African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe

by Doris Lessing

  They talk, they talk, they talk obsessively about the new black leaders. They cannot stop talking about them. But already the harsh and angry judgements of my first few days are changing. Mugabe has this or that good quality. Nkomo isn’t too bad–a pity he’s in the dog-house. This is far from the hysterical turnabout that the Kenyan whites showed a surprised world: one week Jomo Kenyatta was a devil and a thug, the next a Grand Old Man.

  One leader has no redeeming features at all: Edgar Tekere who when drunk went into a white farmhouse and murdered the farmer. Tekere is a fanatic, he is beyond redemption, and Mugabe should get rid of him. Edgar Tekere comes from this part of the world, he is a local hero. Bad luck for Manicaland, these whites say.

  They talk, they talk, they talk…about the regiment that is stationed just a couple of miles away. No, they are not the Koreans, nothing like the Fifth Brigade, but they are far from the nice tidy soldiers of modern Europe, kept tucked out of sight when not in use. They behave very badly, not above stealing what they find unguarded. They terrorize women they find alone, join beer drinks when they should not and get very drunk. There is no redress.

  Why are they here?

  When the boundary between Portuguese East Africa and Southern Rhodesia was drawn, two officials met for drinks and settled the matter, by throwing dice…true or false? When an anecdote is told and retold, and it is, and has been, about frontiers all over Southern Africa, then you have to wonder. It is told with relish, by the whites–tamed characters admiring their buccaneering predecessors. (‘Drake was really a terrible ruffian, you know.’) I have also heard it told, with relish, by blacks, in the spirit of, Well, what can you expect!

  Lord Salisbury said: ‘We distributed mountains, rivers and lakes among us without knowing where they were.’

  Presumably he would not have approved of the two raffish young officials, one Southern Rhodesian and one Portuguese, sharing sundowners and dicing for the frontier that runs four miles away.

  The trouble is, it cuts a certain African tribe in two. One part is now in Mozambique, the other in Zimbabwe. Because Mozambique is having such a bad time, and there is famine, and because the Africans on that side see no reason to love or respect the frontier, they come over to Zimbabwe to get food from their relatives, who are well off. This is against the law of the new Zimbabwe, which has to be enforced by Comrade Mugabe’s soldiers, referred to by the locals as the Comrades. This battalion is the real ruler of the area. The whites hate them because wherever they are, there is anarchy. The blacks hate them because they are always raiding homes to see if they are harbouring ‘brothers’ from across the frontier.

  The whites: ‘They behave as if they own the place.’

  ‘Do you think the fact they have just won this war has anything to do with it?’

  ‘I’m not having it, that’s all! The women have been up complaining again. I’ve sent a message to the chap in command. But what can he do? There’s no discipline.’

  But the battalion had its uses, too.

  ‘Something is under way,’ goes the talk on the verandahs. ‘We’ll tell you when it’s over.’

  We stand on hillside looking down at the little huts of the Squatters, poor, makeshift, and, instead of being grouped like a traditional village, they are isolated, dotted here and there, in clearings in the forest where the trees have gone and the soil is slipping away down the mountainside.

  This is what was under way…the battalion had been ordered by the government to clear some Squatters off a farm. In charge of The Operation was a young Scotsman, who hated what he had to do: he had not slept for two nights, he said. After The Operation he came in for a drink. The army had gone in with lorries, cleared everything out of the huts, set fire to them. The women had stood watching the huts burn. There were over seventy women. It was considered significant that two sewing-machines were found, twenty sacks of mealies, and a suite of store furniture. It was taken for granted that these goods were for the anti-Frelimo Terrorists, or Renamo, who–the people around here believe–are sure to win. I ask, ‘But surely these people wouldn’t support South Africa? That’s what it amounts to?’ ‘Look, these are peasants, behaving like peasants–like all the people in villages, poor bastards, while the War was on. They kept their heads down and survived. They know how to survive. Those poor bastards want to eat. People need to eat you know. They don’t eat under Samora Machel. They think they will eat better under the other crowd. That’s all there is to it.’

