African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe

by Doris Lessing

  It is said that the Cuban soldiers now going home are all full of AIDS.

  SERVANTS

  Dorothy is asked what kinds of people make the best employers. She says the ex-pats are the best. Then, the old Rhodies: ‘At least we understand them and their ways. On the whole they are fair.’ She hates, with all her heart, the new rich black class who, she says, treat servants badly, underpay them, do not give them proper time off. She tells all kinds of stories about bad behaviour. For one thing, they exploit relatives. A Chef, asked about this, says she is biased: ‘Of course we make mistakes.’ But she must know that every successful black person is besieged by out-of-work or out-of-luck relatives, whom he is bound to support. Every Chef’s house is full of poor relations. In return for their board and lodging they do housework and odd jobs. The Chef pays school fees for the children and buys their clothes. Sometimes a Chef will be sending as many as thirty children to school. Back we go to Dorothy. ‘Sometimes that is true,’ she says. ‘I didn’t say they were all bad. But these days a lot of the rich people behave like whites, they don’t help their families.’

  AID WORKERS TALK

  ‘I don’t know what it is about this country. It just gets you. I’ve worked in a lot of Third World countries but this one…you really care what happens to it–perhaps because they have a chance of making it. But I think it is the people. I don’t want to leave them. I know when they send me on somewhere else, I’m going to spend half my time worrying about what’s going on here, if they are getting it together.’

  ‘Why do you get so fascinated by this place? That’s easy! Are the good guys or the bad guys going to win!’

  THE BOOK TEAM OF THE COMMUNITY

  PUBLISHING PROGRAMME

  And now that stroke of luck travellers dream of, which we cannot plan, expect, order, or foresee: I was invited to go with a team of people making instructional books for use in the villages. These people, their ideas, their work, are revolutionary, truly so, not in a political sense. The originator, Cathie, a South African who had worked in rural areas there, was shocked by the ignorance of village people in Zimbabwe about modern living, even the household technology everyone in Europe takes for granted. Besides, what of the waste of talent, of potential? ‘The most important resource of the country is being wasted–the intellectual and creative energies of the people living in the rural areas which no one recognizes or bothers to develop.’ There was a gap here, an insufficiency, something needed to be done, so she decided to do it.

  There came into being–though not at once–a team consisting of herself, with two small children, Talent, the young mother of three children and former Freedom Fighter, Sylvia, a handsome and vibrant lady, mother of eight, and Chris Hodzi, a shy and sensitive young man, in the way artists are supposed to be and still sometimes are.

  At the time they invited me the Team had already finished two books. Each book is in fact several, for they are translated into six languages. The first was, Let Us Build Zimbabwe Together (the title had been suggested by the village people themselves), a handbook on overcoming civic problems, and how to cooperate in a practical way, ignoring the slogans and rhetoric that cause political activists to believe that if you shout sequences of words long and loud enough, that process in itself is enough to change things.

  The second book was still being put together. It explains economic problems in detail. How to get a bank loan, open a bank account, use book-keeping, assess the chances of success for a dam…a new borehole…a vegetable garden…a village store, or even a roadside stall. Each book is a mix of text and cartoons, like a book of comic strips.

  Now the Team was planning the third book. It is for women, and will be the most controversial because while rural women are acknowledged to be the liveliest agents for change, they have to contend every minute of every day with traditional attitudes about the inferiority of women. Zimbabwe is not the only country in the world where a new government has announced that old attitudes about women are retrograde and inefficient–‘We will give women equality in law and in the work-place’–and then had to contend with the past. One is Libya. Another, Iraq (whether we like it or not). But if you speak to women from Libya, from Iraq, you learn that theory is one thing and practice another. So with Zimbabwe.

  ‘As we all know, we can change laws, but then we have to change hearts.’ (Who? Lenin? Stalin? Mao? Rosa Luxemburg? Emmeline Pankhurst? Mrs Thatcher?)

  Making these books is not at all a question of sitting in an office in Harare and writing down inspirational precepts.

  With the first it was Cathie and Chris who travelled around and across and back and forth all over Zimbabwe, seeking out and talking to people they had been told were outstanding in local affairs, or who had the potential to be. Sometimes they had to contend with antagonism from local officials. They had very little money. They often lived on bread and oranges. They were fed by idealism and the response they got from the villages. What they were offering, expertise, information, was what these people, still recovering from the civil war, half-educated or uneducated, yet expected to be modern people in a modern world, were hungering for. ‘I knew there was a need,’ said Cathie. ‘Not until we actually got into villages did we realize just how enormous a need it is. Every time we got to a village we were welcomed as if we were actually bringing the goods then and there–that was because of all that hot air from the government. But what we were saying was, This is how you do it. As soon as they understood that, the word went around and then we were inundated with demands to visit them. So then the Team became four instead of two.’ And, soon, officialdom noticed them, saw how good these people were, and offered support.

