African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe

by Doris Lessing

  This meeting ends, like the others, with promises from the Team to be back in a few months to collect all the material.

  Then, as always, there is a song. The message is vigorous but the tune is sad: it is an old tune. Some of the African songs are as naturally sorrowful as Russian songs, designed to break your heart even when on jolly subjects.

  People are slow to change, but they do change.

  So go slowly and they will change.

  That is one song. Then another:

  Tell them about development,

  Tell them about health.

  Don’t tell the people to do what you say,

  Tell them to do what you do.

  And now, a hymn tune:

  God’s love is so wonderful.

  Love, love, wonderful love of God…

  And there is a great circle of women dancing. Women come in from everywhere around, hearing the music. Some drop out and stand ululating and clapping. A few have babies on their backs.

  As we go to the car, escorted by everybody, the woman returns who has been at the AIDS meeting. She is half-laughing, half-furious. There is in existence a proper well-made educational film about AIDS, giving facts, explaining dangers. But the local mission nuns have vetoed it. No one seems surprised the nuns have the power to do this. The same nuns, I was told, burned The Grass is Singing, my first novel, having remarked it was a good book, but dangerous.

  The film actually shown said that AIDS was a danger to homosexuals and to drug-users. But homosexuality is not part of African culture; in Africa AIDS is a heterosexual disease. No one here has heard about drugs stronger than marijuana which grows everywhere and is part of the culture. Several hundreds of school children, some as young as nine or ten, have sat uncomprehending through this film and are at this very moment dispersing, bewildered.

  The local doctor has said that five people died of AIDS in the last few weeks, in this area. That is, the acknowledged deaths from AIDS. Since no one knows anything about AIDS, a person may die of it and all you hear is: my brother got too thin, and he had swellings and then he died.

  As we climb into the Landcruiser a village man says to me, ‘You have chosen a good time to visit Matabeleland. The Unity Accord has made us happy. The Dissidents have stopped making our lives a misery. We had a good harvest last year. The rains are good this year. And–of course!–there will never be another drought in our Matabeleland.’ Everyone laughs, and to the sound of laughter we leave the Growth Point.

  The train to Harare left on time. In the early morning, after coffee and biscuits, I went to stand in the corridor. Six women seemed a lot in that one compartment.

  Two windows down a young smartly dressed girl stood watching the bush go past. A couple of duiker grazed their way into a gum plantation. A partridge ran madly beside us, as if racing the train.

  A young man, handsome, a dandy, watched the girl from the end of the corridor. He came sauntering down, politely apologized as he squeezed past me, and began with, ‘Where are you going? It’s a nice day, I think. Haven’t I seen you before?’ She jabbed her toe into the corridor wall, and hung her head: maidenly bashfulness a culture away from her dress, her shoes, the pink beret. He chatted on–whimsical, frankly trying to charm her. But the courtship made slow progress. She would not respond, she simply would not, but went on poking her toe at the wood, and hung her head.

  Suddenly she could not prevent herself letting out a giggle. He laughed out loud with his victory, clapped his hands and spun around on his heels. After that it took him five minutes to get her to say yes to meeting him in Harare that night, in a bar, for a drink. ‘And who knows? We may like each other and go and eat some sadza together.’ As if that hanging head, the sulky indifference, had never been, she chatted animatedly with him for the remaining hour into Harare.

  THE TRAVELLING CLASSES

  An evening in Harare spent with academics, journalists from various countries, politicians in and out of office, some farmers, musicians, a mixed lot black and white. What do they all have in common? They travel, they make comparisons, they are of the travelling class.

  If it is hard for most of the white people to leave Zimbabwe, then for nearly all the black people it is impossible, and the world outside Southern Africa hardly exists.

  The academics present have been out on scholarly missions. The journalists, by definition, get about. The farmers have relatives in Europe. The politicians, like their kind everywhere in the world, are always off on Committees, Commissions, Conferences.

  Something extraordinary has happened.

