African Laughter Read online

  We walked through the enormous sweet-smelling eucalyptus trees.

  ‘I often come here. I come here whenever everything gets me down. At least I planted all these trees. But not long ago I began to think, what a pity I didn’t plant musasas. Indigenous trees. In those days who would have believed musasas could be under threat? You know those TV programmes they make, about animals? Every one ends with, This animal’s habitat is under threat. I can’t bear to watch them any more. If I had planted musasas they would just about be getting mature now. That would have been something, wouldn’t it…we could be walking here through musasas. A protected plantation.’ He laughed. ‘We make these wrong decisions,’ he said, and stood with his hand on the smooth creamy trunk of a blue gum. It was a diagnostic, affectionate hand, and he even patted the tree. Meanwhile Sparta and Sheba ran about among the leaves, noses down, after smells. Harry stroked the tree. ‘All the same, it’s a good place.’

  He took me to where a notice, stuck on a board among rocks, said, ‘Please Remember to Bury your Rubbish.’ At the same moment we burst out laughing. ‘It’s the Scouts’ and Cubs’ camp site,’ he said. ‘That’s where they put up the tents. That’s where they build the fire. That’s where they sit in rows to eat. That’s the rubbish pit. That’s where the vans park when they bring cornflakes and sliced bread and orange squash from the supermarket.’

  We laugh, staggering about in the dead leaves and the dust, while the dogs leap up to lick our faces.

  GIVING LIFTS

  Some miles on from my brother’s house, I drove–without so much as a premonitory catch of the breath–over the place where, a few days later, four other people and I were in a car accident so bad the only explanation for our all not being killed is that five guardian angels were on the alert.

  The trip to Zimbabwe had been planned like this…I would spend two weeks with members of the family and then take off into the new Zimbabwe, allowing to happen to me what would: the only way to travel. Meanwhile I was impatient to talk to Africans, any African, to find out what lay behind the rhetoric of war. The black man in my brother’s kitchen was a friendly soul, but he was not likely to talk frankly to his employer’s sister. He had supported a lost cause, the Bishop Muzorewa, that was all I knew.

  I had stopped the car to admire a particularly beautiful stretch of country. If, as a child, on the slow journeys to Marandellas I took in every turn and twist of the road, every heap of boulders, on the hurtling journeys to Macheke, as a young woman, I was always in a car full of people in emotional juxtapositions with each other, and we did not notice much outside the car. I did not remember this view. A beaten-up lorry came skidding to a stop near me, a black youth got down, and the lorry turned off on to a side road. The youth stood looking after the lorry for a long time. Then he turned, and saw me sitting there. He came slowly towards me, his face a plea. This was very different from the importunate clamour of the crowds at bus-stops. I opened the door and he got in beside me. At once he bent himself away from me, in a disconsolate curve, his hands limp between his thin knees. He was trembling in little spasms, as people do who have been cold for some time: it was a sharp, sparkling, highveld morning. He wore a suit, a white shirt, a tie, all clean and pressed, but the materials were cheap. I asked where he was going. He said it would be after Macheke.

  I had hoped he would want to be set down before Macheke, called Mashopi in The Golden Notebook, because I had planned to stop, walk around, sort out memory from what I had made of it.

  I asked, ‘Why are you so sad?’ and his whole body made a convulsive struggling movement, as if it were invisibly bound, and he was trying to get free. Tears welled sparkling from under his tightly pressed lids. He shook his head: it was too terrible to talk about. We drove smartly on, while I tried to recall sights and signs that belonged to the road to Macheke, but we were going too fast: there is not only a different road for those who walk, or go by bicycle, but for those who drive at thirty, and sixty. The cars we used to go to Macheke were all on their last legs. During the War we drove what we could get.

  He began a dreary and hopeless sobbing. It was clear he had been doing a lot of crying.

  ‘Please tell me, what is the matter? Perhaps I can help?’