  The lorries took the Squatters down to Mutare, to be resettled, I was told. But it turned out only ten per cent were going to be given a place on the land. ‘Most of them have jobs in Mutare, or have husbands or brothers in work there. They have homes already.’

  ‘Did they get their sewing-machines back?’

  ‘Impounded.’

  ‘And the maize?’

  No one was comfortable. The Operation was a victory for the whites, giving them reassurance that the black government would at least sometimes enforce the law.

  There was anger later when these Squatters were taken before a magistrate and ordered never to return. Not fined. Not remanded. Not put on bail. Told: Don’t do it again.

  ‘Of course they’ll do it again. They’re walking back up the mountain through the bush at this moment. The Minister of Agriculture keeps promising us, Yes, Yes, of course you can’t have Squatters on your farms, but the next thing he has one of those rabble-rousing meetings of theirs and he says the white farms are up for grabs, and promises them land. He knows there isn’t enough land. He never tells them that. He gets them all worked up roaring and shouting, and next day he comes to us, Oh don’t worry about a thing, just go on growing your crops, Zimbabwe couldn’t do without you.’

  A few days after driving towards the Indian Ocean, Harare to Mutare, I drove back, not stopping, Mutare to Harare. Negotiations had gone on with the petrol station, where no one without a permit was served unless you were part of the local mechanisms of barter–services or favours or farm produce in return for a tank of petrol. The pipeline had just been cut again by Renamo, and the road was empty for miles at a time. Sometimes I find myself thinking, What luck to be living now, and it is often when driving alone in wild country, alone, or, as today, companioned. Not only is it permitted, this driving about where one wills, it is actually approved–though probably not for long. Make the most of it while it lasts, I guiltily admonished myself, dawdling or racing in the poisonous machine. On that day in Eastern Zimbabwe, through that landscape, under the tall cool sky, it was no good reminding myself that this was, in the minds of all the citizens, still a war country, with every tree or hill or turn of the road a reminder of killing.

  Is there a more beautiful country in the world than this one?–combining magnificence, variety, freshness of colour with a way of speaking to you intimately about our story as a species (we originated hereabouts, so they say) as if you, this item of a moment in history were truly the heir of everything humankind has done and achieved. Survival is what this dangerous grandeur reminds you of: if we have all survived so much, then surely we can confidently hope…but we were nearing Harare and the road was no longer empty, and my companion was pointing out this car, or that lorry or bus, expostulating about the standards of driving. Liberation had released on to the roads thousands of vehicles that were not licenced and could never be licenced because of their decrepitude, but, ‘This government doesn’t care about a little thing like that, it’s shit-scared of its own people. It never prosecutes one of its own. If one of us offends, then that’s it, the police have time enough for that.’ But if many of the black drivers were bad, then the black men who drove the coaches and buses of the regular services were all good chaps: ‘I’d trust my life to them anywhere, any day.’ Certainly now my attention was withdrawn from the bush, the mountains, the sky, and all the associated scaly and furry thoughts banished, I had never seen a more interesting collection of jalopies, tin cans tied up with string, rusting mementoes of the da
ys when ‘everyone’ had cars. They were, in short, just like the cars driven by the poorer white farmers of the old days. Each vehicle pumped out black smoke. Long before you glimpsed one of them toiling up a slope ahead, the greasy black clouds were drifting across the trees, and soiling the cool blue of the winter sky.

