African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe Read online

  MISSIONARIES

  Two young white missionaries, a married couple, have dropped in. They have been six months in Zimbabwe. For the whole of an afternoon they exchange with their hosts critical anecdotes about the Africans and the black government, watching to measure how well they are fitting in with what is expected of them. They radiate the self-satisfied cheerfulness I associate with a certain type of Christian. I find this scene more than usually depressing: I used to watch it as a girl. People who in England would be ‘liberal’ here can adjust themselves, are even more anti-black than their hosts. Their voices: condemning, sniffy, superior, cold. Again I listened to The Monologue.

  LEAVING

  It is time to fly home. I have not been back to the old farm, though for the six weeks of the trip I have talked about it. Yes, yes, of course I must go, it is childish not to. But really I don’t want to. The same reluctance that in 1956 made it impossible to turn the car’s steering wheel into the track to the farm, gripped me still. The person I should have gone with was my brother, already packing to Take the Gap. He had shut a door on the past and I understood him perfectly. ‘That’s it. Cut your losses! Goodbye!’ Besides, petrol was so short. And besides, it was the worst time of the year, the rains had not come to the farms in the north-east, the bush would be dry and the air full of dust.

  I said goodbye to the humans, to the little black cat, to wicked clever little Vicky, to the sweet stupid ridgeback, and to the fierce bull terrier. Saying goodbye to humans is one thing: almost certainly you will see them again, but to animals, now that has to be a real goodbye.

  THE SQUATTERS

  As I turned off the farm on to the main road, which was not more than a track itself, soldiers from the battalion were marching up from the camp, through the gum trees. They were full of the raw confident energy of a recently victorious army.

  Two miles from the farm I stopped for two women and they got in the back seat, with their baskets and their bundles. Yes, they were going down to Mutare, and the bus was late. They had already waited two hours. They looked about fifty, were probably younger. They were like poor women everywhere in the world, women you don’t notice because there are so many of them, shabby, overweight from poor food, old too early, tough, wary, cunning, surviving. They did not want to talk, though one had a good bit of English. They were Squatters, and I had come off the farm of an enemy. Five miles on I slowed to pick up an old man who was toiling up a hill, and using a stick as if he needed it to keep upright. They did not want me to, made annoyed sotto voce exclamations as they moved their things to make room. But when he got in, they all exchanged courteous greetings, and talked like neighbours until, five miles on, the old man tapped my shoulder to make me stop. He carefully got out. He lifted his hand in farewell to the women, and then, the hand allotting more formality, to me. He carefully made his way into trees, leaning on his staff. I drove on, down to Mutare, while the women chatted softly. I knew that if I understood what they were saying, I would be learning more than I had in my weeks in Zimbabwe. But I not only did not know the local language, I did not know Shona. When I was growing up no white child learned Shona.

  In Mutare there were complicated negotiations at the garage, over petrol. The women asked if I was going to Harare, and I said yes. They said they would come with me. There was more than a hint of command in their voices. They directed me to go to a certain hotel where they would tell a relation this and that, who would tell another that and this, and then they must buy some presents for Harare relatives. I sat in the car under a flame tree, and looked at the people walking up and down the slow lazy streets of this always slow-moving town, and wondered if this visit would stop the miles-long Main Street appearing regularly in my dreams as a symbol for difficult journeys.

  The women returned, with suitcases, and got into the back seat. Off we went. It was going to be a long drive, because my inner monitor or governor still would not let me drive faster than about fifty miles an hour. I began to sweat and tremble if I did. The women were commenting on my slowness, but I did not want to alarm them by explaining I had been in a car accident. I was understanding a good bit of what they were saying, by intonation. They had decided I was one of the ‘good’ whites, because I was giving them a lift. They asked if I lived on one of the coffee farms and I said, No, I was from England, and this explained everything. We began a real conversation. Their lives were full of difficulties, mostly because between them they had seventeen children. They were sisters. One husband was dead, killed in the War because he was asleep in a hut set on fire by Smith’s men. The other husband had a job in Mutare in the supermarket. Some of the children were in school in Mutare. The smaller children lived with them, the mothers–in other words, up in the mountains, in the Squatters’ huts. There was one son in good work, in a hotel, but the oldest son of one sister had never worked, and he was drinking. The women were worried because two children would end school this year, and where would they get work?

  We talked on and off on the long slow drive from Mutare to Harare, and there was an incident interesting enough to remember. I saw a tall very thin young man flailing his arms about to make me stop and give him a lift. I was slowing when both women leaned forward and energetically shook my shoulders, two strong hands commanding me to drive on. First I thought, But it’s like the old man on the mountainside, they want the back seat to themselves, but then they said, ‘He’s a bad man. He’s a skellum from the War. You must not give lifts to bad people.’ I said, ‘But you have to trust people.’ I heard the feebleness of it as it came out of my mouth. Why did I say it? I don’t believe it, but something in their picture of me had brought the foolish words out of me. I have more than once been surprised at myself when other people’s expectations of me make me say things, do things, I like to think are not in character.