  ‘No one can help. I lost my job this week. They said I am not good enough. I got my Certificate but they said I’m no good.’

  ‘Who said?’

  ‘My Department. Mr So and So…’ The name of a black man. ‘Mr Smith liked me and said I was good at my job and Mr So and So…’ He wept.

  To get a job in the big city is the goal of every young person in Zimbabwe, like everywhere in the world. The usual pieties go on about the delights and virtues of village life but people cannot wait to leave the villages. Here sat a young man condemned to return to his village. His big city had not even been that metropolis Harare, but Marondera. He had been a citizen of urbanity, and now he would take his Certificate and his brave thin suit to his village where they would be wrapped in plastic bags and put on a high shelf out of the reach of dogs and chickens, or better still, hung from a nail so ants and insects could not reach them. He would be one of the unemployed, the workless, taking up a hoe sometimes when the women nagged at him enough. The high moments of a life spent dreaming about the delights of that centre Marondera would be when he walked to the main road and got a lift–if he was lucky–so he could spend an afternoon in the little town, looking up former colleagues for whom he was now a country cousin. They had been able to clutch tight to the ladder of success. Perhaps they would allow him to go with them to the beer house or the cinema.

  ‘It is because all the white people are going. They are taking all the jobs with them.’

  ‘But this is only temporary. It’s only two years since Independence. There will be all kinds of new jobs.’

  ‘Where are the new jobs? I don’t see any new jobs.’

  This struck me as unreasonable. As I had been saying to my brother, ‘What can you expect in two years?’ This, though I did not know it then, so close to the start of the trip, was to be my strongest impression of it, and it remains with me now as a consistently surprising fact. Two years before, in 1980, had ended a very brutal war, involving the whole country. Comrade Mugabe had come to power as the strongest group that had fought in the bush against Smith and Co., which meant there must be large numbers of people disappointed he had won and who were looking for reasons to disapprove of him. The people he had put into government had proved they were good at guerilla warfare, but now they had to govern a modern country in the modern world. Without any tradition of training in administration. Without enough educated people. Without any of the background of experience every child, no matter how poor or deprived, takes for granted in developed countries–which means everyone knows about telephones, letters from government departments, electricity, post boxes, buses, trains, aeroplanes, magistrates’ courts, social security, clinics. Without this background of culture of a practical kind, these people had at a moment’s notice to take on the task of running a country the size of Spain. In a country devastated and shocked by war. You would think they would be given a few years to get used to it. Not at all. Every newspaper, television programme, or international expert talked about Zimbabwe as if it were an established country to be judged by the highest standards. If some authority had pronounced, This is a young administration, taking on almost impossible problems, it must be given time to find its feet–then I had missed that charitable recommendation. Why should the Mugabe administration be expected to behave like an established member of the family of nations? I believe, partly, it was because Comrade Mugabe claimed to be marxist, and it was unconsciously assumed the authority of marxism would ‘count’ for good marks, just as, so recently, a young man of twenty-two from Devon, a friend of mine, found himself in old Northern Rhodesia governing a district the size of Yorkshire and sitting in judgement in the courts; he was not seen as a young man of twenty-two, but rather as a representative of the Br
itish Empire. And then, too, there had been all that rhetoric during the years of fighting, always confident, loud, and full of boasts and promises. But whatever the reason, Zimbabwe was being judged as if there had not been a war. This often happens. The reality of war, the suffering and the brutality and the terror–all that is suppressed almost at once, because it is intolerable and no one can stand it, and instead the pain (and the horror at the way everyone behaved) becomes frozen in war memorials, patriotic speeches, war rhetoric–sentimentality.

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘I am twenty-two years old, madam.’

  ‘Please don’t call me madam.’

  If he was twenty-two then he was twelve or thirteen when the War began.

  ‘Where were you during the War?’

  ‘At school, madam. My father wanted me to get my Certificates.’ And he wept even harder. ‘I’ll never get a job now the whites are going. Mugabe doesn’t know anything. The whites are cleverer than us. We need them to stay here and give us jobs.’

