African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe

by Doris Lessing

  The meal in the hall that night–and all the other meals–was noisy and exuberant, with an atmosphere of holiday. To most of the people here taking courses, this training college in the bush represented a time of affluence. Few people can afford to eat meat at every meal, or even every week, and certainly not great slabs of it. And when we went off to the bedrooms, the shower block was full of women showering. Like a party it was, a water festival. There they stood under the streams of hot water and called out to each other their pleasure and their surprise at the lavishness of it all. No one in the villages has unlimited streams of hot clean water. Some women had showers several times a day, just as they ate as much as they could.

  Chris was sleeping on the men’s side of the building. Talent and Cathie were in one room, Sylvia and I in another. The four of us crowded on to Talent’s bed, for discussion on next day’s strategies. It was an atmosphere pleasantly reminiscent of after lights-out at school.

  ‘We must take things slowly,’ said Cathie. ‘We forget, we’ve done this so often, but for nearly everyone on this course it’s new. It’s worth taking the trouble to explain and explain. This is the first time ever people have been asked to choose their own themes, and then write their own articles and poems and stories and then comment on it all. We mustn’t let them be shy. We must watch out for the ones who don’t speak and encourage them.’

  Talent has had her experience in the army and then at the collective farm. ‘We must split them into smaller groups to discuss the material, between every session. Then they will support each other, and it’ll be easier for them to criticize us.’ She is always the first to translate theory into practice.

  Talent and Cathie began a close, expert, detailed discussion on the right sizes of groups for different purposes. Sylvia was tired, she wasn’t sleeping: she wanted to go to bed. The room was divided by a partition for privacy but it was easy to talk. We talked until late, just as Cathie and Talent were doing in their room. From every room in this women’s wing, until late, came voices, laughter and, once or twice, singing. Sylvia was not laughing. She was telling me about a close friend whose marriage had broken up, and in a way she often uses: she does not want me to make quick judgements about manners and mores she is sure are hard for me to understand. They often are.

  There are several children, the oldest nearly twenty, the youngest still a baby. The husband is a civil servant. The marriage was always difficult: he was for some time an alcoholic, she saw him through it, protected him, interceded with superiors. Then there was another woman and a baby: she took him back. Only a few weeks ago she discovered that he now not only has another woman but a new baby: she knew nothing about this until someone told her the baby was being christened. She accused her husband: he said he wanted her to accept a polygamous marriage. She said, ‘When we married you had the choice of a Christian monogamous marriage, and a marriage according to our customs. You chose a Christian marriage.’ ‘I have changed my mind,’ said he. She refused to accept a polygamous marriage. He is spending all his time with the new wife and baby, and if he does come home it is only to shout at her. Meanwhile she is supporting the children, almost entirely, because his money is going on the new wife, the baby, a new house. The new wife’s relatives say he must not have anything to do with his old wife and come to threaten her. Under the new law she could force her husband to support the children, but she is afraid. Sylvia says she is ashamed to tell me this story. I say I don’t see the difference between many men in so-called Western culture and this husband. Monogamy, polygamy, what’s in a word? Many Western marriages are polygamous, and more and more couples break up, remarry, and the children may have a place, even a room, in two homes. Sylvia does laugh at the idea of a child having a whole room to itself, let alone two, in two houses.

  She says the pattern is only superficially the same: she does not mean, either, the difference in standards of living. It is no use, she says, judging things by what is happening now, you have to look at the history, too. When she was growing up, there were four wives, each one married properly, according to form. A woman who is not married is seen as a prostitute or a loose woman. Her father had to marry the wives of a brother who died. Not until his fourth wife did he love a wife.

  ‘Our custom is that a brother’s widow must be married to a surviving brother; this is a good thing, because it means women are supported, but it is a bad thing too, because they are not loved by their husbands.’ I ask if the four wives got on. At first Sylvia says yes; then she admits that she has never heard of the wives of one man being real friends. Though they might pretend to please the husband. ‘Polygamous marriages are bad for women,’ she says at last, making an admission she would rather not make. When people these days say ‘our customs’, ‘our culture’, you are intended to take it seriously, even when they are seeing these phrases like unsafe life-rafts in a stormy sea.

  I was lying there in the dark, listening to the women all over the building talking, laughing, splashing and singing in the showers, and I was thinking of the man who had to marry three women not chosen by him, before he could marry one he loved. But it was not possible to mention this. What atmospheres forbid you to say, an invisible clamp on your tongue, can often tell you how stupid you are being. This was not a nice dispassionate chat about cultural differences, nor could it be. Sylvia was too unhappy, a heap of misery just the other side of the partition, because of this failed marriage, when she was so afraid for her own.

  A New Yorker joke came into my mind: a boy of about fifteen in his first grown-up suit approaches a worried-looking rather drunk man at a party, saying, ‘I don’t know if you remember me? We met here last year: I am your son by your third wife.’

