African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe

by Doris Lessing

  Comrade Mugabe learned from all this, and only two years after Liberation there was a careful, cautious, thoughtful policy of buying up white farms as they became available, settling selected people on them, but only when elementary services had been guaranteed. The rhetoric that accompanied this policy was as senseless and torrential as in any communist country, but luckily there was (and is) little connection between what was happening and the words used to describe it.

  Inflamed and justified by the years of rhetoric, black people rushed on to the new farms, not waiting to be properly settled, but were removed again, if unsuitable. Who was suitable and who not? Well, that’s it, the promises of the Bush War did not mention suitability.

  ‘The whites stole our land, and now we want it back.’

  ‘Yes but slowly does it. Do you want Zimbabwe to be a mess, like Mozambique, like Zambia, like Tanzania?’

  ‘We don’t care about all these big thoughts, long-term perspectives. Just give us the land you promised us.’

  ‘But there isn’t enough land to go around.’

  ‘Then throw the whites off their farms and give us their land.’

  ‘There still wouldn’t be enough land.’

  ‘That isn’t what you were saying when you were the Boys in the Bush.’

  ‘Yes, but the exigencies of that period of time prohibited in-depth analysis, and now we have examined the situation from all angles and taken into consideration the parameters of the parastatial infrastructure and relevant co-ordinates, it is evident that…’

  ‘Give us our land.’

  The new farms are an extension of the already existing settlement areas and Native Purchase Areas set up under the whites, just as the Master Farmer Certificates given to good farmers are a continuation of policies begun under the whites. It was not possible to give credit to the whites for anything in 1982, so the new policies were presented as if born out of the head of the new regime.

  On the white verandahs, the most important article of The Monologue was the Squatters. When I was not sitting on verandahs, I sat in cars, being driven through areas crowded with every kind of shack, hut, shanty, each surrounded by straggling mealies and a few pumpkins. The earth was eroding into gullies, the trees were being cut for fuel. Who drove me? Explosive, splenetic whites.

  ‘Just look at that, look at it, there won’t be any soil left…’

  ‘For God’s sake, calm down!’

  ‘It’s not as if they are even living there…the men have jobs in town, they bring their wives and kids to the land they’ve squatted, they can’t live on what they grow, they can’t even grow more than a few meals of sadza.’

  ‘You are going to have a stroke if you aren’t careful.’

  ‘And the Minister won’t do anything…when he addresses meetings of the Faithful he just promises them land…he’s scared not to. When he speaks to us, the white farmers, he says, “Yes, yes, yes, you’re right, no of course we don’t want soil erosion.” But he doesn’t do anything.’

  The soil was washing away. The gullies deepened. Bad enough on mealie-growing land, but on the steep hillsides of the Vumba perched and huddled the shanties with a few thin maize stalks about them, and some chickens. But this shallow forest soil could never grow maize, and whole hillsides were sliding into gullies. ‘Just look at that!’ shouted the white farmers, who these days are all conservationists to a man, woman and child.

  Half an hour’s drive from this high valley in the mountains that grows coffee, kiwi fruit, soft fruit, passion fruit, you have dropped a couple of thousand feet and there you are in the tropics: pineapples, bananas, mangoes, any tropical fruit, but what united these different landscapes was the Squatters. On to every farm crept the people from the towns hoping to be farmers, real farmers, with title deeds. And every farm repelled them: it was a new and energetic guerilla war.

  Which sometimes took surprising forms. A certain liberal white farmer (but the word liberal is a malediction) on Liberation called his workforce to him and said, ‘And now we shall all work together as equals. No more migrant labour on this farm. I shall give every one of you two acres of land to build a permanent home. The land will be yours. What you grow on it will be yours.’

  ‘And what do you suppose happened?’ demanded the white woman who was telling this tale, her face lit with hatred. ‘Well, what do you think? All the relatives moved in at once, there were hundreds of them. That idiot went to his permanently employed men and said, “Can’t you see that there won’t be any soil left here in five years’ time? It’ll be desert. Your friends are cutting all the trees down. You must send them away.” But of course they wouldn’t go. They could recognize a good thing when they saw it.’

