African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe

by Doris Lessing

  The decades roll past and behold there is the new university on the hill near Harare, and a letter in the newspaper. ‘After a dance at the University you see the black students lying entwined on the grass in the dark, two by two, kissing and much more than that. When they were asked why they behaved like this, since it is not any part of their traditional behaviour, they replied, with straight faces, “But we learned it all from you.”

  Similarly, a delegation of black women went from Zimbabwe to Israel to visit kibbutzim. They behaved arrogantly, using high peremptory voices, ordering people about. When asked why they were so rude to their hosts, they answered: ‘But that is how our white madams behave, so we thought it was the way we should behave.’

  Next afternoon I was walking with Annie along the road on the mountainside above the house when an old man in ragged clothes, with a thick staff like a Biblical patriarch, came towards me. He stopped when he saw Annie, held out his staff horizontally against her, gripped in fists that trembled, and angrily said, ‘Call the dog.’ Annie was not threatening him but she blocked his way and knew that she did: she was full of wicked enjoyment. ‘To heel,’ I said, uncertain whether she would obey me. I was remembering this dog was a bull terrier, and part of the house’s defences, like the security fence whose gates these days stood open. The old man’s fear said everything about her function. She did not come to heel. The man could have killed me and the dog: all the terrors and the hatreds of the Bush War were in his eyes. ‘Sit,’ I tried. Slowly Annie lowered her scarred haunches, but did not take her eyes off the old man’s face. He could not pass her. ‘She won’t hurt you,’ I said. ‘You hold the dog,’ he said. I gripped her by the loose folds of neck flesh and he slowly edged past, holding out his cudgel level with her head. ‘She’s just a silly old dog,’ I said, and was at once incandescent with embarrassment: but I actually had said those stupid words. The old man did not turn his back on Annie until he had gone a good twenty yards. ‘You hold that dog,’ he shouted back. I did. I was afraid she might chase him.

  Coming towards us came a flock or flight of girls, ten or so of them, returning from an afternoon’s tennis at the Club. They dawdled or skipped about or made little runs out of excess energy. They giggled and their high excited voices rang out over the steep slopes of the mountain. They wore their little shorts and their little shirts; they were all long pale frail limbs, but one had new jeans which she had carefully torn to be fashionable, so her plump knees showed. Their shining tresses blew about, and pretty eyes and pink mouths were lightly sketched on plump faces. They were like an Impressionist’s little girls caught in a moment of self-absorbed pleasure.

  The old man strode straight past them, and now his cudgel was held out in front of him, at the ready.

  It is not often one sees oneself as others see one.

  That night all the girls were in front of the great fire, occupying chairs, the sofa, or lolling on the floor with Annie. Two of them were wrapping her around with green paper streamers left over from a party at the Club. She sat, with her head slightly lowered, looking at them as she had at the old man, a measured patience and control.

  ‘Annie, silly old dog Annie…’ They collapsed, laughing, and rolled about the floor, while the servant carefully stepped past them with the tray loaded with supper. Annie stood up, burst her bonds, and went to lie nose to the fire, decorated with frilly green bits like seaweed or lettuce.

  RAIN

  One night, not on the verandah, but inside, with the fire roaring up, the rain began to bang down on the corrugated iron roof, and the company applauded. The long drought…dry dams…the coffee plants standing with slightly wilted leaves, the dogs coming all day panting to the water bowls–and now, unexpectedly, rain. At once everyone’s spirits revived. Happiness. An intoxication.

  THE ASSISTANT

  One afternoon, when the verandah was full of guests, some of them girls from down the hill, there was an apparition in the sky: Zimbabwe’s champion parachute jumper was floating down from a tiny aeroplane, a neighbouring farmer’s. He floated slowly, for the new parachutes allow plenty of adjustment, and it can take five minutes to make a descent. He’d better not land over in Portuguese East, cried somebody, and a Swedish girl visiting at a near farm said fiercely, ‘Really, it’s Mozambique!’ ‘Renamo or Frelimo, they’ll have his guts for garters,’ said the offender. The girl has been, is, silent, observant, and shocked, because she thought that after Liberation, everything, everyone, would at once be different. ‘I suppose you find us very strange?’ she has been asked, by a visiting old-style white from a tea plantation. ‘I find you very strange,’ she said fiercely. ‘You, the white people.’ ‘That’s because you don’t understand us,’ came the amused, impervious-to-criticism reply. ‘It takes time, you know.’ She had burst into tears and then everyone was very kind to her. ‘They patronize me,’ she said fiercely. ‘How dare they!’