  THE SHOW

  The Harare Show was on. The Salisbury Show in the old days was part agricultural show, part industrial, with horse-racing, song and dance of all kinds, parades, fashion, not to mention the Show Ball. The Show Ground covers many acres, and people came in from everywhere, South Africa and Northern Rhodesia too. This year apprehension darkened anticipation: last year, in 1981, the first Show after Liberation, a group of drunk and armed Freedom Fighters had rampaged, overthrowing stalls, threatening to beat people up, singing snatches of revolutionary songs. The War was only a year away, and everyone knew that all over the country were these men, and not a few women, who had fought for Liberation and who–many, if not all–were bitter that the whites had not all been instantly thrown out of Zimbabwe. ‘This is not what we fought for,’ was what they yelled, seeing so many white faces behind the stands and stalls. But it was not only white people they insulted and threatened. They were people who needed to fight, to hurt…and suppose it all happened again this year? My brother had decided not to take his feather pictures, bone buttons and key-rings to the Show, but then said he was not going to be panicked by a bunch of ‘terrs’.

  I walked past the place where prize cattle were being led in front of the judges, their foreheads adorned by large rosettes, Second Prize, First Prize, Champion, like girls with bunches of flowers in their hair at an old-fashioned dance. At Light Industry groups of men, white, stood together talking in low voices, their shoulders held defensively. There were quite a lot of people, but ‘in the old days’–but that was only three or four years ago, on the other side of The Divide–the Show had been so crowded you could hardly move. Around a large circle of bare earth were the stalls of Arts and Crafts, and there was my brother waiting for customers.

  ‘There’s no one here,’ says Harry, calm but angry. ‘I might just as well not have come.’ All the people behind the stalls selling the kinds of beads, belts, flowers, clothes you would find anywhere from Camden Lock to the Market Square in Helsinki or a country fair in the States were white. The thin crowd was mostly white.

  I sat in a deck chair in the sun outside his booth and watched the people drift past, slow, slow, with the steering loitering look of fish in a tank, hesitating at this stall, nosing gently at the next, wandering about over the great circle of brown dust. The faces…many were dream faces, distorted but familiar. These were people I had gone to school with, danced with at the Salisbury Sports Club, raced dangerously about with in cars, before one had to feel that cars were a threatened species. I knew them and I didn’t know them. And since I do dream so much about old Rhodesia, probably I had encountered them disguised in my sleep.

  An elderly woman, in a tea-party suit, with a flowered hat and white gloves, stops, stares, and advances cautiously to my brother.

  ‘Is that you Harry? I thought it was. Long time no see. I’ve been in The Republic to have a look. But I’m sticking it out here. I like our Affs better. They’re a nice lot compared with there. You can always have a good laugh with our Affs.’

  He did not say he was Taking the Gap, only remarked that the Show was not what it used to be. ‘I’m only here because I thought we should show the flag a bit.’

  A pause. She looks hard at me. She goes close to my brother. She lowers her voice. ‘Harry, who is that lady in the deck chair?’

  ‘That’s my sister,’ he says, lowering his.

  ‘You mean that’s…?’

  The two faces turn to stare at me.

  ‘But I thought she was…’

  ‘Yes, but with this government–she’s on their side. So she’s not Prohibited now.’

  Her face is harassed, with that it’s-all-too-much-for-me look, like a housewife whose saucepan is boiling over while her baby has spilled the custard over her clean floor. She laughs nervously, while Harry confides, ‘She’s still got all those funny ideas of hers, you know.’

  As she walks off, she gives me a dignified inclination of the head, while the flowers on her hat nod gently. I raise my hand in that gesture that says, Hi there!

  Harry comes to me and says carefully, ‘That’s Joannie.’

  ‘Ah. Well. It’s nice to see everyone again.’

