African Laughter (12 page)

‘Soon everyone will forget,’ said Gore. ‘Only old people like me will remember Mutare was called Umtali.’ And he shook with laughter, the marvellous African laughter born somewhere in the gut, seizing the whole body with good-humoured philosophy. It is the laughter of poor people. If we were not talking about the War, when they were tense and sombre, they laughed.

They wanted to know what changes I had seen since I had left so long ago for England.

I wanted to talk about the emptying and thinning of the bush, how the animals had gone, and the birds and the insects, how this meant everything had changed; how myriads of small balances, hundreds in every small patch of bush, necessary for water, soil, foliage, climate, had been disturbed. I had already begun to suspect that these changes were more important than, even, the War, and the overthrow of the whites, the coming of the black government. Now, years later, I am sure of it. But I could not talk like this to these people then, at that time. It would have sounded an irrelevance: at best, like one of the eccentricities the whites go in for.

It is, I think, almost a law that what one is afraid to say because it will be rejected by the atmosphere of a time, will turn out to be a few years later the most important thing of all.

So I did not say anything about that; instead, that when I had left in 1949 there had been a quarter of a million whites, and one and a half million blacks. Now, so the experts claim, it is eight million. Eight million of mostly very young people. In a generation there will be twenty-five million.

‘Eight million,’ said Gore, laughing and shaking his head. Because of the word
million
, as much a block to his imagination as it is to mine. Mutare, his ‘big city’ had never had more than thousands in it.

‘We are poor people,’ he said, gravely, when he had stopped laughing.

This was a comment, not only on the eight million, who would have to find food to eat and clothes to wear, but on what I had been saying about Britain.

I knew what he found particularly interesting in what I told them, when he translated it for his friends. He at once translated when I talked about unemployment benefit, which for them was like news from another galaxy; about the Underground system in London; when he heard that every child went to school until the age of sixteen; that there the shops were full, and there were no shortages of anything, ever. He did not translate when I was ready to talk about our system of government, political parties, elections, town councils.

For the two hours it took to reach Mutare I was with men who knew about what other people had from the talk of travellers, from newspapers, from television–but they seldom saw television or films; they saw aeroplanes in the sky and sometimes got lifts in cars, but they would never travel in an aeroplane or own a car. They were excluded from the marvels of modern living but had come close when for ten years they had been in the front line of a war fought with modern weapons, for about these they talked with knowledge and expertise. In short, they were like most of the people in the world.

Their way of telling me what their lives were like was quiet, ironical, in stories where poverty was something like a character in a folk tale.

I put them down in Mutare’s main street, and was sorry to see them walk away, turning to wave and call back farewells. Then I parked and went into the new hotel.

FATHERS AND SONS. NOT TO MENTION MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS

I sat in the Leisure Area. I do not see how it could be called a lounge or even a sitting-room. I was reflecting that recently, in one of the most expensive hotels in the world, the Four Seasons in Hamburg, I had breakfasted in that dining-room once found in every hotel, a long tall-ceilinged room with chintz curtains at long windows. There were white damask tablecloths, heavy cutlery and–this is what marked it out from your common hotel–jam in pots, with a spoon. Old-fashioned charm is what rich people want to pay for. No doubt, quite soon, a hundred thousand characterless modern hotels will be pulled down and replaced with loving copies from the past. Meanwhile, new countries hastening to prove their worth in the company of nations, are building modern hotels.

At the table next to me sat two middle-aged men, white, farmers, and I listened to The Monologue–President Banana and the chickens, Mugabe’s motorcade, and, too, angry exchanges about Squatters and the inadequacies of the Minister of Agriculture. With my other ear I listened to two Swedes, man and woman, who were working on a scheme for retraining and resettling Freedom Fighters. They were talking about the whites near their Resettlement Scheme, who were doing everything to make their work difficult. They lowered their voices to say the new bureaucracy was impossible, almost as hampering as the retrograde whites. They decided to go to Harare and see a certain Minister (black), first making sure his assistant (white) would put some sense into his head. ‘Of course you can’t expect things to come right so quickly,’ said these reasonable souls. I went on sitting with the two farmers on one side and the two Swedes on the other, and watched people coming in and out, white and black, in groups and families, and among them quite a few of that new breed, the international Aid workers. The waiters were all black, lively, and with a confidence and ease it was pleasant to watch.