  Down, down, floated the handsome hero, over the mountains and the bush, while the little girls and the not so little girls sighed…he disappeared into the trees, and appeared an hour or so later walking up the mountain carrying his parachute. Frowning, modest, and–as usual–inarticulate, he subsided in a chair, grabbing up a beer, blushing because of his many admirers.

  The Farm Assistant…The Tutor appears plentifully in literature, but where is The Assistant? He is very young, an object of sympathy because he has no money, and is lonely in this house so full of family and their friends. He works like a demon all day, because his future depends on it. The farmer’s wife is bound to be in love with him in an aching, motherly way. The daughters lie awake at night for him. The daughters of neighbouring farmers take to arriving at all hours. The farmer, who was almost certainly once an assistant is laconic, sardonic and watchful.

  This particular farm assistant was–well, of course–shy. He was handsome. He knew nothing, and yearned to know everything. ‘Tell me a book to read,’ he might demand, and, when handed one, turned it over with lanky respectful fingers. ‘Yes, I’ll give this one a try.’

  He dropped in often. Dropping in, dropping over, is the style of the life of the verandahs and not only for people. Animals visited, too. The great Alsatian from the next farm, who got lonely when his people went off down to Mutare, which they often did, came over to us for company. I might wake in the night–I was sleeping on the verandah–and feel the warm muzzle on my face or arm. A soft pleading whine and he climbed on to the bed, ‘Tarka! What are you doing here, you should be at home.’ If Tarka turned up in the day, a telephone call. ‘Your dog Tarka is here again.’ A servant came to fetch him. ‘Come on, Tarka, come home.’ Tarka went off, disconsolate, with a hundred wistful glances back at the house full of people and the three dogs, his friends.

  PARTINGS

  The little girls and their mother departed for Cape Town, just as I soon would leave for London. Then thousands of miles would again separate us. This was when I should leave to find out about new Zimbabwe, but I could still hardly move, what with the bruised ribs and leg. I lay in a long chair on the verandah and looked out over that view of mountains and hills and rivers and lakes that no one could ever get tired of. Sometimes small puffs of smoke just over the border meant that Renamo was at it again, blowing up something or other.

  My son sat with me, when not in the fields. He was still in pain. Days passed, then weeks. We were both bored. We told each other we were bored. In a small field down the hill were some sheep, put there to pasture by a neighbour. The sheep had brought flies with them. We sat on the verandah with rolled-up newspapers and swatted flies. Nine, twelve, fifteen, twenty-nine…‘I’ve killed thirty flies,’ I would boast. ‘Jolly good show. But I’ve killed thirty-five.’

  ‘You’re cheating!’

  ‘No, you’re cheating. That’s my fly, not yours.’

  People came and people went. Sometimes the verandah seemed to me like a seashore, with tides rushing in, depositing sea-drift, and out again. A car full of people might turn up fro
m Harare, and they were all fed, and slept on the living-room floor. ‘Milos! Bring tea…bring beer, make supper for ten. Make breakfast for sixteen.’

  I lay on the verandah, and thought how alike in general pace and style are the lives of the blacks and the whites, the easy hospitality, the generosity. (Nor can we now say, But the whites are rich and the blacks poor.) Why then, if they are so alike…in fact my thoughts were the same as those before I left Southern Rhodesia in 1949. But in those days I had nothing to make comparisons with. My thoughts tended to be a blur of incredulity: how could people go on like this when it was obviously stupid? But now I had seen the world and knew that people went on like this everywhere.

