African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe

by Doris Lessing

  At the table next to me sat two middle-aged men, white, farmers, and I listened to The Monologue–President Banana and the chickens, Mugabe’s motorcade, and, too, angry exchanges about Squatters and the inadequacies of the Minister of Agriculture. With my other ear I listened to two Swedes, man and woman, who were working on a scheme for retraining and resettling Freedom Fighters. They were talking about the whites near their Resettlement Scheme, who were doing everything to make their work difficult. They lowered their voices to say the new bureaucracy was impossible, almost as hampering as the retrograde whites. They decided to go to Harare and see a certain Minister (black), first making sure his assistant (white) would put some sense into his head. ‘Of course you can’t expect things to come right so quickly,’ said these reasonable souls. I went on sitting with the two farmers on one side and the two Swedes on the other, and watched people coming in and out, white and black, in groups and families, and among them quite a few of that new breed, the international Aid workers. The waiters were all black, lively, and with a confidence and ease it was pleasant to watch.

  Soon a young couple, white, came to join the Swedes. They were of that immediately recognizable kind, children of the 1960s who, if too young to have actually partaken of the delights of that decade, were stamped by it. They are genial, anxious always to present to everyone a willed innocence, are open to every idea going, sensible or not, from pacifism to vegetarianism or aromatherapy and UFOs, and they know that if it does not seem everything is for the best in all possible worlds, then in some mysterious way this will come to pass. These were in their late twenties. They had to discuss with the Swedes if they could come to the Resettlement Scheme to work. The young woman was a physiotherapist, the young man wanting desperately to help people, but without special training. Both were Zimbabweans, and from this area.

  Now, out of its sequence, I shall describe a later visit to a couple I had known well in the old days. The middle-class everywhere complain about poverty; for some reason or other, no matter how much money they have, it is never as much as they are due. This is not an original observation, but on this trip it was being given startling new life. The couple I was visiting were both getting on, like me. They were in their sixties. They had retired from civil service jobs. Both were full of health, energy and complaints. Their house was a large bungalow, many-roomed, with verandahs all around it, and it sat in two acres of land, full of fruit trees and vegetables and flowers. Everything in the house had the sparkling cherished look which is not often seen in Britain, where women work, or do not have the time for this level of housework. It is the look that goes with servants. This couple employed two servants, men. ‘But I am afraid poor Anne has to do some of the cooking these days.’ ‘Yes, I am afraid it is a bit of a burden.’ The servants cleaned the house, grew the vegetables, tended the fruit trees, laid the table, served the food. When we had finished they cleared the table, made coffee and washed up. Meanwhile my friends of thirty years ago complained. The Monologue, of course. But they were also complaining about their poverty, their deprivation, and in the nagging peevish voices of spoiled children.

  Towards midnight, having spent some hours saying Dear me and Tut tut, I cracked and asked how many people in the world did they suppose lived on the level they did? This cruel question did not at once reach them. They sat blinking, unable to believe I could be so treacherous. ‘In Britain you’d have to be rich to live like this. Even in America, to have two servants, you’d be rich. Your way of life is an unreachable dream to ninety-nine point nine per cent of the world’s people.’ Silence. What they could not credit was such a degree of disloyalty to the white cause. Loyalties, particularly those confirmed by war, have never had anything to do with reason, commonsense–nothing of that boring sort.

  It was already late when the two young people came in I had seen at the hotel that first morning in Mutare. Their son and their daughter. Two different generations, two kinds of people. How did they manage to talk to each other? With difficulty, is the answer. The young couple had begun work with the Swedes, and had rung up their parents to tell them. This was the first physical encounter. The two elderly people sat there in their neat, correct clothes, she with her newly waved silvery hair, he with his buttoned-in tidiness–and gazed with hurt eyes at their careless, casually dressed offspring who were helping those enemies, the Terrorists. The young ones had come in so late because it meant less time in this atmosphere of accusation. ‘We would have dropped in earlier but we don’t get much time off,’ said the daughter, and her father said at once, ‘Of course they’re going to exploit you for what they can get out of you.’

