African Laughter

by Doris Lessing

  The woman in whose hut the young man had been living, with her son, said, ‘But he is not a bad person. He wants to be kind.’

  The Extension Worker: ‘These young people get paid to come here and teach us. But we don’t get paid for teaching them everything.’

  The hostess woman, who is large, literally shining with health, has suddenly become someone else: she has become the young man. Every bit of her body pleads as she stands in a curve, head poked forward, chin thrust out, eyes moving from one face to the next in a mix of aggression and apology. She is the poor young man who can be seen at this very moment, a forlorn figure, holding out his hand that has a store biscuit in it, to a small child who is shyly taking it. Becoming herself, the woman stands laughing. Everyone laughs with her.

  LOVE OR SOMETHING. I

  In a remote part of Zimbabwe, two American ex-pat teachers live together in a minute house on the edge of a dusty village, near a school that is built in the middle of a vast dusty space. They both come from well-off families, in a large city in the Mid-West. They are used to an easy life. One evening, having finished supper, they are sitting side by side at the little table they eat their meals off, correcting homework by candlelight. There is a knock on the door. They open it and in step an old man and two young men: a local minor Chief with his attendants. ‘Drat,’ think the girls. ‘It is already eight-thirty, and it is bedtime, if we want to get up at five tomorrow.’ The candle is subsiding in a puddle of grease, and they quickly light another. ‘Come in, come in,’ they cry, ‘sit down, take a seat, would you like a beer–tea–coffee–mineral water?’ The old man sits, and his two young men stand behind him.

  The girls know the old man. He is the father of two of their pupils.

  ‘I have come on a serious matter,’ says the old man.

  The girls exchange looks: this must mean that it is Gwenda he wants to speak to, for his daughter is a girl who often gets into trouble with her teacher, Gwenda.

  The girl who is not Gwenda discreetly withdraws to the kitchen where she stands correcting exercises by the light of another candle.

  Gwenda smiles encouragingly.

  ‘I have come to ask you to be my second wife,’ says the old man.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘I love you. You must be my wife,’ he insists.

  At last: ‘Do you think we could work out a relationship?’

  ‘Yes. I love you.’

  ‘But your first wife would be unhappy. She would be jealous.’

  ‘Jealousy is unknown among us.’

  Oh yes?–the girl in the next room, eavesdropping, can positively be heard thinking: the house is so small everything done and said can be heard by everyone. This makes Gwenda even more nervous.

  ‘But you are older than my father.’

  ‘That does not matter. In our culture it is not important.’

  Gwenda stands with an unopened beer bottle in her hand, staring at him. Then, an inspiration: as she speaks she knows she is saved. ‘But my parents would never hear of it, they would never agree to my living so far from them. They would not give their permission.’

  ‘In that case,’ says the old man, ‘I have no more to say.’

  The beer bottles are opened. The two young men are urged to sit down. The two young teachers and their guests converse for an hour or so, and then all agree yes, they will be good friends.

  LOVE OR SOMETHING. II

  It is in the same little house, the same two girls, and about the same time at night. A commotion outside. They draw back a curtain. A young man they know professionally, a community worker, is staggering about in the dust, drunk. ‘Gwenda,’ he howls, ‘Gwenda.’

  ‘But I haven’t done anything to encourage him,’ protests Gwenda, to her colleague’s satiric look.

  ‘Don’t you dare go out,’ she says.

  Gwenda is not, as might be thought, an extraordinary beauty. She is pretty. So is her friend, who has also had her opportunities.

  But Gwenda is kind-hearted: if not succoured, the young man will probably fall down.

  ‘Well now,’ she says smartly, ‘it is time you were in bed.’

  ‘Gwenda,’ he shouts, embracing her, ‘I’ve had a terrible day. I’ve just been helping to rebury six Freedom Fighters who were killed in this village. I love you. I want to have a white girlfriend.’

  She pushes him off, with, ‘But I don’t want a black boyfriend. Inter-cultural marriages are very difficult. Besides, I have a boyfriend at home.’

