African Laughter (24 page)

TELEVISION

Most evenings we watch television, sitting there in front of the screen as if it were a child we expect to do better if it tried. In fact television is going well. In 1982 it was, quite simply, embarrassing. Everything was awful, the presenters gauche, newsreaders unpractised, and the rhetorics of the Revolution, crude. Now the programmes may not be up to much, most of them, but these are professionals who have learned from the best. Dazzlingly pretty girls, young men fit to be film stars, offer us the news–nearly all of it parochial. They inform us of the progress of the ITCZ, and act in advertisements as entertaining, if not as sophisticated, as the ones in Britain. Programmes from Britain are shown, basics, like Dickens, but nobody likes the British programmes, except for ‘Yes, Minister’. ‘The Povos enjoy watching Chefs having difficulties.’ What everybody likes are the American programmes, ‘Dallas’, ‘The Colbys’, ‘Dynasty’–the good life.

‘In Britain I suppose we didn’t have a choice–we are an American cultural colony…’

‘Why Britain? All of Europe!’

‘All right. But there is no reason why this country should have made that choice. There isn’t money for textbooks in the schools and universities, the libraries are running down because there is no foreign exchange to buy books, you can’t send for books from overseas, because Customs makes sure you have to pay on them–’ (thirty per cent of the value of the books, as valued, arbitrarily, by ignorant officials). ‘But there is plenty of foreign exchange for “Dallas”. Not to mention rubbishy magazines from down South full of pornography. How do their minds work, this government, do you think? Why does Mugabe…?’

As in Britain, where people sit around, dazed by incredulity: ‘Why does
she
do this or that? What on earth does she think she’s doing, running down universities, science, research, libraries, the arts…?’

As always there are the two main kinds of thought, the Muddle Theory, ‘It’s just a damned cock-up’, and the Conspiracy Theory, ‘They want to fill the peasants’ heads with rubbish, it keeps them quiet.’

Here the Muddle, or Cock-up, Theory inevitably holds sway. Several times a day the talk turns to the general inefficiency, the new bureaucracy.

‘Tell me, if you are talking about inefficiency, have you been in Britain recently?’

‘Yes, but there are levels of incompetence. And you are surely not suggesting that
he is
allowing all this rubbish into Zimbabwe? He’s an educated man. Books were important to him–he has said so. What can be the reason for his penalizing books, culture, serious magazines, libraries? It must be a mistake.’

He
of course is Mugabe. The assumption always is that
he
is on the side of the angels, that is, of whatever policy the speaker is favouring.

AN AID WORKER SPEAKS

‘If you ever want to understand what we really stand for, in these people’s minds, if you feel like having your nose rubbed in it, then go to a remote village in a Communal Area. There you are, sitting in a dusty space between trees–every tree has a branch lopped off for firewood, of course–and you are with five hundred or so people who have come in from miles around for the great occasion. It is not that they don’t know what television is. They know. It is “Dallas”. It is “Dynasty”. There is a moon shining away overhead. A late cicada is still at it. The crickets are clicking. There is one TV set in a hundred miles and there is America presenting itself for the admiration of the world on the small screen. Now,
we
have defences against it: it is only when you watch people who don’t have defences that you understand how well-armoured we are. We watch cynically, we think, Well, it’s a lot of rubbish but why not? But those village people sitting out there under the stars, they believe it’s for real. As murder follows murder, theft, double-cross, swindle, lie and racket, not to mention the fifty-seven varieties of sex, their eyes shine ever brighter with honest admiration: this is what the modern world is all about. ‘I wish I could go to America,’ you hear, as the programme ends. Off they go back to their huts through the bush, these poor people, but they know that if they are crooked enough, and unscrupulous enough, and cruel enough, they too can enjoy the riches of the world.

‘And it is the same in India, in South America–everywhere I’ve been part of the scene, poor people watching the American dream, in a dozen countries.

‘But why does America choose to show itself like this to the world? That’s the question.’

GRANITE

Yesterday, being taken around by a man who adores Zimbabwe, chiefly–he says–because of its granite, I heard that granite is radioactive. But Zimbabwe is full of granite, whole mountain ranges of it, or great upthrusting single smooth mountains, or tall clumps of balancing boulders. If granite is radioactive then half the citizens should be shining in the dark or about to evolve in interesting ways–to look at the stuff only from the positive aspect. The point is not how radioactive granite is, dangerously, or mildly, an amount to be expressed in figures, but that the idea of radioactivity is appropriate to granite. Photographs of granite never give any real idea of it. It has a sparkle to it, a liveliness. If you put your hand on it on a hot day it seems to pulse.

This man says that when he is away from Zimbabwe he feels exiled from granite. It is the oldest rock in the world, says he: it came bubbling up from the world’s secret interior, slowly rising through layers of other rock to surface here. He can’t live without granite…I once knew a poet, a Yorkshireman, who spoke about rock in this way, but it did not have to be particular. The feel and the weight of rock, stone–any stone–in one’s hands, that was the thing. It gave substance to his life.

Should I ring up some appropriate office and enquire, my voice made stern with the ring of one in search of scientific exactitudes: ‘Just exactly how much is granite radioactive?’ Of course not: this country is a myth-breeder, it always was. Revolution, that maker of myths, has only made it easier for a voice to slip into that tone, careless, dreamy, proud, where one says, ‘Look at that granite mountain over there–I don’t know why they make such a fuss over Ayers Rock–imagine some great lizard crawling over it, the size of a railway train. A winged lizard…just the place for a dinosaur to lie out and soak in some sun…’

A PICNIC

Today I was taken to see the Bushmen paintings some miles from Harare. Again the drive through rich suburbs, then the rich red lands, then a Communal Area. This one is comparatively well-off. Most families have at least one member working in Harare, and the money comes back here. Or cash crops are grown on these small well-worked fields and taken in for sale. There are all types and kinds of dwellings, from the old pattern of groups of huts, to new brick bungalows standing by themselves in little gardens, with cars outside them.

