African Laughter

by Doris Lessing

  Next morning, sober, he will be beside himself with rage. ‘I’ll kill them, I’ll kill them,’ he will certainly say, banging his fists against the wall, weeping.

  Then our party goes to a table. A Zimbabwean evening. Just like a Southern Rhodesian evening. I sat there, the women sat there, while the men got drunker and drunker. They had long ago passed that alas very short period when drunks are inventively funny, wondrously witty, and had become stupid. How many hundreds of evenings had I, a young woman, sat literally stupefied with boredom, swearing I would leave this country, leave it if it was the last thing I did. ‘I’ve got to get out of here or it’ll do me in…’ Boredom, obliterating boredom…

  THE RESTAURANT

  This is the Jameson Hotel, which was inter-racial years before Liberation, and has always been a good-natured place. In the restaurant a husband is urging his wife to order food she has never tried. ‘You can’t eat only sadza,’ says he, like a school master. She is a fat woman, laughing helplessly as she points to an item on the menu, then covers her mouth with both palms and sits shaking. The waiter stands smiling, other waiters interrupt their work to watch, the restaurant manager comes over. Everyone, black and white, is involved in this moment of social evolution.

  She tastes a cheese dish, wrinkles up her face, shakes her head then shudders with her shoulders, so that a collar of tangled necklaces flash and tinkle. But we can see she is committed on principle to liking only sadza, and we do not have to take the rejection seriously. A waiter removes the cheese dish with a great philosophical shrug. Another dish is set before her. She pokes her finger into it, rolling her eyes. ‘No, no, you must use a fork,’ says her husband, with appropriate severity. She compromises with a spoon, takes up a little edge of whatever it is, lifts it to her lips, makes a big astonished face, purses her mouth, shakes her head, sits back wheezing out laughter and pressing the napkin to her whole face.

  By now everybody is laughing.

  The waiter sets down a plate of pudding, with a flourish and a last-ditch gesture that involves us all. Her eyes stretched wide, she stands bravely at the precipice edge, she plunges in a spoon, she takes it in slow jerks to her mouth, groaning with apprehension, she encloses the spoon with her lips, she tilts back her head and allows a look of ecstasy to overcome her, she removes the spoon from her mouth, and uses it to eat up her pudding very fast, with little cries of appreciation, while the waiters reel about laughing. ‘My dear,’ says her husband smiling, ‘you are a very foolish woman.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I am a foolish woman, my dear, but I will have some more of whatever it is. I like it.’

  IN A POET’S HOUSE

  A house in Harare. A black poet is married to a white woman. French. She has a job in the university, works long hours. He has no job. She is cooking a meal for eight people, and more keep arriving. I ask if I can help her. ‘No, it is her work, she must do it,’ says the husband.

  A writer exiled from Kenya has just arrived in Zimbabwe. He has the restless aggressive humour so useful for his situation and is being funny about the anomalies and injustices in Kenya.

  Present, too, is a man of about thirty, ex-freedom fighter, who, it is rumoured, will be the Minister for Arts. He is also being funny, joking with the host that if Zimbabwe goes along like Kenya, it will not be long before he as Minister will be ordering his arrest, because a certain new periodical he works for shows signs of seditious thoughts.

  ‘Seditious thoughts,’ says he, ‘we can’t have that, boy. Better watch those seditious thoughts or we’ll have to take steps.’

  Two white journalists have just been arrested, no explanation given: they work for The Herald. This is not the first time journalists have been in trouble. We joke at intervals all evening about the journalists and the degree of their seditious thoughts.

  When the meal is served by the hostess, who is tired, and–it is easy to see–pretty angry, she waits on us all.

  ‘It is our African custom,’ says the poet, when I comment.

  ‘Then I don’t think much of it,’ I say.

  ‘Seditious thoughts,’ says he, and we all laugh again.

  It was not good laughter.

