African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe

by Doris Lessing

  But, take heart, the politicoes who cannot endure that Africans have rhythm, who cannot believe that it is possible to have rhythm and other things too…at a meeting of intellectuals in Harare, a poet who had just come from the rural areas, where everything is sung, danced, mocked, acted, demanded that the writers and poets present sing a song, but they could not, they writhed with embarrassment, reluctance and selfconsciousness, just as civilized people are supposed to do.

  And, when I sat for a couple of hours in a car watching a pavement in Bulawayo, of the dozens of people who passed only two women walked as they once all did–goddesses is the only word. The rest thumped and clumped and flumped and were clumsy and graceless, just like us. As a girl I used to watch village women walking to the well, one hand held up to steady the cans on their heads, and tried to be like them, but I could not do it.

  That night the women did not go to bed at all. When they had done dancing, they all had showers and were sitting in the buses that were to take them to villages, by five in the morning. Some were tearful.

  The Team sit drinking tea, summing up the week. A success. A woman on another course who has got hold of the draft women’s book, sits by us and says, ‘It is the Chefs and the bosses who should be reading these books and learning from us. They are always talking about educating the people. But it is they who need educating. They know nothing about us because they never come near us.’

  Other women come to sit with us. ‘Now everyone knows the women do all the work, the Chef’s wives and all kinds of career girls descend on the villages dressed up like fashion models, their hair straightened and their cheeks glowing orange from skin lighteners. They congratulate the village women, and return to politicking in Harare.’

  In Harare I heard an Extension Worker say she refused to go into a Communal Area unless she could stay in a village, having heard a song made up about patronizing visitors. ‘Now work hard, ladies, keep it up, Zimbabwe is proud of you, here, have a sweetie, have a bit of cake.’

  The village women are scornful of the smart city girls who ‘want to be white blacks’. The chemists are full of skin-whitening creams, some with chemicals that have been banned in other countries.

  The villagers do not admire Harare. The word can mean an attitude of mind. Perhaps they talked of Babylon thus.

  Stately Look

  Harare

  a

  prostitute

  trying

  on

  new york’s

  oversized

  suit

  import

  quality

  Simbarashe R. Johnson

  (From Tso Tso, a new magazine.

  Tso Tso means twigs.)

  None of us wants to leave this optimistic, energetic place.

  ‘I don’t know why it is,’ says Cathie, ‘but in the offices in Harare they talk as if these people are stupid. It can take me hours to get a point across to officials there that these people get at once. They are much more quick-witted. The political women are all intellectual and abstract.’

  In only one way does this training centre, run by socially concerned and optimistic staff, resemble the school in the bush.

  If you look closely, some of the parquet tiles are missing or loose. Curtains are falling down. Shower curtains are torn. Strips of wood are coming off the edges of tables, and some chairs are shaky or useless because screws have come out. There is a look of mild dilapidation. Yet a young man who has attended courses in various training colleges remarks, ‘I like coming here best: it is so well maintained.’ A mystery. Nothing is wrong here that could not be put right by an efficient housewife with some glue, a screwdriver, a needle and cotton, a step-ladder. One evening a hosepipe ran water for hours beside a path where staff constantly passed, and this in a water-short district.

  ‘They should train a team of young women to cope with minor wear and tear and send them from institution to institution.’

  ‘Why doesn’t one of these Aid organizations…?’

  ‘Why doesn’t Mugabe…?’

  On the way back in the coach, we pass one of the largest black townships.