  But I couldn’t tell her this joke; the atmosphere forbade it. She would not find it funny…well perhaps it wasn’t funny…was there something wrong with me, to find it funny? If so, then what did this say about ‘Western’ culture? What jokes could Sylvia tell me that I would find shocking? But Sylvia was not telling me jokes, not that night, not that trip.

  Next morning began the week’s work. Every session was introduced by a little play that encapsulated a problem, rehearsed for a few minutes after breakfast. Then there was dancing, a song. Everyone joined in.

  Most of the problems were familiar from last year. There were two, provoked by the existence of the women’s book, that were–so Cathie and Talent said–really revolutionary, and challenged the fabric of ‘our culture’, ‘our customs’–and were bound to cause opposition. One was that babies are automatically registered in the name of the father, ‘who then goes to one woman after another, and we have no legal control over the children we bring up. Sometimes we don’t see the father for years, but by law he can just turn up and take the children.’ And another, ‘Why should land automatically be registered in the name of the man when it is the women who do all the work?’

  And there is another new theme. Last year no one mentioned AIDS, not once, in the meetings, but the government propaganda is being effective, for a sketch by one of the groups about prostitutes and their clients began with a man limping from weakness across the classroom, and at once everyone said, ‘He’s got AIDS.’ This sketch was funny too. All the impromptu playlets and sketches are funny.

  In a week as lively as any I can remember, some incidents stand out.

  Cathie is standing by the blackboard, making diagrams of statistics. She says that she is going to skip the next page of the draft book because it is too difficult. She means the statistics are too detailed to be illustrated in this way, but one of the women, misunderstanding, says sweetly: ‘Just try us. It is possible we may have the intelligence to understand.’

  A local official, a man, says, ‘I don’t know why it is that people who do the most work, nearly always women, working all day, walking long distance, get paid practically nothing, while men sitting in offices get paid ten or twenty times as much.’ Because he is one of the men sitting in an office, he is applauded and at onc
e they make up a song about it, which they sing to him, clapping and ululating.

  Judges can be very harsh, particularly with women. A woman had a third child and killed it: she was supporting her mother and father and her grandmother. ‘I cannot support all these people on my wages.’ She got a prison sentence and her children were taken into care.

  Another woman killed her ninth baby, was imprisoned, and her eight children were put in care. The welfare official said, ‘We decided to find out how they were doing. Eight child allowances were being paid to a relative, who doesn’t know where the children are. We have lost eight children. Where are they?’

  A discussion on why the judges are so inflexible: the conclusion is because they are new to this job. ‘People can only be flexible when they are sure of themselves. But while they are learning to be sure of themselves, we have a bad time.’

  (There are several legal systems in Zimbabwe. Shona customary law. Ndebele customary law. Mbacha customary law–which is a mixture of Shona and Shangaan. Roman-Dutch law. English common law.)

  Several times in the workshops women complained that poor black women farmers are employed by richer black farmers, particularly women, who pay them badly or do not pay them at all, only giving them some food. ‘We have no alternative, we have to work for them, we have to feed our children somehow.’

  One evening after supper a woman sat herself by me and asked, ‘Have you ever seen people as poor as we are?’

  ‘Much poorer, in some other countries.’

  ‘I have never been outside this province. It seems to me we are very poor. If you do not have enough to eat sometimes, isn’t that being very poor?’

  I said to her, ‘There are parts of the world where people just suffer poverty. But if you people are in a bad situation you try to think of ways out of it. If you have a problem, you decide to solve it. That in itself makes you rich compared to them. And you are all so full of energy and determination.’

  She thought hard, for quite a long time: a minute–more. When I believed the conversation was over, she remarked, ‘And yet we owe so much money.’

  I said, ‘The total debt of all the African countries is less than the debt of any one South American country.’

  ‘You mean that Africa is richer than South America? Have you been to South America?’

  ‘In Brazil.’

  ‘It is worse than here?’

  ‘Yes, it is. For one thing, there are greater differences between rich and poor.’

  ‘We’ve got rich people here too, now. Haven’t you seen them?’

  ‘Nothing like as bad or cruel as in places like Brazil.’

  She sat quietly beside me, thinking. Then: ‘Why is it poor people in some countries don’t complain?’

  ‘Sometimes it is because they haven’t energy, they are so badly fed or full of diseases. Sometimes it is because of a religion that makes them suffer in silence.’

  ‘But I am religious and I am complaining. I complain all the time. My husband says to me, Woman, why are you complaining? I say, Your life is all right, but my life is very hard and that is why I am complaining.’ She laughed, loudly, so that people turned to look and laughed in sympathy.

  During one workshop a terrible story was told of cruelty, of official stupidity. The whole room was laughing, forty or so people. I said to the man next to me, ‘Why are you laughing? That’s a terrible story.’ ‘That is why we are laughing,’ he said.

  A certain man who had been hostile to the women during the last visit of the Team, was here again, claiming he had had a change of heart: now he knew he had been wrong. But, said he, it hurt him to hear women criticize men, who all loved women. ‘For my part I think women are a gift from God.’ For all of that day, when it was felt that the proceedings were becoming too heavy, someone remarked, ‘Women are a gift from God,’ and everyone laughed, the men too.