  Again I was thinking how much everyone was in shock, the post-war shock which, not long afterwards, I was to experience in Peshawar among the Mujahideen, among the refugees. And where else? Yes, it was long ago, and I was on a railway platform in Berlin, at night, with a friend. Suddenly we realized that all the people waiting for the train were men, and all were cripples from the War. (That is, the Second World War.) All were drunk, black drunk, sick drunk, and they were full of anger, but like a volcano that has grown a crust of cold ash. My friend and I had been laughing, talking–and then heard how uncomfortably our voices echoed here, along the bitter wintry platform. We saw these angry men, and one said, in English, ‘All right, laugh. If you’ve nothing better to do. You’ll learn better.’

  Quite late arrived two Freedom Fighters–guerillas–Boys from the Bush–‘terrs’–Terrorists–heroes. They were related to one of the guests, and had been put in a rehabilitation camp outside Harare. They wore new civilian clothes, suitable for work in offices, which is what they were being trained for. They were drunk. Soon everyone was unhappily drunk.

  THE ACCIDENT

  Again we were on the road Harare to Mutare, and the car was crammed with people and with suitcases. After we had stopped at a roadside delicatessen stall, the car was even fuller, with hams, smoked meats, sausages, bacon. To get food of anywhere near this quality in London, you would have to go to specialist food shops. The Coffee Farmer was doing the driving. We went on safely until ahead of us on the almost empty road appeared a bus, or coach, so crowded with young black men it seemed they would start falling out of the windows. They were the police off to a football match. There is a rule, not in any rulebook, known by every driver in Zimbabwe, which is that one does not overtake if there is a turning off to the right, because drivers so often forget to use mirrors, and do not signal–but it is hard always to remember it. We rapidly caught up with this rollicking-along bus, and ahead was a turn to the right, with a culvert beyond that. We accelerated to pass as the bus, which had not signalled, turned to enter the right-hand road. Our driver tried to swerve, but the culvert was in the way. The bus, having seen us, ought to have turned sharp in a U-turn behind us, but it straightened and hit us to the rear, pretty hard. Our car fell on its right side, was pushed along by the bus a few yards, then turned over on its back. Inside the car everything went into slow motion. I was aware of how I slid, carefully, as if my intelligence was directing it, into the well of the car, bumping my head. The doors burst open in showers of glass. I crawled out, wondering how many of our bones had been broken, asking, ‘Is everyone all right?’ I stood by the wrecked car, listening to one of the little girls in the back calling, ‘Mummy, Mummy, are you all right?’

  In no time we were all sitting by the car, on the tarmac. Our wrecked car and the police bus that stood askew but upright across the road were the only vehicles in sight. Groups of policemen were wandering about, shocked, as we were. Then we got cautiously to our feet, dazed, behaving according to our natures. The driver, as famed for his stiff-upper-lip as for his many lucky survivals in accidents and dangerous escapades, was standing as if to attention by the car, announcing, when asked, that he was fine. In fact he was the worst damaged of us all, with a broken shoulder. The young woman, mother of the two girls, spends her life running things, cushioning tender human beings from harsh events, being attentive to everyone’s needs. She was smartly lifting suitcases to the edge of the road, getting things into order again. The little girls were crying, ‘Why me? Why me?’ as we all do the first time disaster strikes, when we have not yet learned how often life moves from expressing itself through statistics–that is, other people–to oneself. As for me, I was leaning against the car while my head swam, clutching my handbag, and thinking, ‘Well at least I don’t have to go through all that nonsense of filling
in forms for passport, driving licence, cheque cards; I haven’t lost lists of addresses and telephone numbers.’ I was fine too.