  THE NEW TOWNSHIPS

  In the old days black townships around cities were assemblies of any kind of cheap housing, sometimes brick ‘lines’–single rooms built in strips, without even lavatories, or sheds of corrugated iron, like factories. Sometimes local authorities built suburbs of hundreds, or even thousands of identical little brick houses, perhaps single rooms with kitchens, and communal lavatories at the back, or, if luxurious, two rooms. Now the new suburbs qualify as towns in their own right. Again they are of thousands of tiny houses, two rooms with a verandah, a kitchen and bathroom. To make such a township, first all the indigenous trees are cut down, the roads are laid out, usually on a grid pattern, and then the houses go up in a dusty or muddy plain. They are crammed as closely as the old houses built under the whites: the new suburbs, like the old, look what they are, desperate attempts at cheap housing. Zimbabwe is hardly short of space, not like Europe where every yard is contested. Why then are these houses massed like so many toy towns? Because this reduces the cost of the services: the pipes, wires, lines, ducts, sewers that make it possible for many people to live together. Is this not perhaps short-sighted? Would it not have been better if Comrade Mugabe had insisted from the start on paying more and laying out towns with enough space between the houses for some kind of privacy? It is hard to see where they find room even for a washing line, particularly since, as soon as people move in, they plant fruit trees. To reach the bush, the trees of their heritage, they have to leave the townships and make excursions into ‘the country’. Why didn’t Comrade Mugabe…? Surely he could not have agreed to this short-sighted policy?

  As in the old days, the hour of travel into the big town for work, the hour back, are on roads crowded, jammed, with bicycles, buses, and (but still only a few) cars. The people who live in these townships mostly cannot afford cars. There is talk that railways will be built to link the black townships with the big town–which is not white now, but multi-racial. The cheap suburbs are black, and poor.

  If you drive past such a township, or fly over it, and see the ordered, not to say regimented, arrangement of identical houses, an image is created of many units, each for a family. But each house, meant for a family, contains perhaps twenty or so people. Anybody doomed to rural living with a relative in town will claim the old rights of kinship and try to fit themselves into a house which is already exploding with people, a house appropriate for the nuclear family, for mother, father, and two or three children. But this house could not be more unsuitable for clan or communal living, which was better accommodated in the old days with clusters of huts: it is easy to build a new hut if relatives come to visit, or find themselves homeless. Rather, once it was easy, but now there are not enough trees, or enough grass for thatch.

  No, clan living, the extended family, is being done in by the modern towns, and the necessity for them.

  The new townships are not cheap. In fact it was cheaper to rent a house in the old days, when they were subsidized.

  Two little rooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, limit numbers, even if people do sleep ten or more to a room. ‘You know my heart is large,’ a certain woman wrote in reply to a request from a country cousin for a corner somewhere, ‘but my house is small. There is nowhere left for you to sleep, except under the kitchen table.’

  The Book Team worry that they spend their time in rural areas, not these overcrowded, poor, complex conglomerations where people must be needing just as much help.

  ‘But not the same problems. They don’t need to be told about starting co-operatives and bank accounts. How to handle bureaucracy is more like it.’

  ‘But we all need to know that!’