  Weeks later, just before I left the country, when I described this encounter to a black intellectual, he said in a troubled voice, ‘Who said those things? Are you sure?’ I said, ‘But why are you surprised? I don’t understand any of you. Why do you expect so much of yourselves? Why does everyone go on as if Zimbabwe has been in existence for fifty years? The War ended two years ago. There were all kinds of different opinions during the War and a lot of blacks fought for the government. Why should all that come to an end overnight?’ But what I said was so much against the atmosphere of that time I might as well not have said it. People were numbed. People were turned off…had turned themselves off. They needed a formula: united black marxist Zimbabwe.

  We drove on, south-east, getting closer to Macheke (or Mashopi) through that landscape, all miles of wintersere grass, where the wind made rivers of light, where clumps of musasa stood in their airy green, edged by blue mountains–that scene which somewhere in it held his village, to which he was condemned for ever. As he must think, being twenty-two, when what happens to you is for ever.

  ‘Look,’ I said reasonably. ‘The white people are not cleverer than you. You are only believing what the whites have been telling you. Did you know that for centuries the people of Europe–that means white people–were considered backward and primitive by the Arab world? When the Romans invaded Britain, the way you were invaded by the whites, they called us stupid and backward and savage. And we were.’

  While I said all this I felt increasingly ridiculous.

  ‘Someone wanted my job,’ he said. ‘That’s what happened to me.’

  I could have said, the sociological approach, ‘Oh well, you see, there are too many people in the world for the number of jobs available. And this situation is likely to get worse, not better.’

  Instead, I asked, ‘Was the War bad for you?’

  He burst out angrily, ‘It was horrible, you don’t know, no one knows…’ He wiped the sleeve of his precious jacket across his wet face. ‘In the village, first the Security Forces came, then the Comrades came…we had to be nice to them, you see. We had to pretend…we couldn’t be safe, it didn’t matter what we did.’

  I gave him some tissues and he mopped up his face. ‘We only read about it in the newspapers and saw it on the television,’ I said, wanting him to ask, Where are you from?–and he said, ‘Were you in Harare in the War?’

  ‘I was in England. I’ve just come from London.’

  He gave a what-do-you-expect sobbing laugh, and a shrug. ‘Yes, that’s it, of course, from England. You are a white person from England. Now I understand.’

  ‘We have unemployment in England.’ As I said this I remembered he would not be getting unemployment benefit, but living off his family.

  A black Zimbabwean said to me, ‘The extended family is a very good welfare system. We don’t need old people’s homes and mental hospitals and unemployment benefit. I have a piece of land twenty miles from Harare, about fifty acres. Twenty to thirty people are always living off it. Grandparents, aunts, nephews, cripples, crazy people, the unemployed. You despise that. Subsistence living, you say, as if it’s nothing. But subsistence means that people are feeding themselves. They aren’t in institutions being kept by taxpayers. You only admire big farms that sell surplus produce.’

  ‘Why did you come here to Zimbabwe? Are you going to live here? Have you got a job for me? Any job. I want it.’

  ‘No, I’ve just come to visit.’ Here I could have said I was brought up here, then left–and so forth, but all that happened before he was born, possibly before his parents were born. Far away in the mists of history this white woman lived here…

  ‘Why don’t you stay here?’ he cried, seeing this job, too, disappear. ‘Or perhaps one day I will come to England. There everybody has a lot of money and a house.’