  ‘Yes, yes. You must think about it. I love you.’

  She says severely, ‘You are very selfish. You have to learn to see other people’s points of view.’ And goes indoors.

  Next day they meet in the supermarket. It is a small supermarket, which you would easily mistake for a village shop. It is not a place where you can avoid unfortunate encounters.

  He says, ‘They tell me I behaved unkindly to you last night.’

  ‘Yes, you did.’

  ‘Then I’m very sorry. I feel really sad this morning.’

  ‘Your apology is accepted.’

  A Jesuit priest said, ‘The Feast of All Souls has a new meaning. The souls are the souls of the dead fighters, killed in the War, and left unburied.’

  All over Zimbabwe teams of former Freedom Fighters are being sent to areas where they fought, to try and remember where fighters were killed and carelessly buried, or not buried at all. The corpses or bones are buried with appropriate rites. It is believed by many that the country is full of dissatisfied and vengeful ghosts, and it is they who are responsible for Zimbabwe’s many problems.

  TWO WHITE FARMERS AND

  THE BOOK TEAM

  We are back with the farmer who last year sang us his hymns to the soil, and we are watching gangs of seasonal workers plant tobacco. This is far from the chancy operation of the old days, which depended on the coming of the rains. Pierced pipes and long hoses now make planting possible weeks earlier. ‘Water, we have so much water now,’ cries the farmer, meaning the new dam, full because of the good rain, and already irrigating the farms around here. This soil is producing three crops a year. ‘Soilmining,’ says the farmer, irritable because of his conflict, loving real earth, but working with this, which is like brick dust and soaked with chemicals. This earth is no pleasure to look at or to touch. Not in this field are we likely to see the farmer bend to lift a handful of earth and marvel at it–an act of worship. But he is pointing at another farm just across a river. ‘Now there’s a farmer! He never wastes time lying awake at night wondering what Nature’s going to wham us with. His farm is really high-tec, they’ve got everything, you should see it. I tell you, Israel’s got nothing on us in this district…yes of course he’s white. The Affs don’t have any feel for this kind of farming, and good for them. I’d like to believe they never will.’

  He goes on, irritable and discouraged in a way I remember from then because of ‘trouble’ with his workers.

  It was all his own fault, said he: he brought it on himself. Last season he suddenly couldn’t stand seeing the female casual workers sitting on the floor of the work-shed hour after hour tying up tobacco, with their babies on their backs. Eight hours a day. It was insane. He offered them a crèche and two trained nurses to run the crèche so the women would not be burdened. The women refused, saying they wouldn’t trust their babies to strange women, because of the danger of witchcraft. ‘Witchcraft! It’s unreasonable! It doesn’t make sense! It’s irrational! I tried again this year but they wouldn’t hear of it, and there’s bad feeling but they won’t tell me why. All I know is, I’m some kind of a villain.’

  I asked the Book Team about this. There we sat, five of us, under a tree, talking about the affairs of the world. Both Sylvia and Talent took it for granted that the farmer, being white, wanted a crèche because the women would be more efficient. I said it was not so: he was upset because of the over-burdened women. They wouldn’t have that. ‘Do you realize you at once assume the worst just becaus
e he is a white farmer? You won’t credit the whites with any human feelings at all?’ It was no good. When I persisted, they said, as if this was proof of the man’s illwill and not his incomprehension, ‘And anyway, he is starting at too high a level. He should have made enquiries in the farm village and found women who are already trusted by all the other women. It wouldn’t be easy, because of course they don’t trust each other. They are from different tribes.’ ‘But,’ I ask, ‘handled differently, do you think he could get them to accept a crèche?’ A long discussion: on the whole, probably not. Cathie was unhappy because of the witchcraft and wanted the others to agree it is being exaggerated. But Talent and Sylvia and Chris insisted that witchcraft is a serious problem, and won’t go away just by being ignored.