  The young Zimbabwe began with the naïvest, most untutored enthusiasm for communism. The newspapers printed nothing critical of communist countries. The Gorbachev revolution was hardly mentioned. The self-criticisms of the Soviet Union went unnoticed. That Stalin is no longer the Father of his people but rather a murdering maniac has passed most people by.

  Sometimes one is tempted to believe that the mental attitudes of a country have something to do with its sun and soil. Old Southern Rhodesia was the same, complacently indifferent to the outside world. Leaving it was like leaving a stunned or a drugged country. The only comparable places are in certain Mid-Western States in America, where curiosity about the world ends at, let’s say, the borders of Iowa or Nebraska. A university audience will hardly know where Afghanistan is–or Sri Lanka, or Pakistan. In California sun-drugged youngsters will stare at the mention of Gorbachev.

  Similarly, Zimbabwe. You may spend an evening with a professor of history, or of literature, whose attitudes towards the Soviet Union or China are identical with those of thirty years ago. Someone may remark–wearily, since they have learned the uselessness of it–‘But the Russians themselves are debating the forced collectivization of the peasants, Stalin’s purges.’ ‘Nothing but capitalist propaganda’ comes the prompt reply, with all the self-righteousness of the True Believer. An inaugural address to a new year of students may begin with a set-piece of praise for the achievements of our great brother the Soviet Union, but these do not include the courageous self-examination of the last five years, because the illustrious academic has never heard of them. If some intrepid person remarks, ‘But you can hear the Soviet Union’s criticisms of itself, on the shortwave radio, at most hours of the day or night’–then the faces of these survivors, the Stalinists, put on the shrewd seasoned look of those who have known and seen it all: they aren’t going to be fooled, not they!

  One of the bad effects communism has had on the West, perhaps the worst, is that generations of politicoes have learned politics from what is described as ‘the communist style of work’. ‘The Leninist style of work’. This style of work demands a sneering jeering language, based on a moral contempt for opponents, which suffuses the mind and character and prevents any kind of thinking that isn’t on the level of the school playground. I grew up when ‘everyone’ was a communist. (‘Everyone has been a communist; no one remains a communist.’) People like me can recognize from one look at some representative of the ‘hard left’ on television, that scarcely-concealed glitter of mendacity, the pride at cleverness that knows how to outwit opponents with election rigging, or the fixing of statistics, character assassinations, the whole ‘bag of tricks’. This immediately recognizable look, the equivalent of laying a finger against a nose with a slow wink is, unfortunately, not recognized by people who were not young when ‘everyone’ was in ‘The Party’. And that means they have no defence against it.

  The upheavals in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe send shockwave after shockwave to undermine the old guard, but in more isolated parts of the world, tucked away in university departments and institutes of higher learning, they survive, proud of ‘the bag of tricks’, the ‘style of work’, deliberately refusing to know not only that their great exemplars have self-destructed, but that all the mental attitudes associated with them have gone too. These little crooks can never see themselves as others see them, since they identify with Lenin the pure. They d
o great damage, because the idealism of young people who learn to see through them goes sour, for they become angry, then cynical and are often turned away from any kind of politics, or even ordinary service to the community.

  In Zimbabwe, 1988, the travelled ones know what goes on in the Soviet Union and China, the communist world to which, in theory, they belong, and will discuss it all with sophistication and worldly wisdom. But the ordinary citizens know nothing. Privilege in our world often resides in this: that people have information. Did anyone plan this? Of course not. It just happened, this mental tyranny; and it is perpetuated by Stalinist woodenheads who are fighting to hold their places in the seats of high learning, for they would not get jobs anywhere else. They are infinitely skilled in political intrigue and infinitely unscrupulous. The decent and informed people in their departments succumb to despair, and take their skills elsewhere, when they can, because their energies have to go not on teaching, but on trying to maintain a position against colleagues they despise, but cannot ignore.

  Meanwhile, in schools all over Zimbabwe children dream of the distant shores of learning, in the University of Zimbabwe, which they probably will never reach because they are not clever enough.

  Research into the workings of the mind shows that a percentage of people are incapable of changing their minds, no matter what the evidence. If they have been imprinted at some point in their lives with, let’s say, the information that all cats are black, then for ever after they will say all cats are black, even if white cats are paraded before them with labels saying White Cats.

