African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe

by Doris Lessing

  VIEWS ON THE FUTURE OF

  SOUTHERN AFRICA

  A prominent South African lawyer, a liberal: ‘Everyone is hypnotized by the political stereotypes. All they can see is the injustice of apartheid. But the country is roaring ahead, the blacks are roaring ahead in spite of everything, and they are so full of talent and energy. Yes I suppose there will be some bloodshed…’ here he impatiently waves his hand, ‘but not nearly as much as everyone expects. You’ll see, we’ll come to an agreement. And then–the sky’s the limit. In fifteen or twenty years it will be one of the most exciting parts of the world. The brakes will be off, full steam ahead.’

  Visiting European politician: Not a hope! Not because of Zimbabwe but because of South Africa. South Africa’s going up in flames and Zimbabwe will have to be involved. Look at the past if you want to see the future: Zambia weakened itself helping Zimbabwe and now it’s a disaster. Zimbabwe weakens itself helping Mozambique. It’s no good being a strong swimmer surrounded by drowners.

  South African liberal: Why should South Africa solve its problems? It never has. It has been a brutal and repugnant and successful tyranny ever since I can remember and that’s fifty years. Look north: Botswana has a tiny population and an atmosphere of get-rich-quick. Zambia can’t feed itself. Zimbabwe can feed itself but it is not taking care of its soil. Namibia and Angola and Mozambique are ruined by war. The whole of Southern Africa will be another disaster area, full of repressive corrupt governments.

  A Zimbabwe academic has been on a visit to Zaire and reports: ‘Towns that ten years ago were operating as towns are derelict. No electricity, no transport, no mails, the hotels don’t work, no petrol. I visited the central library. Once it was a good library. The librarians haven’t been paid for years and they have fed their families by selling the books. Empty shelves–nothing. The schools aren’t working…no textbooks. You can’t say, It’s gone back to Africa, because the infrastructure wasn’t African. It’s weird, it’s creepy, it’s like a fantasy film…you go into a suburb you remember as a rich suburb and all you see is the smoke from hundreds of cooking fires outside every house burning up the trees and the shrubs and when those are gone, what then? How did it all begin? Electricity cuts. One by one, the services collapsed. Now no infrastructure left at all.

  ‘Can’t you see what is happening in Zimbabwe? We have been having electricity cuts for weeks. The railway system is not working. The telephones work or not.* They can’t even get coal from the coalfields to the hospitals–this week no operations in Harare’s main hospital. No coal for the tobacco barns and tobacco is the main foreign exchange earner. They borrow six locomotives from South Africa, and in the first week two are a write-off–two more are disabled and need repair. At a time when Zimbabwe is grinding to a halt Mugabe hands over fifty-five per cent of the railway capacity to ferry Zambia’s freight to the ports. The roads–there is no way this country can maintain its road system, not without handouts. I go to X province, the roads are being done up, I hear. The Swedes are paying for it. Next day on a new road: the French are paying for it. Are we going to go on like this, living on handouts? Gimme, gimme, gimme, give us libraries, give us new locomotives, give us the bloody lot.’

  SO WHAT SHOULD BE DONE?

  Marxist student: The Bourgeois Revolution has failed. Now we must have a Revolution of the Proletariat.

  Black farmer: Transport, it’s all transport. If only Comrade Mugabe would organize our transport…

  White man, (born in the country, plans to stay in it, on innumerable boards, committees, charitable governing bodies): First you take the brakes off investment. But that won’t change anything until something else happens. Money has been poured into this country–millions. Most of it wasted. The Aid agencies, they don’t understand the priorities, they don’t understand the level they should have started at. The railways will work when these chaps have been trained to understand the mechanics. Industry will work when there’s a trained personnel. Look at Zimbabwe airlines–they fly, don’t they? They don’t just fall out of the sky? No, they decided to have an airline–all these countries have to have one, they’re prestige. But they put money into training the chaps to teach. Because they had to. If I had my hands on this Aid money I’d set up colleges to train the teachers. There’s a gap–that’s the gap. And make it prestige. Mugabe should be right in there making speeches and dishing out prizes. Do you know what has happened? These young black chaps, they want to study literature, God help us, they’ve inherited all that snobbery from England where engineers are dirt. When I was in the States last year I kept meeting engineers in the aeronautics industry, English, Scottish, they are working in the States and in Europe where engineers are valued. But here it is a matter of life and death for engineers to be trained and then valued. Until we’ve got this layer of properly trained black chaps it’s pouring money down the drain.

