African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe

by Doris Lessing

  ‘A horrible story!’

  ‘Yes, but that is not the point. Have you wondered how often in our culture people put spells on other people–no, no, not witches and that sort of thing…what are spells? Strong wishes. Well, how often do you think families or just spiteful individuals bad-wish someone? Well, think about it then…’

  It is certainly true that witchcraft has unsuspected dimensions of usefulness. Ayrton R.’s little cat, now very old indeed, was his mother’s cat, much loved by her. Now Dorothy and George both believe that Ayrton R.’s mother’s spirit is in the cat, who is her mudzimo. ‘A good thing,’ says Ayrton R. ‘It means they treat the cat well when I am away.’

  Indifference or cruelty to animals is sometimes a reaction to what is seen as white sentimentality. Or rage at how whites will love animals but are unkind to blacks.

  ANIMALS

  A joke that is also a popular song. A white man sets off on a car journey. His dog is beside him in the front seat, and his black servant is in the back seat. There is an accident and the man is killed. The police ask the servant what happened. ‘Don’t ask me, ask the dog.’

  Some time in the last few hundred years the Zambesi changed its course. Its old exit to the Indian Ocean was where Beira is now. The present delta is a hundred miles or so to the north. ‘What I wonder is, how did the animals take it?’

  A small battle in the War between humans and animals. A certain farmer, growing citrus, got a poor crop because of the vervet and simanga monkeys. He put up an electric fence. The monkeys easily jumped over it. He heightened the fence. The monkeys discovered that electric shocks did not kill them. They learned to jump in such a way that the electric shocks knocked them into the orchard where they ate their fill, and then positioned themselves so they were knocked back out of the orchard. The farmer could not bring himself to increase the electric shocks to the point where the monkeys would be seriously harmed. He went back to employing a man with a gun: expensive as well as being less effective.

  Simanga monkeys are being resettled in areas where they have gone.

  A Story of Two Unimportant Creatures

  In a house in Harare a large black dog, half Newfoundland, half Rottweiler, welcomes the visitor with a determination that you notice him: bold, not to say commanding, eyes watch your every movement. He accompanies you as you walk about the house, then the garden, always one step to heel, his nose at your hand. When you stop to turn, his head is there to be stroked and patted, and his eyes never leave your face. Another dog, a small Alsatian, is lying in a dusty hollow near the back door. He watches, his whole body saying, I am not worthy to be noticed, while his eyes crave affection. When you go to pet this dog, the big dog’s nose, head, then shoulders are interposed between your hand and the smaller dog’s head. Again and again this happens: it is not possible to caress the Alsatian, for the big dog will not allow it. The Alsatian knows your goodwill, but knows too it has no alternative but to ask for nothing as it lies in its dusty place. It came as a refugee to this friendly house, full of people of all colours, and of cats, monitored by this jealous dog. Its owners went south to The Republic–they Took the Gap, and left it behind. This Alsatian, say its new owners, making a joke of it to black guests, is a racist. It has been taught to attack black people. Now its skills, for which it was valued, applauded, and given titbits, are reproached: when it performs as it was trained to do, it is chastised and rebuked. This confused and unhappy dog is determined on one thing: that it will not lose this home where at least it is fed and has a place to sleep. As it watches the confident and successful dog, the Alsatian seems to be silently weeping. If it were human, it would be saying, ‘I am sorry, I can’t help it, I don’t know why I am wicked.’

  THE BOOK TEAM

  We take a coach to a town in Central Province. The coach is efficient, well-driven, punctual. Gone are the days when the Team went on long journeys by bus, for the authorities saw a humorous cartoon by Chris of the Team standing bedraggled in the rain near a broken-down bus, and insisted they should travel less dangerously: in the five weeks of my trip the newspapers reported four major accidents with buses. ‘We don’t want to lose the whole Team all at once!’ cried the officials. Nor is their diet restricted to oranges, bread, milk. ‘It was a healthy diet, at least,’ says Cathie. But even on this trip, at the end when funds ran low, I heard the Team telling Cathie that she really must not expect them to put up with it, if she fed them all on five dollars after a hard day’s work. ‘I lose pounds on every trip,’ says Chris, who is too thin.