  THE GARDEN IN HARARE

  There is no end to the variety. I ask Ayrton R. to walk around it with me and give me names. Clerodendrum: glory bower. It is dark red. Clerodendron: bleeding heart. The yellow marmalad
e bush. Mackaya: a mass of pale pink, veined with carmine. Aspidistra as ground cover. Various hydrangeas. The fiddlewood tree. Magnolias. Ajuga as ground cover. Tree ferns. Cape chestnut. Miniature bamboos. The potato tree, twenty feet or more tall, covered with purple flowers. Elephant’s ear. Busy lizzies. Indigenous arums. The spur flower: purple spikes. Plectranthus bushes. Flowering prunus. Blue agapanthus. Hen-and-chickens, otherwise the spider plant. Bougainvillaeas in maroon, orange, white and pink. The ginger bush: yellow with red. Different kinds of canna lilies. Mallow: pink. Ornamental cassava. The tape worm plant: segmented narrow leaves. Albizia: an indigenous tree. Geraniums. Succulents. Small heliotropes. The Kenyan croton tree. A tree with oak-like leaves, and panicles of rust colour. Hymenosporum. The red handkerchief bush. From Australia: the brush cherry tree, with bright pink fruits. Thunbergia: a blue creeper. The Pride of India: crepe myrtle. A cactus from Arizona, with a flower like waterlilies, grown with an indigenous canary creeper up it. Cacti with flowers like red fountains. The Beaumontia vine, with enormous white flowers. Strelitzia from Natal, the national flower of California. Red robin: a large bush. The Chinese hat plant: rust colour, purple, yellow. Berberis. Ficus benjamina. The pineapple-guava plant: like Christmas decorations. The pigeon berry tree–yellow. Mulberries. Peach trees. White agapanthus. A daisy from the Eastern districts, indigenous. The pompom tree. Escallonia. Hamelia: rather like a honeysuckle flower, always in bloom. Pampas grass. The kitchen herbs. Indigenous waterlilies. Day lilies. The indigenous red-veined banana tree, from the Bridal Veil Falls at Chimanimani: it is really a plantain. The yellow daisy bush. Penstemon. The Cape honeysuckle: orange. The Mediterranean rock rose, magenta: a cistus. Hebes. Cannas seven foot tall, in orange pink. ‘You could garden with cannas alone.’ Barberton daisies. New Zealand flax: maid-of-all-work with red currant-like flowers. Yellow lantana. Cape may: a mass of white blossom covering a bush. Miniature white poinsettias. A guava. Acanthus: purple. The wild fig tree: indigenous. The giant ageratum, covered with fuzzy mauve. Lemon and orange trees. Bauhinias, purple and white. A large yellow bush, nameless. The yesterday, today and tomorrow bush. Pomegranates. Sage shrubs, very large. Daisy as ground cover, pink. Fuchsias. Chinese lanterns: orange. An anonymous pink creeper. The handkerchief bush: white. Moonflowers, white and yellow. Cotoneaster. From South Africa, a succulent with minute magenta flowers. Cascades of nasturtiums. Cycad: Japan. The powder puff bush, faint pink, like a delicate thistle flower. Hypericums. The flag bush, grown with the white and the red handkerchief bushes. Aloes with dangling red spikes, from Nyanga. The bottle brush tree, which birds like so much. The Chinese sacred bamboo. Honeysuckles. Azaleas. The mirror plant from New Zealand. The lady’s slipper plant, a thumbergia from Mysore, like an orchid, dark rust and yellow dangling panicles. Monstera: a tree-sized creeper. ‘I always feel sorry for monsteras when I see them as prisoners in English offices.’ Rothmania, a tree with pink bellshaped flowers. Oleander. Plumbago. Petunias, pinks, cornflowers. The Norfolk Island pine, from New South Wales. Marigolds.

  We stand at the bottom of the garden, the list in my hand, listening to the noisy louries. As the bush thins and goes, will the birds come in to the town gardens for refuge, as happens in Britain?

  A team of black men are working in Ayrton R.’s swimming bath, which has developed a crack. I am listening to the talk and laughter as I have done half my life, from outside, not part of it. But in the Training Centre I was part of it, and never thought about the colour of anyone’s skin.

  ‘A fairly dizzying business, this,’ I say, ‘swooping from the verandahs to the grass-roots and back again.’

  ‘White master and white madam, watching black people work,’ says Ayrton R. ‘Whether you like it or not.’

  ‘Would you say that patch of rape down there is bigger than it was last year?’

  ‘Hmmmm, yes, I think it is. Well, that’s all right.’

  In my mind’s eye that paradise of garden slowly submerges under a sea of green mealies and rape. Well, it is certainly the way of the world. Only a week before I was reading how two female explorers travelled across the Gobi desert–that was before it was criss-crossed by military roads–and came on a wonderful walled garden, all flowering trees, plants, and the splashings of water, a paradise in the midst of leagues of stony dusty emptiness. They returned that way some months later. A minor war had destroyed the garden, and all that remained were hillsides full of charred trees and fouled water channels. But: one of the prettiest gardens in London grew vegetables right through the War (Second World) and on the day the War ended began the work of restoring lawns and pools and roses.

  ‘Who do you think will be living in this house in thirty years’ time?’ I ask, not meaning to be abrasive.

  Ayrton R. is terribly upset. ‘I hope I will.’

  Our eyes travel up past his house and on up the hill to the houses of the new rich black class. We are both thinking that it would not be Dorothy or George or their children who would buy this house, nor the men working in the swimming bath.

  This poem criticises the new black rich class.

  The Vengeance of the Poor Man

  You treat me like dirt,

  Pull, push and kick me,

  With boots soiled with mud,

  And call me a filthy wretch.

