African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe

by Doris Lessing

  I was thinking that this was rather like being in Pakistan, meeting refugees all day, who had come out from Afghanistan with nothing but what they had on their backs. Our group despaired several times a day: if we had a million pounds to spend, it would all disappear in half a morning, and still do nothing very much.

  THE FIGHTERS

  Judy Todd has been involved with settling Freedom Fighters in jobs and on farms. Not all the difficulties were foreseen. For instance, a certain young man complained that when he applied for jobs, he was granted an interview but as soon as he gave his particulars a job mysteriously became unavailable. And what name was he giving? ‘Comrade Spillblood’. Other names that proved unappealing to employers were Comrade Instant Death, Comrade Advance Zimbabwe, Comrade Lightning, Comrade Ceasefire, and Comrade Drink Blood.

  THE DISSIDENTS

  A Swedish journalist was present at that anticlimactic event when the Matabele dissidents gave themselves up under the amnesty.

  The scene was a shabby room in a police station. In the middle stood a dozen or so desperadoes slung all over with weapons, including one Gayiguso, famous because he had recently killed sixteen people with an axe. The police accepting their submission were unarmed. The world’s journalists were sitting around the walls. They had been told not to ask provocative questions, because ‘of the spirit of reconciliation under the Unity Accord’. Unable to think of anything more interesting, one cautiously enquired, ‘And how do you feel now?’ Expecting–perhaps?–reflections on the key fact that it is possible indeed, increasingly common, for a few people, even half a dozen, to bring whole countries into civil unrest, or civil war–to destroy the very frail stuff of civilization. The reply from the intrepid Gayiguso was the confidence that they wanted to sleep in a nice bed and have some food. After all, they had been living in the bush for ten or so years, in caves or where they could, raiding food from villages or fields, or forcing villagers to feed them. An uncomfortable life, even when not murdering people and burning homes. Their hardships, they seemed to feel, deserved sympathy. ‘I’ve never seen a rougher crowd of men,’ said the journalist.

  When these ‘dissidents’ returned to their villages, their families rejected them, saying they weren’t wanted.

  All kinds of people who had supported these men–believed to be an army–now disowned them, including the students who had demonstrated for them.

  And now, what to do with them? They were put on to a farm under sympathetic supervision, and soon became good citizens, with a tendency to lecture the Youth on the need to keep the law and respect government.

  Reformed Terrorists are often taken like this. Many of the Red Brigades in Italy, who suffered reverse conversions in prison, and demonstrated their capacity for citizenship by turning their prison cells into universities–writing memoirs, learning languages, taking degrees–when let out went about telling already perfectly good ratepayers and householders that it is important to abjure violence and illegality. I was told by a certain Italian that it had not been the least bizarre experience of her life, seeing a female ex-Terrorist who had murdered several harmless people lecture, ‘with a sort of modest self-respect’ a girl of fifteen (her own daughter) on the need for law and order.

  NOVELS

  Someone who had the idea of researching the over one hundred novels written by blacks which will never be translated into English, found something unexpected. Whites figure in these novels hardly at all, or when they do, often as helpful and Olympian figures, taking a child to hospital, or giving a lift. But you can read a couple of dozen such books one after another and not meet one white character. ‘They are not interested in us,’ said the man who told me this, amused, ironic. ‘We assume they are fascinated by us, the way we are by them. But we are simply noises off, that is, down there in the villages.’

  ‘Down there…’–the phrase is sometimes used ironically, meaning the rapidly enlarging gap between the poverty of the countryside and the riches of the towns, not because the countryside gets poorer but because the towns get richer.

  Ayrton R. and I, both brought up in the country, he in Matabeleland, I in Mashonaland, and both remembering how the whites sat around discussing the ways of the blacks, talked about these hundred or so novels as a revelation.

  ‘Then that means that if the whites left this country entirely most of the blacks wouldn’t even notice? Perhaps it would become like those countries up north which are rapidly going back to old Africa, as if the whites had never been there, everything is collapsing, nothing working, transport, telephones, roads, railways, the civil service, hotels–nothing works.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ says Ayrton R. at once. ‘The infrastructure here is too sound.’ He speaks protectively, and with pride.

  Infrastructure is not a word that usually spends much time in my mouth, but I seem to be hearing it and using it, several times a day.

