“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.
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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.
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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.”