  ‘Did you know that every year the Japanese train 400 times more engineers and technicians than we do?’ (‘We’: The British.)

  ‘Training, training, training, TRAINING, TRAINING–it’s training that we need. TRAINING.’

  POLITICS

  A Commercial Farmer (white) in the high-tech district, where not so long ago Selous bartered with Lo Magondi, applied to become a member of Zanu PF. He was interviewed by two important members of the Party.

  ‘First of all,’ says he belligerently, ‘I have to tell you three things. One, I have a big mouth and I’m not going to change.’ (He had been famous for attacks on government policy.)

  ‘And what else, comrade?’

  ‘I’ve been farming thirty years in this country, and I’m going to go on farming the way I know best.’

  ‘And what else?’

  ‘I’m never going to leave this country. If you burned my house down around my ears and told me to live in a mud hut I’d stay.’

  ‘Welcome to Zanu PF, comrade.’

  GIVING UP

  People leave Zimbabwe for apparently minor reasons: straws that break…

  ‘You are leaving because of what? You’re mad.’

  ‘If you like. I moved house. I put up a dura wall around the garden.’ (A type of cement fencing.) ‘All day in the department I hear, “So you’ve put up a dura wall, just like a white, you all put up fences.” But everyone knows the first thing a Chef does when he buys a house, before he even moves in, is to put up his dura wall. All I hear is the whites this, the whites that. I’ve had enough of this racism. It’s getting worse. I’m off.’

  A scientist left because, having many times applied unsuccessfully for some laboratory equipment, refused on the grounds of shortage of foreign exchange, he stood at the airport watching ‘Dozens of these damned Chefs off to one of their conferences somewhere. There’s always enough money for that.’

  The last straw for another was a new history book for use in schools, designed to correct the errors of the white version of African history. First. There is one short chapter on the hundred years of white domination, which transformed black culture. ‘It’s called Positive Discrimination.’ Then, hunter-gatherers are described as inhabiting the Middle East until one thousand years before Christ. ‘You can’t have black kids knowing there were scintillating civilizations around the Mediterranean long before they were ever heard of.’ And then, that polyglot band of desperate, penniless, hard-drinking adventurers who arrived to take their chances in the Kimberly diamond mines are described as ‘capitalists’. And then, in a book meant for both girls and boys, the pupils were invited to imagine themselves king in medieval Africa, loaded with finery, and waited on by his wives. ‘Not a word about all the important roles the women had, they were not just wives to the king, that’s just rubbish. No, I’m a historian. That means facts. If these people want to go in for all this political rubbish then–I’m off.’

  But: the man who left because of the fence is back. ‘I’d like to take the bloody place by the shoulders and shake some ordinary bloody commonsense into it. But I don’t want t
o live anywhere else.’

  Nor is it unknown for black Zimbabweans, and even a Chef or two, to be found far from home. After an evening spent playing that game known as choosing one’s words, you may hear, ‘Yes, that’s how it goes…funny how things turn out, sometimes.’

  THE VERANDAH IN THE MOUNTAINS

  Again I look down on hills, lakes, rivers and forests and above them is a baby aeroplane, owned by a local farmer, and in it with him is the Coffee Farmer. They are circling the mountains, and the valleys, and the Communal Areas looking for signs of soil erosion, which will then be reported to the Soil Conservation Committee.

  Through the days and the evenings I sit listening to the ideas bubble.

  Everywhere in the Communal Areas you see these fat goats. How is it the blacks don’t make goat cheese? They like strong tastes. Surely they’d like it. Why don’t…?

