African Laughter

by Doris Lessing

An irrepressible physical vigour–that’s what you see everywhere.

  The young people are noisy, laughing, uninhibitedly full of enjoyment. They have just returned from Harare where most of them had never been. Jack took them, at his expense, on the bus, and to visit a printing firm and a newspaper and to a meal in a restaurant. The bus trip both ways, many hours of it, was part of the experience.

  We are here in the classroom because Jack has said it would be a good idea for them to interview us all, as part of learning how to be journalists. Jack himself, Ayrton R., one of the teachers, and I, we each are surrounded by a group who ask us, what is our favourite colour, do we like this school, how do we like Zimbabwe, do we think it is fair girls should always have to do so much work (the girls). But it is noticeable that the pupils writing down our replies in notebooks are every moment less assiduous, for they are looking past us at where the handsome young teacher is talking about his problems. In a moment, they are all crowding around him and we, the interviewees, are with them for we are as rapt as they are.

  This teacher is the star among the staff, with two A-levels, more than any teacher has, not only at this school but at any of the others round about. He has been accepted at teachers’ training college and so he is at the foot of the ladder which may take him at last to Harare. He talks dreamily, and often, about living there ‘one of these days’. But now what he is talking about is his wife. He leans against the wall, arms loose by his sides, as if they ache with emptiness, and as he talks, he does not look at any of us: his eyes are full of tears and he addresses the wall.

  ‘This is my sad day,’ he says. ‘It is a too too sad day, for this morning I heard I am now a divorced man. My marriage is finished.’ He cannot go on, and pretends he is waiting for the apprentice interviewers to write it all down.

  His wife has an office job in the little town about fifty miles away. It is the town with a hotel that has electric light, a bar, a dining-room, and a courtyard with coloured lights strung among the tree branches. And, often, music. She lunches at the hotel. This is permissible. But she has been seen at the same hotel in the evenings, very late. (Ten o’clock perhaps? Eleven?–everything is relative.) Friends have told him she is there having a good time with men. This means she is no better than she ought to be–as my parents used to say. He has had to divorce her.

  It is occurring to more than one of his listeners that there is something here…A handsome young woman says to him (while her eyes swoon with love), ‘But when you go to teachers’ training will not your wife be…’

  ‘My ex-wife…’ He openly sobs.

  ‘But she will be left alone in Kusai and is she not alone all the time when you are here? She must be lonely.’

  ‘But I am lonely too.’

  And now the hot silence confined in the dusty air of the classroom while outside thunder and rain lurk about hot skies announces without words–in fact positively shouts–that if he is lonely then he has only himself…

  He is leaning against the wall in a limp curve, his arms dangle palms out down his sides, his head is slightly back, his eyes are shut. Thus a man might stand waiting for the final bullet…

  ‘And it is not my fault. I asked her to take another O-level and she could be a teacher too, but she likes the hotel in Kusai better. I said to her, It is your duty to get more qualifications and help Zimbabwe.’

  A couple of the young men supported him with, ‘Shame’, ‘That was not well done.’

  ‘Besides,’ says he, with the fine appearance of justice that accompanies such remarks, ‘women must obey their husbands, it says so in the Bible.’

  Moderately dizzying, this conversation is, switching from level to level, as is so common when–as the phrase goes–cultures are in the melting pot. Between the young man who lectures his wife on becoming qualified, and the one who says, Women must obey their husbands, lie cultural gulfs, not least because he cites scripture when it suits him.

  Ayrton R. says, ‘You know, women all over the world are finding men’s claim to God’s support in these matters increasingly unconvincing.’

  This contribution is being judged as a far from equal one: it is as if Harare itself has spoken.

  The teacher stands facing Ayrton R., being judged and sentenced.

  A pretty girl saves the situation by asking, with a giggle, her pencil poised over her notebook, ‘What do you think about love?’

  He replies with severity that children at school should be thinking only of their books and of learning: love is for older people. On the girls’ faces now appear properly sceptical smiles: recently two senior girls have married teachers.