  ‘And what happened?’

  ‘He went to Australia and he’s farming near Perth. And all his Squatters got their comeuppance anyway because his farm was purchased by the government.’

  Verandah talk was not only of Squatters. When Mugabe was fighting his desperate war in the bush, he said other things that were less than intelligent. One was that compulsory dipping of cattle* was a sinister plot by whites to destroy the cattle–the mombies–which are warp, woof and weft in traditional African life. Compulsory dipping was in any case hard to keep up while the War was going on, but at Liberation the blacks at once stopped dipping, and as a result there were all kinds of diseases. Hard for the government to begin enforced dipping again. ‘But we thought you told us…’

  The Comrades in the bush announced that making contour ridges to stop erosion was another ploy to undo the blacks. The bad results from this were in 1982 already visible. On African farms they were ploughing right across the contour ridges. Gullies formed, which became ravines, water rushed down them carrying precious soil. ‘You wait a few years,’ said ill-wishing or conservationist whites, ‘they won’t have any land left–but they’ll blame us for it, as usual.’

  This concern for the land impressed me. When I was growing up the whites were land pirates in more ways than by grabbing it. When the government made contour ridging compulsory, and sent out surveyors to map the land, they grumbled. All that has been forgotten. If The Monologue in its various forms was boring, and you wished only to be somewhere else as it started up again–again, again–when these people talked about farming techniques, it was a very different thing. These reformed pirates and land grabbers know about inventions and discoveries from every part of the world. They experiment, they innovate, they wonder if tree planting in Scotland or the thousands-of-years-old tricks used to wring water from deserts being used by Israel could be applied to Zimbabwe. They discuss wind power, solar power, water-screws from the Middle East and Egypt, new ways of building dams, the introduction of drought-resistant plants from semi-deserts, the control of pests by other pests or helpful plants, the farming of eland instead of cattle.

  I was taken to visit a farm which was ‘a bit of a show place, you won’t find many farms like this one’.

  The couple had farmed in Northern Rhodesia, were among the hundreds of white farmers who left when it became Zambia. They went to the Transvaal and farmed successfully, but ‘They don’t know how to get on with the Affs down there. The Affs there aren’t friendly and nice like our Affs. They are sullen. I never saw a smiling face all the time I was there. So we decided to try Southern Rhodesia.’

  Again history caught up with them, and inflicted on them a black government.

  He was a remarkable farmer. The farm was more like a medieval manor, or perhaps a white farm in the old days, than farms now; full of workshops and mills, dairies, a blacksmith’s, a leather-worker’s shed. The farmer resembled a stereotype Texan, for he was tall, tough, rangy, slow-talking. He had a genius for improvisation. During the War, with machinery and spare parts hard to get, he had attended every farm sale, bought up the machines, and rehabilitated them. His farm was a museum of farm, machinery: I recognized ploughs and harrows and planters from the 1920s and ’30s. There were a couple of acres full of these machines
, and every one was in working order. He had taught a couple of farm workers all he knew, and these men looked after their machines like–well, like mombies. This joke was made by the farmer to the men, and returned to us by the men, laughing. ‘Nearly as good as mombies,’ they said, showing off wagons, planters, reapers. The place was almost self-sufficient, with storerooms full of preserves, jams, honey, cheeses, pickles, and bins full of grain. Supper was a feast, and breakfast another, and nothing on the table had been bought. The farmer’s wife was as remarkable as her husband. When her husband went off for months at a time to fight, it was she who ran the farm. She did not find it easy to take a back seat again–like all the wives who managed farms while the men went to war, and who tended to exchange resigned looks when their husbands said things like, ‘So and so came to look after my wife when I was away fighting.’ Now, with peace restored, as well as being a farmer’s wife of the old kind who could turn their hands to anything, she was running what amounted to a training school for house servants. These were all female, not male, but the decision to employ women had not been made by her. ‘Oh, I do what I’m told,’ she said, and then, ‘Come and see the Princess: Yes, I have a Princess working in my kitchen.’ This was not said unpleasantly, as it certainly would have been in the old days, for she was trying to come to terms with the new Zimbabwe. In the kitchen a pretty black girl was learning to cook elaborate cakes and puddings. ‘They come up to me from the village every day, they beg me to teach them, they cry and if I say no, they just go on coming back till I give in. Please teach me, please teach me and so I have five girls working for me, whatever next, my husband tells me I’m silly, but I say, I’m doing my bit for Zimbabwe, aren’t I? There isn’t any work for these poor girls, you see. They know I give them a good training, and they try to get work somewhere in the towns in a hotel or one of the embassies. They all want to work in a hotel. I show them everything, how to cook and serve and make beds and keep the verandah plants nice. I teach them how to answer the telephone and take messages.’ Before I went to bed they warned me that if I went for a walk before breakfast then I must be careful. ‘There are all kinds of skellums about you know, because of the War. And if you hear a lorry, get into the bush. If it’s just our soldiers, then it’s all right, but if it’s the North Koreans…’