  A woman has just come back from Argentina, with, ‘They grow the same crops as here. Maize, pumpkins, tomatoes, legumes, potatoes. But the poor people make dozens of different dishes with them. Why can’t Argentinian know-how be introduced here?’

  It has occurred to an old-timer that the shifts and contrivances, the improvisation, of the white homesteads of the early days, where there was no electricity, refrigerators, running water, could be used now in the poorer Communal Areas. For instance, the coolers that were supplanted by refrigerators. Shelves are enclosed by walls of chicken wire, but doubled, an inch or so apart, the space filled with charcoal. Around the top of this safe is a metal groove that has very small holes in it. It is filled with water that slowly trickles down through the charcoal, so the walls of the safe are always wet, and the evaporation cools the inside of the safe, where butter and milk and meat wrapped in pawpaw leaves to tenderize it are kept at temperatures degrees lower than outside.

  Canvas water coolers were hung from rafters or tree branches, and had in them lemonade and cold tea as well.

  I said, ‘Outside our house was an enormous metal tank where on hot days the water got so hot you couldn’t put your hand into it. Now I find it hard to believe it never occurred to us to use the water for baths or washing clothes.’

  ‘Why don’t they…?’

  ‘Why don’t we…?’

  ‘What if…?’

  In the coffee valley the government AIDS campaign is working. ‘Not just the government, we are at them all the time too. But it’s sad, because at the beer drinks and dances they are afraid to get drunk and have a good time. Now they’re all getting religion instead, you know, the song and dance religion. A good thing, because they have hard enough lives without not having any fun at weekends.’

  The Coffee Farmer has been mugged in Mutare in the middle of the day. He had just been to the bank to deposit cheques. The muggers thought he had been in to collect the month’s wages for his workers. ‘They certainly knew what they were doing,’ says the Coffee Farmer, with more than a hint of admiration. ‘One tripped me, and the other frisked me. They were off before I got up off the pavement. I ran to the corner but the car was too far off to see the number plate. They must have been watching for the moment when only one person was on the street. Well, bad luck, I only had a couple of dollars on me.’

  A PASSIONATE PROTAGONIST

  In Harare’s beautiful park I was the victim of clever pickpockets. Two engaging youths approached me and a companion and asked if we would sponsor a walk in aid of something or other. One suggested I should spread the form where I would note my contribution on his back, which he helpfully turned so I could sign. While I signed, my hands were occupied, and he slid his own back and into my bag, where he lifted over a hundred pounds. Meanwhile his associate engaged the attention of my friend.

  When I told this story to a woman who cannot endure the slightest criticism of Zimbabwe, she at first looked anguished, but rallied. ‘You say it was a clever operation?’ ‘Oh yes, brilliant, I can’t imagine pickpockets in London with such charm, such persuasiveness.’ She sat back, with a satisfied sigh, like a proud mother.

  HOT SPRINGS

  Under the whites this was a popular resort, but it is ruinous now, the pool and bathing cabins unused. Of the old amenities only a kiosk remains for the sale of cold drinks. Young men are crowded on benches around trestle tables drinking beer and playing draughts with paper boards and beer tops for counters. At a separate table an old man holds court, surrounded by young men and boys listening to his reminiscences. They sit as if hypnotized by their attention to him, sit motionless, but often laugh and then sit silently again for fear of missing anything. This scene, in its wildly beautiful surroundings, reminds me, again, of Italy, the zest of it, the enjoyment. Only sit near the draughts players and you are charged with the spirit of enjoyment.

  I think of Guy Clutton-Brocks’, ‘They are the happiest lot in the world. They get enjoyment out of anything, anywhere, at any time. And we are the most joyless.’

  Ever since I can remember, I’ve listened to groups of whites speculating about why this should be so, every level from ‘What the hell’s wrong with us, anyway?’ to, ‘What is there in our culture, where did it start, what happened to make it so hard for us to enjoy ourselves? The northern climate? Protestantism? The Industrial Revolution?’ (‘When in doubt blame the Industrial Revolution.’)

  So bullied are we all by ideologues, it is hard to say the Africans have anything whites do not, or that we have anything they do not, but the fact is, up and down Africa, as travellers have always averred, they enjoy themselves.