  ‘Yes, it is today that my divorce is final.’ He made this sound as if unpleasant things like divorce are a natural result of thinking of love when you should be studying.

  ‘And now,’ says Jack, ‘you must ask him how much of what he has said can be written down and how much is off the record. Because a good journalist has to respect the interviewee.’

  ‘No, write it all,’ cries the handsome teacher, ‘I do not mind. It will warn other people not to marry for love.’

  Tears well into his beautiful eyes and the pretty girls long to kiss them away, one by one.

  Meanwhile, somewhere in the office fifty miles away in Kusai, a that-day divorced young woman is planning an evening with a local admirer, or even with a passing-through Harare Chef. Over a table in the restaurant that has such tactfully dimmed lights, she will say how unhappy she is, and how disappointed with a husband who neglects her and thinks only of himself.

  ‘Poor little thing,’ it is only too easy to imagine. ‘Never mind. What a shame. I’d never treat you like that, not a clever pretty special girl like you.’

  THE LOST ANIMALS OF THE BUSH

  Next morning Jack’s minute room was filled with pupils and teachers coming to say goodbye to us, and to be with people sustained by the blessed ichors and zephyrs of Harare.

  The handsome teacher was there too. He remarked that what he liked best was to go for walks in the bush by himself. ‘I am a serious man,’ he said to me severely. ‘People do not understand me.’ We were standing at the door. He waved his hand at the ravaged trees and the eroded earth and it occurred to me that when he said ‘bush’ and I said ‘bush’ we did not mean the same thing. I told him that the country around here had stayed in my mind for thirty years as an ideal of what forest could be, with musasa trees perhaps hundreds of years old, and full of every kind of animal. He was silent, surprised. I was experiencing that suspension of probability that accompanies moments unforeseen when you begin a journey, a pilgrimage–moments when things slide into place: it had never, ever, entered my mind that there was a generation in Zimbabwe which did not know how their own country had been, and so recently.

  ‘Animals?’ he asked. ‘What animals? You mean mombies? You mean goats?’

  ‘When I was a girl in Banket the bush was full of koodoo, sable, eland, and all the smaller buck, particularly duiker. There were stem buck and bush buck, anteaters and porcupines and wild cats and monkeys, and baboons and wild pig. There was every kind of bird. There were still leopards in the hills. Elephants had gone. Lions had gone. But you couldn’t take one step in the bush without startling some creature.’

  ‘Did you live in a game park?’ he asked.

  ‘No. That was how the bush was then. Everywhere. In every part of the country. And the birds…the dawn chorus–it split your ears. There were flocks of birds sitting all along the telephone lines…every kind of bird. And if you looked up in the sky any time of the day you saw the hawks circling. Five, ten–or more. Then you saw that everywhere in the sky were groups of hawks spiralling in the thermals. There might be twenty or thirty groups of them. The sky used to be full of hawks and kites. The groups further away were like little black flies against the blue. Now when you look up…’ We walked away from Jack’s little house and stood on the track outside it, with the Blair toilet a few yards in front, the still derelict water tank
on its rise, and sparse trees dotting the land off into the distance. We stood looking up. There was not one bird in the sky. ‘Hundreds of them,’ I said. ‘Now you’re lucky if you see one. And in the morning when you went to see what had happened in the night, you examined the dusty road, and the tracks and the spoor of birds and animals were so thick in the dust it could take half an hour to sort it all out.’

  He lowered his eyes from the empty blue, he stood gazing around, he was sombre, of course, because of his unhappiness, but now he was bewildered too.

  ‘You say that wasn’t a safari park?’

  ‘No. Don’t you see–that’s how things were everywhere then. That was how all the bush used to be. And now on that road all you’d see would be the marks of bicycle tyres.’

  ‘Probably my bicycle,’ he said, and laughed.

