African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe

by Doris Lessing

  There is investment again, and the railways are recovering. But when I said in Harare we were going by train, several people said, ‘You can’t do that, it’s dangerous. It’s just possible if you go first class.’

  Hearing this, Dorothy remarks that she often goes to Bulawayo, by train, third class. She is serving a table full of people dinner at the time. Ayrton R. has taught her to be a cordon bleu cook. She stands there in her smart dress, this plump handsome lady, watching us to make sure we taste everything she has cooked, and she smiles when we commend her food. She likes the idea that I am going to Matabeleland. So does Ayrton R. She and he exchange nostalgia about the beauty of their homeland while we eat mango fool, and for the hundredth time everyone congratulates Mugabe on the Unity Accord.

  Dorothy remarks that she thinks I will find the train to Bulawayo ‘not very bad’. She thinks it is a pity people sometimes condemn things without knowing enough about them. It turns out that no one present has been on a train recently.

  The Team is travelling second class. At the station queues wait to collect already booked tickets, but at the time an official should have appeared–no one. The queue doubles up on itself, and soon the room is so full the queue loses definition. ‘It is not corruption that’s going to do this country in, it’s the inefficiency,’ I hear, not for the first or the twentieth time.

  We solve our problem by approaching an official standing at the edge of the crowd, apparently without function. His job certainly is not to deal with us, but he does, from good nature, not for a bribe. And there we are on the platform which I swear has not changed by so much as a nut or a bolt. It still looks as if made from a giant Meccano set…and can that be the same coat of battle-grey paint? The long platform seethes with people. Then the train consisted of half a mile or so of coaches, most of them with a few white faces at the windows, then, further along, a couple of coaches with brown faces–Indians and ‘Coloureds’–a forced conjunction of people guaranteed to cause resentment to both, which it did for all the time of White Supremacy. Finally came a couple of coaches where all the blacks were squashed. This arrangement meant that most of the platform used to be sparsely occupied by whites.

  I amuse the Team by a description of those times. They find the past improbable, and laugh at it. Cathie says that South Africa’s segregation patterns, in her time, have never been as rigid as that. Talent who spent all her youth as a guerilla fighter has never known old Salisbury. Chris is still in his early twenties.

  Just in front of us is a black woman so burdened it is as if she is there to illustrate some statistic. In her belly is a baby, on her back another, and clinging to her hand a small child. She spreads a blanket on the platform and places on it three more children, twins of about eighteen months, and an older child of about five. The three sit there while tall people mill about them. They are uncomplaining, not fidgeting. I remark that it would be hard to find white children who would sit there stolidly, not making a fuss. Cathie says the children are taught to behave well, but she is convinced it is bad for small children to be forced to sit silent and obedient for so long. I say that if one woman has to cope with several small children it is just as well they have learned to behave. Talent listens to this exchange without comment. We ask her what she thinks, and realize she does not find the sight of this exhausted woman remarkable. Or perhaps she is herself tired. The Team have already said that at the beginning of the present tour of Zimbabwe, five weeks ago, they were all full of high spirits, but now they’re waiting for a second wind. ‘It will be all right when we actually start work.’

  The long platform eddies with people, nearly all black. Among them are perhaps a dozen white faces. Chris, yards away, waves to show he has located our places, and pushes his way towards us as the crowd ebbs into the train. The mother of the children is frantically running about, weeping–one of the babies on the blanket has wandered off. She has babies all over her, in her arms, clinging to her knees. They do not cry. Large solemn eyes in small serious faces stare around them, unfrightened, Chris goes to alert some official to her predicament, we go into the train. They have put us three women into a coupé, and Chris into a compartment with five others. We do not want to be separated: already we feel like a family.

