African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe

by Doris Lessing

  Strong strings tie my taunting

  tongue straight and silent,

  With no might nor right or curling

  and lick the doors of its cave-empire.

  Tongues! Who thought even tongues

  could be spiderwebbed silent?

  During those days of blighting bullets

  amid slogan chants

  Those years of the bloody bayonet

  to the lull and soothe of ‘honest’ promises

  Who could ever have the thought–

  –of those tight cutting strings to masses?

  Tongues-UES-UES-UES-.

  S. Kumbirai Rukuni

  PATTERNS

  I am shown a piece of stone that has the outline of a leaf impressed in it. The leaf is like the little fish on my mantelpiece, its form obstinately preserved, through so many thousands of years. The fish, the leaf, make me think of something that happened in the 1960s, in London. For some reason, I forget why, a group of people got into the habit of meeting most evenings, to sit around my big kitchen table, to talk and drink wine. We were old, and young, and from various parts of the world. We played this game: every person who sat down was given a drawing block, and different coloured pencils. We doodled. I don’t know how this game began. I found a heap of these drawings recently, and at once knew who had drawn what. We each had a characteristic style, and themes that repeated night after night, week after week. Some of us got desperate, trying to escape this cage of necessity, that made us produce the same patterns, no matter how hard we tried to change. One man, brought up a Roman Catholic, who then became an atheist, drew tight, small patterns, and in every one, somewhere, was a cross. There was no way he could avoid that cross. When he refused to let his pencil make a cross, we pointed out that the pattern of the drawing was a cross. A young girl, in one of those psychological labyrinths it seems impossible one will ever get out of, drew convoluted knot-like patterns like intricately braided tresses. She could not draw in any other way. When she put her pencil to the paper, it seemed, of its own accord, to make these black, swirling knots. A woman then at the height of her life, full of content and optimism, drew patterns of leaves and flowers. She tried to draw different things, but an animal, or a person, or a cup became half vegetable, growing leaves and fruit. A woman in a state of indecision–should she leave her husband or not–put her pencil to the paper, made a line or a shape, scratched it out, started again, scratched it out: at the end of an evening her sketch pad would be full of jagged erasures. And so it was with all of us: we were set in modes, by organizers and governors unknown to our conscious selves.

  BOOKS

  President Mugabe has said there will be a good library in every village. I have been visiting more schools, some as bad as the one run by ‘the man without character’, some good. But in very good schools there are empty shelves in rooms that call themselves libraries where books ought to be. Books written by African writers are all read to shreds. There are rejects from better libraries, and among them might be books the children would enjoy, but no attempt is made to differentiate between them. Perhaps the idea is, better any books than none at all. But there is such a hunger for books, for advice about books, in this country where the electronic revolution is yet to happen. Radios may or may not pick up the BBC or South Africa. There is little video, and a few programmes from The Open University, but only a minority benefits from these, since most schools do not have television. Books remain as influential as they ever were, in countries like Zimbabwe. It is not possible to exaggerate the influence of books, even one book. Dambudzo Marechera, the author of House of Hunger, described how, when he was a hungry child scrabbling for bits of food and clothing on the rubbish heaps attached to white houses, he found a thrown-out Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedia. It changed his life. Yet even the big libraries in Harare and Bulawayo are short of funds. If you send them books, you may get a letter: I am sorry, please don’t send any more, we cannot afford the Customs duties. Even the University of Zimbabwe library is not funded to keep itself up to date with books.

  MUSIC

  A Sunday morning mbira party. The mbira is a base of wood with metal strips of varying lengths and widths set on it, in tiers. It can be held between two hands and played while walking. When I was growing up the gentle sprightly tinkling of the mbira could be heard as you walked through the bush, and then the player came into sight, usually a young man with a hoe slung over a shoulder, his fingers conversing with the hand piano (which is what we called it) while his eyes searched the bush for game.