  I took the original incident and the comments of the Book Team to the Coffee Farmer.

  ‘I wonder how often good intentions on the part of us whites go wrong out of sheer bloody ignorance. I’d never have thought of going to find a woman in the village and talk to her about setting up a crèche. Witchcraft wouldn’t have crossed my mind. Why should it? Why don’t they ever come and tell us when we go wrong about this kind of thing.’

  White farmers are villains–and that’s the end of it. It is true that some are not the most endearing people in the world. But what of the others, who are trying hard? Too bad about them. I think of Alan Paton’s ‘I am afraid that when they turn to loving, we will have turned to hating.’ The word ‘loving’ is not one I would choose. But I remember arguing with a black friend of mine who wanted to preserve a picture of white farmers as cruel savages: he retreated back and back until he cried out, ‘But they don’t love their homes as we do.’ But if there is one thing that has distinguished the whites, right from the beginning, it is love for the country. I said this…he could not bear it. I think of Proust’s duchess (I think it was) who, when faced with some unpalatable truth, cried out, ‘Then at least don’t tell me about it!’ There is a point in political feelings when some invisible balance turns and thereafter people don’t want to be told about it. Basta. Enough.

  The blacks talk about the whites as if there is, and always has been, a layer of people who remain the same, clinging on to privileges no matter what. Yes, some left to Take the Gap, but those who remain are those who have always been here…but in fact there has never been a homogenous, stable, white minority. Since the Occupation in 1890, 600,000 whites have passed through the country. At the height of White Supremacy, under Smith, the figure was 250,000. In my time, then, there were 100,000 or 150,000 whites. Only a few, some farmers, civil servants, politicians, businessmen, were permanent. The rest came, and then went. They left because they hated being part of the white oppression, or because they were bankrupt. Few blacks even now would be prepared to see any white as poor: in the past the gap was too great; all whites were rich. In the 1930s, when young men came out from Britain because of unemployment and the Slump, to take any kind of job they could get in Rhodesia, and often failed, and went Home again–that is, if they could get relatives to send them their fares–returning to unemployment, drink, every kind of demoralization, they were seen by the blacks as rich.

  A Catholic lay-worker told me she had been given a trip to Ireland, and had been astonished to see poor people, ‘people as poor as we are’, giving money for missions and church work. ‘Where did you think the money came from, then?’ ‘Oh,’ she said gaily, ‘I thought everyone white was rich. I felt really ashamed when I saw those poor people counting out their coins to give to us.’

  A SAD, TRUE STORY

  A black girl, clever, ambitious, with parents proud of her, passes exam after exam, and gets a scholarship that takes her to the United States, to university. No sooner does she reach there, than in every mail there are letters, not only from her family, and her clan, but from her village and even nearby villages, demanding money, clothes, goods of every kind. Also, books. She has set up a library in her village, and donated a great many books, sending some from the States. This has been an expensive business: the United States postage is not cheap, and the Zimbabwe Customs charges on every parcel according to whim. She appeals to various foundations for books, because her stipend does not allow much for extras. Still the requests come. She does her best to meet them. She lives more frugally than most students, eats little, dresses poorly, because of what she has to send home. Driven to desperation, she puts an appeal in a local newspaper, for donations of clothes, and money for her village. A representative of Zimbabwe in Washington warns her that she is blackening the name of Zimbabwe, and if she does it again, she will lose her scholarship.

  Her straitened lifestyle makes it hard for her to have the usual student social life. She is lonely. At home she has been close to a sister. With difficulty she saves up money to pay this girl’s air fare to come for a visit. The girl arrives, takes one look at the small flat, the meagre food, the simple clothes of her sister and starts abusing her for deceiving her. ‘You have deceived us all.’ What had she expected? Well, obviously, the same as she has seen in ‘Dallas’, ‘The Colbys’, ‘Dynasty’, which is how people live in the States. She stays three days, then insists on going back to her village in Zimbabwe. The poor student is depressed: it takes her a year to get over the shock of this rejection. She decides she can never return to Zimbabwe, there is no way she can satisfy these demands. Or perhaps she should become a nun?

