African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe

by Doris Lessing

  ‘Chalets and canoe trips,’ I protest, for he is talking about a particularly magnificent bit of wilderness under the hills.

  Ayrton R. protests, ‘It will be just like Kariba.’

  ‘Not at all. These things can be done with taste.’

  My room, at the back of the house, is vast. There are toys pushed to the backs of cupboards. As well as screening for mosquitos there are heavy bars on the windows: the Bush War was bad in these parts. This kind of country, all kopjes and heaped boulders and ravines and thick trees, was made for guerilla war. In the bathroom spiders and flying ants and moths make for the light or fall into the bath. In London one spider demands appropriate measures: a towel draped over the bath so the creature can climb out, or a tin lid for water, somewhere low, since they die of thirst: they go in search of water under our taps. Here you take no notice, it is Africa, there are too many of them. Once I was visiting a farm near Nairobi, which I remember most for its posse of Arab horses that were brought up to the house to be petted and fed sugar lumps. But I also remember the caterpillars. Occasionally caterpillars invaded the house in thousands, and one had simply to wait for them to go away, brushing them off chairs, beds, the dining table. After a bit you hardly notice them–I was told.

  I wake in the night to listen–what for? The tom-toms that used once to beat all night from every farm compound. But it is as if a pulse has ceased to beat. The night is dark and almost silent. Through the bars come the small sounds that say the bush is awake, birds and small animals and once a dog barking from the farm village.

  In the morning we wake at different times and sit on the verandah drinking coffee. The farmer’s wife is out riding. The farmer has already been out on the lands, and now he is entertaining us. This morning it is medicine. ‘We need a cure for a disease, but the doctors don’t know about it. We get it often, whites and blacks. Your limbs are like lead, you have a sore neck and shoulders, and you can’t move them, everything aches, you wish you were dead. Then it goes. I think it is an insect bite, perhaps it is like tsetse or malaria. You have a certain kind of stomach upset. You go to the doctor, he says it is flu. It isn’t flu. The Africans know it isn’t flu. We know it isn’t flu.’

  The farmer’s wife comes back, and we set off for a walk, all of us.

  The farm’s pigs are–it goes without saying–allowed to forage for themselves, no battery pigs on this farm. They are a small energetic company, who present themselves for recognition and greetings.

  The farmer says everyone underestimates the intelligence of animals. If we knew what they thought of us, we wouldn’t like it. Also, their sense of humour. Pigs play practical jokes on each other. So do calves. Young animals play games, like children. Sometimes he takes himself into a field where the calves are and he sits down quietly under a bush until they forget he is there, and he watches them play king-of-the-castle, pushing each other off an anthill until one of them wins. Then the winner comes down and they start the game again. It is nearly always the same calf that wins: the aristocracy of Nature, you have to understand it, Nature knows nothing about democracy. There is always a buffoon in a crowd of young animals, a prankster who makes the others laugh. You think animals don’t laugh? Don’t you believe it! See that little pig over there? He’s the runt of the litter, he’s full of tricks and they laugh at him.

  We are shown the vegetable garden. ‘If we were allowed to be subsistence farmers we could live like kings on ten acres. Everything grows here. We already grow more vegetables on half an acre than we can possibly use–the Africans get most of them, and we grow things for them they like to eat and we don’t. We have cows and pigs. We are self-sufficient already, but we are committed to this business of over-production. What am I growing tobacco for? To earn foreign currency for Mugabe but I’m not allowed any to buy spare parts and new machines. Rich farmers they call us, Commercial Farmers, all they see is the amount of land, not the risk of it. We can be wiped out in a hailstorm in ten minutes. We watch the skies all through the rainy season, the clouds pile up, my God, will it be this time? Hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of damage while you watch–it’s all a gamble. And then, the locusts are back. We’ve got hoppers on the farm, I’m spraying them but there can be a potential army of locusts in a few square feet of bush hidden away somewhere, you miss them–and that’s it. And if you poison them don’t imagine it doesn’t do harm, all these poisons do harm. We have to pay the penalty for battery chickens and torturing pigs in pens they can’t turn around in. Who is going to punish us? God, that’s who. Don’t think He isn’t watching us.’

  He is talking about his workforce, paternally, protectively. He and his wife like the Africans. There is never that cold dislike you learn to listen for. And they like him, so he says. ‘They call me the Crazy One, but that’s all right. If I’m an eccentric all it means I get things done in new ways. They come to me, they ask this and that–loans, or to help them with bureaucrats. I pull out their teeth when they ask, I doctor them, we discuss their problems. They listen to me, and I listen to them. But what you must remember is, they are going along with our ways because it’s the modern world and they’re stuck with it, but our ways aren’t their ways, they don’t like them, they like their own ways, it goes against their natures, the way we do things. In the end, it won’t be our ways they choose. Well, all right, it’s their continent, but I hope they’ll let me use a few acres of it. I think they will. You know the important thing about them? All that noise over the War made everyone see things wrong. These aren’t vengeful people. They don’t go in for hating. When you get talking, you know what you find? They’re very philosophical people, they take the long view. So–they’re like me and that’s why we get along.’