  At the half-way stop, we sit around under trees in a café garden, and I listen while Talent, Sylvia, Cathie, and Chris give each other information–through chat, gossip. An apparently casual process. The Team are at that stage when they must be conscious of what their strengths and weaknesses are. These four small vulnerable people are besieged with demands. Every village in Zimbabwe would like the Team to visit. In Harare the telephone never stops ringing. Aid organizations, government departments, ‘Third World Groupies’ sense that here is something extraordinary. The Team now begin to see that they are strong, because of how other people see them. And how can they cope with what is asked of them if they are weak? They discuss their ‘styles of work’, and gently criticize each other. I realize I am watching a process that was the aim of the old communist activists. But not one of these people is a communist: they share an ironical patience with the political circus. When I ask if they have read how in old Russia idealists ‘went to the people’ with their skills and their enthusiasm, they say no: but they are interested to hear about it. ‘I don’t think it’s strange that we are the same,’ says Talent. ‘They had people who needed a lot of help and so do we.’

  Contemplating the extent of help needed, the depth of need, the four involuntarily laugh, and look at each other, sharing humorous incredulity.

  It is the level of expectation that surprised them…that supported them…that inspires them. And, often, dismays them. What they are doing is, in fact, impossible.

  Two springs, or rivers–or floods–fed that expectation. One was, that the whites had gone, with their persistent denigration of everything black, their cold, sniffy, self-righteous disapproval. The Africans, with that pressure off them, felt that now everything was possible. The other was, the rhetoric of Revolution, promising everything. ‘In that dawn…’ There wasn’t a woman, man, or child in Zimbabwe who did not expect the good life to begin almost at once. But nothing much happened, except that the new bureaucracy creaked and groaned and tangled them in old and new regulations. Then, up there in Harare the fat cats…Into this vacuum came the Team who said, ‘You can do anything you want to do, all you need is the expertise, and this is what you have to know. And now, learn how to do it for yourselves.’ In the case of the women’s book, they were told, You decide the topics, you bring in the material, you write the book.

  Now, while we drink Coca-Cola and eat meat pies, I listen while they share scorn for the big Aid organizations. ‘They sweep into Harare, can’t even begin without offices, word processors, computers, a staff, and enormous funds.’

  Cathie says, ‘I still only have a desk and we use the house telephone, and I only have a typewriter, no machines at all.’

  ‘And yet we have a network of people working for the Team all over Zimbabwe.’

  ‘It works because we have the goodwill of the people themselves.’

  They make many jokes about the experts known as Consultants. ‘Many of them have never set foot outside Harare. If they get down to village level they stay in a three-star hotel and visit the local district offices. They know nothing about local conditions but they lay down the law about what we should do with their Aid money.’

  ‘Just imagine! We get back from a month’s trip all around the villages and then some Dane, or German, or American tells us, No, the main thrust of the problem according to our information is…’

  I have a cutting with me.

  They lean over the table
, reading, their faces slowly spreading into smiles.

  ‘If we had only a fraction of that money…’

  ‘Even a thousandth of it.’ ‘Even a millionth of it.’

  Advising Africa has become a major industry, with European and North American consulting firms charging as much as $180,000 for a year of an expert’s time. At any given moment sub-Saharan Africa has at least 8,000 expatriates working for public agencies under official aid programmes. More than half of the $7 to $8 billion spent yearly by donors goes to finance these people. Yet in the two and a half decades since African Independence Africa has plunged from food self-sufficiency to widespread hunger. Is Africa getting the right advice?