  Once I had wondered why Europeans were so obsessed with their racial superiority, and if it was a compensation for their having been so backward, so uncouth, while the civilizations of the Middle East and the East glittered and despised theirs. The European arrogance was only the boastfulness of the nouveau riche? Pride in white skin was because there was nothing much else to be proud of? But that was before I had watched an Indian girl trying all afternoon to make her dark face lighter: she was about to meet a possible bridegroom. Before I had read the poems of an Arab who was praising the pearl-white skin, the milk-white skin, of his girl, for, he said, Europeans did not know what they were talking about, when they were proud of their ‘white’ skins. For real poetic whiteness, you needed a girl who had been shut up in a shady room all her life, and never allowed near strong light.

  What is this thing about whiteness? Yes, this is a naive question, ridiculous…but how was it possible, I marvelled, naively, that the Afrikaans right-wing was ready to risk everything in war for racial supremacy, when they had seen what happened in Kenya, and in Southern Rhodesia?

  ‘The trouble with you people,’ I say to the Coffee Farmer, ‘is that you have no historical sense whatsoever.’

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ he says. ‘Anyway, we gave them a jolly good scrap.’

  ‘But for God’s sake, it was all unnecessary, there need never have been a war, everything could have been settled without that, without all the waste and death and suffering.’

  ‘But things can always be settled without wars, if people want. So why aren’t they?’

  So we argue.

  In the mornings I was awakened by a soft, shurring, silken sound, like wind in leaves. The man whose task this was crouched over the coffee beans that were laid out in long rows to dry, on the slope outside the house. They had got damp in the night dews, and needed to be stirred and turned. Shrrrr, shrrrr, shrrrr…he crouched there, his hand turning and turning the beans with a movement not unlike that used for turning curds that will be cheese. Sometimes there were two, or three of them. I listened to the low soft sound of African talk, African laughter. What are they talking about? I ask Milos. ‘They are talking about the Comrades,’ was the usual reply–meaning the battalion stationed a couple of miles away. ‘They just want the Comrades to go away.’

  But it was not always the Comrades. I stood with the Coffee Farmer watching a crowd of women and half-grown children, the casual labourers–the Grey Area–loading bags of coffee on to a lorry. ‘What are they singing?’ I ask. ‘You’ll like this,’ said he. ‘They are singing, Here we are, as usual, working away, while white people stand watching us. But never mind, quite soon it will be Saturday and we’ll have a party and get drunk.’

  In the living-room where the great fire burned it seemed there were parties most evenings. ‘Milos! Bring beer. Milos, bring coffee, Milos…’

  ‘He’s a good old chap. When you’ve gone I’ll send him off for a couple of weeks and he can go to his village and get drunk day and night if he wants. Well out of sight of his wife. She gives him a bad time.’

  ‘Do you realize how hard that man works?’

  ‘Of course he works hard. So do I. Anyway, he keeps an army of friends and relations in that house of his back there.’

  ‘House, you call it.’

  ‘It would be perfectly adequate for him and his wife and children. Anyway, if I paid them any more I’d go bankrupt. Well, that’s what this government wants I suppose.’

  ‘That hasn’t changed, at least–farmers saying they are going bankrupt. Of course this government doesn’t want that. You’re here to earn foreign currency.’

  ‘Then why doesn’t it pay us what it owes us? They’ll put off paying us for months. You’ve got to go down on your knees and beg for the money. They keep it to the last possible second because it’s earning interest. Anyway, they’re incompetent.’

  ‘Of course they are. You didn’t give them training for real responsibility and now you are paying for it.’

  And now, a silence, because we do not want to begin, again, the real argument. Instead I make a detour. ‘Your trouble is that you people are unkind. Heartless. I wonder what it must have been like living under this cold angry disapproval. What it must still be like, for that matter. Bossy. Cold. Unkind.’

  ‘I only disapprove of them when they deserve it. I respect them when they deserve it.’

  ‘You mean, you respect them for qualities you think of as white qualities.’

  ‘If you like.’

  So we argue.

  Some years ago a book came out called Operation Rhino. It described how threatened rhinoceroses were transported by lorry and by air to new habitats. The author wrote about these beasts with the tenderest solicitude, with imaginative sympathy. Helping him in his task were dozens of Africans. They were–had to be in the course of things–poor, needing everything. I read the book through once, enjoying the expertise of the author in the ways of the rhino. Then I went through it again to see how these helpers of his in an after all dangerous operation, were described. They weren’t. They were taken for granted. But each rhino was described so that you felt you would recognize it if you met it in a zoo.