  PASSIONATE PROTAGONISTS

  A white person said…a black person said…I was taken to task by one of the people who loves the new Zimbabwe, and cannot endure the slightest blemish. Because blemishes undoubtedly exist, she insists even more on political definitions: a not unusual reaction. ‘We are all Zimbabweans now,’ she cries. ‘We aren’t black or white, we are people.’ I say her attitude is sentimental, unreal. She says mine is unhelpful, and anyway, what does it mean, black, or white?

  I say nothing could be easier. White means all the shades from the ivory of skins that have never seen the sun to the café-au-lait of the mixed-race people–usually called Coloured, but it is a risky word, because the political ‘line’ changes so often. Black means the gradations from this same coffee to the velvety black of tropical Africa.

  True that certain politicoes, particularly in the United States, have decided that ‘black’ is reactionary, but the people these sentimentalists claim to defend, namely, the blacks, use it all the time.

  JESUIT ACRES

  It was Cecil John Rhodes himself who gave the Roman Catholics so many fat acres. They have always run schools, convents, training centres, missions. Some of the best schools in the country are Jesuit, Dominican. It seems no one grudges them these acres.

  If one were to say their record does not deserve unmixed praise, then what does?

  For instance, a friend of mine, whose grandmother was the storyteller for her clan, a famous lady, replied when I asked him, Do you remember your granny’s tales, for if you do then you should record them before they vanish–‘I knew them when I was small, because that was how we Africans were taught about life then, through stories, but when I was put in Dombashawa School all that was beaten out of me. They said our culture was backward, and now I couldn’t remember even one of those tales. They beat us and beat us. They beat us for anything and everything. You have a saying, I think, Spare the rod and spoil the child?’ He laughed.

  I am being taken on a trip to a Jesuit school, Silveira House, by Sister Dominica. She is a nun, but refuses to wear the uniform or accept discipline which she thinks arbitrary and foolish. She lives in a holy house but makes her own life. She is responsible for the recruitment and welfare of large numbers of young whites who teach mostly in remote parts of Zimbabwe and in very poor schools. She wears dresses, skirts, blouses, but with a large silver cross. A colleague, an equally independent soul, wears culottes and a halter top. They are feminists, critical of the male authority of the Church and the Pope.

  I wonder what Mother Patrick would make of them? Kindred spirits, I think.

  Sister Dominica was a nun at the convent where I did five years hard, from the ages of seven to twelve. We compared notes, from such different points of view about the administrative and teaching nuns, educated women from Ireland and from Germany, and about the ignorant peasant women, all German, who looked after us. If that is the word for it. For all these years I have remembered Mother Bertranda with gratitude. Once a child literally ill with homesickness crept towards the august office that was surrounded by a sea of grey granite chips crunchi
ng under feet trying to be silent, and, daring an upright pillar of black and white, the Dominican habit, climbed on to a lap that sloped away under the many slippery robes, and wept in arms that turned out, after a first stiffness of surprise, to be kind, warm, close, hospitable. Over the child’s head Mother Bertranda exclaimed and consoled in German, swinging back and forth as strenuously as a rocking horse.

  Sister Dominica said, ‘Perhaps, but if you were a very young and frightened novice thousands of miles from home, you would have experienced her differently. She terrified us.’

  Silveira House is an old school, privileged, funded, well-known. Comrade Mugabe taught a course on trade unionism here, I was told, with pride. The school consists of many single-storeyed brick buildings scattered among trees, and shrubs and flowers. Cats lie about in shady places expecting to be admired. The place is empty, because the pupils have gone for their holidays. We are taken over it by the principal, whose life links with mine, just as Sister Dominica’s does. His family was German. He spent four years of his childhood in an internment camp near Salisbury. During the Second World War. My second husband, Gottfried Lessing, a German, was six weeks in the internment camp, then let out to pursue an ordinary life, instructed only to report once a week to a certain office, so lax a requirement he often did not bother and no one seemed to notice. He was anti-Nazi, but then so was the interned family. I listened to the principal describe his years in the camp, thinking about what makes the so different fates of people: often chance, luck, some small happening. About Zimbabwe he was talking in that voice characteristic for this time: anxious pride, a passionate need to explain and excuse–the pride for what is being achieved, the anxiety for what is needed, so much and for so many.

