African Laughter

by Doris Lessing

  The long drive to Mutare in a fog of pain was the start of a psychological process that now seems as interesting as the accident itself. My mind ticked over comfortably as usual, making this or that comment, but ‘my nerves’ (what nerves? where situated?) jumped and suffered, but on a parallel track to my intelligence. Nothing I told them made any difference. It was not fear I was feeling, but the neurological results of shock. It was dark by now, and we could not see the road to Mutare, and that made it all worse. The well-known timidity of old women is because they know what can, and does, happen, but young people do not know, and therefore bounce about half-drunk in cars going at a hundred miles an hour on bad roads, and fearlessly do things their ‘nerves’, still unschooled by experience, will not allow them to do later.

  My nerve-sickness continued for weeks. I know–and who does not?–how heart and mind can run on parallel tracks, heart craving what mind forbids, mind’s ordinances derided by the heart, but until this accident I had taken for granted that my physical self did more or less what I wanted. Now I was afraid of heights, to the point I could not stand on a hillside whose worst threat was that I might roll over cushions of grass into a gentle hollow: I came out in a sweat, I was paralysed, if not with fear, then with a generalized inhibition. In a car I could not drive faster than fifty miles an hour: a governor inside me I knew nothing about would not let me. If there is one thing I adore it is being taken up in a small aeroplane: given a ride in one through the mountains of the Vumba, I felt sick and silly. I could not cross a road without sweating, or descend a staircase without clutching the stair rail. My mind observed all this helplessly, and if it tried mockery, that made no difference. Then, one day, in London, I found myself dodging through traffic from one pavement to another, the way we all do, and knew I was cured. The mysterious ailment had lifted: it was not a wearing-off, but a sudden deliverance.

  A WHITE LAGER

  A large house in Mutare, spread about with rooms and verandahs in a large garden. A welcoming hostess. Children. Young people…a lot of people…We were at once absorbed into kindness and efficiency. A ‘proper’ doctor was summoned. Again we were examined. The X-rays at the country hospital had been misinterpreted, some were inexpert. More X-rays were ordered. The shoulder was very bad…there were cracked ribs…a damaged tendon…a hairline fracture. I might have remarked that it is not unknown for misdiagnoses to be made in the advanced hospitals of Britain. But: ‘Well, what do you expect?’ was in the air, was being said loudly, with the smugness of the righteous. In this house it was essential to prove the Africans wrong as often as possible. For all the years of the War, the house had been a lager, a central point. People from exposed farms came in to stay a night, or several, if ‘terrs’ were reported to be around, or during periods of bad fighting. Women whose husbands were doing a spell with the Security Forces came with their children. The fighters came, between spells of duty, for meals, a bath, a good sleep.

  Strong in this house was the atmosphere I was brought up with: in the farmhouses of The District were men and women with unambiguous roles: there was women’s work, and there was men’s work. Coming from London where every house one goes into has a different pattern, a different balance between men and women, this colonial society was a shock. Salutary, I suppose, as a reminder: this is what I and my kind reacted against. Next morning, as we left, one of the men was barking orders at his young woman. He did this because other men were watching: he was proving he knew how to keep a woman in her place.

  All the men had fought in the War. People kept whispering, ‘That man, over there, he was the best helicopter pilot in the War.’ Or, ‘He rescued such and such a family from beneath the noses of the ‘terrs’.’ Or, ‘She fought off a ‘terr’ who got inside the security fence, and he got scared and ran for it.’ The women had cooked, bandaged, nursed, and looked after others all through the War. Some had gone armed, day and night, for years. The War filled their minds still, not as a continuing vendetta or crusade, rather as a memory of when they were all stretched to the best and utmost, and when this house reached its fulfilment as a refuge, a fortress.