  When played seated, the instrument is held inside a calabash, for resonance, and metal beer tops are used to add depth and tone.

  There were a lot of people, perhaps forty, on the verandah enclosed on three sides by rooms. A swimming bath was watched in case toddlers went too close.

  Pupils of a school some way out of Harare sat in tidy rows, wearing their dancing costumes, consuming soft drinks and peanuts. They are well known and entertain visiting Chefs, at parties and banquets. Now they are playing for fun. The meal was sadza, with relishes of peanut sauce and green leaves; rice and curry; stewed chicken, bread, and Mutare’s famous mangoes. Ice-cream. Oceans of Coca-Cola.

  The mbira orchestra consisted of three black players, one described as Zimbabwe’s best player, and some white amateurs who joined in the accompaniment. The children danced to the mbira. This kind of dancing is deceptive. It begins with simple padding movements, the feet flat, the body quiet, then grows, but slowly, into a frenzy of movement where you cannot follow the variety and speed of the rhythms, for at the dance’s height it seems the dancer’s feet are always in the air flying after energetic arms and shoulders, every part of the body answering a different beat. There was one little girl, perhaps eight or so, watching the older girls’ movements and carefully following them. She was all concentration as she adapted her arms, her feet, her body, to the dance. Once I watched flamenco dancers in Granada (this was before every flamenco group was tuned to the tourist industry). Four or five women danced together, of different ages, the oldest being perhaps sixty. They were initiating a new dancer, a girl of twelve or thirteen. The older women watched her, making almost imperceptible gestures of correction and encouragement. The audience all knew this was an occasion for the new dancer, joined in the clapping, and called out to her. One day she too would be a famous flamenco dancer, like her grandmother, her mother, her aunt, her elder sister…And she danced for hours, absorbed in her rituals. So, too, the little girl that Sunday morning on the verandah.

  People called out for this mbira piece, or another: soft, delicate music, subtle music, the rhythms outside one’s capacity, just as the energetic patterns of the dancers were too fast to catch.

  ‘This music is to us what your New Testament is to you,’ said the famous mbira player. ‘It is sacred to us.’

  Later, in London, I switched on the radio and heard the most seductive of the pieces I had heard that morning being played with a Western orchestral backing, as part of a concert. They say the Zimbabwe mbira players are honoured outside Zimbabwe, but hardly known there: there is a centre for mbira music in New York. Similarly, young people will often have no time for their own songs and music until they hear them played by visiting bands, who have fallen in love with them and adapted them.

  When I was a girl there was a man called Hugh Tracey (‘That man Hugh Tracey!’) who went around the villages recording and collecting music. The whites regarded him as some kind of a freak, even a traitor. Some of that music would not have survived without him.

  AN OUTLINE FOR A PLAY. A FILM?

  A Woman of Our Time

  The young man who will one day command a national movement/a guerilla army/his country, represent his people while in exile or in prison, shows none of the qualities of a popular leader. He is shy, scholarly, an observer. The man best known to the Party and the People has all these qualities. When he speaks crowds go wild. He stands in front of them arms held open a
s if in an embrace, while they shout Viva, or Shame. It is expected he will lead the country, but the capacities that make him so popular also undo him: he likes to be liked, secretly values his reputation with the whites as ‘reasonable’ hates unpopularity. He agrees to a deal with the whites that make him a ‘sell-out’ and even a traitor. At any rate it is the shy and scholarly man who takes his place and proves himself as a skilled and tenacious negotiator/leader of an Army/President of the Party/a powerful presence, all the years he is in prison. (Men who have led African countries have all been in one or several of these roles. As for the uncharismatic second-in-command coming forward to take power, this has happened more than once.)

