African Laughter (23 page)

THE SHED

Peter Simbisai wants me to see a certain shed. It is a large plain lock-up shed with a cement floor. It is communally owned. At its start, a great many families wanted to be in on this scheme. In the impetuous early days of Liberation everything seemed effortlessly possible, all kinds of people wanted to join all kinds of communal schemes, which sounded easy, because in any case working in groups was part of their tradition. But each family not only had to put money into the materials to build the shed, but then help build it, and afterwards look after it. Someone always had to be there: this afternoon it was a young woman whose turn had come on the roster. She said that most families had left the scheme, leaving a nucleus who had built it up, and now people wanted to join it again, because it was changing the life of the area.

In the shed is a weighing machine for the sacks of produce, and to weigh people when doctors and nurses come. There is a heap of maize, seed maize, tinted blue and green as a warning not to eat it or feed animals with it. This seed maize is numbered R-201 and SR-52, developed in old Southern Rhodesia and valued now. We are expected to share ironical appreciation of the fact that this precious maize is expertise from the bad old days. In the shed, too, political meetings are held, educational classes of all kinds, and parties. The owners of the shed are proud its facilities are available to everyone, members or not, that it is a centre for the whole area, and such a success that other people in neighbouring areas are talking about building a similar centre. ‘In good time this shed will become a Growth Point,’ says the young woman, but she and the others are advising caution, having experienced the difficulties. Only people who seem likely to stick with it should be invited into the scheme.

Most of all, the problems of transport have to be solved. Having grown the crops and bagged them and weighed them and stored them here on the good cement floor where the animals cannot get in and eat them, ‘and the white ants cannot tunnel, after all that–transport.

LORRY SERVICES

Everyone, anywhere in Zimbabwe who gets together a bit of money buys a lorry and sets up a transport firm. It is one of the quickest and easiest ways to get rich. The farmers living far from the markets, often far from Growth Points, are easy prey. They are forced to pay more than they should to get their produce transported. They are helpless until they can afford to buy their own lorry, and meanwhile they feel they are being bled by these conscienceless transport firms–which might very well be run by members of their own families. There is no legislation regulating what is charged for transport. ‘Why doesn’t Mugabe do something to protect us? He says we are the hope of Zimbabwe, we, the black farmers.’ ‘We are slowly building the infrastructure the whole country can build on…’ ‘The government should match their words with their deeds.’ ‘Comrade Mugabe should…’

THE STORE

This unimpressive shed was changing lives in a large area. Now we were to see something equally important. Again we drove through thinned and impoverished bush, full, however, of fat and contented cattle, because of the rains, to a village where there was a communal store, owned by the usual nucleus of families who had risked every bit of money they had to set it up. There was a regular store, doing well, and this new communal store was in competition with all that capital, wrung from them, the former customers. Their problem was of course the shortage of capital, and so their new clean scrubbed shelves had fewer goods on them than the commercial store. Peter had helped set this store up, and was proprietary and proud, and we were introduced to the owners, all proud and anxious, and there we stood about drinking Coca-Cola, or was it Pepsi-Cola, while I contemplated the cola revolution, for everyone drinks the stuff. These people who may not have enough money to feed their children enough protein will pay money for soft drinks, and on the shelves of the remotest stores are ranks of bottled tooth-rot and gut-rot and there too are the piled loaves of white bread. While I stood there gossiping, up came a young man all smiles and good nature with that immediate childlike lovableness that says, This person is not one of Nature’s successes. He wanted to know if I would drive him to a place many miles distant. The people I was standing with watched me to see if I had understood, and when I replied in the formula of the country that I would take him ‘just now’–which is like the Spaniard’s
manana–
they nodded approvingly. The young man went off, satisfied, and one of the men said to me, not ‘He is one of the afflicted of God’, or ‘He is simple’, but ‘He has a short wire’. The use of this phrase seemed to me to sum up pretty adequately what has happened to this society in one hundred years.

