African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe

by Doris Lessing

  To get to the paintings we had to turn on to a dirt road, where granite tumbled everywhere about us, in the shape of cliffs, hills and heaps of piled boulders. Heat sizzled out of the granite and down from a sky where there was not one cloud. The road goes through villages, where, if there is a car, then it is likely to be visitors for the paintings. Now there are plans to take small, carefully selected groups of tourists who can afford to pay well. As usual here is a collision between the need to look after these easily damaged paintings and the imperative to earn foreign exchange.

  The road became wheel-marks through rough grass. We passed some people sitting out under trees, who greeted us. We greeted them, feeling awkward at being there. Half a mile further the road ended, we parked, and climbed cracked slopes, littered with rock, through granite boulders that always seem about to topple, but never do, to a baby cliff where you pull yourself up and then go crabwise to a ledge where once the Bushmen stood to make their pictures on a low overhang. And here you see why there are so few left of these rock records of the past. Once you could see rock paintings almost anywhere you searched among hills or boulders. There were some on our farm, sprightly half-effaced figures on the underside of a boulder. They were vandalized, deliberately destroyed. I remember watching white schoolboys throwing stones at a rockface covered with paintings, on and on, until they were chipped, cracked. Why? Because they were there? What is this need to destroy?

  There is graffiti here, clumsy scrawls, a stick figure like a small child’s first efforts: this time, it is the local people who have tried to deface this gallery of lively sketches. They are done in coloured soils or plant juices and have survived here for hundreds of years. Elephants, different kinds of buck, hunting parties with their spears, all with the immediate living truthfulness you see in a sketch done by a Japanese master: half a dozen lines that create a flower, a face.

  The experts argue about the meaning of some of these scenes, these figures. The trouble is, we are looking at them through our eyes, and there is no way of knowing, I say, how those people then saw the world. I am with an expert who probably knows as much about Bushmen paintings as anyone in the world. He disagrees with me: we can find out how they thought and understand their cosmology from these pictures.

  Sometimes, when you are with an expert you casually say something and then know you have touched an area where people have been arguing, speculating, for years.

  He said, ‘Perhaps you enjoy the idea that we don’t understand them, and can’t understand them?’

  It is true: there is something restful in the thought that thriving and successful peoples have lived and we have no idea at all how they experienced what we call reality.

  If you turn your back on the overhang of pictures you stand high, looking out over a landscape that goes miles, to hills, to mountains, the rim of hot blue sky. Below are patterns of fields: those lines that separate fields, are they contour ridges or fences? If fences, or hedges, then that is not an African concept, but then contour ridges weren’t either. The people who made these pictures, little people, short stubby made-for-hardship people, stood here long before the Africans of these times were here, looked out over this landscape and saw–what? How do we know they saw what we see? Perhaps when they looked at hills, valleys, trees, they owned what they saw in ways we don’t understand, as the Aborigines in Australia can be part of a landscape through song. Perhaps, looking out, their backs to the pictures they had made, they were the landscape, were what they saw. Sometimes people now have flashes or moments when it is as if they are ‘part of everything’, merge into ‘everything’ they flow into trees, plants, soil, rocks and become one with them. How do we know that this condition, temporary and only occasionally achieved, and with rare people, was not their permanent state?

  Arguing enjoyably about these possibilities we climbed back down through the rocks to the car, to have lunch. Two black youths have come from the huts to gather yellow fruit lying all over the ground, fallen from the mahobahoba trees that grow here in a grove. That is what they are pretending to do, for politeness’ sake, but really they want to watch us. We set out china plates, knives and forks, glasses. We spread out cold chicken and salad and orange juice. Should we ask them to join us? But they are keeping just far enough away to make that awkward. Besides, there is not enough for four. We eat, while they hang about, watching, watching, leaning to pick up one of the yellow fruits, putting it in their mouths, leaning down again, standing up to stretch, and yawn and turn away, pretending indifference–and then again they pick up fruit and stare at us.

