African Laughter (18 page)

PAY NIGHT

Scene on a farmhouse verandah in old Southern Rhodesia. On every farmhouse verandah, once a month, this scene took place, through the 1920s, the ’30s, the ’40s, the ’50s…

The sun has gone down in its glow of sorrowful red. The stars are coming out. On a small table are piles of cotton bags from the bank in town, full of coins. Beside the table sits the farmer and behind the table stands the bossboy. If this is a raised verandah, then the table is at the top of a flight of steps, the polished red cement steps of prosperity, with plants crowded on both ends of every step. A lamp is on the low wall, if there is no electricity. Or, as on our farm, a hurricane lamp is set on the table which is in front of the house. Another hangs from the branch of a tree. A crowd of black people stand waiting. The bossboy calls out a name and out steps a man wearing a pair of old shorts, and a ragged vest. No shoes. In the pay envelopes are a few coins. The bossboy earned a pound a month, ordinary labourers ten shillings, twelve shillings. What could one buy with this money? A pair of shorts cost two shillings. A vest cost less. No one wore shoes. To buy a bicycle cost five pounds, and could take a couple of years to earn. Food was supplied.

The women had come up from the compound, though they did not do farm work. Pay night was an occasion, a spectacle, something to liven things up. They stood to one side, all together. They were handsome, and wore blue and white patterned cloth wound around them, or as skirts, or as full flouncy dresses. They had head scarves and bangles and earrings. These things were likely to be all they owned.

Sometimes there were arguments about the coins in the envelopes. Then the bossboy, speaking for the farmer, would say, ‘But you were away from work three days. You went to the beer drink on boss Jones’s farm.’ The man would stand there patiently, his face puckering with distress, which had to do as much with his life as with this small incident in it, a shilling taken off his pay. ‘But I didn’t go to the beer drink,’ he might argue. ‘I went to visit my brother.’ ‘But you can’t go visiting every time a brother arrives in The District!’ The man would shake his head, take the money and walk back to the little crowd which received him with sighs, sympathy, shakes of the head and then–marvellously–they might laugh, warm, irrepressible, infectious. Hearing that laughter the farmer might sit staring at the farm workers, his face a history of contradictory emotions. My father, for instance, who, contemplating ‘the system’, might conclude with his characteristic testy exasperation at the ways of the universe, ‘Bloody farce, that’s all it is. I mean, it’s a
farce
. What else can you call it?’

Now, looking back, things I took for granted come forward: for instance, what the women wore. For decades every black woman in Southern Rhodesia and Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland wore blue and white, indigo and white, patterned cotton stuff. Whose idea was it? At some point somebody must have said–who?–‘We are going to manufacture this type of blue and white cloth for the women of Southern Africa.’ The patterns look Indonesian. The cloth was manufactured in Manchester along with kenti cloth for North Africa and the kangas of Kenya. The great bales from England arrived in ships, were put on to trains, and the rolls of cloth, smelling of dye, found themselves on the shelves of hundreds of ‘kaffir truck’ shops. It was beautiful material, strong, good quality. The women looked beautiful. This cloth could not be worn by poor women now, for it is associated with the shameful past. Meanwhile, it is made up into luxury items for boutiques in the big cities of The Republic, and bought by fashionable white women and fashionable black women who may have never known its history. In Zimbabwe I saw it covering sofas and chairs in a farmhouse, and as curtains in Harare. Unwritten social history: in this case probably in the records of the great cotton manufacturers of the Midlands.

The farm workers who stood in the dusk waiting to be paid, the sunset fading behind them, were not the same from one year to the next. They moved from farm to farm, if there might be a shilling or even a sixpence more in their pay envelopes at the end of the month, or a kinder farmer, or a better water supply–a good well, a nearby river. Only the bossboy and his assistant, and a man skilled at driving the teams of oxen, and the carpenter and a man who knew about machinery, stayed on from year to year.

Now, in 1982, I again sit on a verandah on a pay night, watching. It is an enclosed verandah, not a large one. On one side is the kitchen, on the other a bathroom, and doors lead off to the main part of the house. The dogs sleep here on three car tyres covered with old sacks. They sit beside us now, one, two, three, watching, interested.