  ‘Look,’ said his son, his voice already angry, ‘this is a Swedish relief organization. They can’t afford to pay us much.’

  ‘Of course they aren’t going to pay you,’ said the mother, brisk and in the right. ‘All they are ever interested in is getting everything they can.’ They here meant the blacks, though the attack might as easily have been against the Swedes, who were supporting the ‘terrs’ against the whites.

  ‘Look, Mum,’ said the young woman. ‘I keep trying to explain it to you. We want to do something to help the country. It’s our country too now, and we want…’

  ‘It’s not our country, it’s their country,’ was the bitter reply.

  At this, the two young people exchanged glances. The young woman shook her head slightly, but was noticed, and her father said, ‘That’s right, just treat us like fools. We are too stupid to understand anything.’

  The mother said, ‘Oh Paul, don’t quarrel with them, or we won’t ever see them at all.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ said the daughter. ‘But it’s hard work, and everyone works till all hours. It’s not just an eight-to-four job, but we’ll come when we can.’

  ‘Oh yes, we know! We’re too old to change, we’re no use.’

  ‘I never said that,’ said the girl, for this was too unprogressive a thought for her to own. ‘Of course you aren’t. No one ever is.’

  ‘But,’ said her mother, ‘your fiancé didn’t like it either, did he?’ She tittered and went red, because she knew this was below the belt.

  The girl also reddened, but from anger, and said, ‘It’s just as well I found out what he is like in good time.’

  ‘Her fiancé didn’t like all this living with the Terrorists,’ said the father, triumphant.

  ‘He’s gone south,’ said the young woman to me. ‘He’s Taken the Gap. Well, it’s the right place for him, isn’t it?’

  ‘If we could take our pensions out we would Take the Gap too,’ grumbled the father.

  ‘You wouldn’t be living like this in The Republic,’ said the son. ‘I had a letter from Rob, and he’s earning half what he did and there’s no question of servants.’

  This talk went on, the young people getting more exasperated, but patient, while now it was the parents who exchanged looks that said, There’s no point, keep quiet.

  But as their children left, the parents said, ‘Now you’ve got your Zimbabwe, I hope you’ll like it.’

  THE VERANDAHS

  And now here is the life of the verandahs at its best, because the houses are high in the Vumba mountains and the one where I am to spend a few days looks down on valleys and hills, forests and lakes. Also the border with Mozambique, four miles away. Sometimes there are little puffs of smoke, and the small sound of distant explosions. Renamo are again blowing up the pipeline, the railway, the road. Farmers who spent years fighting against the ‘terrs’ listened to the sounds, noted the exact size and shape of the smoke-puffs, and diagnosed such and such a mortar…type of explosion…gun. They spoke with the nostalgia of those who have learned expertise they will never use again. The Selous Scouts appeared in every conversation. I had known that as soon as I was in Zimbabwe, the certainties of ‘progressive’ Britain would recede, become less black and white (black, good; white, bad) but the hardest thing was to find myself in an atmosphere where it was taken for granted
that the Selous Scouts were all heroes. I met as many people proudly claiming to have started the Selous Scouts, or whose uncles, brothers, nephews started the Selous Scouts, as in London I know people who invented the CND logo.

  Among its other accomplishments the Selous Scouts ran training courses for people like farmers who could not be fulltime soldiers. One course was how to survive in the bush. Initiates were given a piece of string and a knife, told which plants were edible and which might have water in them, and left in the bush for a week or so to get on with it. It seems to me few people, or perhaps I should say few of a certain type, would not respond with all the energy of fantasies made real. No one brought up in, or near the bush, for a start. Because of the heroic and romantic aspects of the Selous Scouts many Rhodesian whites found it easier to overlook the brutality, the ruthlessness.

  Within a couple of years, in South Africa, in every bookshop would be shelves full of books on the Selous Scouts (mostly ghosted, since the type of person who excels in commando or SAS styles of fighting are seldom those who take easily to writing books) and the Selous Scouts had become for the white right wing a symbol of excellence and of the heroic War for the survival of white Rhodesia. The expertise of the Scouts contributed to the brutalities and excesses of the South African troops in Angola and Namibia.