  On we drove, up towards the crest of a long ridge, and then down into a valley; up the next rise and then down, while sometimes he cried silently and trembled, and then dried his face, and trembled and burst out crying again, while I was, with part of my mind, in cars going to Macheke for the weekend thirty-five years ago. Communists, we called ourselves. The label we used to describe ourselves was that, and it is a shorthand as useful as most. But in fact we spent little of our time on the current communist prescriptions for a better world, partly because the ‘line’ laid down by the Communist Party of South Africa, and, therefore, by Moscow, was that the black proletariat would take power and create justice all over this land. There were, then, few Africans who fitted into this definition. We thought in fact about what went on everywhere else: Britain, Occupied Europe, Japan, the Far East, America. The War was an education in thinking about the world as a whole. It was a watershed, precisely in this way. The First World War began the process. My father said that when he was growing up on the outskirts of Colchester (a Roman town) it never occurred to anyone to brood about events in America, or China or–much–even in London. No, the news was that Bill’s (his school friend) father’s mare White Star had won the 3.30, and that there would be a church picnic. But the War put an end to that. Even on the farm he read newspapers from London, and listened to the crackling broadcasts from the BBC. He felt a famine in China or India as his personal responsibility. The admonition that we should eat up whatever it was on our plates we wanted to leave was delivered with an incredulous, passionate, accusing anguish.

  Macheke is so vivid in my memory because of the War. Now I believe we were all mad, all over the world, whether actually in the fighting or not. Perhaps the world cannot murder on such a scale without going mad? Is this a consoling thought? Is it true? Is mutual murder the natural state of humankind? For us, then, this so terrible war was of course the War that would end all war, for everyone at last would see how terrible war was. (Just like my parents and the First World War.) All of us believed, as an article of faith, in a peaceful future world…I was in my mid-twenties, part of a group. Then such groups had to be political. By definition we were in the right about everything, destined to change the world and everyone in it, and our opponents were either misguided, or mostly wicked. We were all in love or not in love but wished we were, or wished that he or she was in love with us; or we had been disastrously in love, leading to regretted marriages (but luckily divorce was nothing these days), and because many of the group were pilots in training they were always being whisked off to dangerous parts where they could get killed, and many were. Partings were frequent and painful, but borne because of the state of elation we all lived in, and because we all drank too much. Alcohol, sex and politics: endemic intoxications possessed us. Exhausted with our lives in the big city, Salisbury, we took ourselves down to Macheke at weekends, not every weekend, but often, whole groups of us, in the cars we owned or borrowed. What happened in Macheke I described, changed for literary reasons, in The Golden Notebook. But how much changed? All writers know the state of trying to remember what actually happened, rather than what was invented, or half
invented, a meld of truth and fiction. It is possible to remember, but only by sitting quietly, for hours or sometimes for days, and dragging facts out of one’s memory. That means thinking yourself back into that scene, that car, that bedroom. Thus you create parallel truths: what really happened, what did not happen. But you soon begin to think, why all this effort? Memory in any case is a lying record: we choose to remember this and not that.

  ‘Do you remember, Doris, when we…?’

  ‘No. Not a thing. But do you remember…?’

  ‘No. Are you quite sure we did that?’

  Mashopi was painted over with glamour, as I complained in The Golden Notebook. When we see remembered scenes from the outside, as an observer, a golden haze seduces us into sentimentality. And what we choose most often to remember is the external aspect of events: sparks flying up into boughs lit by moonlight or starlight, their undersides ruddy with flame-light; a face leaning forward into firelight, not knowing it is observed and will be remembered. But what was I really feeling then?

  I do remember a good deal of what I really felt at Macheke. Why are those impressions so strong, from that time? After all, the War went on for a long time, years of it. I lived in different places, with different people. I was different people. Between the efficient young housewife of my first marriage, and the rackety ‘revolutionary’ of 1943, ’44, ’45 there seems little connection. Even less between those two and the young woman who–still always in crowds of people who changed, came from everywhere in the world, were always on the move–was developing the habit of privacy, writing when she could, increasingly thinking her own thoughts, increasingly self-critical. And yet we all know what the connection was: it is the sense of self, always the same–and that is the consoling, the steadying thing, that whether you are two and a half, or twenty, or sixty-nine, the sense of yourself, who you are, is the same. The same in a small child’s body, the sexual girl, or the old woman.