  This is hard to believe–unless you see it. Most of us by now have seen it…for instance, there was a young woman brought up in the top echelons of the Communist Party of East Germany, and knew it all from the inside, who then was for seven years at the Moscow University; she married an Englishman, and lived at an English university. Knowing all about communism, she was not a communist, but would have been happy to discuss what she knew. But left-wing circles in the university refused to have anything to do with her. She was a reactionary, a fascist; she was probably CIA.

  ‘Mugabe ought to do something about it.’

  ‘What, precisely?’

  ‘Well, he could make a speech of some kind.’

  ‘But he is a marxist. And the revelations of the Gorbachev era didn’t emerge in a single speech, they unfolded over months and years, people had time to get used to them.’

  ‘Then he should instruct the newspapers…’

  ‘But we don’t approve of him instructing newspapers, do we?’

  ‘Then he shouldn’t discourage lively and critical editors.’

  ‘How do we know he does.’

  Oh surely it can’t be Mugabe himself: Mugabe is of course on the side of the good, which in this case means the availability of information. Conversations can go on for a whole evening where it is assumed that Mugabe has been misinformed: he is surrounded by yes-men and they don’t tell him the truth.

  Someone remarks that every leader that arises anywhere is assumed–in the West, particularly in Britain–to be a giant of liberal democracy. If Ghengis Khan appeared now in no time the London leader-writers would be reassuring us that he liked Western films, subscribed to the Guardian, supported Amnesty International, had a wry sense of humour.

  We–that is, Europeans, people with an experience of democracy as practised in Europe–assume the countries we colonized were taught democracy. In Southern Rhodesia a lively democracy was enjoyed by the whites, but was never extended to the blacks who experienced only various forms of repression under the whites. Why then should they not have turned to communism?

  Robert Mugabe is the product of an authoritarian culture. He was educated by the authoritarian Catholics. People who taught him, and fellow pupils, say he was clever, always reading, did not mix easily with others, but watched and listened: ‘A typical intellectual.’ He was brought up under White Supremacy, which was like living under a cold lid, like a frozen sky. His culture, his people were always criticized, disparaged, despised. When they say now, ‘But it is our culture, it is our custom’ as a last word, what you are hearing is self-respect, a people’s pride, that has survived decades of contempt. When Mugabe became part of the liberation struggle, it was British rule he opposed, and the language of marxism was common to all liberation movements then. They say it was Samora Machel who finally made him a communist, and that was quite late in his career. Because the Soviet Union made the mistake of backing Joshua Nkomo, Mugabe was orientated towards China, whose history since 1949 has been continuous, successive, waves of mass murders–millions upon millions killed for ideological reasons. (I actually heard a Chef say about this, ‘But you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.’) He led an army that fought not only against Smith’s forces, white and black, but sometimes against the armies of opposing political groups, Bishop Muzorewa, Nkomo–for while these armies had the same aim, they often competed for future power.

  Mugabe was put in detention by Smith. To be detained or a prisoner was a harsh experience. The prison was the scene of hundreds of executions, many of them Mugabe’s friends and comrades. All kinds of atrocities were committed by Smith’s men, which are talked about but have not been officially exposed: this is because of the need to bury the past and its ‘mistakes’. Smith refused Mugabe permission to visit his son–his only child–when he was ill, and when the child died he was not allowed to attend the funeral. It is sometimes argued that this was the stupidest thing Smith ever did. When Robert Mugabe came to power it was after more than a decade of war fought, as wars have to be, with brutality on both sides. The attempts on his life have isolated him, made him suspicious. Why then do people expect Robert Mugabe, with such a history, to be this combination of Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson, Gandhi? But people do expect this: Comrade Mugabe, like God, is on everybody’s side. And he does sometimes behave with magnanimity.

  What has there been in Mugabe’s experience to make him admire democracy?

  Yet as communism, and marxism as an idea collapses, as communist societies give up and go, it is likely that the ‘marxist’ leadership of Zimbabwe will be pleased their communism has always been more rhetoric than fact.