  When I am dead and buried,

  Your deeds will tear your heart.

  Your farms, wild and bushy,

  I’ve tamed, fenced and ploughed;

  The yield I gather you sell

  To spend the cash alone.

  When I am dead and buried,

  Your deeds will tear your heart.

  Your cows I dip and milk,

  Your horses shoe and brush,

  Your sheep I feed and tend,

  Yet I live on crumbs.

  When I am dead and buried,

  Your deeds will tear your heart.

  In your sumptuous house

  I toil and sweat for you,

  Yet in the heart of Harare

  You see a stranger in me.

  When I am dead and buried,

  Your deeds will tear your heart.

  In hotels that glitter,

  On fatty steaks you dine,

  Honey your tongue with oozy puddings,

  And sink your frame on cosy beds.

  When I am dead and buried,

  Your deeds will tear your heart.

  My Kufa is bony ridged,

  Your Gutsa is round and plump,

  Dull and feeble is Kufa,

  Bouncing with energy is Gutsa.

  When I am dead and buried,

  Your deeds will tear your heart.

  S. J. Nondo (From Tso Tso)

  Gutsa: as it sounds. Kufa: associations of death, deprivation. Ayrton R. says, ‘I suppose one ought to be pleased that it’s not just the whites who are the villains. But I don’t think I am.’

  ON THE VERANDAHS

  Someone says that Smith, asked in the States what he thought about the black government, replied that the whites had underestimated the intelligence of the Africans. Everyone is delighted with this little morality tale.

  Street children in Harare–gangs of petty criminals, as well as ordinary kids, are playing games based on their traditional stories of hare, tortoise and the other animals. They keep the structure of the tales, the plot, but the characters are called J. R., Bobby, Sue Ellen, and so on.

  A man who has been at a celebration for the successful building of more Blair toilets, reports that they are taking off, even in the more remote places, because they are status symbols. ‘It is salutary to meditate on the theme of how much of human progress has been dependent on “I have a Blair toilet, but you don’t have a Blair toilet.”’

  The Minister of Justice was in prison for ten years under Smith, tortured, beaten. He is planning to abolish the death penalty, and ‘they’ say he is a good man and concerned about the prisoners. ‘I know what it’s like,’ he is supposed to have said. The dissidents who were in pri
son at the amnesty at the time of the Unity Accord, and not let out because they had committed crimes of violence are, it is said, shortly to be released. There are no political prisoners in the Zimbabwe jails. Everyone I ask says, ‘No, conditions are good. We are doing all right. We don’t have to be ashamed like South Africa, or Zambia.’ ‘How is the food?’ ‘I’ve never seen an overfed prisoner,’ was one reply.

  THE WINDS OF HISTORY

  ‘What is the most dangerous job in Zimbabwe? “Minister for Internal Affairs: your conscience will kill you.”’

  We were talking about the man who ran the prison outside Salisbury during the War of Liberation, when so many people were hanged, beaten, tortured. ‘No, you can’t blame the prison governor, he was only doing his job, it’s the Minister who is responsible.’

  But it is probably a mistake to imagine responsible officials with consciences made swollen and tender by remorse.

  In London during the 1950s were numbers of men who headed the Liberation movements of British Africa’s colonies. All were poor and many were unable to return home, where they could expect to be put at once into prison, if they had not already escaped from prison. Some kept themselves fed on post office jobs, ever a life-line for people educated above their job possibilities. Others subsisted on hand-outs from well-wishers. There were households where these men could get a meal and meet revolutionaries from other parts of Africa.

  My visitors included a school teacher Orton Chirwa who would shortly return to liberated Malawi but there he would spend many years imprisoned by that cruel man President Banda. He is still in prison; a future President; some future Ministers; a trade union leader who would soon die of malaria; a man who, on returning home to the struggle, would spend time in a British jail and then, on Liberation, be made Minister for Economic Affairs but was imprisoned again, as a threat to his country. He was in prison seven years, mostly in solitary. And, too, a youthful hero, round, sweet, radiant with idealism, the pet of all the older men for he was a poet and often moved to spontaneous Odes to Freedom, Liberty, and Justice.