  Comrade Mugabe accepted an offer by the North Koreans to supply soldiers to train a regiment especially to guard him and act as exemplars of military efficiency to the rest of the citizens. They were thugs, bullies and, more than once, murderers, for it was they who were blamed for the recent murder of two tourists not very far from this farm. Everyone feared them. In 1982 only one issue united blacks and whites: loathing of the Koreans, the infamous Fifth Brigade. ‘They’d kill you as soon as look at you,’ said my host. Said too, the five girls who were off to their villages through the dark bush, together for safety, with a man from the farm as escort. When I went walking early, about six, it was through fields full of coffee bushes that were dusty and limp from lack of rain. I was listening for the birds, even hoping to see an animal or two. There were some birds, not very many, but no animals. Suddenly appeared a lorry full of men in uniform, jolting past in clouds of dust. They were a local regiment, not the Koreans. I stood in the dust at the side of the road, ready to run if necessary. They did not look friendly, but then, why should they?

  Soon after I returned to London, I heard this couple decided they didn’t want to live under a black government: it was the bureaucracy, the incompetence, the Squatters, and, above all, fear for their future. They took their skills and experience and expertise, and returned to the Transvaal, sullen blacks or no, and started again from the beginning, because they could not take money out of the country. What happened to that farm, full of workshops and machinery and animals? That great house, full of rooms? To the young black women so desperate to be cooks, parlour maids, waitresses?

  At supper–fifteen people, family friends, visitors, a scene of peace and plenty–all the talk had been of war. Again I heard the note of bitter longing and regret, when they remembered how at nights they lay in the bush under the stars, and tried to stave off sleep because of the splendour of the skies, and listened to the silence of the bush–full of danger, and that was at least half the point. ‘The best time of their lives’–what else? And with a thousand times more reason than when my father talked of the best time of his life, meaning the companionship of soldiers. ‘I’ve never known that again…’ But that was the trenches. Longing, regret, nostalgia–for what? More and more I think that these, our most powerful emotions, longing or regretting, are about something else, some other good or lack. There’s a Companionship few of us have known, which we dream of, and in war it comes close, for a time. With Death as its price. Then the War is over, and suddenly everything tells these men they are no longer young. It is not a long slow attrition, which is how most people experience the onset of middle age. During the War years they have been valued and have valued themselves for the attributes of young men: physical strength, toughness, endurance, bravery. And for years they have been in an earlier stage of culture, where men hunted other men, to kill them. No wonder memories of war are such a strong drug. And all over Zimbabwe black men who had fought for six, seven, eight years, in the forests and kopjes and vleis, sometimes from the age of ten, or eleven, had endured that cruel war, so much worse than we were ever told in the newspapers, had fought inadequately equipped, and often untrained–these men were remembering a time of hope. For years they had lived in and off the bush, their fathers’ heritage, if not their own; they had been with equals and friends, the white man and his cold cutting ways held in focus as an enemy, and a long way off. They were permanently drunk on the most satisfying rhetorics, so much better than alcohol, and on danger. Now they were back in civilian life, most in poorly paid jobs, or jobless and clinging on to the often semi-criminal fringes of town life, or jobless in villages. Or they were crippled and being ‘rehabilitated’, sometimes being taught to read and write. Probably the people who could understand each other best of all in Zimbabwe, in 1982, were the white and black veterans of that war. But they had to hate and condemn each other.