  We forget that it is still rare for poor people far from a town to observe the lives of rich whites or, these days, the rich blacks.

  ‘They are looking at something unattainable,’ says my companion, indicating the big American car, built for a life on rough roads, and the basket, the plates, the glasses, the cutlery. ‘They are already twenty-five years old, and they aren’t young enough to have taken part in Mugabe’s educational revolution that says every child, girl or boy, must get a secondary education. They have probably done four or five years in school. They are unemployed. They dream of the good life in town. They will never have a car and a bungalow made of brick, with glass windows and curtains and a three-piece suite.’

  When we had finished eating, we packed everything into the basket, buried our rubbish in a hole under a rock, but left the chicken out on a piece of paper on a rock. To leave it seemed insulting. Not to leave it seemed cruel. Only the night before I had been told a story of how in a poor village suffering from drought, they killed a chicken and made sure that every one of the forty-odd villagers got at least a shred of chicken and some broth with their sadza.

  As we got into the car baboons were barking from the ledge where the paintings were. They had been watching us from some safe place, and now had come to inspect the ledge to find out what we had been doing, and if we had left anything. Soon, when the black youths had gone back to their huts, the baboons would come here to pick up the yellow fruits, perfectly ripe today, for these fruits have a moment of ripeness, just a few hours, and before that they are sour and rough on the tongue, and afterwards slimy, repulsive.

  A COMMERCIAL FARM

  We drove on the Golden Stairs road, past the Mazoe dam. This area is famous for its oranges, for its various agriculture. The farm is near the Umvukwes, that is to say, Mvuri–or the Dyke. How did it happen that Mvuri, a soft rumbling word, was heard with a clacking k? A mystery. That Chinhoyi should be heard as Sinoia, Gweru as Gwelo, Mutare as Umtali–not hard to understand. Soon we were near the Dyke, with its load of billions of years. I have on my mantelpiece a small slice of rock, once clay, and in it a fossil fish that was blithely swimming along when some cataclysm sunk it in choking ooze. The label says this little fish, Dapalis Macrurus, is thirty million years old, a matter for awe, but the clay that surrounds it must be thirty millions old too, but no one slices up and sells ancient clay to sit on people’s mantelpieces with labels that say, This rock is thirty, or three hundred million years old. Clearly, for awe, we need a form, the outline of a fish as delicate as a skeleton leaf; or the Dyke, which we can see dividing the landscape, a visible announcement of extreme age; we need upthrusts of granite which we gaze at and think, Here we touch the archaic, here is real antiquity, as if the soil they are embedded in, a million or so years younger, is worth less of our human respect.

  The farm is an old one, that is to say, was ‘opened up’ not long after the Colony began. The farmhouse is old and comfortable, with the deep verandahs of those days, like big shady rooms. But first we sit out under trees. Under layers of leafy branches, we sit and listen to ring doves, cinnamon doves, the emerald spotted dove, and the different kinds of louries. The heat is heavy, and the bird sounds, by long association, seem the voice of the heat. The temperature is well up into the nineties, but it is the dry snapping highveld heat that does not sap and undermine like the wet heat of sea coasts. We drink tea. We drink varieties
of fruit juice. We discuss, what else, politics. I am on the alert for the babyish querulous grumbling of the whites only six years ago, but no, all that has gone. This is what I listened to all through my childhood on the verandahs: farmers grumbling about the government which always and in every country is hostile to farmers. The government and the weather, between these two anarchic tyrants farmers are for ever ground down, no matter what powerful lobbies they operate, no matter how well they are doing.

  The Commercial Farmers have an energetic organization and meet continually with government, to the point that other groups complain the Commercial Farmers are unfairly represented. The Commercial Farmers are always being told how much they are valued, are proud they produce difficult crops that bring in the needed foreign currency.