  Inside the coach I see it is identical with those of then: solid, respectable, shining with brown wood and yellow and green paint. Yes, I am told, it probably is the same: they haven’t renewed the coaches yet. Here is the fold-away metal basin, here the exactly placed hooks for keys, or belts, or to pull yourself up to the higher bunks. I run through the sequence of thoughts appropriate for the occasion: can this be the same coupé where in ’48, in ’38, 1–etc., and so forth. Meanwhile the bedding official has appeared. You buy your bedding tickets when you buy your ticket. This official used to be white, now he is black: a fatherly manner goes with the job, and he is full of advice about not leaving belongings near windows where station thieves can reach in. Sometimes they employ long sticks with hooks. And remember that it can get cold, with so much rain, so keep yourselves warm. While he makes up the beds, appears the inevitable clash of cultures. Talent wants the windows tight shut. In her village she would have slept in windowless huts, the door fastened against thieves and prowling dogs, even wild animals. Cathie and I are convinced we cannot sleep without fresh air. A compromise is reached, while the bedding official listens. He would adjudicate if we let him. He departs to the next compartment, leaving us feeling tucked up. We stretch ourselves out, one above the other, I on the bottom shelf, Talent in the middle, Cathie on the top. We plan to sleep the moment the train moves, but the train does not move. On the platform the people who have come to say goodbye stand in groups, talking, laughing. Bottles of soft drinks are passed in and out of windows. The scene could be Italian in its vivacity, its enjoyment of the moment. What I am remembering is a hundred farewell scenes during the War, poignant scenes, full of that reckless elation which is war’s secret and dangerous accompaniment. But now such scenes take place at the airport, so the atmosphere of the platform has lost an ingredient. How many times had I watched the train pull out, listening to the long shrieking note of the whistle, a sound that monitored our emotional lives through all the years of the War, heard from one end of Salisbury to the other. But this engine has a new voice, it makes brief hectoring hoots–not to signal departure. Not at nine, nor at ten; not at eleven, or twelve o’clock.

  Jealous for the honour of Zimbabwe Cathie and Talent keep assuring me that they often make this overnight trip to Bulawayo, work the day there, returning the next night. Never has this happened before.

  At two-thirty the engine emitted its fussing hoot, moved a couple of hundred yards, and stopped. We slept.

  At six the same attendant arrived with coffee and biscuits. His glance at the window–humorous, tactful–directed my and Cathie’s attention: it had got itself closed in the night. Had we slept well? he wanted to know. Cathie at once went into the exchange in Shona, I have slept well if you have slept well. We were stationary somewhere half way between Harare and Bulawayo, where we ought to be arriving about now. Cathie and Talent were anxious, knowing that groups of women were travelling long distances to meet us: the first would be in the office at nine-thirty. The train went on standing, fretting a little. Hours passed. We had not brought food. ‘My mother always said, never travel without food and coffee,’ said Cathie. ‘Imagine, I used to laugh at her.’ Trips along the corridor showed, through doors left open for sociability’s sake, people enjoying fruit and chicken. Some grumbled: the steady low-key complaint used to relieve anxiety. Talent lay calmly on her bunk. She told us she learned how to wait in the War. Sometimes they were hiding in the bush waiting for a safe time to move for days, without food or water. They ate fruit from the bush, when there was any. Once, after rain, the whole company of a hundred or so stood around a tree and each sucked the water from a single small bunch of leaves. Five leaves each. Talent said, ‘Sometimes I look back and I don’t know how
I did those things. I couldn’t do them now.’ She was one of the team that collected bits of body after a bomb went off. ‘You’d find a hand or a foot or a bit of liver, or a heart, and you’d think, But this is one of my comrades…we used to bury just bits of people. You have to get hard, you make yourself not care about what you are doing.’ For a time Talent was defusing bombs. Where was that going on? ‘In Zambia–they used to bomb where they thought our camps were. Sometimes they hit us, sometimes not.’ I could tell from how Cathie was listening that Talent did not often talk about the War. ‘I was lucky,’ said Talent, ‘I wasn’t one of the pretty girls. The pretty ones used to be taken off into the bush by the Commanders.’ This remark surprised me: I think she is very attractive.