There is a small table with money on it and the farm manager, who is no longer called a bossboy, sits beside the mother of the little girls, as an equal. She has spent the whole day working out the money due to everyone, because the Coffee Farmer is in too much pain. A dog has leaped up and jarred his broken shoulder. ‘A little setback, I am afraid,’ he says, and will not laugh when we tease him for being so heroic.

Outside the verandah is a crowd of labourers, men and women. It is five in the afternoon, and the sun is slipping behind the tall dark mountain.

The workers are of two kinds, the regulars who are paid the legal minimum wage, thirty pounds a month, or more, and the casual labourers who come for the harvest. They are paid very little, but work is short. Every day men and women arrive to ask the farmers for work, and say they will work for less than the minimum wage, ask how are they going to feed their families? ‘I can’t pay you less,’ say the farmers virtuously. ‘It would be against the law. Well, don’t blame me, take it up with the government–it’s your government now, isn’t it?’

This is, in short, one of those well-known ‘grey’ areas that spoil the maps of theoreticians. Casual labour does not, or should not exist…hardly exists at all…soon will not exist…is almost illegal…without it a whole range of economic activities could not go on.

This pay night, just as it was
then
, is a colourful scene. All the women wear bright store dresses, headcloths, flashing bangles and beads, and it is they who contribute the gaiety, for the regular workers are dressed no better nor worse than the farmers, which is to say casually, if not scruffily. The seasonal male workers cannot begin to compete with their women. Everyone has shoes, these days. Nearly everyone wears a good cardigan or jersey.

It is a noisy scene, too. I sit there with my black eye, my bruised forehead, and the women are joking about the eye. No need to know the local language: women all over the world would be joking in just this way.

The paying out of the money goes like this. A name is called, and into the verandah comes a man or a woman. The little girls’ mother says a greeting in Shona: she has a good friendly way with her, and a brief conversation ensues, with jokes and laughter. The manager opens the relevant envelope and the money is spread out on the table, to be checked–the pitiful few notes and coins, but no one complains.

Throughout this scene the two little white girls stand watching. One is twelve, one ten. They wear very brief shorts and heavy sweaters. Their sweaters cover the shorts, and they look as if they are naked under them. They are innocent, and unaware of how they must strike the Africans, who are eyeing them, shocked. Since they were born they have lived among Africans and it has always been their right to wear anything they fancied, go about almost naked if they liked. I remembered how, in the 1930s, the girl from the next farm to ours, who had just reached fourteen and the age for self-assertion, appeared on the rocky crown of our hill, getting out of the car in tiny shorts, a halter top and high heels. My mother was shocked. My father was agonized. ‘What must they be thinking? Their women never show themselves like that.’ ‘What about their breasts?’ demanded my mother. ‘They sometimes go about with bare breasts.’ ‘Yes, but that’s their custom. You’d never see a black woman with a brassière and shorts that wouldn’t cover a mango.’ ‘Well, that’s
our
custom,’ said my mother, defending what she hated. ‘But we should be setting a good example,’ he said, and again, as he did so often, ‘
What can they be thinking of us?
’

The decades roll past and behold there is the new university on the hill near Harare, and a letter in the newspaper. ‘After a dance at the University you see the black students lying entwined on the grass in the dark, two by two, kissing and much more than that. When they were asked why they behaved like this, since it is not any part of their traditional behaviour, they replied, with straight faces, “But we learned it all from you.”

Similarly, a delegation of black women went from Zimbabwe to Israel to visit kibbutzim. They behaved arrogantly, using high peremptory voices, ordering people about. When asked why they were so rude to their hosts, they answered: ‘But that is how our white madams behave, so we thought it was the way we should behave.’