  Making the book for the women was being done in stages, just like the other books. First, the Team went around the whole country, finding women who already represented others. Each had to be persuaded to take on even more work: many said they had too much to do already. Yet now their task was to go around the villages, to other women as individuals or in groups, and persuade them to take part in the making of this new book. Having set the women’s book in motion, the Team went back to Harare to finish the second book, and arrange for the translation of all three. Then out they went again, for the women’s book, all over Zimbabwe, to meet the women. At the point I joined them they had been on the road five weeks and were tired. They had travelled by local bus–no joke, this, since buses are overcrowded, and tend to break down; by train; by car when they could, and, occasionally, comfortably, in official cars. This was happening more often: local officials were beginning to see how valuable these people were. In every district the attitudes of local bureaucrats varied. A hostile local official could ruin everything. Time had to be spent on courtesies, even flattery, in the offices of district Party bosses.

  ‘But,’ said Cathie, in her breathless way that combined enthusiasm with apprehension because of what she had taken on, ‘they help us more and more, they even send us messages to come to their districts.’

  We were off down the Mutare road, five of us together, late for a meeting, while I gave up any idea of watching for landmarks–balancing boulders, rivers, crags–for while I sat by Sylvia, who drove, my head was turned so that a flood of information and statistics emanating from Cathie in the back could enter my right ear and, with luck, assemble themselves usefully in my already swollen-with-facts brain.

  The meeting is in a local government office. An office is an office is an office. We have sped from Harare in what seems a few minutes: some of these women have travelled hours, even a day, to get here. Twenty of them are waiting, a serious, sober, attentive little crowd. I understand the phrase ‘to hang on’ words: they are hanging on every word spoken, in this case by Cathie, who is using English. Every syllable, hesitation, nuance, is being assessed. These are poor women. They feed and clothe families on very little–some on twenty or thirty pounds a month. (Yet the Team has said these are comparatively well-off women: wait till you get to Matabeleland next week, then we will be w
ith really poor women.) It is pleasant watching these shrewd, humorous faces, and how they turn to their neighbours with a joke, a comment, and then laugh–and the laugh spreads around the room. One woman and then another says the weeks she has spent covering a ward or district were heavier than the organizers seem to realize. Am I sensing: ‘It’s all very well for you, rushing around the country in a car, while we use our legs, or bicycles.’ I think I am. But ‘you’ does not only mean Cathie, the white woman, but Chris, the black man, as poor as they are, and Talent who lives on Simukai, a farm which can scarcely be described as rich, and Sylvia, who has as many children as they do.

  Cathie has said that everything about making this women’s book is revolutionary, cuts across custom: now I begin to see what she means.

  She is telling the women the response to the book is very good, women everywhere are working on it. Now she wants every woman in this room to talk to the women on either side of her, and discuss ideas they want to be in the book.

  This way of conducting a meeting is revolutionary. In fact, what it reminds me of is stories about early days in the Russian Revolution, when idealism still governed events, and young activists went out into the countryside to ask villagers to take charge of their own lives. One difference: there is not one word about politics. Not one slogan. No rhetoric.

  These women are not only being asked to take control of their lives, without submitting to men, but to overcome reluctance to talk to women who might come from an area a hundred miles or so from their own. Here, we are cutting across tribal and clan divisions. This is Mashonaland, certainly, but the Mashona are an infinitely subdivided people. This women’s book is subversive in ways immediately evident to the women themselves–and the local officials, who are sitting at the back of the room, watching.

  Soon the women are in lively discussion. Then each one in turn puts forward an idea. These having been written down, the initiative is again passed back to them with, ‘And now we want you, the women, to write the book. If you don’t know how to write, tell a neighbour who can write to take down what you say. You can send in stories, poems, songs, jokes, articles, it doesn’t matter what. When all the material is in from all over Zimbabwe we will bring it back to you and we can decide together what will go into the book.’

  The women have not expected this. At first they are confused, then they are pleased. Soon they are telling us and each other what they will write. Many of the suggestions are criticisms of the local Party officials. The Team has told me rural people speak their minds about anything and anybody. Behind me sit the Party officials, listening to what, in a really communist country, would be a cause for prison or death.

  THE RUINED HOUSE IN THE TRANSVAAL

  This meeting was in Marondera, my brother’s nearest town for most of his life and near, where, long ago, the family lay out under trees and were part of the night-time bush. To match that past with the women’s meeting in the local office–impossible, two different worlds, just as it was not possible to imagine telling my brother about the women’s meeting. But I could not have done that anyway, for he was dead. He died in the Transvaal in the car that was taking him to hospital. If it had been an ambulance of the kind we take for granted in Europe, they would have known how to stop him dying of the heart attack.

  My brother had visited me twice, in London, and we spent many hours, and days, saying, Do you remember?

  He talked about his new life but he did not like the Transvaal. One doesn’t grumble, of course.

  One story he told me several times. Every evening he went for a walk into the veld, with–at first–the two dogs, and then with one. He came on a ruined house in the middle of the tramped-down, over-grazed, dirty grass.