  A few days later on the verandah of a certain club in the mountains, referred to–what else?–as a watering hole, I am introduced to a man who would not have disagreed if I had described him as the–once–hardest of hard-line whites. For that is what he had been.

  ‘I nearly packed up and Took the Gap when we lost the War. The worst mistake of my life, if I had.’

  ‘So you like the black kids, do you?’ prompt his boon companions, encouraging him as one does a child you hope will show off nicely.

  ‘I like them all right. They are a fine bright lot of kids.’

  He had chanced to discover that black children in the townships knew nothing about the bush, or the animals that live in it, and little about the lives of their grandparents. He set up a camp in still unspoiled bush far from any town, and now takes batches of town children there for a week or so, and he teaches them about the trees, the plants, the animals.

  When not with the children his job is culling elephants.

  ‘Keeping them down to the right number, you know.’

  ‘Right number in relation to what?’

  An ironical grimace. ‘Yes, that’s it. But remember, we’re the only country who has handled the elephants well. Anyway, there are too many of the buggers. We aren’t going to go short of elephants.’

  But what he likes best is the time he spends with the black children.

  ‘I had the wrong idea about the Affs, you know.’

  ‘I seem to remember quite a few people were saying something along those lines.’

  ‘Better late than never.’

  I tell this story to a couple of black friends, poets. We are on a verandah in Harare, one that is netted and barred like an old-fashioned meat safe: we are sitting inside a cage. The house was burgled last week. The world is more and more a paradise for thieves, we reflect. Will there soon be more thieves than honest people? Should we all join the prospering profession?

  These poets are poor: most writers are, here, unless part of the university.

  When I am with them it is only a few moments before I begin to feel what they do: it is a sombre mood we share, for these are not people deprived of information–far from it. Africa, the continent, does not inspire anyone with happy and optimistic thoughts, these days. No one likes marxism and the censorship that keeps the newspapers so infantile. They know that in Europe and the Soviet Union communism is very ill, but most poets in this country are young, which means they were part of the euphoria of Revolution, and they are sitting by the deathbed of communism as if by a dying mother or father.

  What I have told them about the watering hole in the mountains and the elephant hunter has, it seems, silenced them. Often on this trip, on the point of asking a question or adding a comment, inhibition has sat on my tongue, as if this organ were the Culture Gap embodied. Besides, everyone I meet seems to have a raw place where the skin has only just grown over.

  ‘Excuse me,’ says Poet A. ‘Are you saying a white farmer is taking our kids on trips to show them the bush?’

  ‘Yes, that is what I am saying. An ex-farmer, actually.’

  The two young men face me with angry eyes–but that is not the point. They are despondent, hurt.

  ‘Why should he want to do that?’

  With difficulty I make myself say, ‘Because he cannot stand the idea that black children shouldn’t know anything about their bush.’

  This remark in itself is taking a lid off impermissibles: it is believed by every black person that all white farmers are as bad as Simon Legree, with never a human impulse between them.

  ‘I’d like to meet that paragon,’ says one, trying to be humorous, but he laughs, most unhappily.

  ‘No, I think you probably wouldn’t,’ I say, attempting to match his humour. ‘You have to be brought up with this lot, you know, to understand…’ I definitely falter.

  ‘Hidden hearts of gold?’ says Poet B. Rather, sneers.

  ‘No, not exactly. But you know, some of them are trying hard.’

  ‘I haven’t noticed it.’

  ‘If they are all paternalists these days then just think what they were like before.’

  ‘It’s a bit late for paternalism.’

  ‘Well, you’re all stuck with each other–’ I say, allying myself, as it happens, with Comrade Mugabe, and his ‘We are all citizens of Zimbabwe now.’

  The two young men show the signs of being trapped, restless checked movements, restless eyes, and their faces darken even more.

  Poet A says, ‘And what does a Honkey know about the bush anyway?’

  Here is another moment when my tongue has a weight on it.

