African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe

by Doris Lessing

  But there was a difference. In the living-room of our house were bookcases, and newspapers and magazines came from London.

  No books here. Nothing in that room for those children, not a book, a toy, a magazine, an exercise book, a pencil, a picture.

  Then we stood looking out, over the fields and the bush, just as we used to do then, first at this range of mountains, then that, for if your eyes stayed too long on one group of hills, where the light was changing, then you might miss the drama of the Umvukwes (or the Dyke) where a peak was being touched by sunlight while its fellows were still defined by shadow.

  And here, but above our heads–well above–was where we sat every night it didn’t storm or rain to watch the stars and the comets raining down, for the sky was so clear then that…

  Enough.

  My heart hurt, not for my parents, who after all hadn’t done too badly, though that was not how they saw it, but for my brother, who had so suffered from coming back here. Well, every day there are more people everywhere in the world in mourning for trees, forest, bush, rivers, animals, lost landscapes…you could say this is an established part of the human mind, a layer of grief always deepening and darkening.

  After that we drove fast, taking only a few minutes, to the Ayreshire Hills, where the new dam is. Mazwikadei, the name is. In 1956 I stood on a hill above a landscape soon to be flooded by the Kariba dam, then just completed, the tall curving white walls standing high about the Zambesi. All that magnificence soon to be drowned. ‘Why not? There’s plenty of Africa, isn’t there?’ And now the Kariba lake is enormous, it dominates the map and the minds of the people of those parts, just as the Dyke does further south.

  After one good wet season this new dam is nearly full.

  My brother and I used to take the rifle and walk through the bush to the Ayreshire Hills, moving silently like the black people, having learned from them, listening to the cicadas and for the movements of animals, watching the birds. The big vlei on our farm, full of thorn trees, is as it used to be, but it is silent. It used to sound with the cooing of doves, the ones with the delicate black rings around their necks. Everywhere in that bush were doves and go-away birds and other louries and above all that sorrowful enchanter the emerald spotted dove whose cry, the Africans say, sounds like, ‘My mother is dead, my father is dead, all my relatives are dead, oh, oh, oh, oh…”

  We crossed the Menene river on stepping stones, watching for crocodiles. After that came the Mukwadzi, just below the hills, the river that is newly dammed. We used to squat on a certain long slope of rough warm granite and look across a small gorge and wait, keeping our voices a murmur, trying not to move. Soon the baboons would come, dozens of them, guarded by a big male who kept his eye on us, warning his people with grunts and barks if we moved carelessly. We watched them all go down to the river to drink, perhaps fifty or so of them, the little ones on their mothers’ backs. Then they merged back into the hills, the big male going last, sending us across the river a final admonishing bark.

  All that land is going under the water. Going, going…

  Well, what of it, says the voice of commonsense–mine, at least sometimes. This happened in Europe centuries ago. A continent does not have to be inhabited by its own real animals, its original indigenous trees. Europe is doing fine. It is beautiful. People come from everywhere in the world to admire it. Well, then? We are doing all right–aren’t we?

  and, Again…

  1989

  One world generates another.

  Santayana

  AIR ZIMBABWE

  I am sitting next to a Chef, a mini-Chef, with a new job in some department, and he has been out of Zimbabwe for the first time in his life. To New York. To a conference. His story is, must be–how could it be otherwise?–rags-to-riches. Yes, he went from his village near Rusapi when he was eighteen to join the Comrades in the bush, but he was lucky, he only once saw something bad, when a friend was killed by a mine exploding, but for months and months he did not get enough to eat. ‘I was so thin my mother cried when she saw me. But the girls didn’t cry. I was too good-looking.’ After the War he was a clerk in an Harare office working for a Chef who had been his commander in the bush. Then when this man was promoted even higher, he was offered the empty place. ‘Three of us hoped for that job and when they said it was my job, I went home and told my wife and we cried so much!’ He was a fat and self-important man, but his delight at the fine world now his kept dissolving his pomposity into a sighing laughter. An excess of pleasure pressed his plump hands together, and he could not prevent them softly clapping, applauding his good fortune. Or he shook his head, smiling, in disbelief. Have you ever visited New York? Do you know the White Plaza Hotel? Do you like the food from Thailand? Have you seen Les Misérables? That was so sad it made me cry. Had I been to Paris? He was going to Paris soon for a conference. I asked him, if he could have his heart’s desire, what he would choose for Zimbabwe. ‘How can you ask me such a question! Of course, it would be prosperity.’ ‘Suppose a fairy godmother offered him on behalf of all Zimbabwe…’ ‘Who is this fairy godmother? Is it the World Bank?’ Fairy stories, I said, often are about good or evil spirits who grant wishes or put curses on people. I began with Snow White. He was enchanted, that is the word, never has there been such a listener. He pressed his hands together, he clapped them, he laughed, he sighed, he listened with his whole self. And that is how I spent that night, until he slept, telling fairy stories to a Chef.