  ‘It’s not the same, not like England, if you found a ruined house here someone would know about it. But there–it made me feel really funny, that old house, someone lived there didn’t they? I wonder what happened to them. I was poking around and there was a potato plant. It had finished flowering so I pulled it up. There was a cache of good potatoes under a cracked bit of cement floor. But that place must have been there empty for years and years. I couldn’t make sense of it. I went poking about in that ruin and I kept coming on potatoes, more potatoes, that plant had put down roots under everything–old bricks, slabs of cement, I couldn’t come to the end of it. There was something about that place the potato liked.’

  ‘But I thought they didn’t like too much lime?’

  ‘Not much lime left, I should think. Not after so many years. Anyway, I just went on pulling up bricks until all the potatoes were exposed. There must have been a couple of big sacks of them. Then I didn’t know what to do. In the old days there would have been baboons, or birds, but now there’s nothing. I took some potatoes home. I went back every evening, and there the potatoes were and then one night–they had gone. Probably a herdsboy. At least someone got the benefit. I didn’t like to think of those potatoes working away there, season after season, and no one getting any good out of them.’

  IN THE NIGHTCLUB

  The next meeting was in Jamaica Inn, once a nightclub for whites, now a Rural Women’s Training Centre. In an office wait thirty women, who at once let us know they have been kept waiting. Cathie humorously apologizes. They humorously accept her apologies. The nearer you get to Harare, I have been told, the better dressed and more confident the women will be: this is a smart and self-possessed crowd.

  Three men, local officials, are greeted as allies by the Team. They sit at the back. Now the proceedings are in Shona, and Chris Hodzi, who is sitting beside me making sketches, translates for me. Chris sits through every meeting, listening, choosing moments of tension or drama or humour.

  The men interrupt with comments and criticism. Cathie sends me a note saying the men are playing devil’s advocate, giving the women experience in handling hostility. It seems to me one man means every word he says: I am sitting just in front of him. He is a large middle-aged man, a pillar of society in his three-piece suit. His face is calm and confident.

  The three men are polite and formal, while the women bring up all the points we have heard at the other meeting–and will hear again. From one end of Zimbabwe to the other, the Team say, the women raise the same problems. Nor do the men react much when the women demand that government representatives–in other words, themselves–should come to the villages to explain their new rights to them: often male officials take advantage of their ignorance. The men start serious heckling when the women talk about prostitution. The Team have said they have found prostitution in every rural area, no matter how remote. Before their travels they believed, like everybody else, that prostitution was a problem for the towns. The man behind me says village women are greedy these days and are not satisfied with their husband’s earnings. Women are not as they used to be. They want careers and they neglect their families. For example, who is looking after your children while you are all enjoying yourselves here? The women laugh, and say neighbours are caring for their children. And what about your husbands? Who is cooking their food? Not one woman asks why the men should not cook their own food; they say their husbands are being looked after.

  Women spend money on making themselves up, on clothes, all they care about is we should think they are beautiful and love them–says the conscientious dissenter behind me.

  Not at all, says one woman, the others clapping softly to applaud her, it is a question of self-respect, of making yourself look nice.

  I hear the male voice behind me, low, intimate, as if spoken into the ear of a woman in his arms, ‘You know what I am saying is true.’

  I make the point that these arguments can be heard in every country in the world, but feel ‘the world’ enters this room as an irrelevance.

  The women’s demands go on: the men heckle: it is all good-natured enough, and they joke and laugh.

  Then the women sing, clapping their hands: it is a song they have made up especially for this meeting. ‘We have come together to wo
rk with our hands. Lying under a tree sleeping we have left to the dogs.’

  This is the end of the meeting. Just as the women rise, and gather their belongings, the man behind me remarks softly, ‘One of the reasons a man rejects his wife is because she is a witch.’

  A silence, a change of atmosphere, a chill. No one laughs.

  The silence is a bad one. Everything about this meeting until now, the tone of it, the style, is rational, reasonable, the modern world. But witchcraft is from the past. Yet everyone knows how strong it is. The women do not look at the men. They do not laugh. I would say they are afraid. When I turn to look at the men behind me they seem complacent: they have had the last word.

  Again the Team says they will be back here at the stage of the discussion of the submitted material.

  And off we go back to town.

  THE TRAIN

  People telephone to say how much they envy me going off with the Book Team. ‘You get cynical in Harare with all the corruption and bureaucracy. But you won’t feel cynical when you meet the people in the villages, particularly the women.’

  We are to go by train.

  In 1982 they said the railways were dead, because of lack of capital investment, because white skilled labour had taken itself out of the country, and no one knew how to make the trains work. I stood by the railway lines with a farmer from Mutare and heard his lament: ‘Under our government the trains came through here, dozens of them every day on their way to Beira. They ran on time. They were efficient. Now you get one or two trains a day, and they are filthy, and full of hooligans.’