  These men know they are revolutionaries to be here at all. They like to be asked what makes them special, more enterprising, than other men.

  Here is an autobiographical piece submitted to a workshop.

  In 1965, on the 9th day of May, a baby boy was born at Masvingise, a small village in the Chivu Communal Lands. ‘He shall be called Amos’ they finally agreed.

  Shining with youthful freshness and innocence the baby could not foresee the misery that was heralded by his birth. He only managed to have a glimpse of his father seventeen years later, and that was that.

  Unlike other children in the village I managed to go to a mission school at Bergena in 1980 for my secondary education.

  I became a shining example and many male parents sent their children to school. I am now working, and I owe everything to my mother who worked so tirelessly to make me what I am. However, I miss my father, but I am not sure he would have made me what I am now. Amos Sithole. Co-operative Assistant. Gutu.

  I take the opportunity of being with so many people of so many different kinds, to ask what they think about Edgar Tekere, whose name is in every newspaper as a threat to the government, to order, to security and to Robert Mugabe.

  But no one is talking about Tekere and his new party. For that matter no one mentions the Unity Accord. This is Central Province and not Matabeleland, but the whole country was celebrating the Unity Accord only a few months ago. People soon take good fortune for granted.

  Tekere? We aren’t going to vote for him. We are just stupid village people, don’t forget, and we don’t want another war.

  Tekere? He’s useful in opposition, he keeps them awake for us, but he’s not steady enough to be a leader.

  Tekere? I like him because he’s an alternative. But they say at the next election we can vote for people we put forward ourselves, not from a list Mugabe has chosen. If that happens, then everyone will forget about Tekere.

  As the week goes by, the Team visibly tire. They put so much energy into the workshops and seminars, and into the discussions that go on every evening in the bedrooms. And, again, they have already been on the road for weeks. The women are worrying about children and husbands. Chris talks about his girlfriend.

  When they get back to Harare there will be rooms-full of material from these workshops and from past ones. Chris will have to make many drawings and submit them to the Team.

  No area or district must be favoured at the expense of another.

  When Cathie gets home she will not rest, for she has so much correspondence. From all over Zimbabwe requests for the Book Team to visit them come pouring in. Cathie has no secretarial help. How does she get everything done? She herself doesn’t know: the more you have to do the more you do, she says. But she is worried. ‘Sometimes I think it is not possible to do what we are doing.’

  ‘Of course it is impossible,’ says Talent. ‘That is why we are doing it.’

  The Team is worried, too, because they do not always have this welcome. They have enemies. And it will not be easy to get ‘them’ to accept this women’s book, so full of explosive ideas. ‘We don’t know who our enemies are. No one is going to say anything openly against us now, because the village people like us, but suddenly you come up against a block and then you know…’

  ‘But often the block isn’t hostility, it’s inefficiency,’ says Talent.

  On the last night there is a party after supper. Soft drinks, beer, snacks, and dancing, in between sketches contrived by the different groups.

  One is about highly qualified girls trying to get jobs, but they fail, because the Chefs prefer unqualified girls who are pretty or with family connections. ‘You say you are my mother’s auntie’s second cousin? Take a seat and fill in this form in quadruplicate.’ The qualified girls go off, reciting their hard won qualifications to each other and the audience.

  Another is about a charlatan village healer getting rich on the gullibility of his patients.

  A sketch shows a woman possessed by the Spirit giving out all kinds of positive and optimistic prophecies for the future of the Women’s Book. Then the ngangas are moc
ked when she begins shaking and writhing and demanding money from derisive bystanders.

  One sketch is solemn. ‘The way these books have helped us as communities is very important. They have changed our attitudes and our working style and have made us feel part of Zimbabwe. These books were an eye-opener to the community leaders and to us as development workers.’

  When this party ends it is only ten o’clock, but the women say they won’t go to bed until they have properly sent off the Book Team. The training centre has a large and formal entrance hall. The women and some men take this over, demanding the Team’s drum. They start a wild stamping and leaping dance, far removed from the sedate dancing of the official party. The whole building vibrates with their singing and with the drum. People who have gone to bed descend to reprove them but find themselves pulled into the circle of the dancers. One of the songs they make up says, ‘This is our book. We, the women of Zimbabwe are making our book. It will change the lives of our children and our husbands. It will reach other countries. Hear us, hear us, Harare.’

  Someone watching these women during the week of workshops would have one image of them, the same observer catching a glimpse of this uninhibited dancing, would see something very different.

  It will be noticed that I am making the claim that Africans, or at least these Africans, have rhythm. Why not?–when they claim it themselves. These women are aware of the dramatic value of the thing, when, having introduced a workshop session with a dance, they sit down and say, with severity, ‘We feel that sub-clause (d) of clause 2 is incorrectly drafted. We are putting forward this alternative sub-clause.’ They are conscious of the value of both worlds and intend to keep both.