  ANIMALS

  The ‘gun-boy’, a man of fifty or so, is out every night after baboons and wild pigs. Driving along the side of a mountain through the bush, in these parts more like rain forest, suddenly there is a troop of baboons and their young crossing the dangerous exposed road.

  ‘Ahhhhh,’ sighs the visitor from Europe.

  ‘Vermin,’ snaps the farmer.

  A group of wild pigs, the little ones running after mother…‘Oh, look, look at the little pigs.’

  ‘Vermin, rubbish,’ says the farmer.

  Baboons raid the coffee fields, can lay waste a whole field in a night, and have learned they can get high on coffee beans. They do get high on coffee beans. Pigs root up the vegetable gardens and chase the house dogs and kill them when they can.

  The man with the gun is essential to the mountain valley and its farmers. Baboons and pigs and people cannot live together, too bad.

  In the forests of Mozambique there is no game left, because of the War. Nothing, all killed.

  But every morning, when I got up, about five-thirty, to be in time to see the sun rise, I sat on the verandah and observed, a hundred yards down the hill, a vervet monkey sitting in the top of a tree, lolling there like me on my chair, and he was watching the sunrise too, as he warmed himself after the cold night. He stayed for about half an hour. Friends, or family, more frivolous characters than this philosopher, cavorted about in the lower branches or chased each other across the ground from tree to tree.

  HOTELS

  On the road up to the Vumba are two hotels, old style, full of space and character, with verandahs, lawns and–birds. You sit out on a sunny lawn, overlooking mountains and forests, and drink tea, beer, and watch the birds flashing about in the trees. The game warden for this area is also linked with the hotel industry. He is ful
l of woe because the kidnapping of the six tourists will put people off coming to visit. We sit about drinking this and that and play the game, ‘If I were…’ In this case, Minister for Tourism. We would advertise package tours for bird-watchers, promising old-fashioned hotels, full of charm.

  THE NEW CLASS

  In one of these hotels I sat with a friend in a corner of the bar. At the bar four very young, very smart black people. The two girls wore evening dresses, all bare backs and shoulder straps. The men were in dinner-jackets. They flirted and chattered and behaved stylishly. Film behaviour. My friend, an old-time white, and I were experiencing quite different emotions. Those girls, there–thirty-five years ago–that was me. I knew they felt as I did, aged nineteen, twenty, in my ever-so sophisticated dance dresses. They were desperate and unsure. My companion said, ‘They are civil servants from Mutare, up here on a night out. Well, good luck to them.’ Meaning, If that’s what they want, then that proves they are stupid.

  ANTHROPOLOGY

  Certainly not on the verandah, for it is too cold, but around the great fire, a dozen people, some visitors from Harare, talk about the news: if three of the six tourist hostages taken on the Victoria Falls road have been released, their captors say they will kill the others by a certain time. Several say it is a bluff, no one has been killed or will be killed. Then a man from Bulawayo says, ‘If the Matabele say they will do a thing, they do it. It is their culture.’ He told us he had lived with the Matabele during the War for months, had eaten and slept with them. When he came out of the bush it was hard to remember English, for a day or two. On cold nights, with one thin blanket each, he slept in a sandwich between two Matabele. He has nothing but admiration for the Matabele. When later it was confirmed the hostages had been killed, he said, ‘I told you so.’ Quite a few of the company love the Matabele, it turns out, and even more the Zulus, from whom the Matabele descended. There is present an historian and anthropologist, and he teases a South African girl. ‘Why do you love the Zulus? It’s because they are military people by nature. Soldiers. The Prussians of Africa. I can tell what a person’s like according to whether they like the Matabele or the Mashona. The Mashona are easy-going, creative, artistic, and witty, just like the Italians. That’s why the Italians who settled here after the Second World War got on so well with them. Both have a great gift for living. But white South Africans adore the Zulus, and certain types of white Zimbabweans adore the Matabele. Like to like.’