  When his Party wins an election/the War in the Bush/gains Independence from a European power because the Winds of Change have blown his way, he at once becomes the only man who could possibly ever have led the country: hindsight is a persuasive writer of history. But while he finds himself able to handle the former Colonial power, the leaders of other African countries, and trips to meet world leaders, being a popular leader does not come easily. He never had the gift of eloquence, and does not have it now. He has never swayed crowds. He watches colleagues, some of them brave figures from the fight for Independence, easily gather to themselves hearts and minds which they seem to wear like badges or medals, for when they stand on platforms it is as if they are surrounded by an aura of confidence: I love you, you love me. Secretly he yearns over his people like a shy lover. It is not unknown for him to weep while speaking/stutter/appear pedantic because overcontrolled.

  The man so isolated inside his shyness soon seems proud and austere and even cold. Some call him a saint. He is known for his integrity. He lives simply and makes sure everyone knows it. He tries to moderate the excesses of associates who are energetically getting rich.

  His first love/wife dies, or he finds her simple village ways (which match his own) a handicap. He meets a woman who at once attracts him. She has everything he lacks. Large, ebullient, beautiful; loud, laughing, extrovert,’ she commands everyone with her charm. (It might be interesting to make her from another part of Africa or from another tribe, adding to her attractions for him, but to the suspicions of the populace about an outsider.) This man feels as if he has been in prison all his life and this woman has released him from it: suddenly everything that had been difficult for him becomes easy. When they are with friends in the evening (it seems now there are parties every night) she communicates with them all, using her whole body: no one can take their eyes off her. When she stands on a platform (which she increasingly does, claiming her right to be Mother of the Nation) she holds crowds with her majestic breasts and thighs just as much as with her beautiful face, her full voice. He watches her, admiring, full of love, but uneasy. How does she do it? What is this gift which he has been so absolutely denied? He jokes with her–but in his way, which is as if jokes might turn out dangerous when unmonitored–that she has not been elected, and while it is all right to be Mother of the Nation in her role as his wife, she must not go beyond that.

  ‘Nonsense!’ she cries, and, seeing she has hurt him, for he withdraws like one of those acacia leaves that fold themselves up even at the approach of a finger, she embraces him and he again feels life flow through him.

  She is crying ‘Nonsense!’ often. When he says that their rule of life must be modest. When she returns from some Conference which she has spent talking with other wives, and now says she has opened a Swiss bank account, and he says No, it is dishonest to spend the People’s money. When an opportunity comes (pretty often as the country develops) for her to take part in deals that are increasingly shady, and he remonstrates. It takes him a long time to understand she has not one molecule in her body of what he has always taken his stand on: his honesty, for which he is known all over Africa and the world. She really does not know what he means when he says, We must set an example, or We must not let our country become corrupt like the others. ‘Why not? Corrupt? But everyone does it,’ she might carelessly say, laughing. And she teases him as she sometimes does for his inhibitions in more intimate ways. She even uses the same words: ‘Where do you get these ideas from? Who says no? Is there a law which says we mustn’t….’

  Yes there is a law, for he passes it, making it illegal for Ministers and Public Servants to own more than a certain amount–one house, for instance.

  They take no notice of this law. The citizens wait for him to enforce the law, and stand by them, his people, who put him into power, who trust him to be on their side and with the Purity of the Revolution/the Party/the War of Independence. He does nothing. They do not understand why not. They do not yet know the Mother of the Nation has her fingers in many tills, though they keep a cold eye on the Ministers and Party Bosses and know exactly what they are up to.

  The Leader watches his wife whom he loves, whom he depends on for vital contact with the world, gaily and even proudly and certainly shamelessly making herself a rich woman. There is a scandal and it is impossible to avoid putting certain public figures on trial. They are proved guilty. The nation waits for them to be punished And now the whispers begin: he cannot let Justice take its course, because the guilty ones have said that if they are punished they will expose his wife.