  One young woman was a daughter-in-law, who had gone to The Republic for good, and was here on a visit to her family. Her husband had been Chief of Police. She said the moment they had decided to Take the Gap was when a black man her husband had arrested several times as a suspected sympathizer with the ‘terrs’, had put his arm around her at an official cocktail party and said, ‘And now we shall call each other Comrade and all work together for the good of Zimbabwe.’

  ‘I said to my husband: That’s it, now it’s time we left.’

  This incident was related as if there could be no other reaction than deciding to leave at once. The same young woman described, without any self-consciousness, that traditional colonial scene: ‘When I left for The Republic I cried when I said goodbye to the cook and the houseboy and the garden boy and our nanny. They were part of the family. They said: You are our father and mother. They were crying too.’ Now it was evident she was wondering whether to come back to Zimbabwe. In The Republic they were worse off, had a small house, poor jobs, and did not have even one servant. Many people who had left, they said, were trying to come back.

  In the room that night was a man who had worked for Intelligence during the War. He was asking me the carefully casual questions that are such a give-away. Not for the first time I was reflecting that it must be an enjoyable business, being a spy, for few of them seem able to let it go: power, I suppose: the agreeable illusion that one is able to control events.*

  The questions he was asking might have been appropriate if I had been fighting with the Comrades in the bush, not living at ease in liberal London. And that is the other thing: all these security departments seem to create for themselves a devil figure of their opponents, and then believe in it. Look at Angleton in the CIA…they become paranoid. If, however, one is on the same side as the spy department, then one has to worry because of their incompetence, years out of date with their information, if it was ever genuine information in the first place.

  That night I shared a verandah with the Coffee Farmer. He would rather have died than complain when awake, but, asleep, he groaned’ and suffered. I lay in one position all night, since it hurt to move, and I groaned freely when I had to. In the early morning he started up out of sleep, and before even conscious shouted into the void, ‘Bring tea!’ And, lo, tea was brought at once, by the cook, for both of us.

  All over the big house people were bathing, showering, shaving, dressing, putting clothes on children, chatting, drinking tea. Some of the men drove off to get in some golf before breakfast. The women helped the servants get breakfast. The doctor arrived. Only the broken shoulder was serious. By now my black eye was a wonder, and children appeared from houses up and down the street to admire it. Then there was breakfast, everything the English breakfast has at its best, and, too, fresh fruit and fruit salads and bottled fruit and jugs of cream. Thirty or so people took breakfast. Easy to imagine this scene during the War, the atmosphere of lager, the unlimited hospitality.

  BACK ON THE VERANDAH

  After breakfast we were packed into a station-wagon and driven up the Vumba, over those roads that wound and swerved and swooped through mountains, and while my ‘nerves’ jumped and shuddered, I grew more irritated with them and with myself. All of us, the wounded, were in a much worse way than yesterday: bruises that were silent then were complaining now. On the verandah of the house in the mountains we counted our sore places, and lay about stiffly, and were waited on by the devoted Milos, the servant, all tender solicitude, and later we moved indoors to the great fire and neighbours came and were helpful and infinitely skilled. No people on earth are more kind, more hospitable, more resourceful than the whites of Southern Africa, when it is a question of one of their own kind…and what is the point of saying it again?

  And so began the convalescence. The little girls recovered first and were playing ping-pong and t
ennis at the Club a mile away. Their mother and I were slower. The Coffee Farmer was in a bad way, facing a difficult operation on a shoulder already damaged twice.

  People appeared and disappeared on the verandah.

  It is evening around the winter fire, and the room is crammed with people and with animals. The shy young assistant from the next farm, the champion parachutist of Zimbabwe, sits with his new puppy and a great white Persian cat he is looking after and does not want to leave alone. The new puppy Vicky, a clever, scheming little bitch, sits by Josh, the half-grown sweet and stupid ridgeback. The fierce guardian of the estate, Annie, the bull terrier, who is a mass of scars and wounds, puts her head on her master’s knees and groans with agonized affection. A man whose job is to settle Africans on the new farms, has brought his dog, a setter. A little black cat, who is timid, finds all this astonishing and is frightened, and slips in and out between the legs of dogs, puppies, people, until she finds a safe place on a rafter, from where she watches us all. There are two couples from the farms lower down the hill, with three labrador puppies, brought to please the little girls, by their own little girls, who are teenagers. We, the wounded, sit carefully in corners, fending off friendly animals who are a threat to our sore ribs and our bruises. Who waits on us all? Milos, and beer and tea and coffee and cakes arrive all evening. It is noisy and cordial and we all watch the animals and discuss them and their behaviour as if they are people.