  Under a group of trees was a spread of benches and tables, and on them all kinds of carvings in stone and in wood, watched over by their creators, young men who are unemployed and hope to better their fortunes in this way. Some of their creations are on sale in galleries in Harare.

  There is also a good crafts shop, run by one of the forceful women to be seen everywhere. From Sister Dominica I again hear the words: It is the women that keep this country going. They do all the work. Everywhere you look women are working and men lazing about.

  THE DIGESTER

  Based at Silveira House is an internationally known expert on alternative technology, Brian McGarry, at once recognizable as one of that breed, people passionately concerned with saving the world from our stupidities. He is, among other things, trying to invent, adapt, devices to save energy, so that Zimbabwe’s rapidly vanishing or thinning bush may be saved. In some areas there are no trees left, and people dig up roots, or burn thin handfuls of straw, competing with animals who need to eat it, or even burning the light flat cakes of cow dung–and this has not been common practice in this country–when dung is needed for fertilizer.

  There exists a solar stove, a natty little device, but it is not popular, has no emotional appeal. You can’t sit around a solar stove the way you can around a fire, gossiping. If everyone used the solar stove, then the forests of Zimbabwe would be saved. Similarly, there is a useful contraption called a digester, easy to make and cheap to install. A pit is dug near the living hut, and fed with a slurry of animal dung or plants. Another pit takes the spent slurry, to be spread on fields. From a small vent near the main pit a pipe leads methane gas into the hut, to the cooking area. In the middle of the hut we were shown was a large smoking log with a pot standing beside it, and the gas pipe was not working. That log has been burning in the middle of a cave, a hut, a hall for–how long? Thousands of years? Millions? The centre of communal life, family life, in every part of the world.

  A COMMUNAL AREA

  We were taken around by an instructor in agricultural and communal expertise, a middle-aged man called Peter Simbisai, an energetic character who was proud of what he and his kind are accomplishing. First to a family place of a traditional sort, a group of huts inside a fence. ‘Here,’ said he, ‘lives an old man with his sons and their families, all here, with him.’ Not looking at me, but past me, because of the criticism: ‘We aren’t like you people. You don’t mind if your children leave home at eighteen, perhaps going as far away as South America. We like to keep our families together.’ He spoke with reproach.

  This kind of hut is not impressive from outside. Inside they are tall, airy, cool. A bench goes part of the way around the inside. About a quarter of the wall space is filled with cooking pots. Shelves hold clothes and crockery.

  There is talk of a new tourist venture. Groups of people will be led on walking tours through the bush, spending their nights in villages–that is, in huts like this group of huts. Villages asked if they want to be on this tourist route have said yes.

  We were driving through still fresh and uncut bush, the light and airy trees of Mashonaland, which are infinitely various, for unlike the forests of Europe, they have never been subjected to an Ice Age. That is why the trees and plants of Europe are so limited in kind: the Ice Age destroyed the old forests and the trees we know are what have taken hold since the ice retreated.

  Peter wanted us to see something he said was important. Soon he was driving us through a Communal Area, an old one, which meant it had been a Reserve. I had known the Native Reserves in the old days. As the Colony of Southern Rhodesia was settled the blacks were moved off good land and put in the Reserves which were poor bleak places, often without roads, schools, clinics, even enough water. When Mugabe came to power he decided that the first necessity was to direct money to improve the rural areas. Someone who did not know what the Reserves used to be like might not be impressed now, taken to a Communal Area. They are still poor. What you at once see is that the bush is impoverished, full of stumps, and most trees have lost a limb, or two limbs, to the need for firewood. They have been carefully pruned by people who know very well that these trees of theirs are precious. The grass is thin. There are gullies of erosion, or the slope of a field shows a scattering of grit and pebbles where the rains have washed away the soil. Groups of huts may be at distances of as much as half a mile. The general effect is of emptiness, but in fact the soil is carrying as many people and animals as it can–more than it should in some areas. But what this imagined observer will not know, as he speeds comfortably enough along the new good road, is that the road was so recently a dusty or muddy track, that the groups of brick buildings that occur here and there are new, though the idea and the name Growth Points, originated under the whites; that these Growth Points, consisting of clinic, administrative buildings, schools, are expected to develop into little towns, feeding services into the area; that the little fields of maize and cotton and sunflower which seem so unimpressive compared to the great rich red fields of the Commercial Farming areas are growing every year more and more of the country’s food–that, in fact, here is a transformation that can be valued and understood only by people who know what it was all once like.

