African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe Read online

  It is possible to fill rivers with poison to kill the bilharzia, but the poison kills a lot else as well. Besides, the next rains will dilute the poison and make it ineffective. It costs money to poison a river. It costs much less to treat a person for bilharzia. Once there were long, and painful, and complicated treatments for bilharzia, but now it is easier. Much better not to get the disease at all. Much better if everyone in a village gets into the habit of using a toilet and not the bush. The Blair toilet was evolved by one of the real, not sufficiently-sung, benefactors of humankind, and is being installed in the villages of Zimbabwe to the accompaniment of propaganda campaigns about the habits of bilharzia and all the other filthy diseases that afflict Africa. Thus one may find oneself engaged with a schoolchild in some remote place in discussion that would do credit to a junior doctor in England. ‘You see,’ one said to me, ‘just because you can’t see something, that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. You must always wash your hands.’ And she went off into a chant of, ‘Wash your hands and use the soap. Wash your hands before you eat.’

  The Blair toilet is based on the known preferences of the flies that carry so many diseases. The flies prefer light to dark. The toilet consists of a very small hole in a cement floor, over what is known as ‘a long drop’. The hole is perhaps seven inches by about three or four. There is another hole, a large one, full of light, built outside the toilet. The flies go down into the dark after the smell, but then try to get out through the well-lit exit, which has a wire screen over it. They die there. They die in myriads. Because of this simple idea fly-borne diseases are getting rarer in the villages where they have built the Blair toilet.

  To use the thing is not so easy. It consists of two round cement cells, one for men, one for women. With a hurricane lamp in one hand, and a roll of paper in the other I make my way over rough ground to the toilet. Standing on the steps are some goats, who have to be shooed off. It is a question of being as quick as possible, because the lamp attracts moths, insects, bats. The hole, being so small, needs careful aiming. Men, I am told, find it difficult. Going to the loo here is not something to be undertaken without good reason.

  Outside, I stand on the path looking at the tiny house that spills dim light from a window. The hurricane lamp is at my feet. I look up at the stars, for it is hard to do this in Harare where the town lights are strong, and the air is polluted. The stars appear and disappear as cloud hurries past. It is very cold. It is very damp. Suddenly a noise around the hurricane lamp. Some frogs have been attracted by the light, and are hustling and pushing at the glass, and more frogs are hopping frantically along the path to join them. They seem crazed. With curiosity? I take up the lamp, and, stepping carefully through the hysterical frogs, go inside. Ayrton R. has a bed in another house. I sleep in Jack’s bed. Jack sleeps on the floor among his household goods. A mosquito is trying its chances. It is noisy. The dangerous ones are female and silent. My bloodstream is awash with anti-malarial poisons, so I don’t care. I don’t care because I have not yet been told that malaria is cunning and evolving itself to outwit our poisons: later I met several people who, in spite of regularly taking two different kinds of pill, have had malaria. Twice Jack and I get up to chase out an invading bat which has decided that this shape of walls and roof is like a cave, and will do it nicely for a home. We block up the hole it came in by. I try to read a paperback I have brought, about the adulterous goings-on in a country house in Wiltshire, but they seem remote. Besides I know that my candleflame will shortly attract other visitors. Rain begins to hammer on the metal roof. The frogs exult. I sleep. It is not yet nine o’clock.

  We are awake by five. Outside it is grey and cold. While tea is being brewed I take a can of cold water to the place where one has to wash. There is a curving wall at the back of the little house, enclosing a small concrete-floored space. You strip, hanging your clothes on the top of the wall. You soap yourself, standing naked and shivering, thinking how pleasant it must be on a hot day. You pour cold water over yourself. The water runs out through a hole at the bottom of the wall. Already again at home in a culture where water is precious, I find myself worrying about that water running away into the earth. Shouldn’t it be caught and used for watering something? Back inside I drink tea and am relieved to hear the water is not from the pool under the bridge, bound to be full of bilharzia, but from the well a mile away, presumed to be pure. Jack’s grin admits he is not sure about the purity of that water either. The well, the little river, are the two sources of water for the school, with its hundreds of people, and for the village. Prominent on a little eminence, sheltered by trees, is a water tank which is supposed to pump water from the well, but there is something wrong, probably the valve, at any rate it doesn’t work and there hasn’t been water in the tank for months.

  Ayrton R. appears from his lodging half a mile away, and remarks that if the Aid organizations had any sense of priorities, they would set up teams of engineers to go around schools, Growth Points, clinics, to mend simple things like valves, which no one bothers to mend. They could take with them youngsters who would learn how to put right a valve, a tap, or a broken pipe.

  ‘The trouble is that all these poor bloody kids, in all the schools of Zimbabwe, have decided that only a literary education is worth having. Where do you find the ultimate bastion of respect for the Humanities? Not in Thatcher’s Britain! No, in the bush, where generations of black kids have decided they are too good to be engineers and electricians, and are taking O-levels in English which they mostly fail.’