  Her war went on for years. She was never a girl and then a young woman with clothes and make-up and flirtations: she was a soldier when she was a child. She was a soldier when she met her future husband, for she was one of the men and women who agreed, at the Collection Point, to make a communal farm of ex-guerillas, at Simukai. She remarked that she lived with her husband for years before marrying him. ‘I can’t understand how girls can marry men they don’t know.’ Now she has three small children and her husband looks after them when she is on one of these trips. So does Cathie’s husband. Both say they could never do this work if they didn’t have such good husbands.

  ‘Sometimes I can’t believe I am doing this work,’ says Talent. ‘I can’t believe I am alive. When I was in the bush, I often could not believe the War would end, and I would live an ordinary life.’

  But it seems the War has never really left her: she has terrible headaches and sometimes cannot move for days.

  Listening to Talent was like sitting with my brother talking about war.

  A war ends, you bury the dead, you look after the cripples–but everywhere among ordinary people is this army whose wounds don’t show: the numbed, or the brutalized, or those who can never, not really, believe in the innocence of life, of living; or those who will for ever be slowed by grief.

  Meanwhile rumours enliven the train: the trouble is the brakes, the engine has broken down, rain has flooded the track. Puddles lie everywhere, and the sky is full of lively clouds, blue appearing only intermittently.

  The train moved forward, stopped. Round about Gweru it summoned enough energy for a short move forward of a mile or so, then another, stopping in between like a wounded centipede.

  People left the train and strolled about or sat on the embankment, Chris among them, first in ones and twos, then in groups, then it seemed everyone on the train was out there. It looked like a picnic, but without food. The scene reminded me of what I had been told of the old days–in this case before I was born, up to about the time of the First World War, when the train running north to Sinoia (Chinhoyi) would stop long enough for a man to leap down and shoot a duiker, a bush buck, a koodoo, if game appeared near the railway line. The meat was distributed among the passengers. When the booty was a lion the sportsman was given time to get the skin off. If in a good mood, the engine driver might halt long enough for everyone to have a picnic.

  When our train gathered enough energy for a short move forward, it summoned the wanderers with short nagging snorts, and everyone ran back to it. Soon, when we stopped, people lugging suitcases ran to the road, hoping for a lift. But there were dozens of them, and hardly any cars, and these days people don’t easily give lifts.

  During one long wait two white youths from first class sat by themselves under a tree watching the lively scenes they could not allow themselves to be part of.

  Round about midday the train stood idling near a village. People ran in crowds to buy soft drinks, biscuits. While they streamed one way, a small half-naked black boy ran from his hut where his mother stood watching him. He carried a plastic container, and jumped up into the train to fill it from the train’s water taps. Having drained one container, he ran through the train, stopping at one tap after another. Meanwhile his mother waved her arms and shouted, afraid he would be whirled away from her. But soon he proudly went back, with his container filled.

  The train stood quietly puffing. What was to stop us being here all day…another night…for ever? Time was behaving as it does when there seems no reason why a long wait should ever end. No, much better not to look at our watches, for by now not one but two groups of women were in the Bulawayo office wondering where we were.

  There appeared two white officials with the look of those volunteering for martyrdom. They stopped in every compartment doorway: their task was to defuse aggression. When we asked what could conceivably be holding up this train, they said there was an electrical fault in the signalling system, because of the heavy rain. At every set of points the driver had to wait for written permission to proceed. ‘It is in your own best interests,’ they insisted, in the self-righteous and threatening manner of officials at bay. Shrieks of laughter accompanied them all down the train, like a bush fire behind an arsonist. What written instructions? From whom? Was a man running from the next station with a written message in a cleft stick from some punctilious station master who had looked in an instruction book under the section, ‘What to do in the event of rain fusing the signalling system’? Had the radio not been invented yet? Nor the telephone? No one believed in this nonsense, probably invented by the officials who, said Talent, were obviously pretty stupid.