MEAT, SADZA

We had lunch in Greendale Shopping Centre. These centres are the equivalent of the Growth Points of the Communal Areas. We ate meat. This was always a meat-eating culture. You may begin a visit saying you’ll stick to your near-vegetarian habits, which suit you, but in no time give it up: it gets too difficult. We ate beef. The beef grown in Zimbabwe is marvellous and, when exported, one of the country’s successes. So strong is the bias of the whole culture towards meat-eating it is hard to believe they could ever agree it is wasteful to feed grain to cattle instead of eating it direct, as grain. That really would be a revolution. The whites have eaten meat ever since they maintained themselves, or at least part fed themselves, on shot game. The blacks were hunters when the whites came, as well as farmers. Their main food now may be sadza, but they always eat meat with it when they can.

During lunch we talk politics, but politics mostly as gossip. This Minister had done this, that Minister is doing that. Never has there been a ruling caste so visible to its people, never have followers been so intensely and personally involved with its leaders. Mugabe is owed one tone of voice, but the new caste of fat cats are talked of with a sardonic appreciation of their comic possibilities. Is this, perhaps, politics as theatre? Yes, when politics are followed in places like Zimbabwe, in this close and personal way, it is the dramatic sense that is being fed. Characters really only life-size, are on an enormous stage where they are bound to seem ludicrous, pompous, laughable. But there is charity too: Let’s see how they turn out–that’s the feeling.

For several days I am driven around and about by people able to take time off work. We always come to rest outside the house or farm of a Chef, for a bout of the scandalous, relishing gossip.

‘This house has been bought by…’ ‘That farm belongs to…’ A Minister, or a businessman.

‘The first thing they do, when they move in,’ say the whites, ‘is a mealie patch. That’s how you can tell a Chef’s house.’

‘And why are you surprised?’ demands the black man who is driving me one day. ‘Of course we plant mealies.’

‘But damn it, they aren’t even African. The Portuguese introduced them.’

‘And I believe roses were introduced into Europe from the Middle East?’ he says, laughing with pleasure at going one better.

‘Touché.’

‘So why shouldn’t we love our mealies?’

‘No reason at all.’

‘That’s what I think.’

We are stationary outside the house of a Chef who was famous long before Liberation. I met him once, long long ago, a gentle, humorous, patient soul, who exemplified every virtue you can think of in the line of passive resistance. The whites loathed him and slandered him; the blacks looked up to him.

The Africans in the car today tell me that he is now famous for quite different qualities. He is bad to his servants. He has too many girlfriends. He drinks. He likes going abroad too much, wangles himself on to the commissions and committees so he can have trips to America and Europe. And it is well known he is one of the Ministers involved in the current car scandals.

After half an hour or so of discussion the driver calls everyone to order. ‘Now, wait a minute, just–wait–one–little minute! What is this I hear? I think we have proved it is better to be poor, not rich? This poor Chef here, his character destroyed, ruined by success–a pity he wasn’t left just where he was. Better to live like a dog, kicked by Life. Can it be this is what we have decided?’

‘If that is what we have decided,’ says his wife, ‘then we must undecide it. Better to be a good dog than a bad Chef? No. Not me.’

‘It’s all right,’ says her husband, driving on. ‘You’re safe. My salary won’t allow you to be corrupt.’

‘A pity, my dear.’

COMMERCIAL FARMERS

Are the Commercial Farmers good when they are black? The reply is that many have gone bankrupt. ‘They seem to think’ (the speaker is a white farmer who certainly works hard) ‘that all you have to do is buy a farm and then it runs itself. They buy a store, a hotel, a transport business and a farm, and try to run them all. The farms are the first to suffer, but they don’t always realize that: it’s easy to put a few mombies on a farm and call it farming.’ (Mombies, the word for cattle, sounds like the lowing of cattle, when soft, contented, conversational. It is a word pleasant to use and to hear.)

‘And so they aren’t good farmers?’

‘They are good farmers when they are good farmers. But the really good black farmers are the small farmers. They do it properly.’

THE SMALL FARMERS

They do it properly on old-fashioned technology. Sometimes a small tractor is labouring across a small field, but the level of technology used by most blacks is the same as that used when my father was farming, by the whites. Oxen, not tractors, pulled ploughs, harrows, cultivators of the sort now to be found in farm museums, in Britain. Oxen dragged the wagon piled with sacks of grain or loads of manure.

The need for working oxen is what keeps the perennial debate between whites and blacks, conservationists and the farmers, alive and often acrimonious.