  And who was this Selous? He was Frederick Courtney Selous, an illustrious and esteemed hunter. How many hundreds of thousands of animals did he kill during his years in the bush? He lived from 1851 to 1917 so he watched old Africa being overrun by the whites. He wrote a book called Travel and Adventure in South-East Africa, and here is a bit of it.

  That evening we slept on a Kafir footpath not far from Lo Magondi’s kraals. About two hours after sunrise on the morrow, when we were quite close to the foot of the hills where the kraals are situated, we met a fine old eland bull face to face, coming from the opposite direction, upon which we at once shot him. As we had a little business to transact with Lo Magondi, in whose charge we had left several trophies of the chase in the previous July, and from whom I expected to be able to buy some ivory, this supply of meat, so near his town, was very opportune. We at once sent two Kafirs on, to apprise the old fellow of our arrival, and then off-saddling the horses (there was a beautiful running stream of water in the valley just below us) set to work to cut up the eland and camp.

  In the afternoon our messengers returned, accompanied by Lo Magondi and about twenty of his followers. We at once presented the old fellow with a hind quarter and half the heart fat of the eland, while on his side he gave us a large pot of beer, a basket of ground nuts, and some pogo meal. That night there was great feasting and rejoicing in our camp, our own boys, who had long been living upon meat and longing for a little vegetable diet, buying large supplies of maize, beans, meal, beer and tobacco from the equally meat-hungry Mashonas. Lo Magondi had brought with him all the rhino horns, etc. that we had left in his charge, but no ivory. He however said that he would send for two tusks the following day, upon which I showed him my stock-in-trade consisting of cotton shirts, beads, coloured handkerchiefs, etc.

  It seems the district Lomagundi was named after Chief Lo Magondi. There is confusion because close to Lomagundi, stretching from northern Mozambique up into Malawi, is a tribe* called The Makondi, known for their work in wood and in stone, which is bought by collectors. Wonderful, enigmatic, beautiful statues–but that was long before any whites saw value in African art. They are also storytellers. As well as all that, their women are famed for their skills in lovemaking. If, having heard this, you ask a black man from almost anywhere in Central and East Africa, How about those Makondi women, then?–his face will at once put on the look of one who knows he has to pay tribute. But ask just what these skills are–for after all they might contribute to the joy and well-being of humankind–and nothing more is forthcoming. One man said that the women scar their stomachs. All right: a rough surface, fine–and then? But so far, that’s it.

  POLITICS

  If, as soon as you arrived in Zimbabwe, first London…then Britain…then Europe…then the rest of Africa, receded, dwindled, instead rose up, threatening and powerful and unscrupulous, South Africa, the southern neighbour, the exemplar, the ‘last bastion of White Supremacy in Southern Africa’. In 1982 few conversations did not come around to South Africa, either as a threat or a promise. Not only civilians left every day to this bastion: the soldiers of the disbanded white armies, their occupation gone, talked of Taking the Gap and then forming guerilla groups who would return to fight against the black government. In fact Renamo had been born in white Rhodesia as just such a group. The South Africans employed ‘Rhodies’ not only to train Renamo, but in all kinds of ways subversive to Zimbabwe. They incited ‘incidents’ that reached the British newspapers as the work of isolated adventurers, but in Zimbabwe they were believed to be the long arm of South Africa. (Nothing is more useful as a diagnosis of Britain than going to a country remote from European sets of mind and finding out what has not been reported in Britain, or reported inadequately.) Everyone, black and white, believed that the anti-Mugabe Terrorists, mostly supporters of Joshua Nkomo, whether he welcomed their support or not, were inspired by South Africa. ‘Near Bulawayo there are whole areas of bush the government troops can’t go into at all.’ Everyone knew South Africa sent agents to the international conferences where investment and development were discussed, to spread rumours of the precariousness of Zimbabwe, every achievement minimized, every setback exaggerated. And, in 1982, newspaper correspondents met bombastic blacks, or whites who confidently talked Treason. I listened to feverish whites, in Harare, in Mutare, mostly ex-army, plotting the downfall of Mugabe. Crazed, they were, but could not see it. Smith was their hero. Smith, Smithie, Good-old-Smithie, in every conversation. Easy to hear, instead, ‘Daddy’, ‘Nanny’, even ‘Mummy’, and the terror of children left alone in the dark, children who had been brought up to know they were due everything, and could not lose what they had, for safety had been promised them by ‘Smithie’. But they had lost everything; they had lost their White Supremacy, and still could not believe it. And their plots and intrigues could not have the consequences of Treason because how could it be treason to take back what is rightfully your own? While listening to these infants I used to think of the black man in London (on Liberation he returned home and took his place in the new Zimbabwe) who at the height of the War, when emotions were at their most violent, remarked calmly: ‘We can’t expect that type of white to change. They never will. They are like children and will have to be treated like children. Or like sick people.’