  Soon the train that had left Bulawayo that morning for Harare stopped alongside us. The windows were full of jolly faces, offering us sweets, biscuits, Fanta, even sadza. ‘Shame, better go back to Harare and try again tomorrow.’ In no time our despondent populations had cheered up and began laughing and joking back. At about two our train suddenly shot forward and soon the thorn trees and acacias of Matabeleland appeared. Trumpeting gently we arrived in Bulawayo station nine hours late. The exuberant noisy crowd poured out of the train and on to the Bulawayo platform, once proud of being the longest in the world. (It used to add a few feet to itself every time it was outdone by a platform in the Andes or Cincinnati or somewhere.) Among them pushed the young mother with all her small children in her arms. The women looked like butterflies. The cotton industry in Zimbabwe flourishes, cotton is the second crop, after tobacco, and somewhere there is a designer who fills the shop shelves and covers the women with brilliant swirling patterns that look wonderful on dark skins. At the exit I stopped, for I had heard a voice from the past. A fat bad-tempered white man was using it on a small crowd of patient blacks–the hectoring, bullying voice that…‘But why,’ I demanded, ‘is that man allowed to talk like that now?’ For I realized. I had not heard that voice, not once, since I had arrived in Zimbabwe. ‘Can’t you see he is a South African?’ said Talent. Then I did see: the characteristic belly-forward, chin-out stance which goes with the voice. But why? Was this a religious group? What was a group of black South Africans with their minder doing here? But it was a mystery that had to remain one, because we were hurrying to see if the women were still waiting.

  Embassies had been sent to the station at half-hour intervals all day. They sent commiserations and good wishes. They would be waiting for us next morning.

  Grey’s Inn Hotel has a sign showing sprightly coach horses, Dickensian–oh, lost England!, lamented no less in unexpected parts of Africa than in England itself. Inside, this amiable hostelry is far from English. But perhaps, so I am beginning to think, this explosive, irreverent, witty, selfish society does resemble eighteenth-century England? But then surely England is more like eighteenth-century England with every up and down of the national mood? You walk along a London street and look at the youngsters–for more and more London seems a young town. If you are wise you hold tight to your handbag because of pickpockets. Cocky, jolly, full of self-conscious style, with a swagger to the hips and a set to the shoulders that says, You can’t put anything past me! These attractive barbarians, full of relishing word-play–based on quips and slogans from television–do not resemble anything that was in these same streets
when I came to London after the War. A dreary self-regarding respectability was more like it, to match the dreary unpainted streets and the last days of rationing.

  The hotel is old-fashioned, with an atmosphere that tells you it has been enjoying itself for decades. I hope that does not mean it is due for demolition. My bedroom is large and has four beds: a family room for a society that prides itself on having plenty of children. The others have large rooms too.

  In the heart of this hotel is a patio, or court, part-covered, furnished with umbrellas for the sun. But the sky is grey: the long cold spell hasn’t given up yet. For a couple of hours we sit at a table that expands as people join us, friends and their friends, relations, aides and admirers acquired on previous visits of the Team. The courtyard is crammed. More blacks than whites, and many mixed groups. I know that while I have to note this, because of the past, everyone here has long ago got used to the easy mix of races. In fact a young woman–Persian by origin–tells me her generation are surprised at the racism of their elders. It is in this hotel, a local politician, in opposition to Mugabe’s government, holds court most evenings. People come to listen to him. He is famous for saying everything he thinks: in the years before the Unity Accord that was certainly a brave thing. But this is Matabeleland, I am reminded, this is the home of The Bulawayo Chronicle, the newspaper never afraid to challenge the government on corruption and inefficiency. People are proud that the only newspaper ‘everyone’ reads is in Bulawayo.

  What I remember is that Bulawayo and Salisbury were always in competition. Salisbury said Bulawayo was commercial, crude, lacking in the graces. Bulawayo said Salisbury was boring, and ‘civil service’, respectable, snobby. Now Bulawayo is saying Harare is full of Chefs getting rich and the smell of bad money. Harare says Bulawayo is a backwater. To the outsider both cities seem to fizz with energy and interest.