  A car came travelling fast from the Mutare direction. It stopped, and out jumped a woman who turned out to be a doctor. She exclaimed we were all lucky to be alive, a fact we had not yet taken in. ‘And you weren’t even wearing seatbelts,’ she deplored, unable to believe in our stupidity. She shooed us to the opposite side of the road, just in case one of the rare cars did come along. There we obediently went, and she swiftly examined us, while the thirty or so young men who had filled the festive bus came crowding around us. Now they knew none of them was hurt, they were full of concern for us. They were not drunk, as everyone assumed they must have been, when told about the accident. They had been full of high spirits, non-alcoholic. Now they clucked, and shook their heads and demanded sympathetically, were we hurt. ‘What a bloody stupid question,’ snapped the driver: by now blood streamed from us all. ‘Are you all right?’ they asked me, laying affectionate hands on shoulder, arm, back, and patting me here and there, as if trying to push back into place any dislodged bits. By this time I had a bump on my forehead like those volcanic cones you see in comic strips, with lightning flashes radiating from it. A black eye still had to reach perfection, and one foot was painful. As for ribs, bruised, they had not yet made themselves felt. ‘Of course I am not all right,’ I said irritably, ready to engage in serious discussion. Some of them were crowding around the little girls, who screamed, ‘Keep your hands off me, keep off.’ This was not because they were from South Africa, for they came from a good liberal household, but because they were bruised. But the young men’s feelings were hurt. As for their mother, by now hardly able to stand, she reasoned with them, thus: ‘But you must see that it’s a silly thing to say.’

  The doctor said she would take us to the nearest hospital, and then put in a report to the police station. At this the young men looked put out, since they were the police station. It was agreed by the driver and the doctor that the police would hush it all up and the report would be ignored. As turned out to be the case. The doctor, a missionary doctor, recently had had to certify the death of one of the tourists murdered by the Koreans, or Fifth Brigade. She was wonderfully kind, but irritated, the way people are who spend their lives treating humanity for wounds so often earned by their own folly. Our driver, though in a bad way, insisted on staying at the site of the accident, to establish details for insurance. I do not remember being driven to the hospital, for by then the pain had begun to take us all over.

  What happened in the hospital was a little encapsulation of various trends in Zimbabwe that year, that time–then.

  THE COUNTRY HOSPITAL

  It was a Saturday, and there was only a skeleton staff at the hospital. It is a country hospital, of that homely kind, liked by everyone, which we have so efficiently got rid of in Britain. Our doctor said she would wait with us until the doctor on call had arrived. She could not treat us herself. Protocol. We were admitted by two friendly black nurses, taking temperatures, filling in forms, blotting up the blood that flowed from us all. We staggered, and limped about, and laughed, because we were such an absurd sight, particularly me. I had not yet seen my face, with its Vesuvius bump and its blue-black eye. The little girls had finished crying and wailing and were every inch worthy of their stiff-upper-lip heritage. Then arrived from the scene of the crash the Coffee Farmer, who by now was evidently in bad pain, but he was not going to admit it. The black doctor arrived, driving rapidly and scattering gravel through the flowering bushes that surrounded the hospital. He skidded, and parked with an elegant swoop, while the missionary doctor sighed and said, ‘Oh look at that, hasn’t anybody got any sense?’

  Then, a problem: an atmosphere of difficulty and suspense. The black nurses were afraid we would not allow a black doctor to examine us. This said everything about the problems this hospital had to deal with every day. They were tactful, charming, and relieved when the little girls were taken by their mother into the examining room. Meanwhile the white doctor was telling the black doctor that in her opinion only the man was seriously hurt, and he was–and she lowered her voice–a difficult patient. The two professionals exchanged looks, and then smiles, brows raised. She went off saying she would telephone a certain number in Mutare for us, so that we could be collected. She left us grateful. As I was taken off for antitetanus and penicillin injections, I saw a black nurse trying to get the ‘difficult’ patient to sit down and rest. ‘But I’m perfectly all right,’ he kept announcing, striding about the room.

  I was in a side room with an old nurse, a fat black woman, all competence and comfort. We instantly established a woman-to-woman rapport, and as I took my clothes off, she prodded me for breaks, and we talked. Politics…at once, politics, just like everybody at that time. A young nurse came into the room, and the old woman asked her to go and attend to the others, and firmly shut the door after her. She waited a moment, opened the door again to check, shut it, lowered her voice. ‘It’s dangerous to talk in front of the young ones, they report you to the Party,’ she said. She then began a fast monologue of complaint, which I at once recognized as the one I would be likely to hear from other people, like herself. While she skilfully bandaged and injected, she said Mugabe was no good, he wanted everyone to be communists, and she was religious. Bishop Muzorewa was good, and so was Nkomo–they would not frighten the whites. She said that ‘we’–meaning the two of us–could remember when things were very good, life was sweet, but now everything was bad, the War had been terrible. The whites enjoyed the War, for it was their war. The blacks suffered in the War, but the whites didn’t care about that, and the Comrades didn’t care either.

