African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe

by Doris Lessing

  MEAT, SADZA

  We had lunch in Greendale Shopping Centre. These centres are the equivalent of the Growth Points of the Communal Areas. We ate meat. This was always a meat-eating culture. You may begin a visit saying you’ll stick to your near-vegetarian habits, which suit you, but in no time give it up: it gets too difficult. We ate beef. The beef grown in Zimbabwe is marvellous and, when exported, one of the country’s successes. So strong is the bias of the whole culture towards meat-eating it is hard to believe they could ever agree it is wasteful to feed grain to cattle instead of eating it direct, as grain. That really would be a revolution. The whites have eaten meat ever since they maintained themselves, or at least part fed themselves, on shot game. The blacks were hunters when the whites came, as well as farmers. Their main food now may be sadza, but they always eat meat with it when they can.

  During lunch we talk politics, but politics mostly as gossip. This Minister had done this, that Minister is doing that. Never has there been a ruling caste so visible to its people, never have followers been so intensely and personally involved with its leaders. Mugabe is owed one tone of voice, but the new caste of fat cats are talked of with a sardonic appreciation of their comic possibilities. Is this, perhaps, politics as theatre? Yes, when politics are followed in places like Zimbabwe, in this close and personal way, it is the dramatic sense that is being fed. Characters really only life-size, are on an enormous stage where they are bound to seem ludicrous, pompous, laughable. But there is charity too: Let’s see how they turn out–that’s the feeling.

  For several days I am driven around and about by people able to take time off work. We always come to rest outside the house or farm of a Chef, for a bout of the scandalous, relishing gossip.

  ‘This house has been bought by…’ ‘That farm belongs to…’ A Minister, or a businessman.

  ‘The first thing they do, when they move in,’ say the whites, ‘is a mealie patch. That’s how you can tell a Chef’s house.’

  ‘And why are you surprised?’ demands the black man who is driving me one day. ‘Of course we plant mealies.’

  ‘But damn it, they aren’t even African. The Portuguese introduced them.’

  ‘And I believe roses were introduced into Europe from the Middle East?’ he says, laughing with pleasure at going one better.

  ‘Touché.’

  ‘So why shouldn’t we love our mealies?’

  ‘No reason at all.’

  ‘That’s what I think.’

  We are stationary outside the house of a Chef who was famous long before Liberation. I met him once, long long ago, a gentle, humorous, patient soul, who exemplified every virtue you can think of in the line of passive resistance. The whites loathed him and slandered him; the blacks looked up to him.

  The Africans in the car today tell me that he is now famous for quite different qualities. He is bad to his servants. He has too many girlfriends. He drinks. He likes going abroad too much, wangles himself on to the commissions and committees so he can have trips to America and Europe. And it is well known he is one of the Ministers involved in the current car scandals.

  After half an hour or so of discussion the driver calls everyone to order. ‘Now, wait a minute, just–wait–one–little minute! What is this I hear? I think we have proved it is better to be poor, not rich? This poor Chef here, his character destroyed, ruined by success–a pity he wasn’t left just where he was. Better to live like a dog, kicked by Life. Can it be this is what we have decided?’

  ‘If that is what we have decided,’ says his wife, ‘then we must undecide it. Better to be a good dog than a bad Chef? No. Not me.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ says her husband, driving on. ‘You’re safe. My salary won’t allow you to be corrupt.’

  ‘A pity, my dear.’

  COMMERCIAL FARMERS

  Are the Commercial Farmers good when they are black? The reply is that many have gone bankrupt. ‘They seem to think’ (the speaker is a white farmer who certainly works hard) ‘that all you have to do is buy a farm and then it runs itself. They buy a store, a hotel, a transport business and a farm, and try to run them all. The farms are the first to suffer, but they don’t always realize that: it’s easy to put a few mombies on a farm and call it farming.’ (Mombies, the word for cattle, sounds like the lowing of cattle, when soft, contented, conversational. It is a word pleasant to use and to hear.)

  ‘And so they aren’t good farmers?’

  ‘They are good farmers when they are good farmers. But the really good black farmers are the small farmers. They do it properly.’

  THE SMALL FARMERS

  They do it properly on old-fashioned technology. Sometimes a small tractor is labouring across a small field, but the level of technology used by most blacks is the same as that used when my father was farming, by the whites. Oxen, not tractors, pulled ploughs, harrows, cultivators of the sort now to be found in farm museums, in Britain. Oxen dragged the wagon piled with sacks of grain or loads of manure.

  The need for working oxen is what keeps the perennial debate between whites and blacks, conservationists and the farmers, alive and often acrimonious.

  ‘Your trouble is that you have too many mombies on your land. It is overstocked.’

  ‘My trouble is that I haven’t enough land. I need more mombies to do the work.’