  The breakfast table is loaded. The maize meal we knew has gone. It was a grainy mass, full of taste, but now the grain is refined and sadza is white, jelly-like, tasteless. The men, who are going to be working hard all day, are eating plates of it. The scrambled eggs are from hens free to choose their diet, insects and plants from the bush, as well as grain thrown down for them. There is fish pate made from fish smoked over a certain acacia wood. Jams and cheese and cereals are all made locally. The yoghurt comes from the farm.

  The men are talking about the day’s work, as if no one else around the table exists. Just like then. But the women are discussing a trip into Harare for the day. This emphatically is not like then, when women were imprisoned on the farms, and a visit to a neighbour was a great event. This is such an assault on my memory I postpone the problem till later. Besides, the farmer is talking again. About the AIDS virus. He admires this virus. ‘That is the most cunning little virus. I read the other day that the Devil could have designed it, but no, it is God, giving us a warning. We have all gone mad over sex–the whole world. So God is saying, Now, be careful, I’m warning you again! Next time it will be worse than AIDS, if we don’t listen.’

  This takes me straight back to my Old-Testament-dominated father. In his view it was the forthcoming Second World War that was God’s punishment for sin. He and Churchill alone knew what was rushing towards us: it was the Wrath to Come. There I was, sitting in the same landscape, if from this awry perspective, listening to a reincarnation of my father thundering warnings of God’s new punishments, after fifty years, the Second World War, the Bush War, and all the other wars and disasters. A kind of continuity, I suppose.

  OVER THE RAINBOW

  In Harare they talk endlessly about the new agreement over Namibia in the same way we do about the ending of the Iran–Iraq War, and the end of the invasion of Afghanistan. With every war there is this feeling that it is impossible, it can’t be true, we are dealing in lunacies, there is no reason why it should be happening, it could have been avoided. Yet it is happening, and it seems nothing can stop it. Then–it stops. If it can be stopped, then why did it start? This line of thought goes back to primitive fears, beliefs: is there a God, a Power, that needs the smell of blood? After all, we believed this for th
ousands of years, and perhaps the old belief helps to create the helplessness that can be sensed when war is seething up and seems unstoppable.

  But now the mood is optimistic. If They can stop the Namibian War, then They can stop the slaughter in Mozambique. Obviously it is only a question of time.

  And even cocky: ‘Now the Third World Groupies will take themselves off to Namibia and we’ll get them off our backs. They are packing their bags already.’

  ‘Perhaps they will find their paradise in Namibia.’

  ‘Somewhere, over the rainbow…’

  IN THE OFFICES

  I have spent a day…two days…three days, in offices in Harare. Not an easy business: security is a problem. At the entrances to government offices there may be guards, in Aid offices doors are anxiously unlocked to let you in, and then locked again. ‘Skellums’ of all kinds abound, the young unemployed, some of them children, and the ex-soldiers, subsisting somehow in holes and corners of this populous city on petty crime and not so petty crime. ‘None of that kind of thing under us, under the whites,’ you hear, in the sniffy voice of the black-disliker, ‘we used to just stroll in off the street any time we liked to have a chat about our problems.’ ‘Who strolled in? The whites strolled in, the blacks were seen as potential thieves.’

  Government offices, Aid offices, in both the words most often heard are Infrastructure, Extension Worker, Aid Money and–of course–Comrade Mugabe.

  I sit and listen. Not only for the facts and figures which are after all in the pamphlets and reports that now cover every possible surface in my room, but for the tones of a voice. Passionate Protagonists to a woman and a man, but some sound as desperate as parents with a sick child, and others are, there is only one word, cynical. The new rich class, the corrupt elite, that’s the problem.

  ‘You go down to the villages, you see how they are working; you see how optimistic they are, and the poverty, the terrible poverty, then you come back to Harare and watch these fat cats swanning around I tell you, it makes me want to…’

  On the wall of a government office I see a poster.

  The Boss drives his men,

  The Leader inspires them.

  The Boss depends on authority.

  The Leader depends on goodwill.

  The Boss evokes fear.

  The Leader radiates love.

  The Boss says ‘I’.

  The Leader says ‘We’.

  The Boss shows who is wrong.

  The Leader shows what is wrong.

  The Boss knows how it is done.

  The Leader knows how to do it.

  The Boss demands respect.

  The Leader commands respect.

  So be a leader,

  Not a boss.

  They say this exhortation is on the walls of every government office in the country.

  FAT CAT ADMONISHED

  In a certain Aid office I was told this story, to persuade me–persuade himself?–that things were not so bad, really.

  A very high-up official, a woman, ‘one of the good ones, you know’–kept close contact with her village, which is in a remote area, far from Harare. She insisted a male colleague should come with her to visit it. ‘How long since you visited your village?–Very well, you must come with me to mine.’ He agreed, grumbling. The first night she broke him in gently, at a decent hotel, but the next night it was a terrible hotel. ‘People have to use it, don’t they?’ she said. ‘Why shouldn’t you?’ He complained and suffered all the way. From the last little town on the road they had to walk through miles of bush to her village. She introduced this man to women working in the fields, and they at once started to shout at him that if he was a Chef then what did the government think it was doing? He complained, ‘They shouldn’t be talking to me like this, they should show respect.’ A child had been sent to fetch the old men. Ten or twelve of them arrived, together, and the oldest said, ‘Sit down, my child, and now you must listen to us.’ The great official obediently sat. ‘My child,’ said the spokesman, ‘you have done very badly. Your thoughts have not been with us. All we hear about you is bad. How is it that we had that terrible war and now all we see is people like yourself, who have forgotten about us, getting rich in Harare?’