Soon a young couple, white, came to join the Swedes. They were of that immediately recognizable kind, children of the 1960s who, if too young to have actually partaken of the delights of that decade, were stamped by it. They are genial, anxious always to present to everyone a willed innocence, are open to every idea going, sensible or not, from pacifism to vegetarianism or aromatherapy and UFOs, and they know that if it does not seem everything is for the best in all possible worlds, then in some mysterious way this will come to pass. These were in their late twenties. They had to discuss with the Swedes if they could come to the Resettlement Scheme to work. The young woman was a physiotherapist, the young man wanting desperately to help people, but without special training. Both were Zimbabweans, and from this area.

Now, out of its sequence, I shall describe a later visit to a couple I had known well in the old days. The middle-class everywhere complain about poverty; for some reason or other, no matter how much money they have, it is never as much as they are due. This is not an original observation, but on this trip it was being given startling new life. The couple I was visiting were both getting on, like me. They were in their sixties. They had retired from civil service jobs. Both were full of health, energy and complaints. Their house was a large bungalow, many-roomed, with verandahs all around it, and it sat in two acres of land, full of fruit trees and vegetables and flowers. Everything in the house had the sparkling cherished look which is not often seen in Britain, where women work, or do not have the time for this level of housework. It is the look that goes with servants. This couple employed two servants, men. ‘But I am afraid poor Anne has to do some of the cooking these days.’ ‘Yes, I am afraid it is a bit of a burden.’ The servants cleaned the house, grew the vegetables, tended the fruit trees, laid the table, served the food. When we had finished they cleared the table, made coffee and washed up. Meanwhile my friends of thirty years ago complained. The Monologue, of course. But they were also complaining about their poverty, their deprivation, and in the nagging peevish voices of spoiled children.

Towards midnight, having spent some hours saying Dear me and Tut tut, I cracked and asked how many people in the world did they suppose lived on the level they did? This cruel question did not at once reach them. They sat blinking, unable to believe I could be so treacherous. ‘In Britain you’d have to be rich to live like this. Even in America, to have two servants, you’d be rich. Your way of life is an unreachable dream to ninety-nine point nine per cent of the world’s people.’ Silence. What they could not credit was such a degree of disloyalty to the white cause. Loyalties, particularly those confirmed by war, have never had anything to do with reason, commonsense–nothing of that boring sort.

It was already late when the two young people came in I had seen at the hotel that first morning in Mutare. Their son and their daughter. Two different generations, two kinds of people. How did they manage to talk to each other? With difficulty, is the answer. The young couple had begun work with the Swedes, and had rung up their parents to tell them. This was the first physical encounter. The two elderly people sat there in their neat, correct clothes, she with her newly waved silvery hair, he with his buttoned-in tidiness–and gazed with hurt eyes at their careless, casually dressed offspring who were helping those enemies, the Terrorists. The young ones had come in so late because it meant less time in this atmosphere of accusation. ‘We would have dropped in earlier but we don’t get much time off,’ said the daughter, and her father said at once, ‘Of course they’re going to exploit you for what they can get out of you.’

‘Look,’ said his son, his voice already angry, ‘this is a Swedish relief organization. They can’t afford to pay us much.’

‘Of course they aren’t going to pay you,’ said the mother, brisk and in the right. ‘All they are ever interested in is getting everything they can.’
They
here meant the blacks, though the attack might as easily have been against the Swedes, who were supporting the ‘terrs’ against the whites.