  Lloyd Timberlake, Africa in Crisis

  Cathie produces from a string-bag material for the forthcoming seminars and shares it out. There will be this problem and that problem, says Cathie. The four are leaning forward, looking into each other’s faces, intent. Sylvia speaks, then Talent. If they did not know how to concentrate these moments when they are together, not actually working, nothing would get done. This break under the trees is the equivalent of an organizing meeting, but it is not called that, nor do they think of it as a meeting. If this fragile little organism, so full of life, developing on its own inner impetus, allowed itself to fossilize and demand a structure, then they would need hours-long meetings to get through what they do now in a few minutes.

  They are all people under pressure in their ordinary lives. Talent has three small children and takes a good deal of the responsibility for the running of the collective farm. She can only come on these trips because of the support of her husband–it was he who said, ‘There are no men and women, there are only people on this farm.’ Sylvia with her eight children finds the going hard. She is a large, queenly woman, confident, competent. Cathie whose energy incandesces not only her, but everyone else, is the queen-pin of the Team, one of the world’s natural organizers. She has children, and says she could do none of this work without her husband’s help. When the four sit together like this, the ‘family’–for they say they are one–their differences of temperament and style show in every gesture, in how they sit, how they talk. Cathie leans forward, smiling, always smiling, and her hands present her ideas in sympathy with her breathless, tumbling words. Sylvia sits four-square, nodding, or sceptical, magisterial. Talent claims she is shy, and finds it hard to speak, but with her friends she is funny, satirical–a comic. Chris is mostly silent: he watches and he listens, and five minutes later he will pass around a sketch he has made of the three in energetic verbal combat.

  A young man comes towards us. He is shy, he hesitates, he waits until Cathie and the others recognise him, welcome him. Last year he worked with the Team in this district, and, knowing they were bound to stop here today has been watching for the coach. He needs advice.

  This is his problem. His family are insisting that he marry. He is thirty, and that is old not to be married, in Shona culture. But how can he support a wife? On a tiny salary he earns as a junior welfare worker he already supports an old mother, an assortment of unemployed friends and, too, his brother’s family. This brother, himself fifteen, made a fourteen-year-old girl pregnant. Both youngsters were expelled from school, thus guaranteeing for both a future of unemployment. The girl’s father demanded marriage. These two are still under twenty and have two small children. This young man here supports them all. He is afraid of marriage. His mother was left by his father, and for a long time she fed her children on what she could find in the dustbins of white houses. (I have now heard this tale several times and it is still happening. ‘But now the really good dustbins are multi-racial, so I suppose that is progress.’) This young man wants a real marriage, he says: like Cathie’s, like Talent’s. He has heard them talk about their husbands. He does not want to marry the girl chosen for him by his family, because he does not know her. What should he do? He seems confident they will know the answer. Talent and Cathie consult together. Then Cathie says marriage should never limit you, but add to the possibilities of life. Yes, says Talent, you should have a partner like my husband who makes you think about everything.

  The young man says, ‘But how do you know beforehand? I do have a girl and I like her, but how do I know she would turn out to be a real wife, like Cathie and like Talent?’

  At this point we are summoned back to the coach.

  There are five of us, finding our places in the crowded coach, but we joke there are really six. Everywhere the Team goes, they take a big drum. This is because no meeting can be expected to go well without music. ‘This is the best travelled drum in Zimbabwe,’ says Cathie.

  When we reached the coach terminal in the town there was an official car waiting. Cathie says, ‘You don’t know what this means, look, this is the District Office car. They said they wanted us so badly they won’t let us pay in the training centre. And look–those men are the big bosses for the area. They’ve come to meet us. You don’t know what a change this is.’

  We were taken to the training centre, which is built not in the town but well outside it, a large, light, five-year-old building surrounded by expanses of grass, then trees, making an uncompromising statement: Here is Progress, here is the modern world, here is Zimbabwe. It is full every day of the year, with people from every part of Central Province, taking courses on management, book-keeping, accountancy, dressmaking.

  The Centre takes a couple of hundred at a time. For the Book Team’s week of seminars thirty women have come, and nine men. That the men should be here, supporting women, for the women’s book, is another revolution and not a minor one. These men must all be extraordinary in some way, for not only are they going against traditional ideas, but must expect criticism, perhaps derision, from other men. The Team congratulate each other about the men’s presence. ‘There you are, Chris, you aren’t going to be the only man now.’