Next afternoon I was walking with Annie along the road on the mountainside above the house when an old man in ragged clothes, with a thick staff like a Biblical patriarch, came towards me. He stopped when he saw Annie, held out his staff horizontally against her, gripped in fists that trembled, and angrily said, ‘Call the dog.’ Annie was not threatening him but she blocked his way and knew that she did: she was full of wicked enjoyment. ‘To heel,’ I said, uncertain whether she would obey me. I was remembering this dog was a bull terrier, and part of the house’s defences, like the security fence whose gates these days stood open. The old man’s fear said everything about her function. She did not come to heel. The man could have killed me and the dog: all the terrors and the hatreds of the Bush War were in his eyes. ‘Sit,’ I tried. Slowly Annie lowered her scarred haunches, but did not take her eyes off the old man’s face. He could not pass her. ‘She won’t hurt you,’ I said. ‘You hold the dog,’ he said. I gripped her by the loose folds of neck flesh and he slowly edged past, holding out his cudgel level with her head. ‘She’s just a silly old dog,’ I said, and was at once incandescent with embarrassment: but I actually had said those stupid words. The old man did not turn his back on Annie until he had gone a good twenty yards. ‘You hold that dog,’ he shouted back. I did. I was afraid she might chase him.

Coming towards us came a flock or flight of girls, ten or so of them, returning from an afternoon’s tennis at the Club. They dawdled or skipped about or made little runs out of excess energy. They giggled and their high excited voices rang out over the steep slopes of the mountain. They wore their little shorts and their little shirts; they were all long pale frail limbs, but one had new jeans which she had carefully torn to be fashionable, so her plump knees showed. Their shining tresses blew about, and pretty eyes and pink mouths were lightly sketched on plump faces. They were like an Impressionist’s little girls caught in a moment of self-absorbed pleasure.

The old man strode straight past them, and now his cudgel was held out in front of him, at the ready.

It is not often one sees oneself as others see one.

That night all the girls were in front of the great fire, occupying chairs, the sofa, or lolling on the floor with Annie. Two of them were wrapping her around with green paper streamers left over from a party at the Club. She sat, with her head slightly lowered, looking at them as she had at the old man, a measured patience and control.

‘Annie, silly old dog Annie…’ They collapsed, laughing, and rolled about the floor, while the servant carefully stepped past them with the tray loaded with supper. Annie stood up, burst her bonds, and went to lie nose to the fire, decorated with frilly green bits like seaweed or lettuce.

RAIN

One night, not on the verandah, but inside, with the fire roaring up, the rain began to bang down on the corrugated iron roof, and the company applauded. The long drought…dry dams…the coffee plants standing with slightly wilted leaves, the dogs coming all day panting to the water bowls–and now, unexpectedly, rain. At once everyone’s spirits revived. Happiness. An intoxication.

THE ASSISTANT

One afternoon, when the verandah was full of guests, some of them girls from down the hill, there was an apparition in the sky: Zimbabwe’s champion parachute jumper was floating down from a tiny aeroplane, a neighbouring farmer’s. He floated slowly, for the new parachutes allow plenty of adjustment, and it can take five minutes to make a descent. He’d better not land over in Portuguese East, cried somebody, and a Swedish girl visiting at a near farm said fiercely, ‘
Really,
it’s Mozambique!’ ‘Renamo or Frelimo, they’ll have his guts for garters,’ said the offender. The girl has been, is, silent, observant, and shocked, because she thought that after Liberation, everything, everyone, would at once be different. ‘I suppose you find us very strange?’ she has been asked, by a visiting old-style white from a tea plantation. ‘I find
you
very strange,’ she said fiercely. ‘You, the white people.’ ‘That’s because you don’t understand us,’ came the amused, impervious-to-criticism reply. ‘It takes time, you know.’ She had burst into tears and then everyone was very kind to her. ‘They patronize me,’ she said fiercely. ‘How dare they!’

Down, down, floated the handsome hero, over the mountains and the bush, while the little girls and the not so little girls sighed…he disappeared into the trees, and appeared an hour or so later walking up the mountain carrying his parachute. Frowning, modest, and–as usual–inarticulate, he subsided in a chair, grabbing up a beer, blushing because of his many admirers.

The Farm Assistant…The Tutor appears plentifully in literature, but where is The Assistant? He is very young, an object of sympathy because he has no money, and is lonely in this house so full of family and their friends. He works like a demon all day, because his future depends on it. The farmer’s wife is bound to be in love with him in an aching, motherly way. The daughters lie awake at night for him. The daughters of neighbouring farmers take to arriving at all hours. The farmer, who was almost certainly once an assistant is laconic, sardonic and watchful.