  A week into my stay in a new Zimbabwe I finally understood that these were indeed sick people. As I moved from one verandah to another–morning tea, lunch, afternoon tea, drinks, dinner–on the flanks of those incomparable mountains, I listened to The Monologue, and reminded myself that these were normally cool, self-reliant, resourceful and humorous people. The Monologue up here was bitter, self-pitying, peevish, began with the day at six or so and went on till bedtime. Now it was not only President Banana and the chickens, Mugabe and his motorcade, but the new bureaucracy, inefficient, arbitrary, weighted against the whites. The Swedes and their Aid operations were hated with a cold rage that now I find hard to believe. Did I really sit listening for hours of malicious anecdotes about the Swedes? Indeed I did: I have my notes. The Swedes were the first, or the most generous, or the most visible of the new armies of international benefactors, and particularly attracted resentment, but so did anyone who had supported the ‘terrs’ or who had assisted the birth of Zimbabwe. Cold Comfort Farm, that exemplary settlement where, for years under the whites, black and white lived and worked together, had always attracted criticism, but now what it stood for had triumphed, every kind of gossip circulated among the whites, some so stupid and so petty I had to keep telling myself: a political enemy is not described as someone who disagrees with you, almost certainly from motives as idealistic as your own, but as vicious, twisted, i
mmoral, and incompetent.

  Above all, there were the Squatters…one could encapsulate the whole grievance of the blacks thus: They came and stole our land.

  Land, the soil, the earth, this is what had been taken from the blacks. Throughout the War of Liberation, the Bush War, Mugabe was making a promise, that when the whites were defeated, every black person would have land. What Comrade Mugabe meant was that they would be part of communal schemes and settlements, but every black wants to own land as the whites do, to have and to hold and to pass on to heirs. Comrade Mugabe was fighting a hard war and his was only one of the armies. He did not know he was going to win. Perhaps even in the midst of such uncertainties it would be wiser for guerilla leaders not to make impetuous promises. It is not possible for every black person to own land or even live on the land. There will never be enough land, particularly with the population doubling, doubling, doubling, at such short intervals. But when the War ended, every black person who had supported Mugabe because of his promises, and many who had not, waited for land, and for Paradise to begin.

  This Paradise was in fact more like an anarchist’s utopia. No one would need a licence to drive a car. Cars would not need licences. No one would have to pass school exams, yet everyone would have qualifications and certificates, and any job at all would be at once available. No need for tickets on buses or on trains. Electricity and water would flow as free as air through pipes. Of course not every black believed in every article of this creed, but every black believed something on these lines, or, at least, this fantasy was believed in by the more childish part of the blacks. And who knows how much despondency and betrayal is felt by that sensible and adult part of a person whose childish fantasies have to die?

  By the time Zimbabwe was born there were three countries to learn from. Mozambique’s economy was in ruins, partly because the whites had been thrown out, with all their expertise. In Tanzania Nyerere, inspired by the examples of the Soviet Union and China, where collectivization had led to the deaths of tens of millions of people, introduced forced collectivization and the peasants practised passive resistance, so that in the shops of that fertile country was little food or none: peasants always win in the long run. In Zambia, due to mismanagement, agriculture was such a disaster most of the food was being grown by the few remaining whites. (This remains true in 1992.)