  It is said that on Liberation certain villagers went out into the bush and slaughtered large numbers of animals, because concern for them had become associated with white values: care for animals, but indifference to themselves.

  THE WOMAN WALKING

  UP THE MOUNTAIN

  On a drive through some particularly dramatic mountains, this happened: in the car were the Coffee Farmer, The Assistant, and I. We were going up a steep hill. In front walked a young black woman. She was very pregnant, had a baby on her back, held a small child by the hand. She was walking slowly. Understandably. I knew that the two men had literally not seen this woman. Her need was invisible to them.

  ‘How about giving her a lift?’ My voice was stiff with fury, a build-up from weeks of anger, from years of past anger as a young woman, and the anger due to the moment. I knew we would not be giving her a lift.

  ‘You know she wouldn’t expect it.’

  ‘You could establish a precedent, couldn’t you?’

  The Assistant can’t believe his ears. He has been told about my funny ideas, like the ideas of those bad people the Swedes, but brought up as he has been, he has never heard any.

  Wrangling, we drive slowly up the steep hill past the pregnant woman.

  It is The Assistant who is disarming me. I know quite well that if he had to sit beside this black woman and her children he would probably suffer some kind of nervous attack. Yet he couldn’t possibly be a ‘nicer’ person, as we say. I would remember him, I knew, for his quality of puppyish, unformed, decency.

  One evening, when a horde of guests had descended, our host had remarked it was a pity all the hams, sausages, and so forth had vanished in the accident.

  ‘What do you mean, vanished?’ asked The Assistant.

  ‘They were stolen,’ said the Coffee Farmer.

  The Assistant thought. ‘You mean the Affs stole your food?

  That’s not right. People shouldn’t steal.’

  ‘Of course they should have stolen it,’ I said. ‘Probably none of them had ever seen such a cornucopia. We were like a travelling delicatessen.’

&
nbsp; He thought, he puzzled. For one thing, he did not know the words cornucopia, delicatessen.

  ‘Just imagine it,’ I said, ‘what all that food must have seemed like, hams and bacon and sausages scattered all over the road, like a miracle.’

  ‘But it’s not right to steal,’ he said.

  The conversation in the car ended: ‘And anyway, she’s bound to be a Squatter. I’m not giving lifts to Squatters.’

  ‘I should say not, it wouldn’t be right,’ said The Assistant.

  Since then an obvious thought has added itself to those already in my mind which I might have had before: no one was likely to give this woman a lift. Who? Certainly not the new rulers of the country, flashing about in their great cars, their motorcades. Perhaps some local missionary, or a doctor…everywhere in the world this peasant woman, with one (or two) babies inside her, one on her back, one or two clutched by the hand, is slowly walking up a mountain, and we can be sure that few people see her.

  INNOCENCE

  The innocence of the farm assistant made me think of a certain television programme, towards the end of the Bush War, when it had become evident the ‘Affs’ were going to win. Half a dozen young whites were talking. They were the new type of young white, to be seen in Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, Canada, different from their elders and from their contemporaries who have elected not to change. They are immediately recognizable by their open and smiling readiness. Charm. They are like friendly children. These were chatting away about the War, in a confiding way, offering to the viewers as an experience we were being privileged to share with them, their coming to a mature understanding. ‘And now we are going to need your help,’ they cried engagingly. ‘You must help us!’ They meant themselves, the whites, who were about to change their ways and become good citizens of a mixed society. It was they who deserved help, and they were appealing to the world with confidence they were going to get it. It was their due. All their lives they had been due everything, and they expected everything still. I watched this programme not really surprised, since I know my compatriots. The telephone rang. It was my friend the black man who might ring up to share certain moments. ‘Did you see that?’ he asked. ‘I certainly did.’ ‘Can you believe it?’ ‘Well, yes, I am afraid I can.’ ‘God,’ he breathed, ‘how is it possible? We have been exploited, we have been ground down, we have had our country stolen from us. But it is they who have to be given tender loving care.’