  All the Communal Areas I have visited are in wildly beautiful country. The people living here are poor. Their lives when the rains fail are hungry. But surely it is better to be poor here, in this sunlight, this beauty, than, let’s say, Bradford or Leeds. There ought to be different words for poverty that grimes and chills and darkens, and this poverty where people live in spleendour, lifted up on to the Altitude into ringing windy sun-scoured skies.

  THE ALTITUDE

  I had forgotten about the Altitude. Today, afflicted by a disinclination to do more than sit on the patio and watch the birds, I heard: ‘But you are still getting used to the Altitude.’ Where I was brought up the Altitude was held responsible for most ills. Being run down, another not easily defined condition, meant you should get off the Altitude, and getting on to it again needed a period of readjustment. The Altitude has a lot in common with contemporary dangers like radioactivity and ultra-violet rays which cannot be seen or felt, but strike you down nevertheless.

  THE GREAT DYKE

  The map of Zimbabwe shows that all of it stands high, except where certain rivers go, but along a ridge running slantwise on the eastern side, the Altitude is 5,000 to 7,000 feet. Banket is on this ridge, and the road running from Sinoia (Chinhoyi) to Harare, and the road from Harare to Mutare. The Umvukwe mountains are part of the ridge, but the name was heard wrong, the real sound is Mvuri, and anyway, these days they are called the Dyke. I have been hearing the Dyke, the Dyke, in so many conversations, not realizing it meant only those mountains I spent so many years of my young life staring at, for it turns out this chain of mountains are considered to be the end bit (or one of them) of the Rift Valley, which as we all know, threatens to split Africa in a billion years or so. Perhaps where the Darwendale chrome mine now makes the flanks of the Dyke glitter with its spilled ores, will lap the waters of the Indian Ocean, and then this landlocked country, this plateau so high and dry-windswept, will be damp with sea winds. The Dyke is loaded with the minerals of a half a continent, pushed southwards in a tongue through other geological formations, and the whole chain is carved with small workings, both new and abandoned, some from long before the white men came. The hills of the Dyke are bald and bare, so highly mineralized trees won’t grow on them. It is hard to imagine an idea more attractive to the myth-making mind than this one, so casually proprietary with units of a million years, as is the way of those arch myth-makers, the geologists. You hear, ’He’s farming on the other side of the Dyke’. ’It’s on the Dyke, you know,’ and you are meant to gather that much more is expected of the situation than if the Dyke never entered it at all.

  THE ITCZ

  Simila
rly, there is the ITCZ, which means the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone, and it seems to crop up in every other conversation. This is mostly because of the tricky rains, which did come on schedule this year, after some unsatisfactory seasons. For years the drought in Matabeleland was serious enough to figure regularly in overseas news and it killed off over a million animals, in a population of eight million already reduced by the Bush War and dissidents. In a run of bad years there can be a good one, or a half-good one, and then the rains fail again. This year began well: but that doesn’t mean it will go on well. All Zimbabwe, including Matabeleland, is green and watered, but now it is time the rains came again. The hot dry blue days that succeed each other, delighting me and other fugitives from November in Europe are making all the locals nervous. ’Why doesn’t it rain? Those aren’t rain clouds.’ And we go indoors to watch the ITCZ prowling about on the satellite pictures of the television weather programme.

  I remember how, then, we used to watch the skies to the north, from where the rains have to come, we felt the heat building, with a practised sense for the different densities and weights of heat, while the clouds piled higher every day and turned from silver to black. We said, ’The storks have arrived from Russia and from Turkey and East Europe and the chimneys of Germany and Denmark, so now the rains should start.’ This year the storks have arrived well, and the fields around Harare are black with their multitudes, but the rains are holding off. It seems that the rains are generally starting later than they used. Then October was the rainmaker, some time in October the rains had to come, but now, it seems, November is when they start. The trouble is, the weather is at odds all over the world and temporary anomalies are instantly seized on as evidence for the worst. ‘Oh no, the rains never start in October these days, the seasons have changed.’

  TELEVISION

  Most evenings we watch television, sitting there in front of the screen as if it were a child we expect to do better if it tried. In fact television is going well. In 1982 it was, quite simply, embarrassing. Everything was awful, the presenters gauche, newsreaders unpractised, and the rhetorics of the Revolution, crude. Now the programmes may not be up to much, most of them, but these are professionals who have learned from the best. Dazzlingly pretty girls, young men fit to be film stars, offer us the news–nearly all of it parochial. They inform us of the progress of the ITCZ, and act in advertisements as entertaining, if not as sophisticated, as the ones in Britain. Programmes from Britain are shown, basics, like Dickens, but nobody likes the British programmes, except for ‘Yes, Minister’. ‘The Povos enjoy watching Chefs having difficulties.’ What everybody likes are the American programmes, ‘Dallas’, ‘The Colbys’, ‘Dynasty’–the good life.

  ‘In Britain I suppose we didn’t have a choice–we are an American cultural colony…’

  ‘Why Britain? All of Europe!’