  My room in Harare is now full of reports, analyses and abstracts and those dealing with the Commercial Farmers–still mostly white–are interesting for the number of times they will repeat that Commercial Farmers have nothing to fear. This is because the masses of the black landless look with impatience at these big farms of rich good soil and complain that large areas are not being used. But a recent UN Report has said that on the whole the Commercial Farms are properly used. Here is hidden something else, seldom spoken of openly. It is a Grey Area. Everyone knows the bush of Zimbabwe is disappearing, erosion threatens, soil is overused. But it is in the overcrowded communal areas that the bush is going. You can tell when you pass from a Commercial Farm to a Communal Area not only because the soil often changes from red or chocolate to pale colour but because at once the bush is only a ghost of itself. The comparatively undamaged bush on the Commercial Farms is an asset for the whole country. Yet a thousand polemical articles demand that the Commercial Farms should be expropriated. The government says improperly used farms will be compulsorily bought. But improperly used farms are often owned by rich blacks–Mugabe’s supporters.

  Recently very large areas of the country have been freed from tsetse fly, and this means that beasts can now live there and the land distributed to the landless. The conservationists are saying: That means a lot more of Zimbabwe will become semi-desert.

  On the walls of the farm office are two aerial photographs, one taken when the farm was bought, in the 1950s, and one last year. The early map shows large areas of uncultivated land, now very little is left unused. Any committee, commission, or government inspector coming to assess the situation on this farm will at once be shown these maps.

  When this farmer said, ‘I’ll show you around,’ it was with the anxious pride that is the note of now. First, to the tobacco barns, whose design does away with the old technology that kept young farm assistants or struggling farmers awake half the night to check barn temperatures. The leaves are strung on movable racks, the furnace uses a minimum of fuel, the whole operation needs little supervision. What has also changed is the number of workers needed to run these barns: just like everywhere else in the world technology has thrown people desperate for work out of a job. The farmer is proud of his barns. ‘We developed this technology,’ says he, and the we means, here, ‘we, the white farmers of Southern Rhodesia’ and not, as it usually does these days, ‘we, Zimbabwe’. The design of these barns has been copied in other countries, and so have devices invented by this same farmer. ‘I invented this…’ ‘I invented that…’

  We are driven around the fields. It is midday, hot, hot. The farm is still growing maize, which more and more is being grown by the small black farmers, it grows tobacco, and, a new venture, granadillas, or passion fruit. There are fields of these, the vines strung along wires. The plants are being attacked by some new disease but the farmer is not worried, for he has confidence that whatever Nature comes up with will get short shrift from science. In the middle of a field are grazing some duiker and a couple of bush buck. Surely these animals lie up in hidden shady places in the daytime and graze at night? To see them here in the blaze of midday upsets my idea of the proper order of things, like the rains coming in November instead of October. ‘My chaps are forbidden to kill game on this farm,’ says the farmer. ‘Of course they do, when I’m not looking. Not that there’s much left. Do you remember when…’

  He talks all the way around the farm, and, as we sit in the shady living-room, waiting for lunch, he cannot stop talking about his accomplishments, the new techniques, new crops, new ideas–full of a restless energy that keeps him on the move: when he sits down he is up almost at once to reach for a pamphlet, an article, a book.

  Lunch is served by the black servant, and is the meal that will survive in these British outposts long after it is forgotten in Britain. We eat roast beef. Roast potatoes. Badly cooked vegetables. A heavy pudding. That this should all go on with the temperature at nearly a hundred is certainly an invitation to remember commonplaces about national characteristics.

  Through lunch we talk about the unemployed youngsters in the farm village. Of course: everyone talks about the unemployed. On this farm live many times more people than should be here. We discuss the word ‘should’ in this context. The regular workers–that is, the workers who get the proper wage–are a minority. The seasonal workers come and go. Every hut or small house is crammed with people, mostly relatives, and relatives of relatives, here because of the rights of the extended family.

  ‘They break my heart,’ says the farmer’s wife. ‘What’s going to happen to them?’