  The same girl, invited to a Thanksgiving dinner by a teacher, and asked to say Grace, prayed, ‘Please, God, forgive us for having as much food on this table as would feed my village for a whole week.’ Some of her fellow guests were offended, quote the story as an example of bad manners and ingratitude.

  I told this story to a Jesuit Father who was silent for a while and then said, ‘Quite soon those villagers will be saying, as they sometimes do to me, “Forgive us, Father, it was our ignorance.”’

  But surely the question is, how after all this long time can this ignorance exist?

  The answer has to be that the blacks have put their thoughts of the whites, their beliefs about the whites, into some region of legend or myth, where nothing has to be earned.

  When sitting alone on the verandah on the mountainside that overlooks mountains and rivers and lakes, a young black man came cautiously up from the trees, and, smiling, sat down with me. I ordered tea. His name is Never Harare. Why Never? He believes it is because it took him a long time to get born. What is his real name? Ungana: he is surprised I ask. Although he has done several years in school, he has one O-level, and he is now a seasonal worker. He speaks good English. He is very intelligent. He is going to apply to become a policeman, but he hasn’t got the qualifications. Why, then, apply? I recognize the look on his face: It might happen, mightn’t it? I ask what he would like to be, if he could have his heart’s desire. This is not a question you may ask in Britain without expecting an embarrassed smirk. In Africa, not burdened with such inhibitions, the question at once opens the door into…in this case, and at once, fantasy. He brightens: he thinks I have a magic wand and can give him his heart’s desire. He would like to be a farmer. I ask why he doesn’t apply to be given land under the settlement schemes. He becomes limp with disappointment: what he meant was, a farmer like the white farmers, and live the life of the verandahs. Recovering, at least a little, he enquires what it would cost to buy a farm like this one? Thousands, many thousands. We sit looking cautiously at each other, both making adjustments and assessments. I am trying to find out if he thinks he could farm without any experience, let alone without capital, and be ready to deal with bank loans and overdrafts. I have in my mind’s eye the farmers of this area, with their expertise, many with a background of farming–a father, brother, or relative in one of the counties of Britain, with, many of them, money of their own…as we say. How then does this young man with the hopeful bright face see them? He doesn’t. He wants to live this life, just like all the others who were promised it–they thought, when they were still fighting in th
e bush. How does he see himself? As one who has been made promises. If he were actually here, sitting on this verandah as its owner, how does he imagine himself? Well, of course, living as the white farmers…but he knows in another part of his mind, that the whole farm would at once fill with his relatives to the tenth generation and he would not in any case live the life of the verandahs. It doesn’t matter. He is dreaming…when he walked up out of the bush to sit down by me, the farmer himself having driven off somewhere, he was walking into a dream, and now he is living it, drinking tea on this verandah with an old woman who says, What is your heart’s desire? even if she is not going to fulfil what he hears as a promise.

  If I said, Never Harare, I happen to have with me the title deeds of a farm even better than this one, and here they are, he would find nothing impossible. The whites are all rich, and sometimes they are kind-hearted. They may impulsively bestow a farm on some young friend, if in a good mood.

  On my visit in 1956 I read novels by black writers–in those days all men–and every novel had in it a scene where the hero was invited by a white employer to come into the house. ‘Lie down on this nice bed, eat this nice food, and here are some nice clothes.’ Thereafter the hero lived like Oliver Twist, a favoured protege, to become, at last–though this process was not described–rich and powerful. One minute a poor boy living rough, the next the favoured son or godson of a white benefactor who is rich.

  Before Never Harare walked away into the trees I asked him if he ever thought about the fighters who were killed in the Bush War. I did not say, they died that you might be free–but that was in my mind. He smiled–polite, nervous. He did not know why I asked this, but, to please me, said he liked to think of them. Then: ‘I did not know any Comrades. I was at school.’