  PAY NIGHT

  Scene on a farmhouse verandah in old Southern Rhodesia. On every farmhouse verandah, once a month, this scene took place, through the 1920s, the ’30s, the ’40s, the ’50s…

  The sun has gone down in its glow of sorrowful red. The stars are coming out. On a small table are piles of cotton bags from the bank in town, full of coins. Beside the table sits the farmer and behind the table stands the bossboy. If this is a raised verandah, then the table is at the top of a flight of steps, the polished red cement steps of prosperity, with plants crowded on both ends of every step. A lamp is on the low wall, if there is no electricity. Or, as on our farm, a hurricane lamp is set on the table which is in front of the house. Another hangs from the branch of a tree. A crowd of black people stand waiting. The bossboy calls out a name and out steps a man wearing a pair of old shorts, and a ragged vest. No shoes. In the pay envelopes are a few coins. The bossboy earned a pound a month, ordinary labourers ten shillings, twelve shillings. What could one buy with this money? A pair of shorts cost two shillings. A vest cost less. No one wore shoes. To buy a bicycle cost five pounds, and could take a couple of years to earn. Food was supplied.

  The women had come up from the compound, though they did not do farm work. Pay night was an occasion, a spectacle, something to liven things up. They stood to one side, all together. They were handsome, and wore blue and white patterned cloth wound around them, or as skirts, or as full flouncy dresses. They had head scarves and bangles and earrings. These things were likely to be all they owned.

  Sometimes there were arguments about the coins in the envelopes. Then the bossboy, speaking for the farmer, would say, ‘But you were away from work three days. You went to the beer drink on boss Jones’s farm.’ The man would stand there patiently, his face puckering with distress, which had to do as much with his life as with this small incident in it, a shilling taken off his pay. ‘But I didn’t go to the beer drink,’ he might argue. ‘I went to visit my brother.’ ‘But you can’t go visiting every time a brother arrives in The District!’ The man would shake his head, take the money and walk back to the little crowd which received him with sighs, sympathy, shakes of the head and then–marvellously–they might laugh, warm, irrepressible, infectious. Hearing that laughter the farmer might sit staring at the farm workers, his face a history of contradictory emotions. My father, for instance, who, contemplating ‘the system’, might conclude with his characteristic testy exasperation at the ways of the universe, ‘Bloody farce, that’s all it is. I mean, it’s a farce. What else can you call it?’

  Now, looking back, things I took for granted come forward: for instance, what the women wore. For decades every black woman in Southern Rhodesia and Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland wore blue and white, indigo and white, patterned cotton stuff. Whose idea was it? At some point somebody must have said–who?–‘We are going to manufacture this type of blue and white cloth for the women of Southern Africa.’ The patterns look Indonesian. The cloth was manufactured in Manchester along with kenti cloth for North Africa and the kangas of Kenya. The great bales from England arrived in ships, were put on to trains, and the rolls of cloth, smelling of dye, found themselves on the shelves of hundreds of ‘kaffir truck’ shops. It was beautiful material, strong, good quality. The women looked beautiful. This cloth could not be worn by poor women now, for it is associated with the shameful past. Meanwhile, it is made up into luxury items for boutiques in the big cities of The Republic, and bought by fashionable white women and fashionable black women who may have never known its history. In Zimbabwe I saw it covering sofas and chairs in a farmhouse, and as curtains in Harare. Unwritten social history: in this case probably in the records of the great cotton manufacturers of the Midlands.