  She says that the young people come up to this house to ask if they can borrow her books. She gives them detective stories, crime stories. She can’t keep up with the demand for her books. Ayrton R. protests that they are ready for much better. For instance, a young boy he knows of, from a rural school, reads Thomas Hardy. He has suggested Hardy to teachers in the remotest rural schools: with success. The farmer’s wife sounds unconvinced, but says she will offer more difficult books. The conversation slides into a familiar track with, ‘One of these Aid agencies could set up mobile libraries. They should offer everything from Enid Blyton to Garcia Marquez.’ ‘I simply don’t understand these Aid people. I wish I had the handling of some of that money.’ We amuse ourselves mentally setting up projects that would cost a fraction of the vast sums often wasted by the Aid agencies.

  Then, the talk returns to the government: I am listening to what I now know is this time’s Monologue–or one of them.

  Mugabe’s economic policy is ruining Zimbabwe because it is creating stagnation. Zimbabwe is desperate for investment, but why should people invest when they are allowed to take out of the country only five per cent: of course they invest in the Pacific Rim, where everything is booming. Socialist dogma is a killer, as they have found in every country in the world. You aren’t allowed to sack an incompetent worker: that means that you don’t employ them, for you have to carry them. This is only one of the policies you’d think were designed to prevent economic growth. Another is not being allowed to import farm machinery or even spare parts. You can only buy new machines through complicated deals that go like this. Someone outside the country sends a letter, backed by a bank, to the effect that he, she, is prepared to pay for–whatever it is, a tractor, a lorry. These documents are sent by a Zimbabwe bank to the foreign firm who will then supply the machine. But what of those people who don’t have relatives or friends outside Zimbabwe prepared to pay for the machines? As for spare parts…the government will not allot the currency, so machines stand idle, or you have to make trips down south to The Republic to get them, or you smuggle them in, or, using the famous ingenuity Southern Rhodesia was, and Zimbabwe is, so proud of, you invent spare parts or run machines on “faith, bits of string, rubber bands. But you can’t do that for ever”. The only people getting anything out of all this are the crooks in government who set up all kinds of rackets importing spare parts: that is one reason we don’t expect the policy to change. Too many people do well out of it. Or when Mugabe does permit a factory to make some machine, he says there can only be one factory, so, no competition and the prices are several times wha
t they should be: all the disadvantages of monopoly capitalism, but in the name of Socialism.’

  That is one Monologue.

  Another overlaps the first. ‘Eight years this lot have been in power! Heroes of the Revolution! Look at them! What a bunch of crooks! One of them came visiting our school last month…’ (A school teacher is speaking, an idealistic young black man) ‘Where do they get all that fat from, the Chefs? If you pricked him great spurts of pure white pig’s fat would come out. He didn’t care about our pupils. He didn’t know about our problems. All he cared was to get through his inspection–but he didn’t know how to inspect, he didn’t even go into a classroom. He wanted to get back to Harare and feed his fat buttocks and his fat pig’s belly.’

  As we drove back to Harare there was a road block, to check for licences and the conditions of tyres. The death-traps, the rattle-traps, of six years ago are being cleared off the roads.

  In 1982 the road blocks were feared. They were often operated by soldiers, and the raw mood of that time made it a nervous business, stopping so that the inside of a car, the boot, even the engine, could be checked for weapons. Now a smiling young man asked some routine questions and glanced at the tyres.

  ‘Have you work for me?’ he asked Ayrton R.

  ‘What sort of work?’

  ‘Any sort of work. Gardener, housework–I can learn to cook.’

  ‘I am sorry, but I don’t have any work.’

  ‘I am sorry you don’t have work for me.’

  ‘Goodbye. Go well.’

  ‘Go well. Goodbye.’

  We drive on. It seems that whenever you are stopped by the police on a country road, they ask for work. ‘They want to be in town. That is the great basic fact about this country. Everyone, but everyone, wants to be in the towns. Any town. Why should Zimbabwe be any different from the rest of the world? Other countries haven’t solved the problem, why should we be expected to? Is Mugabe going to pass a law forbidding people to come into the towns? If he did, there’d be another revolution and he knows it.’