  At Immigration a sarcastic and unpleasant official gave me a hard time–thus proving how thoroughly Zimbabwe has entered the modern world. Zimbabwe does not like journalists. It is not unknown for journalists and writers to get themselves special passports that do not have these dangerous words on them. Later I argued with a Chef who said if he had his way no journalists would be allowed in. I asked if by chance he admired The Chronicle in Bulawayo? He had to admit that yes, he did. Did he ever read newspapers from Britain and America? Yes, but we are a new country and we can’t afford criticism. I said, Why can’t you? It’s a sign of weakness to be so touchy. Did he really admire those articles in The Herald which usually go something like this: ‘Our great leader Comrade Mugabe inspires Zimbabwe with his example as he leads us forward into…’ At the first few syllables he brightened, but then he was angry at my levity.

  THE HOUSE IN THE RICH SUBURB

  Ayrton R. and I are again standing in his garden, looking up at his house, and then at the airy screen that hides the servants’ quarters, the two rooms and the courtyard where food is cooked, and from where come the sounds of voices, laughter, and, often, music.

  Until a couple of weeks ago there were also the sounds made by the gardener’s eleven children.

  This is what Ayrton R. began to talk about as soon as I arrived: he is infinitely distressed.

  Every afternoon at five o’clock there were screams and tears, as the mother lined them up and washed them in a tub in the courtyard. The neighbours complained.

  ‘But, George, why does your wife have to wash the children just when everyone has come home from the offices and want some peace and quiet?’

  ‘Because they should be washed before they go to bed.’

  ‘But why does she have to wash them so hard they cry?’

  ‘Children hate being washed, everyone knows that.’

  Eleven children make a lot of noise. They need a lot of space. They often spilled out of the little courtyard into Ayrton R.’s garden and he pretended not to notice. The neighbours complained again. They were invited to come over and meet the criminals, the gardener and his wife, two abashed but stubborn people, whose defence was, children make a lot of noise. Tense conversation over the teacups: these negotiations were going on in Ayrton R.’s living-room. ‘I insisted on them all sitting down in my living-room so it wouldn’t be a white boss–black servant confrontation.’

  ‘And it wasn’t?’

  ‘Of course it was. The point is, the children ought to be with both par
ents. George ought to have his whole family with him. On the other hand, you can’t really have eleven children in one room. And two parents.’

  ‘A bit of an impasse, then.’

  ‘But George has a house in his village and there’s a school nearby. The children don’t go to school when they are here.’

  The eleven children and their parents, thirteen people. Dorothy and her man and her three children, who are intermittently here. Eighteen people in two rooms. Impossible.

  ‘I am terribly sorry, George, but you simply cannot have all your children here. Perhaps two…well, three or four then. But not all eleven.’

  ‘This is not your voice I hear, it is the voice of the neighbours,’ said George, with dignity, with reproach.

  ‘No, I am sorry, it is my voice.’

  Later his wife took the eleven children back to the home in the Communal Area. Soon there would be twelve, proving that she is still a woman, so she had stopped being depressed. But she returned almost at once with the new baby and some of the smaller children.

  Ayrton R. looked the other way.

  ‘You would think that in eight months nothing much could change.’

  ‘Things have certainly changed in this household–no, not George having too many children, and anyway that’s only our way of looking at it.’