  Missionary Moffat (the elder) wrote in his diary how he lay awake in his camp bed on a moonlit night and listened to how across the river the poor black savages were dancing and singing to their drums and generally enjoying themselves. He saw it as his God-given task to put an end to all this sinful pleasure. Well, they certainly tried.

  For hours on that afternoon young men came drifting in to drink beer and play draughts; some went over to join the old man’s audience.

  Where in Europe now would you see young men and boys crowding to listen to an old man telling tales?

  If it is being asked, And where were the women?–they were building the fires and cooking the supper for these men, washing the children and putting them to bed, having hoed the fields and weeded the fields and harvested the crops and mended the hut walls and thatched the roofs.

  THE STORYTELLERS, THE WRITERS

  Tales, stories, jokes, anecdotes come spinning off people’s lips like soap bubbles. You could say gossip, too, but there is always an epic quality to it, because Zimbabwe is felt to be important, and that is because memories of the old kingdoms, like Monomotapa (rather, Munhumotapa) are still near. When, later, the white colonialists said, God’s own country, they did not know their pride was from long before they came, and would continue when they were gone.

  Zimbabwe has good writers, surprisingly many, and they have written good novels, but the form of the short story suits them well, perhaps just because when a group of people sit together and the entertainment is ‘gossip’, then accounts of what neighbours or the Chefs are up to fall naturally into shape as tales. As well as the writers who write in English, there are many who use the other languages, Shona, Ndebele and the rest, and these are seldom translated. What are they like? Violent, is the report: they are full of murder, crime, passion, incest, and are bought and read in large numbers.

  When the women who came to the Book Team meetings were invited to make up stories, poems–women who first exclaimed, Oh no, and were shy, but almost at once began to suggest ideas, the beginnings of tales–then I was seeing the birth of writers whom we may well hear of sooner or later. Or at least an atmosphere where writers may be engendered.

  There is already a good novel by a woman, Tsitsi Dangarembga, but it did not have an easy birth. Nervous Disorders was rejected by four Zimbabwe publishers. The Women’s Press in London published it, and only after that the Zimbabwe Publishing House had the courage to do it. It was criticized for being ‘negative’, pre
senting an unfair picture of the lives of black women, who for their part say things like, ‘This is the first time I have seen my life as a Shona woman clearly.’ In short, it is a revolutionary book. The critics were all male, all hostile. They continue to be.

  Zimbabwe critics are mostly bad, but they have the strength of their ignorance, and the backing of ideology. Not only did the academics not have access to news about the Soviet Union and communist countries, but they knew nothing of the many novels where the jargon and pretensions of marxism were mocked. These novels were not allowed in.

  There are groups of new writers who deny any talent to ‘the fathers of Zimbabwe writing’, such as Charles Mungoshi. One might be tempted to cry Impossible!–if the phenomenon had not so often been observed in other countries.

  For instance, in the 1970s in Sweden and Norway, newly-arrived writers dismissed all their elders as talentless, using marxism to justify their envy of them: marxism was ever envy’s most useful accomplice. The information about the state of literature in communist countries, where ‘socialist-realism’ and marxist criticism had been reigning for decades, was available to them all, yet their drive to do down their predecessors was so strong they were able to persuade themselves that ‘socialist-realism’ was alive and well. The ’70s in Sweden and Norway are now referred to as the Dark Ages, not least by the writers who helped to create them.

  In Britain in the ’80s something similar happened, in this case fuelled by the competitive slash-and-burn known as Thatcherism. She spoke of ‘one of us’, of ‘us and them’ ‘not one of us’–and so did the new young group, who claimed talent only for themselves and their cronies, and imposed a style of criticism so vindictive that European colleagues often enquired, Just what has got into you people? Thatcher! the reply often was, but it was only an old phenomenon in a different guise. A whole generation of new readers and writers now believe that malice and rancour is inseparable from literary criticism and reviewing, just as in Zimbabwe a generation believes that criticism has to use the jargon of marxism.