‘Look, Mum,’ said the young woman. ‘I keep trying to explain it to you. We want to do something to help the country. It’s our country too now, and we want…’

‘It’s not our country, it’s
their
country,’ was the bitter reply.

At this, the two young people exchanged glances. The young woman shook her head slightly, but was noticed, and her father said, ‘That’s right, just treat us like fools. We are too stupid to understand anything.’

The mother said, ‘Oh Paul, don’t quarrel with them, or we won’t ever see them at all.’

‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ said the daughter. ‘But it’s hard work, and everyone works till all hours. It’s not just an eight-to-four job, but we’ll come when we can.’

‘Oh yes, we know! We’re too old to change, we’re no use.’

‘I never said that,’ said the girl, for this was too unprogressive a thought for her to own. ‘Of course you aren’t. No one ever is.’

‘But,’ said her mother, ‘your fiancé didn’t like it either, did he?’ She tittered and went red, because she knew this was below the belt.

The girl also reddened, but from anger, and said, ‘It’s just as well I found out what he is like in good time.’

‘Her fiancé didn’t like all this living with the Terrorists,’ said the father, triumphant.

‘He’s gone south,’ said the young woman to me. ‘He’s Taken the Gap. Well, it’s the right place for him, isn’t it?’

‘If we could take our pensions out we would Take the Gap too,’ grumbled the father.

‘You wouldn’t be living like this in The Republic,’ said the son. ‘I had a letter from Rob, and he’s earning half what he did and there’s no question of servants.’

This talk went on, the young people getting more exasperated, but patient, while now it was the parents who exchanged looks that said, There’s no point, keep quiet.

But as their children left, the parents said, ‘Now you’ve got your Zimbabwe, I hope you’ll like it.’

THE VERANDAHS

And now here is the life of the verandahs at its best, because the houses are high in the Vumba mountains and the one where I am to spend a few days looks down on valleys and hills, forests and lakes. Also the border with Mozambique, four miles away. Sometimes there are little puffs of smoke, and the small sound of distant explosions. Renamo are again blowing up the pipeline, the railway, the road. Farmers who spent years fighting against the ‘terrs’ listened to the sounds, noted the exact size and shape of the smoke-puffs, and diagnosed such and such a mortar…type of explosion…gun. They spoke with the nostalgia of those who have learned expertise they will never use again. The Selous Scouts appeared in every conversation. I had known that as soon as I was in Zimbabwe, the certainties of ‘progressive’ Britain would recede, become less black and white (black, good; white, bad) but the hardest thing was to find myself in an atmosphere where it was taken for granted that the Selous Scouts were all heroes. I met as many people proudly claiming to have started the Selous Scouts, or whose uncles, brothers, nephews started the Selous Scouts, as in London I know people who invented the CND logo.

Among its other accomplishments the Selous Scouts ran training courses for people like farmers who could not be fulltime soldiers. One course was how to survive in the bush. Initiates were given a piece of string and a knife, told which plants were edible and which might have water in them, and left in the bush for a week or so to get on with it. It seems to me few people, or perhaps I should say few of a certain type, would not respond with all the energy of fantasies made real. No one brought up in, or near the bush, for a start. Because of the heroic and romantic aspects of the Selous Scouts many Rhodesian whites found it easier to overlook the brutality, the ruthlessness.

Within a couple of years, in South Africa, in every bookshop would be shelves full of books on the Selous Scouts (mostly ghosted, since the type of person who excels in commando or SAS styles of fighting are seldom those who take easily to writing books) and the Selous Scouts had become for the white right wing a symbol of excellence and of the heroic War for the survival of white Rhodesia. The expertise of the Scouts contributed to the brutalities and excesses of the South African troops in Angola and Namibia.

And who was this Selous? He was Frederick Courtney Selous, an illustrious and esteemed hunter. How many hundreds of thousands of animals did he kill during his years in the bush? He lived from 1851 to 1917 so he watched old Africa being overrun by the whites. He wrote a book called
Travel and Adventure in South-East Africa,
and here is a bit of it.