  The official had to sit and listen while one old man after another, and then the women, scolded him. But on the way home he said it had been a wonderful experience. He had been reminded of where his duty lay.

  ‘So you see,’ says my interlocutor persuasively, but sighing, ‘things can’t be so bad, can they?’

  ‘And has the official changed his ways?’

  ‘That I am afraid I don’t know.’

  A POLITICAL OFFICE

  A young woman of medium rank (black) lectures me about the disadvantages of a civil service. ‘We are going to make sure the civil service has no power,’ she says. ‘Otherwise they hold things up when we make decisions. Did you see “Yes, Minister”?’

  ‘It has been argued,’ I suggest, ‘that a responsible civil service can prevent the excesses of a bad government.’

  ‘But our government isn’t bad, it is good, and it will only do what is best for everyone.’

  This particular department is manned and womaned by a host of attractive young people, all in their thirties and committed to any ‘line’ put forth by Comrade Mugabe. That means they must sound like marxists, even if they are not, must support a one-party state, and–this is the important point–support the ever-spreading control by the ruling party over every part of administration. The new bureaucracy doubles every year–exponentially, people claim, it is like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, it is like a fungus devouring everything. That these intelligent people are unaware of the bad things that go on is impossible: what they say to each other behind closed doors can be guessed at. But they present a smiling united front to anyone from outside who might be a critic.

  I remark that Lao Tzu said, ‘You must govern a country as you would fry a small fish–lightly.’

  They exchange looks, hesitate, then laugh. ‘Is he Chinese?’

  I see they think he is modern Chinese, therefore marxist, therefore good.

  My companion, a woman who spends much time in the villages, mentions the new Sheraton Hotel, built by the Yugoslavs, claimed to be the ugliest building ever built anywhere. It is called the People’s Hotel, but no Povo would dare to go near it, for they would be shown the door at once. The officials exchange quick looks: they are aware of all the criticism.

  ‘I heard a village woman from Central Province say, “What they have spent on the Sheraton would give all this province clean water.”’

  The officials do not look at us, nor at each other. From this I deduce they probably agree with the woman from Central Province.

  A bit later in the conversation one remarks, ‘Of course we have made mistakes.’

  The great new buildings are more than a sore point: in some conversations with Povos, even with Passionate Protagonists, it becomes clear they are a symbol of everything people hate about the new regime. There is not only this luxurious People’s Hotel, used only by fat cats and prestigious visitors, but there is the new Party HQ, for which money has been collected from even the poorest people. There is Heroes Acre, which cost a lot of money. And now there is talk that the new Houses of Parliament will be built on top of the kopje. ‘What is wrong with the old one?’ people ask. And, in fact, it is an attractive place.

  ‘And now I suppose the Chefs will travel from their nice homes up to Parliament by helicopter, they’ll never touch ground at all, they’ll see us even less than they do now.’

  The Povos do not approve, either, of the Chefs travelling abroad all the time. There is a new joke about Mugabe. ‘Why is Comrade Mugabe like Christopher Columbus?’ ‘Because he is always discovering new countries.’

  AIDS

  In every conversation these days, sooner or later, AIDS appears. Not in government offices: officially Zimbabwe is not supposed to have a problem with AIDS. The Ministe
r of Health has just announced publicly that talk of AIDS is put about by ill-wishing whites to destroy the infant tourist industry. This has filled doctors, or anyone with information, with despair and rage. Doctors say that half the children brought to the Outpatients are HIV positive. Fifty per cent of the army and the police force are HIV positive. People are dying of AIDS out in The Districts, but the doctors don’t say AIDS, they use euphemisms. Sometimes they don’t recognize an AIDS death, really think it is TB, malaria, ‘flu’.

  Shortly after this the government changed policy, and Zimbabwe began an efficient campaign.

  An official: you have to remember Zimbabwe is one of the successful African countries. Ten per cent of the population have clean water, eighty-six per cent of the children are immunized against measles, polio, tetanus, whooping cough. Infant mortality is sixty-one per thousand. Life expectancy is fifty-seven years for a man, sixty-one for a woman. Literacy rate is seventy-five per cent. There is a country-wide network of clinics, pretty basic, but the infrastructure is there. And now for the bad side: there is periodic malnutrition, associated usually with poor rainfall. The population growth is equal to Kenya’s, the highest in the world. This is partly due to the government claim–at the beginning of Zimbabwe–that any suggestion women should not have as many children as possible was a plot on the part of the whites against the blacks. Without AIDS the population will treble in twenty years. AIDS is the joker in the pack, just as it is in every African country south of the Sahara.