  THE SHED

  Peter Simbisai wants me to see a certain shed. It is a large plain lock-up shed with a cement floor. It is communally owned. At its start, a great many families wanted to be in on this scheme. In the impetuous early days of Liberation everything seemed effortlessly possible, all kinds of people wanted to join all kinds of communal schemes, which sounded easy, because in any case working in groups was part of their tradition. But each family not only had to put money into the materials to build the shed, but then help build it, and afterwards look after it. Someone always had to be there: this afternoon it was a young woman whose turn had come on the roster. She said that most families had left the scheme, leaving a nucleus who had built it up, and now people wanted to join it again, because it was changing the life of the area.

  In the shed is a weighing machine for the sacks of produce, and to weigh people when doctors and nurses come. There is a heap of maize, seed maize, tinted blue and green as a warning not to eat it or feed animals with it. This seed maize is numbered R-201 and SR-52, developed in
old Southern Rhodesia and valued now. We are expected to share ironical appreciation of the fact that this precious maize is expertise from the bad old days. In the shed, too, political meetings are held, educational classes of all kinds, and parties. The owners of the shed are proud its facilities are available to everyone, members or not, that it is a centre for the whole area, and such a success that other people in neighbouring areas are talking about building a similar centre. ‘In good time this shed will become a Growth Point,’ says the young woman, but she and the others are advising caution, having experienced the difficulties. Only people who seem likely to stick with it should be invited into the scheme.

  Most of all, the problems of transport have to be solved. Having grown the crops and bagged them and weighed them and stored them here on the good cement floor where the animals cannot get in and eat them, ‘and the white ants cannot tunnel, after all that–transport.

  LORRY SERVICES

  Everyone, anywhere in Zimbabwe who gets together a bit of money buys a lorry and sets up a transport firm. It is one of the quickest and easiest ways to get rich. The farmers living far from the markets, often far from Growth Points, are easy prey. They are forced to pay more than they should to get their produce transported. They are helpless until they can afford to buy their own lorry, and meanwhile they feel they are being bled by these conscienceless transport firms–which might very well be run by members of their own families. There is no legislation regulating what is charged for transport. ‘Why doesn’t Mugabe do something to protect us? He says we are the hope of Zimbabwe, we, the black farmers.’ ‘We are slowly building the infrastructure the whole country can build on…’ ‘The government should match their words with their deeds.’ ‘Comrade Mugabe should…’

  THE STORE

  This unimpressive shed was changing lives in a large area. Now we were to see something equally important. Again we drove through thinned and impoverished bush, full, however, of fat and contented cattle, because of the rains, to a village where there was a communal store, owned by the usual nucleus of families who had risked every bit of money they had to set it up. There was a regular store, doing well, and this new communal store was in competition with all that capital, wrung from them, the former customers. Their problem was of course the shortage of capital, and so their new clean scrubbed shelves had fewer goods on them than the commercial store. Peter had helped set this store up, and was proprietary and proud, and we were introduced to the owners, all proud and anxious, and there we stood about drinking Coca-Cola, or was it Pepsi-Cola, while I contemplated the cola revolution, for everyone drinks the stuff. These people who may not have enough money to feed their children enough protein will pay money for soft drinks, and on the shelves of the remotest stores are ranks of bottled tooth-rot and gut-rot and there too are the piled loaves of white bread. While I stood there gossiping, up came a young man all smiles and good nature with that immediate childlike lovableness that says, This person is not one of Nature’s successes. He wanted to know if I would drive him to a place many miles distant. The people I was standing with watched me to see if I had understood, and when I replied in the formula of the country that I would take him ‘just now’–which is like the Spaniard’s manana– they nodded approvingly. The young man went off, satisfied, and one of the men said to me, not ‘He is one of the afflicted of God’, or ‘He is simple’, but ‘He has a short wire’. The use of this phrase seemed to me to sum up pretty adequately what has happened to this society in one hundred years.