  ‘All right. But there is no reason why this country should have made that choice. There isn’t money for textbooks in the schools and universities, the libraries are running down because there is no foreign exchange to buy books, you can’t send for books from overseas, because Customs makes sure you have to pay on them–’ (thirty per cent of the value of the books, as valued, arbitrarily, by ignorant officials). ‘But there is plenty of foreign exchange for “Dallas”. Not to mention rubbishy magazines from down South full of pornography. How do their minds work, this government, do you think? Why does Mugabe…?’

  As in Britain, where people sit around, dazed by incredulity: ‘Why does she do this or that? What on earth does she think she’s doing, running down universities, science, research, libraries, the arts…?’

  As always there are the two main kinds of thought, the Muddle Theory, ‘It’s just a damned cock-up’, and the Conspiracy Theory, ‘They want to fill the peasants’ heads with rubbish, it keeps them quiet.’

  Here the Muddle, or Cock-up, Theory inevitably holds sway. Several times a day the talk turns to the general inefficiency, the new bureaucracy.

  ‘Tell me, if you are talking about inefficiency, have you been in Britain recently?’

  ‘Yes, but there are levels of incompetence. And you are surely not suggesting that he is allowing all this rubbish into Zimbabwe? He’s an educated man. Books were important to him–he has said so. What can be the reason for his penalizing books, culture, serious magazines, libraries? It must be a mistake.’

  He of course is Mugabe. The assumption always is that he is on the side of the angels, that is, of whatever policy the speaker is favouring.

  AN AID WORKER SPEAKS

  ‘If you ever want to understand what we really stand for, in these people’s minds, if you feel like having your nose rubbed in it, then go to a remote village in a Communal Area. There you are, sitting in a dusty space between trees–every tree has a branch lopped off for firewood, of course–and you are with five hundred or so people who have come in from miles around for the great occasion. It is not that they don’t know what television is. They know. It is “Dallas”. It is “Dynasty”. There is a moon shining away overhead. A late cicada is still at it. The crickets are clicking. There is one TV set in a hundred miles and there is America presenting itself for the admiration of the world on the small screen. Now, we have defences against it: it is only when you watch people who don’t have defences that you understand how well-armoured we are. We watch cynically, we think, Well, it’s a lot of rubbish but why not? But those village people sitting out there under the stars, they believe it’s for real. As murder follows murder, theft, double-cross, swindle, lie and racket, not to mention the fifty-seven varieties of sex, their eyes shine ever brighter with honest admiration: this is what the modern world is all about. ‘I wish I could go to America,’ you hear, as the programme ends. Off they go back to their huts through the bush, these poor people, but they know that if they are crooked enough, and unscrupulous enough, and cruel enough, they too can enjoy the riches of the world.

  ‘And it is the same in India, in South America–everywhere I’ve been part of the scene, poor people watching the American dream, in a dozen countries.

  ‘But why does America choose to show itself like this to the world? That’s the question.’

  GRANITE

  Yesterday, being taken around by a man who adores Zimbabwe, chiefly–he says–because of its granite, I heard that granite is radioactive. But Zimbabwe is full of granite, whole mountain ranges of it, or great upthrusting single smooth mountains, or tall clumps of balancing boulders. If granite is radioactive then half the citizens should be shining in the dark or about to evolve in interesting ways–to look at the stuff only from the positive aspect. The point is not how radioactive granite is, dangerously, or mildly, an amount to be expressed in figures, but that the idea of radioactivity is appropriate to granite. Photographs of granite never give any real idea of it. It has a sparkle to it, a liveliness. If you put your hand on it on a hot day it seems to pulse.

  This man says that when he is away from Zimbabwe he feels exiled from granite. It is the oldest rock in the world, says he: it came bubbling up from the world’s secret interior, slowly rising through layers of other rock to surface here. He can’t live without granite…I once knew a poet, a Yorkshireman, who spoke about rock in this way, but it did not have to be particular. The feel and the weight of rock, stone–any stone–in one’s hands, that was the thing. It gave substance to his life.

  Should I ring up some appropriate office and enquire, my voice made stern with the ring of one in search of scientific exactitudes: ‘Just exactly how much is granite radioactive?’ Of course not: this country is a myth-breeder, it always was. Revolution, that maker of myths, has only made it easier for a voice to slip into that tone, careless, dreamy, proud, where one says, ‘Look at that granite mountain over there–I don’t know why they make such a fuss over Ayers Rock–imagine some great lizard crawling over it, the size of a railway train. A winged lizard…just the place for a dinosaur to lie out and soak in some sun…’


  A PICNIC

  Today I was taken to see the Bushmen paintings some miles from Harare. Again the drive through rich suburbs, then the rich red lands, then a Communal Area. This one is comparatively well-off. Most families have at least one member working in Harare, and the money comes back here. Or cash crops are grown on these small well-worked fields and taken in for sale. There are all types and kinds of dwellings, from the old pattern of groups of huts, to new brick bungalows standing by themselves in little gardens, with cars outside them.