  George’s oldest daughter, she who has the Spirit, is now in competition with her cousin, George’s brother’s daughter, about which of them has inherited their grandfather’s Spirit: he was an nganga. The real ngangas have finally refused to accept the gardener’s daughter as a medium. The fact is, she is now evidently crazy and getting worse. Her parents want her to go home and live in the village, but she says, at first calmly, then shouting and screaming, that the house in Harare is her home and she has no intention of ever leaving it. She sleeps on the floor in the kitchen separating the gardener’s room from Dorothy’s room and there she entertains men. It is a shame and a disgrace for parents to overhear the love-making of a child, but that is what they are forced to do. Dorothy is also forced to overhear. Her man, whom everyone deplores, begging her to throw him out, has sex with the gardener’s daughter just through the wall from where Dorothy has her bed. Why does she not throw him out? But this woman with three children who has never been married hopes he will make an honest woman of her. If you remember, the gardener’s daughter had sex with all eight security guards at an institution where she was cleaning. The security guards are policemen. Fifty per cent of the police and the army rumoured to be HIV positive. (This figure has not yet been released by the government: meanwhile there are those who say it is much higher.) It was Dorothy who said that all people with AIDS should be put to death. This is the tragedy that is silently unfolding in the crowded servants’ quarters.

  ‘The government may be coming clean about AIDS at last, because AIDS isn’t a plot by the Honkies any longer, but they still pull their punches. The new AIDS poster you see everywhere has a prostitute standing in the shadows while a man debates whether to have sex with her. But it is the army and the police who are worse infected–well, as far as we know. The poster ought to be of a man in uniform and a woman deciding not to have sex with him. But everything is slanted against women in this culture and that is too much to expect, I suppose.’

  And now, to ‘cheer me up’, Ayrton R. takes me to the supermarket.

  ‘I am afraid we have to accept the fact that citizens everywhere are going to judge their government by how well they eat, never mind about democracy.’

  THE SUPERMARKET

  Zimbabwe goes short of very little. People who cannot live without olive oil, tinned fish, some spices, arrange for friends to bring them. Everyone who goes out of the country comes back again with whisky. But there are always new goods on the piled-high shelves as food enterprises start up. The freezer units are full. Stacked high from one end of the shop to the other are some of the best beef in the world, bacon and ham that is not injected with water, and first-rate sausages and salamis. There are ranks of chickens and ducks. The cheeses are good if limited in variety. The bread is excellent, and so are the fruit and vegetables. The maize meal for sadza is here in its different varieties, but this shop has more black people than white in it and they are not confining themselves to sadza. Row after row of shelves are loaded with spirits and liqueurs, all brand names made on licence. (On a van outside a store in a small town near the Zambesi Valley: Cinzano, the Drink of Africa!) The beers are good. Zimbabwe wines, not long ago undrinkable, are winning international prizes–that is, the white wines do, the reds are still learning. All this is produced inside the country. You may think it is not such an achievement for a country to feed itself, but this is more than surrounding countries do. Zimbabwe’s food shops would seem unreachable luxury to Mozambique, Malawi, Zambia, Namibia, Angola, let alone countries further north, some in a state of disaster. ‘Zimbabwe is not to be judged against other African countries: it is more like a South American country’ (United Nations report).

  Trading practices in this part of the world would not satisfy political moralists. Botswana has favouring trade agreements with Zimbabwe and South Africa, imports goods from South Africa, relabels them, sells them to Zimbabwe. South Africa puts Zimbabwe labels on fruit and sells it overseas. Zimbabwe’s citizens travel to Botswana to buy goods in short supply in Zimbabwe: these are often South African.

  ‘And why doesn’t Comrade Mugabe…?’

  Comrade Mugabe doesn’t approve of all this, and says so, but King Canute couldn’t stop the tide rolling in.

  MOZAMBIQUE

  And what else are people talking about?

  Last year Mozambique sooner or later appeared in every conversation. Now few people mention it. This is because the problem is on the way to being solved. Maputo is coming to life again: people are beginning to travel. Some of the braver Mozambicans are going home to ruined villages. Yet the refugee camps in Zimbabwe and Malawi are still full and more refugees arrive all the time. People starve in Mozambique. Bands of bandits threaten the villages. Policing the oil pipeline to Beira and bolstering the Mozambique army still costs Zimbabwe over a million pounds a day. No one seems to grudge this aid, but there are jokes that Zimbabwe, ex-colony, has a colony of its own: Zimbabwe is proud of itself and its support for its ruined neighbour. For instance, the pipeline. It is reckoned that if ‘they’–that is, Renamo, blow up the line the Zimbabwe army can get it back into working order in seventy-two hours. It is impossible to guard the line for its whole distance, hundreds of miles. The most recent blow-up was last month, and it was back in operation almost at once. The Zimbabwe troops are now trained by the British: the infamous days of the Fifth Brigade are over. ‘They are good chaps now, our Zimbabwe soldiers…’ (It is the Coffee Farmer who speaks.) ‘Well, look at who trained them! They’re ready for anything, anti-personnel mines, bomb attacks, air attacks, the lot. Do you remember when you were here the pipeline was cut and there was no petrol for weeks? That couldn’t happen now.’