  The two women were looking full in each other’s faces with wonderful expressions of derision, of amusement. The older leaned forward to give me a lesson. ‘You must look carefully at a person’s face, then you can see if he is good. That one is very bad. The War made many bad people. He would steal your money and our suitcases.’

  They had written me off as a fool, and their manner towards me changed. Soon they tapped my shoulder: a roadside stall had come into view. I stopped. They went to the stall, stood talking for a time with the old woman who was selling. To hurry over a transaction like this is not the way of the country. They brought back cans of soft drinks and opened one for me. Then, without asking me, they peeled an orange for me, and as I drove they handed segments over my shoulder, nodding with approval as I put them into my mouth, as if I were one of their children.

  In Harare they asked if they could come with me when I went back to Mutare. I said I was going to England tomorrow. I could hear my voice, forlorn, regretful. They heard it too. ‘Then we will be meeting next time.’ And to their cries of ‘Next time! Next time!’, I went into the hotel.

  Next Time

  1988

  When life arises and flows along

  artificial channels rather than normal ones,

  and when its growth depends not so

  much on natural and economic

  conditions as on the theory and arbitrary

  behaviour of individuals, then it is

  forced to accept these circumstances as

  essential and inevitable, and these

  circumstances acting on an artificial life

  assume the aspects of laws.

  Anton Chekhov, The Island.

  A Journey to Sakhalin

  MEANWHILE

  It was six years before I returned to Zimbabwe in 1988, and meanwhile all of Southern Africa was on a full rolling boil. This was mainly because of South Africa’s determination that all of the southern part of the continent should remain dominated by the whites. During those years The Republic’s subversion of her neighbours reached a height of unscrupulousness, of nastiness. South African armies kept Namibia and Angola at war, and it is not pos
sible to exaggerate the cruelty of these armies. In Mozambique Renamo did its worst work. South African agents were busy in peaceful Botswana, and it was not unknown for them to murder South African citizens who had taken refuge there. Zimbabwe stood four-square, confronting South Africa, resisting ‘destabilization’.

  Internally The Republic reached heights of repression. The world was told about it, but inconsequentially, intermittently: a spotlight touches a place and moves on. There was a law that prevented any journalist, from inside or from outside the country, seeing anything the government did not want to be seen. I think, when we know it all, the story will be much worse than we ever thought.

  The horrors of the place were masked, as always has been the case, because what is seen by most visitors is the pleasantness of life for the whites, and because social apartheid improved–no longer were there different queues for whites and blacks in shops and banks, and the races mixed easily in restaurants and hotels. But all my life I have been hearing, ‘Never mind about the towns! It’s the countryside, it’s the farms, it’s the little dorps where no journalist has ever gone. If people knew what went on there…’

  Zimbabwe was surrounded by countries where South Africa played puppet-master–surrounded by civil wars and by failure, as in Zambia to the north. Zimbabwe was suffering from a siege mentality, and its leaders were at least in some things paranoid. In Matabeleland, so they believed, and so all the world was told, guerilla armies lurked in the bush that seems made for guerilla war. There were murders in isolated white farmhouses, and some were burned down. How easy to believe that South Africa pulled the strings here too. Mugabe’s response to this threat was to send in troops that were mostly Mashona, and they terrorized villages up and down Matabeleland in a consistent and deliberate and merciless policy of intimidation. They pillaged, they murdered, they raped, they burned. In some villages half the inhabitants were killed. When they talk about this time some people start weeping or cursing or both, for these savage events wounded Zimbabwe’s idea of itself.

  And then Comrade Mugabe behaved like a statesman and offered an amnesty. This was the famous Unity Accord of December 1987 when Joshua Nkomo came in out of the cold. He was minister first in the President’s office, and then became one of two senior ministers. Instead of the expected armies of guerillas, a couple of dozen men gave themselves up. They were former Freedom Fighters who had taken to the bush to express their disapproval of Mashona domination of Matabeleland, and because Joshua Nkomo was not in government, and because–probably the real reason–it is hard for men who have a talent for war to become unregarded civilians.

  And something else bad happened in those decisive six years. Corruption has overtaken every newly independent country in Africa, and Zimbabwe too, though Comrade Mugabe exhorted, pleaded, threatened and passed well-intentioned laws. A new class known jocularly by the populace as the Chefs had arrived.

  A United Nations official remarked, not in an official report, but during one of those unofficial conversations that are probably more influential: ‘It is not exactly unknown for the victorious side in a civil war to line their pockets, but Zimbabwe is unique in creating a boss class in less than ten years and to the accompaniment of marxist rhetoric.’

  But reading newspapers from Zimbabwe, letters from Zimbabwe, listening to travellers’ tales, what came across was not the flat dreary hopelessness of Zambia, the misery of Mozambique, but vitality, exuberance, optimism, enjoyment.