  A customer arrives, a black woman with three large daughters. She wants buttons for cardigans she knits for sale through mail order. I wander off to African Agriculture. Here there are real crowds, but while they are animated, and having a good time, they are cautious too, for they are as afraid of an eruption of drunk freedom fighters as the whites are. They are absorbed in the plants and vegetables. Very few of these people are cut off from their villages, the country, the bush. I thought of Finland where they said there is not one person who does not have a toehold in the countryside: parents, a brother, a sister married to a farmer. These people crowding to examine the produce knew what they were looking at. All kinds of maize, millet, rapoka, munga–these grains I knew, but there were many others. Roots and leaves from the bush that are used to make relishes for the porridge: I knew the leaves only as plants I saw when walking through the bush. Legumes–dozens of different kinds. Potatoes and sweet potatoes, and pumpkins like yellow boulders, and all the varieties of gourds and squashes. These plants were what the Africans knew and grew, and have always grown, but Zimbabwe, the paradise country, can grow anything at all, from the soft fruit, plums and peaches and apples of the Eastern Districts, to the tropical fruits of the Burma Valley, to the oranges and lemons and grapefruit of the Mazoe Valley, to avocado pears, and mangoes and lichees and kumquats, to…is there anything this sun-blessed, star-blessed country cannot grow?

  Crowds drifted from admiring their food, displayed in pots and baskets and laid out on cloth, to the stands beside the place where tribal dancing was going on. The drums livened our feet, and made us move together, and some of the women were dancing, in groups, while men stood by clapping. The tiers were so full you would think not one body could possibly find room to squeeze in, but all the time people, who stood looking wondering where they might fit, found that a space had opened somewhere, and the impossible was happening. Groups of whites stood watching. One group was the new race of Aid workers, or perhaps people from an embassy, friendly, casual, as at home here as they would be, next year, in Ethiopia, Jakarta, Peshawar. Another group was South African soldiers. There was something about them, just as there used to be about the Vietnam veterans. The year before I had come to know a South African who had done two years in Namibia. His face was ravaged, destroyed. The South African soldiers from Angola and Namibia have had to forgive themselves too much. Their faces, many of them, were like wounds. These young white South Africans, here as tourists, looking at Zimbabwe, saw something that they, in The Republic, had fought to prevent. No one looked at them, except covertly, as I was doing. The Africans going past unconsciously (or perhaps knowingly) gave them plenty of space, and lowered their voices.

  Generally, the black crowds here ignored the whites. They did not want to have to see us, or, perhaps, genuinely did not see us.

  The South African soldiers went on standing where they were, looking at the dancing which here was not a show put on for tourists. The soldiers were all high on something, and it was not alcohol.

  I went off and was stopped by a young woman dressed in a wonderful combination of smart red suit, black heels half a yard high, and a head cloth in many colours. ‘Will you give me an interview for my newspaper?’ she wanted to know. We sat opposite each other in the Press Pavilion, and chatted about this and that. Then she asked, ‘What do you think about Zimbabwe?’ We were getting on pretty well, so I risked, ‘At the moment it is breaking my heart.’

  She at once sobered out of her smiling professionalism, and says,
‘Yes, I agree. But perhaps a positive message?’

  ‘Viva Zimbabwe,’ I say. For no reason at all, there are tears in my eyes, and, I see, in hers too. We realize we might easily begin crying.

  ‘It’s going to take time,’ she says, almost under her breath, glancing around to make sure no one had overheard.

  ‘It’s going to take time, but Zimbabwe is on the right path.’

  ‘Very good,’ she says. ‘I like that.’

  AT A BAR

  That evening I am standing at a bar in a restaurant in a suburb, with some friends. The bar is full. A black man has been told that it is now against the law to forbid a black person from going into a ‘white’ bar or club. He is bobbing about among the white drinkers, smiling ecstatically, a bit drunk perhaps, or elated with the emotions of the time. The whites, as they notice him, not at once since they are pretty drunk, make room for him, and one says, ‘Whoa there, Jim, mind my glass.’ ‘Yes, baas, yes, my baas,’ says the brave one, smiling, bobbing, turning himself right around to make sure he is here, actually here, by right, in this white place. ‘Do you want a drink?’ asks another white, and to the barman: ‘Give this nice chap a drink. What do you want to drink? ‘A beer, baas.’ ‘No, have a whisky, go on, be a devil.’ ‘Yes, baas, a whisky please, baas.’