  As soon as we got there, the forty or so of us sat in a big circle and introduced ourselves, first the Team, Cathie, Sylvia, Talent, Chris. As each offered little autobiographies to the company, everyone leaned forward, in the absolute silence of concentration. Not all had been here months before, when the Team came to say that the women’s book was to be decided by them. Impossible for them not to think, What an unexpected combination of people: how did they come to work together? just as the observers–myself, and two area officials–wondered how the people who were prepared to give so much time, so much effort, to the book had chosen themselves, or were chosen, for they were very different, well-dressed, poorly dressed, confident, or fighting shyness. Two women can illustrate the range of difference. Mrs Berita Msindo, with eight children, said she had always worked, first as a teacher, then as a senior development officer. She was proud of being the first woman in the Province to ride a motorbike. She has just returned from a study tour in Rome. ‘All my children are successful,’ she remarked, just as if this were not an extraordinary thing. The two oldest are university graduates, one in England studying agriculture and economics. Another two are school teachers. The four younger ones are doing well at school. Mrs Msindo says her husband is proud of her: without him she could not have done so well. She is a large, handsome woman, humorous, pleased when everyone claps as she finishes.

  The other woman is thin, tentative, anxious: she comes from an area debilitated by drought. She and the other village women get up at three or four every morning to walk to the borehole some miles away to fetch enough water to drink and to cook with: washing has become a luxury. In her area they are all short of food. Her eyes shine with passionate admiration when she listens to Mrs Msindo talk about her life. She says that when the rains come and things get easier she wants to take an O-level. She knows she could pass examinations well if she had time and opportunity. And now everyone applauds her and it seems as if she gently fills, as she sits there smiling gratefully, with their sympathy, their encouragement.

  This business of our becoming a company, a communion, takes about three hours. When a
woman claims an achievement, people softly clap, when the men speak they are especially applauded. The local officials who sit slightly apart, watching and listening, never opening their mouths after the first formal welcome, are impressed and say so. ‘You people are doing wonderful things,’ says the district representative. He sounds bemused, probably wondering how this atmosphere of mutual help, trust, community, is achieved, when at other times, with other people, it doesn’t happen at all.

  These introductory proceedings over, the women dance, singing their welcome to the Team.

  The evening meal was in progress when we got to the food hall. It is a large hall, with four tables down its length. At the end is the serving place, and queues of women and men, mostly young, were being handed plates heaped with sadza, meat, green vegetables. As usual I was astonished at the amount of sadza on every plate, at least two pounds of it. It is a thick porridge, not unlike polenta. The meat was beef, braised, very good, with a rich gravy. The cabbage was well-cooked. The meal would please a hungry Italian. But the surprising thing is, this amount is eaten three times a day, and often with plenty of thick-cut white bread. Unless a stomach is full and heavy there has not been a real meal. Often Africans invited to a ‘white’ meal will go home and fill themselves up with sadza. When Jack took his aspiring young journalists to a restaurant in Harare they complained, only half-joking, there had been no sadza. This surely must be an emotional thing. In Japan, because of the starvation after the Second World War, when even a few grains of rice were precious, rice has become an emotional necessity even though food is plentiful. The rice bucket is there, and people will eat a little spoon or two after a long meal. It is a reassurance, a manna. Sadza is served at every meal cooked in the homes of the new rich, though the menu is usually ‘white’ food.

  But sadza is no longer a ‘black’ food. The son of a privileged white family, asked what he wanted for his birthday meal, said nothing would do but sadza and stew. Sadza is served in every restaurant, every hotel, at every barbecue. In the courtyards of the country hotels, along with the barbecues, are the great pots for sadza. Nothing is more satisfying to the ironies-of-history nerve than to watch those whites who stay in Zimbabwe but preserve their feelings of superiority, filling their plates with sadza. Then–in the old days–sadza was kaffir food and no white would dream of eating it.