and Development Trust, one of the agencies she
worked with in Zimbabwe, that books not needed for a special collection
at the University of East Anglia be brought to Zimbabwe in honour of her
memory and legacy in the country.” Christopher Bigsby, a friend of 30
years and professor of American studies at UEA, to which Lessing left
her books, said: “Sometimes books belong to other people than those who
own them. In this case, they are finding their way to the place where
she herself had her imagination fired by the books sent out to her from
England and where others can now have that same liberating experience.”
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