  According to the politically-correct, ‘bandits’ in Mozambique are always Renamo. But the tale of the crocodile hunter suggests otherwise. The hunter was issued a permit to trap crocodiles in the lakes in Mozambique for live export. He took a boat out into the lake, but first Renamo, then Frelimo, bands shot at him, forced him to the shore, demanded a percentage of the earnings. Several times he was nearly killed. So he gave up. ‘So neither Renamo nor Frelimo got anything out of him. Serves them right.’

  CORRUPTION

  From one end of Zimbabwe to the other, people talk about corruption.

  It seems people have come to terms with it. On a white farm verandah: ‘What are we blaming Mugabe’s lot for? Smith’s lot all feathered their nests. The only honest man was Whitehead and he died a pauper.’

  ‘And Smith?’

  ‘Oh, he was honest, but he’s all bone behind the ears,’ cheerfully says a former enthusiast for Smith’s cause. ‘Look at the trouble Smithie got us into! We need never have
had a war at all! Only a minority of whites wanted that war but then we had to go along with it.’

  Or: ‘The whole country is on the fiddle. No, I don’t blame Mugabe. We all learned it under UDI. You had to lie and cheat then to survive and now it’s our national style. You can’t survive under Mugabe’s financial laws without fiddling. Everyone does it.’

  A variation on the old joke: Two Zimbabwe Cabinet Ministers are standing outside the Pearly Gates. ‘Zimbabwe?’ says Saint Peter, ‘never heard of it. I must go and consult the Boss.’ He goes to find the Boss and says, ‘We’ve got two Ministers from Zimbabwe.’ The Boss says, ‘Oh yes, an interesting little country. I’ll come with you to interview them.’ They reach the entrance to Heaven. ‘They’ve gone,’ cries Saint Peter, and the Boss says, ‘I can’t see anybody either.’ ‘No, no, the Pearly Gates, they’ve stolen them.’ (A United Nations official.)

  A United Nations report: ‘All of Africa is bedevilled with rhetoric. There is no connection between what is going on and how it is described. And Zimbabwe is the worst of them all.’

  THE TOYOTA SCANDAL

  The enterprising editor of The Chronicle who exposed this scandal was sacked, or, as the government put it, promoted, to a job where his journalistic talents cannot be used. The Chronicle is now almost as bland as The Herald.

  But–say the Passionate Apologists–The Financial Gazette is well-informed and critical, and there is a magazine, Parade, which is not afraid. Cynics reply, Why not? The Gazette and Parade are only read by intellectuals, the Povos never read them.

  As a result of The Chronicle’s exposures, the Sandura Commission was appointed: the resulting hearings in court were attended by jeering, shouting, laughing crowds, while the defendants reached heights of imaginative perjury described by one member of the audience as ‘a combination of Baron Munchausen and Cecil Rhodes boasting about the annexation of Mashonaland. I tell you, comrade, only Zimbabwe could have come up with that one–it was better than any theatre.’ All of Zimbabwe applauded Mugabe for appointing the Sandura Commission: at last he was behaving as he was expected to behave, a bulwark against corruption and a defender of the good and the right. The students were particularly full of praise. But then the guilty ones were pardoned by the President, and the people who committed perjury in court and who expected jail sentences were pardoned too. ‘One law for the Chefs and one law for the Povos,’ said the cynical. Said, by the by, the now very cynical. As we all know, there is no one more furiously cynical than an idealist betrayed. Needless to say, the rumours about why the President did this ill-judged thing flourish. ‘They’ say that people very close indeed to the President were implicated. ‘They’ say that the President cannot afford to offend the corrupt Chefs who keep him in power. The charitable say it hurts Mugabe to see old comrades who fought with him in the bush disgraced and in prison.