‘Your trouble is that you have too many mombies on your land. It is overstocked.’

‘My trouble is that I haven’t enough land. I need more mombies to do the work.’

All the Communal Areas I have visited are in wildly beautiful country. The people living here are poor. Their lives when the rains fail are hungry. But surely it is better to be poor here, in this sunlight, this beauty, than, let’s say, Bradford or Leeds. There ought to be different words for poverty that grimes and chills and darkens, and this poverty where people live in spleendour, lifted up on to the Altitude into ringing windy sun-scoured skies.

THE ALTITUDE

I had forgotten about the Altitude. Today, afflicted by a disinclination to do more than sit on the patio and watch the birds, I heard: ‘But you are still getting used to the Altitude.’ Where I was brought up the Altitude was held responsible for most ills. Being run down, another not easily defined condition, meant
you should get off the Altitude, and getting on to it again needed a period of readjustment. The Altitude has a lot in common with contemporary dangers like radioactivity and ultra-violet rays which cannot be seen or felt, but strike you down nevertheless.

THE GREAT DYKE

The map of Zimbabwe shows that all of it stands high, except where certain rivers go, but along a ridge running slantwise on the eastern side, the Altitude is 5,000 to 7,000 feet. Banket is on this ridge, and the road running from Sinoia (Chinhoyi) to Harare, and the road from Harare to Mutare. The Umvukwe mountains are part of the ridge, but the name was heard wrong, the real sound is Mvuri, and anyway, these days they are called the Dyke. I have been hearing the Dyke, the Dyke, in so many conversations, not realizing it meant only those mountains I spent so many years of my young life staring at, for it turns out this chain of mountains are considered to be the end bit (or one of them) of the Rift Valley, which as we all know, threatens to split Africa in a billion years or so. Perhaps where the Darwendale chrome mine now makes the flanks of the Dyke glitter with its spilled ores, will lap the waters of the Indian Ocean, and then this landlocked country, this plateau so high and dry-windswept, will be damp with sea winds. The Dyke is loaded with the minerals of a half a continent, pushed southwards in a tongue through other geological formations, and the whole chain is carved with small workings, both new and abandoned, some from long before the white men came. The hills of the Dyke are bald and bare, so highly mineralized trees won’t grow on them. It is hard to imagine an idea more attractive to the myth-making mind than this one, so casually proprietary with units of a million years, as is the way of those arch myth-makers, the geologists. You hear, ’He’s farming on the other side of the Dyke’. ’It’s on the Dyke, you know,’ and
you are meant to gather that much more is expected of the situation than if the Dyke never entered it at all.

THE ITCZ

Similarly, there is the ITCZ, which means the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone, and it seems to crop up in every other conversation. This is mostly because of the tricky rains, which did come on schedule this year, after some unsatisfactory seasons. For years the drought in Matabeleland was serious enough to figure regularly in overseas news and it killed off over a million animals, in a population of eight million already reduced by the Bush War and dissidents. In a run of bad years there can be a good one, or a half-good one, and then the rains fail again. This year began well: but that doesn’t mean it will go on well. All Zimbabwe, including Matabeleland, is green and watered, but now it is time the rains came again. The hot dry blue days that succeed each other, delighting me and other fugitives from November in Europe are making all the locals nervous. ’Why doesn’t it rain? Those aren’t rain clouds.’ And we go indoors to watch the ITCZ prowling about on the satellite pictures of the television weather programme.

I remember how, then, we used to watch the skies to the north, from where the rains have to come, we felt the heat building, with a practised sense for the different densities and weights of heat, while the clouds piled higher every day and turned from silver to black. We said, ’The storks have arrived from Russia and from Turkey and East Europe and the chimneys of Germany and Denmark, so now the rains should start.’ This year the storks have arrived well, and the fields around Harare are black with their multitudes, but the rains are holding off. It seems that the rains are generally starting later than they used.
Then
October was the rainmaker, some time in October the rains had to come, but now, it seems, November is when
they start. The trouble is, the weather is at odds all over the world and temporary anomalies are instantly seized on as evidence for the worst. ‘Oh no, the rains never start in October these days, the seasons have changed.’