  The farm workers who stood in the dusk waiting to be paid, the sunset fading behind them, were not the same from one year to the next. They moved from farm to farm, if there might be a shilling or even a sixpence more in their pay envelopes at the end of the month, or a kinder farmer, or a better water supply–a good well, a nearby river. Only the bossboy and his assistant, and a man skilled at driving the teams of oxen, and the carpenter and a man who knew about machinery, stayed on from year to year.

  Now, in 1982, I again sit on a verandah on a pay night, watching. It is an enclosed verandah, not a large one. On one side is the kitchen, on the other a bathroom, and doors lead off to the main part of the house. The dogs sleep here on three car tyres covered with old sacks. They sit beside us now, one, two, three, watching, interested.

  There is a small table with money on it and the farm manager, who is no longer called a bossboy, sits beside the mother of the little girls, as an equal. She has spent the whole day working out the money due to everyone, because the Coffee Farmer is in too much pain. A dog has leaped up and jarred his broken shoulder. ‘A little setback, I am afraid,’ he says, and will not laugh when we tease him for being so heroic.

  Outside the verandah is a crowd of labourers, men and women. It is five in the afternoon, and the sun is slipping behind the tall dark mountain.

  The workers are of two kinds, the regulars who are paid the legal minimum wage, thirty pounds a month, or more, and the casual labourers who come for the harvest. They are paid very little, but work is short. Every day men and women arrive to ask the farmers for work, and say they will work for less than the minimum wage, ask how are they going to feed their families? ‘I can’t pay you less,’ say the farmers virtuously. ‘It would be against the law. Well, don’t blame me, take it up with the government–it’s your government now, isn’t it?’

  This is, in short, one of those well-known ‘grey’ areas that spoil the maps of theoreticians. Casual labour does not, or should not exist…hardly exists at all…soon will not exist…is almost illegal…without it a whole range of economic activities could not go on.

  This pay night, just as it was then, is a colourful scene. All the women wear bright store dresses, headcloths, flashing bangles and beads, and it is they who contribute the gaiety, for the regular workers are dressed no better nor worse than the farmers, which is to say casually, if not scruffily. The seasonal male workers cannot begin to compete with their women. Everyone has shoes, these days. Nearly everyone wears a good cardigan or jersey.

  It is a noisy scene, too. I sit there with my black eye, my bruised forehead, and the women are joking about the eye. No need to know the local language: women all over the world would be joking in just this way.

  The paying out of the money goes like this. A name is called, and into the verandah comes a ma
n or a woman. The little girls’ mother says a greeting in Shona: she has a good friendly way with her, and a brief conversation ensues, with jokes and laughter. The manager opens the relevant envelope and the money is spread out on the table, to be checked–the pitiful few notes and coins, but no one complains.

  Throughout this scene the two little white girls stand watching. One is twelve, one ten. They wear very brief shorts and heavy sweaters. Their sweaters cover the shorts, and they look as if they are naked under them. They are innocent, and unaware of how they must strike the Africans, who are eyeing them, shocked. Since they were born they have lived among Africans and it has always been their right to wear anything they fancied, go about almost naked if they liked. I remembered how, in the 1930s, the girl from the next farm to ours, who had just reached fourteen and the age for self-assertion, appeared on the rocky crown of our hill, getting out of the car in tiny shorts, a halter top and high heels. My mother was shocked. My father was agonized. ‘What must they be thinking? Their women never show themselves like that.’ ‘What about their breasts?’ demanded my mother. ‘They sometimes go about with bare breasts.’ ‘Yes, but that’s their custom. You’d never see a black woman with a brassière and shorts that wouldn’t cover a mango.’ ‘Well, that’s our custom,’ said my mother, defending what she hated. ‘But we should be setting a good example,’ he said, and again, as he did so often, ‘What can they be thinking of us?’