  What will supplant marxism?

  Christianity is strong in Zimbabwe, stronger than marxism ever was.

  From a letter: ‘The Pope has just visited Zimbabwe. Thousands of people turned out. Don’t run away with the idea they have all become Catholics, it was all more exciting than a Party rally, that’s all, and they love parties. Comrade Mugabe was there. He said “This is like being baptized again.” Also, that he could see no conflict between Christianity and what his government stood for. At least that’s what people say he said. The newspapers didn’t report it.’

  As marxism fades, the Chiefs become stronger. There are jokes that in the long run the Chiefs will turn out stronger than the Chefs. Slowly, they are getting their powers and privileges back. They are conservative, taking their stand on ‘our culture’, ‘our customs’.

  But not always. And Robert Mugabe, that man conservative by temperament and authoritarian by upbringing, is not at all the traditional African male. He is sympathetic to women, and–they say–much influenced by his mother, a remarkable woman whose life was as hard as African women’s lives nearly always are.

  LEADERS

  Always and everywhere citizens sit around wondering. Why does he–she–they–do this or that? and in the same tone of frustrated incredulity of ‘But why does Mugabe…?’

  There surely must be a secret ingredient, information withheld, a palmed card, the joker in the pack?–for the citizens simply cannot believe what is going on.

  Let us take a recent event in Britain. (But it happened in the United States too.) It was decided to close mental hospitals and throw out all the inhabitants, who would thereafter be ‘cared for in the community’. Anyone who knew about the services which would be caring for these poor people, could foresee what would happen. The u
nfortunates would be living on their wits, or be exploited by landlords, or drink or drug themselves to death. But if ordinary sensible people could see this, the experts could not. It was obvious that quite soon, people appalled by the sordid fate of the expelled ones, would cry ‘Eureka! I’ve got it! What we need are a-s-y-l-u-m-s, what we need are r-e-f-u-g-e-s where they can be looked after. Why is it people didn’t think of that before?’

  Over and over again this kind of thing happens, always to the bafflement of people who are not experts or officials.

  There is an ingredient X. It is that as soon as people get into power, even on an ordinary level, they only meet people like themselves and who think the same–they succumb to a kind of gentle group hypnosis. Nothing is more rewarding than to spend an hour or so in the company of, let’s say, Labour officials, and then an hour with the same level of Conservatives. They live inside different mental landscapes, which they continually reshape to make them fit with their beliefs. So powerful is this mechanism that politicians seem able to persuade themselves of anything. At the time of the miners’ strike–Arthur Scargill’s–members of the hard left all over the country were sure Britain was on the verge of red revolution, and were already choosing the government posts each would fill. A couple of years later they would be secretly thinking, ‘I wonder what got into me?’

  THE FARMERS IN THE MOUNTAINS

  And now, again, the road from Harare to Mutare. Again we sped through rolling open country past all that magnificence, and those other slow journeys when we watched how a clump of boulders appeared far ahead, grew large, dispersed itself at a turn in the road and came together, rose up, seemed to topple, then fell behind as another clump approached–the slow unfolding of the landscape, like a well-known tale or reminiscence told with pauses for effect, was part of the past, and even the journeys of six years before were in another time. The place of the accident? Conversation in the car was so entertaining I forgot to look for it. In 1982 every stretch of bush, each hill or mountain was a memory in the topography of war. That war had gone, together with all the other wars, into the memories of people growing old; a new lot of young people are already looking at each other with humorous grimaces as their elders intone, Do you remember how the government troops came that night and…? Can’t they leave it alone? We don’t want to hear about that. The car carried a load of optimism: the rains, the good rains, were here, the end of the drought; a green countryside, fat beasts, well-fed people. All of us in the world are dependent on the rains coming as they ought, but in Zimbabwe you remember it in every other conversation. ‘If we have another three years of decent rains then Mugabe will be safe. Another drought like the last one and we will be in trouble.’ We? I am listening to whites who so recently meant we, the whites, when they said we, but now they mean Zimbabwe.