  ‘He knows. My brother was the same. He had an instinct for the animals. If you went out into the bush with him, he would know where a duiker was, or a koodoo–he knew the paths they would take.’ Silence, because I was talking about my brother. Another strand was being woven into the webs of inhibition: family.

  ‘His cookb–his servant.’

  ‘OK, his cookboy,’ says Poet B bitterly. ‘Oh don’t worry, my sister’s husband’s got a good job, and she told me a man came asking for work, he said, “Do you want a cookboy, madam?’”

  Laughter, this time shared absolutely, with all the history of the country behind it.

  ‘Your brother’s cookboy?’ invites Poet B, his hands spread open in a gesture of acceptance of fate.

  ‘He used to come to my brother, and ask him to go with him, and his brother–go hunting. Because my brother always knew where the animals were.’

  Silence.

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘When there were still animals,’ I say, and my voice is as bitter as theirs.

  ‘Yes,’ says Poet A.

  Poet B says, ‘I was brought up in Harare, so I would have to ask your brother too.’

  ‘I haven’t been to my village for…well, quite a time, two years…no three…well, it’s probably about five,’ says Poet A.

  Here I could have gone on to say that my brother might have understood the ways of animals, but knew about Africans only through the veils of his prejudice–but what was the point, they knew that. My brother, and other white bush-lovers I tried, did not know that a certain tree, the muhacha tree, is sacred to the Mashona, though they must have walked under the tree, with blacks, a thousand times.

  ‘Really?’ says my brother, as if I were talking about another planet, ‘that’s interesting, I didn’t know that.’

  He, like other white bush-lovers interpret the bush–no, not as white people, for that is not the point, but as modern people.

  An anthropologist said, ‘When I’m with the old people, I have to remind myself they live in a different landscape. Each rock, tree, path, hill, bird, animal, has a meaning. If an owl calls or you see a certain bird, that is a message from another dimension. A pebble set near a path is part of a pattern. You see a bit of rag tied to a bush–watch out! It’s a bit of magic, most likely. Don’t disturb! We don’t live in that world, but the point is, their young people don’t either. They know as little about it as we do. But when I’m with the old ones I sometimes get a glimpse of a landscape that existed everywhere in the world before mode
rn man arrived on the scene.’

  In 1964 at the Independence Celebrations for Zambia, there was an exhibition of Southern Rhodesian art. Near the door as you went out was a large picture of an ancient tree. The artist stood by the picture with that look often seen in Southern Africa, ‘If you choose to notice me, choose to ask questions, you may get interesting replies.’ My companion and I stop, say, what a fine tree, and wait. The artist, an oldish man, looks closely at us, sums us up, as you may see Africans doing, and says, ‘That tree was the telephone for our village.’

  At this point, other people had laughed and walked off.

  ‘What kind of a telephone?’

  ‘You people have telephone lines. We had trees. Through this tree the women sent messages to the men out hunting, when are you coming home, what have you killed for us to cook? And the men sent messages, We’ll be back tonight, or, We can’t get back until tomorrow, we are stalking a fine eland.’

  ‘Why don’t you tell the government how it is done?’ we joke. ‘They’d like to know how to save some money.’

  ‘Ah. But that’s it, that’s the trouble,’ says the artist. ‘All our old people knew how to do it. And sometimes children can still do it. But young people can’t do it at all. It’s gone.’

  ‘Can you do it?’

  ‘When I was a child, the old people used to send me to the tree.’

  Similarly, the Bushmen of the Kalahari had, and a few still have, capacities that the young have lost: they knew days beforehand when people were going to arrive, for instance. And in a book about travel in Haiti it was recorded that the people there used trees in the same way: and again, young people had lost the art.

  The anthropologist mourning lost landscapes (for the impartiality of the scientist wore transparent when he talked about them) told me this story–not of the past, but of last year, 1988. ‘A young girl refused to marry an old man chosen by her family. They put a spell on her. She weakened and grew ill and tried to drown herself. They pulled her out of the water. She agreed to marry the old man and her family removed the spell.’

  ‘A horrible story!’