  I said, as it seemed I was already doing several times a day, that I simply could not understand why people expected things to change so quickly. We–she and I–knew at our age that nothing changed quickly…at least I did not mention the Romans. If there was one thing I had been impressed by, coming here, was this: no one seemed to remember the War had ended only two years ago, that is, they talked about how awful it had been, but not about the damage it had done. Damage to people. Here she remained silent for a while, handling yards of white bandage, and going ‘Tsk, tsk,’ when I winced. She asked, ‘So you weren’t here in the War?’ ‘No, I am from England.’ Here she simply nodded, dismissing me from the possibility of understanding. We discussed family matters–husbands, children. She was shocked to hear I had been divorced, and shocked again when she heard that the mother and the two children now with the doctor were from South Africa, and the difficult patient was a coffee farmer. Yet, with these dubious associates, I talked like a supporter of Mugabe. She gave me curious looks and soon was calling me madam.

  When I was taken into the X-ray room, I apologized to the young technician for spoiling his Saturday afternoon, but he said, ‘I am on call and I like to help people.’ I found this young man charming; I found the black doctor charming. The Coffee Farmer was being much too polite to be natural; his shoulder had been pronounced not too bad, like my foot, and various other bits of our anatomies.

  Meanwhile, the local police had arrived. He was a young black man who, having written down my name, said he had read this and that short story of mine, and he wanted to be a writer himself, for his life had been interesting. Could I tell him how to do it?

  There we sat, all bandaged up, and clutching our X-rays, waiting to be collected by the friend from Mutare who was speeding towards us, doubtless cursing us because of the waste of precious petrol. I explained to the young policeman, who had a sweet sensitive face and was quite unlike the conventional idea of a policeman, how to write a novel. He set aside the business of asking questions and filling in forms while he listened and wrote down particularly useful phrases. Every writer has to do this far too often, and it is hard to deliver the lecture as if for the first time. ‘You see, the trouble is that young writers seem to think that talent is enough; but there are plenty of people
with talent. What you need is to do a lot of work. Probably because one can write stories and indeed whole novels with no more than an exercise book and a biro, people subconsciously believe that it is easy. But if you want to be a writer then you have to write–and tear up: write–and tear up. Every writer goes through that stage when what you write is almost good but not quite good enough. What takes you from this stage to the point of being good enough is the process of writing and tearing up, writing and tearing up. And, of course–reading. You cannot tell any aspiring writer how to write: only that this writing, and writing, and trying again, does it.’ And so on. This admonition was delivered while the little girls tried hard not to groan, as they lay stretched out on two wooden benches, and while their mother and their uncle, pale as their bandages, sat upright, behaving well, and while blood stained the bandages on my foot. My ribs were beginning to hurt horribly. The young policeman said he would look on me as a mother and he would take my advice.

  It goes without saying that this scene outraged what the Coffee Farmer believed was correct for the occasion. He was saying loudly that what mattered was to get all the details of the accident down properly, so that the guilty bus-load of policemen would be brought to justice. He was in the right, a thousand times over. The three black nurses, who now had nothing to do, sat in a row on a bench, hands folded, listening and thinking their own thoughts. The black doctor roared off, and we could hear his car a good mile away.

  NERVES

  Then came the friend from Mutare. Something began that surprised us; we were all afraid, and reluctant to get into the car. Our nerves jumped and winced because every bend in the road, every bump, announced a new accident. When we saw the corpse of the car we had travelled in lying, as in a hundred other accident scenes, at the side of the road, it all got worse. We felt better when we confessed this weakness to each other. Not, however, our stiff-lipped hero who, even more because now he was sitting in the front seat with another hero from the War, was not going to admit weakness. Not for one second now, nor in the painful weeks ahead.