  AIR ZIMBABWE

  That night on Air Zimbabwe, November 1988, announcements were made like this: ‘Comrade Minister, ladies and gentlemen, please fasten your seat belts…’ ‘Comrade Minister, ladies and gentlemen, the non-smoking sign has been switched off and…’ The Comrade Minister was said as if the minister were a box of sweets to be shared out among us passengers. On board were many large and solidly-suited black men on their way home from international conferences, making us whites seem a casual and unserious lot. There was one person who united us all in respectability, compared to his magnificent otherness: a pop star, a young black man glittering and swaggering, like a bullfighter or a Pearly King. Six years earlier the air hostesses had been as nervous as foster-parents on trial, but now they were maternal and firm, and when the lights were turned down and the troubadour sang gently to his guitar, they would have none of it, and ordered him to sleep, preferring their lullaby, ‘Comrade Minister, ladies and gentlemen, the captain and the cabin staff wish you good night.’

  Immigration was a confident young man, Customs another, and there at last were the skies of Harare, a deep and sunny blue, and the foliage was rich green, the rains having come last week. I was driven through a suburb that this time I was actually seeing, inappropriate emotions having taken themselves off. What I saw was streets that kept going out of focus and blurring with remembered street patterns and vanished buildings. We are all of us used to towns that collapse here and there in geysers of dust, quickly transforming themselves into towers, gardens, new streets, but I had not gone through this day-by-day process with Salisbury, which is like living with a person: you hardly notice the slow erosion of a face, or how features re-create themselves. When I left in 1949, when I visited in 1956, the town was still a cross-hatching of avenues and streets sketchily laid over the veld, ratified by trees and gardens as a town. Now you drive through the central part, business and administrative, to get to Harare’s expanding suburbs, glossy, rich, with gardens that in Britain you would have to pay an entrance fee to see. I said, ‘Do you realize what a paradise you people live in?’–and remembered I had said that before, though it was not what I thought when I lived there.

  This house is deep under trees that hold the heat off, and there we were in a room with gardens on two sides, and soon we stood in the garden itself, two acres of it, containing, as a quick census established, several hundred different kinds of plants. Birds swooped about, notably the purple-crested lourie, with its creaking fateful cry.

  In the old days, visiting a farm, you were ‘taken around the place’. It is the settlers’ instinct, showing to fellow civilizers of the wilderness what has been achieved, and on behalf of all of them. ‘See what I’ve carved out of the trees, out of the grasslands, see my house, my animals, my plants, my good strong roof which may very well have to shelter you too sometime…’ so a dog eases itself into a new sleeping corner, fitting his back into a curve, stretching out his legs. He drops his muzzle gently on his paws…‘Yes, that’s the size of it, that’s what it is like, this place of mine.’

  When Ayrton R., my host, showed me his house, his place, he was doing what he had seen done as a child, for he had been born and brought up in the country, just as I had.

  We stand in the middle of this garden and breathe in garden air, facing up to the house that lies in a long curving shape, made longer by a discreet wall screening the servants’ quarters.

  ‘Well, are they any better than they used to be?’ I ask, meaning the accommodation for servants, once a small brick room, or two, that held the lives of one, two, three, servants, and often many of their friends as well.

  ‘The rooms are much better, yes, but it depends on what they hold.’

  ‘And what do these hold?’

  ‘The gardener has eleven children, and sometimes he and his wife have them all here. And the cook has three, and they are sometimes all here. And she has her man living here too.’

  ‘Illegally?’

  ‘Not illegally these days. But that isn’t what I wanted you to notice. What I’ve learned living here, is about space.’

  ‘You have plenty of it.’

  ‘Yes, but just take a look down there.’

  At the end of the garden were two substantial patches of mealies, standing glossy and thick, and a patch of rape.

  ‘That patch there is my mealies, for sweetcorn, and that other patch is theirs. When an African buys a house anywhere the first thing he does is plant a patch of maize, even if it isn’t big enough to give them more than an
occasional cob or two. Maize it has to be. It is a symbol. And that patch of maize appeared as soon as I set up house here. It was not a question of asking me: it is their right.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘The rape is the relish. It makes sense, because that patch will keep them in green stuff, they pull a few leaves at a time. Full of vitamins. And when I dug up a guava tree I thought was in the wrong place–suddenly I was confronted by the cook and the gardener, both in tears, accusing me of an unkind heart. It was really their guava, do you see? So I planted another at once. Parts of this garden are their space. Their right.’

  ‘That’s something new, then.’

  ‘Yes, it is. And now look up there.’

  Up there is a ridge where, among well-established trees, are large houses.

  ‘And up there the new Chefs live. Their houses are three or four times the size of this one. They wouldn’t be seen dead even visiting a house like this. They wouldn’t be seen talking to a mere university intellectual like me.’ He sounds amused, more, full of relish: I was to learn that this relish, this enjoyment in the unexpected, was very much the note of new Zimbabwe.

  Inside the house breakfast was on the table, presented by Dorothy, the cook, a plump smiling lady. Then we sat all morning and talked, about Zimbabwe, with the same relish and pleasure. I had seen by now that the miserable greyness, the sullenness, of last time had gone–I had dreaded it, and there had been no need.