  What hurts him more than anything is that she never understands how she is damaging him, always talks as if it is his ‘shyness’ that makes him so finicky. It is not until the corrupt regimes of Eastern Europe and the countries of the old Soviet Union begin to fall, one after another, because of the loathing of the citizens, that she–for the first time–wonders if her husband’s ‘stick-in-the-mud’ ways might be an advantage. She is in fact secretly angry about the criticisms of the old communist leaders, whom she has admired for precisely those qualities her husband has sometimes expressed doubt about. She likes ruthlessness. She is not shocked by tortures, ‘the strong methods’, of dictators. She thinks their own country would be better, ‘make a good impression’–as she puts it, if they, too, made citizens fear their government. And she encourages the bully-boys of the Party to intimidate opponents, rig elections, beat critics up.

  Now, suddenly, her husband is putting his foot down, saying Enough–and shouting at her, with the barking desperation of a man who feels everything is slipping away from him. The regimes that he has chosen as allies are all collapsing, to the accompaniment of choruses of hatred and contempt, and now this woman, this force of Nature, who is everything to him, has had to be checked…as she shuts herself down, banks her fires, sulks, shows her hurt in a thousand ways, he closes up more and more, just like that acacia frond, subtly trembling even at the approach of a finger. When he shouts at her, forcing her because of his position of authority into obedience, he feels he is cutting himself off from all the secret powers of Nature, while she, obedient, feels that the rush forward of her life, which is based on a confident instinct that lays hold of everything it touches has been checked…unkindly checked, above all unfairly, so now she is a prisoner of his cold cautions.

  The final scene could be in an airport. He, she, and their entourage are on their way to some International Conference. A terrorist bomb has wrecked the Distinguished Persons’ Lounge, and they are all in a hastily-contrived fenced-off part of the ordinary Departure Lounge. Today they have heard of yet another country’s collapse, and she sees about her faces that were until recently those of Prime Minister, Cabinet Ministers, still among the small gathering of Distinguished Persons, though probably they will not be entitled to be here for much longer. Into this area comes that day’s fallen Leader, with his family, and he goes straight to her husband, begging him for shelter. He is bluffing and boasting, pretending it is only a temporary rejection by his People, and he will soon be back in power. She whispers to her husband that on no account must this fugitive be given asylum, because they will be associated with him in the public mind. She is speaking out of the ancient instinct that to be near defeat is bad luck, though she uses the language of reason. Her husban
d, principled as always, offers the hospitality of their country to this disgraced leader: ‘Of course one must help friends in trouble.’

  She knows that his ‘friend’ is one that in fact he does not much like; it is she who has liked him, admired him, and still does, though he is regarded (the newspapers say) as a tyrant, a thug, a murderer, a hangman.

  She is standing rather to one side, looking at this man she has married, in conversation with the refugee President and his family. He is awkward, unbending, stiff…‘arrogant’ they call him, though she is pretty sure he isn’t that…. what exactly is the word that goes with all these qualities of his that have turned out to be right all the time? As she stands there, a pathetic figure, though she is not aware of that, holding herself upright and defiant, a group of women from their own country comes into the Lounge–that is, into the area for common people, just on the other side of the quickly contrived rope that keeps them out. They are off on a delegation to Indonesia, for a Woman’s Conference on Alternative Technology. They see her, the Mother of their Country, and stop, stand whispering to each other. She was at school with the two women leading the delegation, who come forward to the rope barrier, softly clapping their hands in greeting.

  She claps hers, in the manner of one waiting to see what is expected of her.

  ‘Do you remember us, Mother?’ asks her ex-school fellow. ‘Yes, I remember you. Of course.’

  They stand looking at each other, the Great Lady and the humble ex-schoolfellows.

  Then one says, ‘Remember us, Mother.’ Softly and turns away.

  The other says, ‘Remember us, Mother.’ And turns away.

  One after another the women come forward, stand in front of The Mother, but on the other side of the rope, and say, ‘Remember us, Mother’–and turn to walk back to the group, where they stand with their backs to her.

  (There are several women of this type in high positions in various parts of Africa.)