  ‘Quite so. This is where the English aristocratic contempt for people who work with their hands–engineers or technicians–stops. In schools like this. Do you suppose those effete types who said in England, “I can’t ask him to dinner, he’s in trade!” or “I can’t let Angela marry that man, he’s only an engineer” would have believed that, roll on half a century, you’d find black kids stuck in the bush hundreds of miles from Harare unwilling to soil their hands with manual work? Would they recognize their heirs?’

  ‘I was in an office in Harare. An American Aid worker was arguing that the education being given to the children was inappropriate, what was the point of teaching them the British syllabus, with books suitable for Europe? What was needed was a good basic technical education. A black woman who was waiting her turn turned furiously on her. She said, “I see you whites are still just the same. You don’t want our children to have a real education. Oh no, that’s for your children. We want a good education for our children, just the same as yours.”’

  ‘There you are, an aristocrat! Do you suppose she would recognize her predecessors?’

  Conversation on these lines entertained us through a breakfast of semolina and tea.

  Jack went off to class, to be there by seven-thirty. He pointed out that most of his pupils would have got up by half-past four, or five at the latest. The girls would have fetched water, cut wood and cooked porridge, waiting on the boys as well as on their elders. Some of them would then have walked up to four or five miles to school through the bush. Most do not bring food to school. It is common for pupils to faint from lack of food. This is true too of the small children in the primary school, who might go through until four in the afternoon without a bite to eat or even a drink. To get water means walking a mile to the well, and, oddly enough, they lack energy.

  When Jack has gone, instructing us to turn up at such and such a time to lecture his pupils, Ayrton R. describes the room he has spent the night in. It belongs to another ex-pat teacher, who has departed to Britain for the holidays. The room is like a time-capsule, for the walls are covered with CND posters, Greenpeace posters, and pictures of heroes like Che Guevara and Castro–the ‘progressive’ stereotype of five years before. Large numbers of young teachers, inspired by the rhetoric of marxist Zimbabwe, have arrived in bush schools to find themselves disillusioned. In order to do their job they have to forget the ideals that brought them here. The joke is that the poorest street in the poorest
town in Britain would seem full of riches and opportunities to anyone in Zimbabwe.

  ‘Do you realize,’ demands Ayrton R., ‘the lunacy of it? There isn’t a school in Britain that doesn’t have television, a computer, telephone, Fax, copy machines, and some sort of library. There isn’t a child who doesn’t watch television, go to the cinema or on trips to museums and probably to France or Italy. In schools like this one there are classrooms with untrained teachers and too few textbooks, and that’s it.’

  Some of the ex-pat teachers go home the moment their contracts expire, or, pleading illness, before. The various organizations, religious and otherwise, break in their young teachers by keeping them in Harare for a couple of months. But nothing in Harare can prepare you, says Jack, for the realities of a school like this one. Jack himself became mysteriously ill four months after arrival and had to stay in bed. It was with an effort he dragged himself up and back to work. He comes from a gentle family in the Home Counties, and has taught in London schools which struck him then as rough.

  Jack told us to lock the door: we might think there was nothing worth stealing. We went through the bush towards the schools, passing the disabled water tank, then through the junior school, whose long low buildings were so crammed with small children it seemed they would spill out of the windows. Goats came to inspect us. There were puddles everywhere and a grey sky pressed down. We left the junior school behind and walked through a sparse scrubby bush, pointing out to each other an orchid and a butterfly: these days they do not go unremarked. Then a small stream, and a path up a rise to a new strong fence. Outside the fence fusses an indignant cow. She has been accustomed to taking this path, but now, for no reason she can understand, there is this fence, designed to keep her and her kind out. She waits there sometimes for hours, hoping for someone to leave the gate unfastened. We find Jack in a classroom in one of the long barrack-like buildings. He is instructing a group of young men and women who have just sat O-levels. Some are as old as twenty. They give an impression of bouncing energy and vigour and confidence. Any group of young Zimbabweans is like this: they are large, strong, glossy with health.

  Ayrton R. and I sit at one of the desks, watching Jack finish a lesson. The classroom: two of the windowpanes are cracked. The windows are dirty. There is a cracked rafter. The floor is half an inch deep in dust and rubbish. The room would look derelict, if it were not for the lively people in it.

  I notice beginning in me that process known unkindly as ‘Africanization’. Well, I think, in this climate they don’t really need to shut the windows. As for the rafter, easy to put a bit of wire around it. The floor? You don’t need a clean floor to learn lessons. Dirty windows? What of it!

  Ayrton R. is miserable. ‘There is no headmaster, you see. You can tell a school with a bad headmaster at a glance. I’ve seen enough of them.’

  Jack instructs a couple of the pupils to take us next door and show us the library. His pride and joy. He created it. There was no library at all. No money for books because the headmaster stole the money.

  The library is a narrow room, like a wide corridor, and it has perhaps three hundred books in it. Obsolete textbooks. Novels donated by well-wishers or by those who have Taken the Gap, most of the kind read by people nostalgic for dear dead England:

  ‘Edith stood at the window gazing past the buddleia to the road where Geoffrey would come. She had set out her bottle of sherry, but perhaps he would prefer whisky? Where was her whisky bottle? She had had no occasion to offer whisky since last Christmas, when her brother dropped in during his trip home on leave from India. At last she found the whisky bottle pushed to the back of the shelf where she kept her gardening things–insecticides too, she was afraid. She really ought to be more careful! Back in her place at the window she began worrying about supper. It was rather warm this afternoon, at least sixty-five, she was sure. Would steak and kidney pie be too heavy, in this weather? Just as she decided to open a tin of salmon, Geoffrey came into sight along the road. He was riding his bicycle. Oh poor thing! He would be so hot and tired…’

  There were some formidable tomes donated by an American Foundation, so heavy you could hardly lift them, compendiums of literature, history, and so on, designed, you would think, to put people off for good. The books here that are actually read are by African writers, and a few American ones. A survey of what books the teachers read revealed that the only one who read for pleasure liked Chinua Achebe and Frederick Forsyth. The distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ literature is not one that means much when it is a question of getting people to read at all. This pathetic, almost bare room, taught me that what is needed are simply written stories about different parts of the world, explaining ways of living, religions, other people’s ideas. These children (only many of them are grown up) labour through set books too difficult for them. Too difficult for most of them: there is always that rare spirit who, stuck in a village miles from anywhere, will read Tolstoy, Hardy, Steinbeck. Tolstoy, when he was running that wonderful village school of his, talked of the need for simply-told informative stories. Astonishing how often Russian experience is relevant to Africa.

  Enid Blyton is liked by all the pupils.

  Jack had taught the children how a library is run by means of these few books and an exercise book where borrowed books are listed: the pupils take it in turns to be librarian. The books may not be taken home. What would be the point? Homework is done here, in the school, before the walk home, which can be a long one. By the time the children get to their homes, it is dark, or soon will be. They are expected to help with the work–particularly the girls–cutting wood, fetching water, cooking. The huts are at best lit by a candle or an oil lamp but usually the whole family will sit in the hut in the light of the fire that burns in its centre. Not easy to do homework or even read a book. The adults are mostly illiterate or have done four or five years in a bush school. They passionately want their children to be educated, but do not know from their own experience how to help them.

  The parents in such villages are still close to subsistence farming, and must find thirty pounds a year for a child to attend secondary school, to pay for uniforms and exercise books. If they have several children in school, the burden keeps them, often, short of food and clothing for themselves.

  We ask Jack how many of these enthusiastic young people will pass their O-levels.

  ‘I don’t think many of this lot will pass them.’ He is embarrassed, and makes excuses for them. ‘I don’t think you understand…for instance, there was an exam paper set in Britain, one of the questions had the word “shutter”. These people don’t have shutters. One of the meanings of the word was a camera shutter. Most of them have never seen a camera, let alone used one.’

  Ayrton and I are asked to address this year’s O-level class. Few visitors come to this school. Our visit is an event, and not because of the presence of this author, far from it. The star is Ayrton R. who is from the University of Zimbabwe, that abode of the fortunate. The teachers here, with their one or two O-levels each, the one teacher who has an A-level, dream of it…the further off, the more unattainable a place is, the more it seems subject, in the imagination, to fortunate chance. It is not easy to imagine oneself suddenly transported to the teachers’ training college one hundred and fifty miles away: one would need the requisite number of Certificates, but the University of Zimbabwe–who knows?–it might happen, somehow, some time, somewhere.

  As for the children here, they have not yet had their results, and the University of Zimbabwe is still part of the landscape of their dreams.

  Ayrton R. speaks first. Listening, I understand this is going to be as hard as anything I have done. He is emotional, persuasive, and has behind him the experience of having talked to so many groups of pupils, on so many levels. He makes a statement…a suggestion…offers a thought–there is the intense and baffled silence which means an idea has not been taken in. He rephrases, tries again. The trouble is, the language he uses, the words, d
o not find a mirror in the minds of the listeners. In other words, here is the culture gap, illustrated. At the end, trying to give them hope, he says that there is no need to despair, to give up, if they do not pass O-levels, for there are technical schools and this country needs technicians. Their silence is sorrowful, disappointed, if polite.

  It is my turn. I have spoken to many different kinds of audiences in many countries, some of them, as we put it, disadvantaged. This is not the first time I say to young people who will never reach university that there are ways of learning open to them, and no one can stop them learning if they want to learn. With a library and perhaps some sympathetic adult to advise them, there is nothing in the world they cannot study. A good library–I am well used to saying, reminding people of our remarkable inheritance–is a treasure house, and we take it for granted. It is possible to pick up a book, perhaps by chance, when you are a child, and find in it a world existing parallel to the one you live in, full of amazements and surprises and delights; you can pursue any interest through different countries and cultures, diving back into history and forward into the future; you can exhaust one interest and then find another; or, turning over books, chance on a subject you had never suspected existed–and follow that, with no idea when you begin where it will lead. With a library you are free, not confined by certainly temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one–but no one at all–can tell you what to read and when and how.

  The only trouble with this exhortation, which I have to say has set young people off on explorations of all kinds, was that there was no proper library within three hundred miles. And so I was unable to produce more than a few sentences, while they were thinking, Well, we have a library, don’t we?