To get to the paintings we had to turn on to a dirt road, where granite tumbled everywhere about us, in the shape of cliffs, hills and heaps of piled boulders. Heat sizzled out of the granite and down from a sky where there was not one cloud. The road goes through villages, where, if there is a car, then it is likely to be visitors for the paintings. Now there are plans to take small, carefully selected groups of tourists who can afford to pay well. As usual here is a collision between the need to look after these easily damaged paintings and the imperative to earn foreign exchange.

The road became wheel-marks through rough grass. We passed some people sitting out under trees, who greeted us. We greeted them, feeling awkward at being there. Half a mile further the road ended, we parked, and climbed cracked slopes, littered with rock, through granite boulders that always seem about to topple, but never do, to a baby cliff where you pull yourself up and then go crabwise to a ledge where once the Bushmen stood to make their pictures on a low overhang. And here you see why there are so few left of these rock records of the past. Once you could see rock paintings almost anywhere you searched among hills or boulders. There were some on our farm, sprightly half-effaced figures on the underside of a boulder. They were vandalized, deliberately destroyed. I remember watching white schoolboys throwing stones at a rockface covered with paintings, on and on, until they were chipped, cracked. Why? Because they were there? What is this need to destroy?

There is graffiti here, clumsy scrawls, a stick figure like a small child’s first efforts: this time, it is the local people who have tried to deface this gallery of lively sketches. They are done in coloured soils or plant juices and have survived here for hundreds of years. Elephants, different kinds of buck, hunting parties with their spears, all with the immediate living truthfulness you see in a sketch done by a Japanese master: half a dozen lines that create a flower, a face.

The experts argue about the meaning of some of these scenes, these figures. The trouble is, we are looking at them through our eyes, and there is no way of knowing, I say, how those people then saw the world. I am with an expert who probably knows as much about Bushmen paintings as anyone in the world. He disagrees with me: we can find out how they thought and understand their cosmology from these pictures.

Sometimes, when you are with an expert you casually say something and then know you have touched an area where people have been arguing, speculating, for years.

He said, ‘Perhaps you enjoy the idea that we don’t understand them, and can’t understand them?’

It is true: there is something restful in the thought that thriving and successful peoples have lived and we have no idea at all how they experienced what we call reality.

If you turn your back on the overhang of pictures you stand high, looking out over a landscape that goes miles, to hills, to mountains, the rim of hot blue sky. Below are patterns of fields: those lines that separate fields, are they contour ridges or fences? If fences, or hedges, then that is not an African concept, but then contour ridges weren’t either. The people who made these pictures, little people, short stubby made-for-hardship people, stood here long before the Africans of these times were here, looked out over this landscape and saw–what? How do we know they saw what we see? Perhaps when they looked at hills, valleys, trees, they owned what they saw in ways we don’t understand, as the Aborigines in Australia can be part of a landscape through song. Perhaps, looking out, their backs to the pictures they had made, they
were
the landscape, were what they saw. Sometimes people now have flashes or moments when it is as if they are ‘part of everything’, merge into ‘everything’ they flow into trees, plants, soil, rocks and become one with them. How do we know that this condition, temporary and only occasionally achieved, and with rare people, was not their permanent state?

Arguing enjoyably about these possibilities we climbed back down through the rocks to the car, to have lunch. Two black youths have come from the huts to gather yellow fruit lying all over the ground, fallen from the mahobahoba trees that grow here in a grove. That is what they are pretending to do, for politeness’ sake, but really they want to watch us. We set out china plates, knives and forks, glasses. We spread out cold chicken and salad and orange juice. Should we ask them to join us? But they are keeping just far enough away to make that awkward. Besides, there is not enough for four. We eat, while they hang about, watching, watching, leaning to pick up one of the yellow fruits, putting it in their mouths, leaning down again, standing up to stretch, and yawn and turn away, pretending indifference–and then again they pick up fruit and stare at us.

We forget that it is still rare for poor people far from a town to observe the lives of rich whites or, these days, the rich blacks.

‘They are looking at something unattainable,’ says my companion, indicating the big American car, built for a life on rough roads, and the basket, the plates, the glasses, the cutlery. ‘They are already twenty-five years old, and they aren’t young enough to have taken part in Mugabe’s educational revolution that says every child, girl or boy, must get a secondary education. They have probably done four or five years in school. They are unemployed. They dream of the good life in town. They will never have a car and a bungalow made of brick, with glass windows and curtains and a three-piece suite.’

When we had finished eating, we packed everything into the basket, buried our rubbish in a hole under a rock, but left the chicken out on a piece of paper on a rock. To leave it seemed insulting. Not to leave it seemed cruel. Only the night before I had been told a story of how in a poor village suffering from drought, they killed a chicken and made sure that every one of the forty-odd villagers got at least a shred of chicken and some broth with their sadza.

As we got into the car baboons were barking from the ledge where the paintings were. They had been watching us from some safe place, and now had come to inspect the ledge to find out what we had been doing, and if we had left anything. Soon, when the black youths had gone back to their huts, the baboons would come here to pick up the yellow fruits, perfectly ripe today, for these fruits have a moment of ripeness, just a few hours, and before that they are sour and rough on the tongue, and afterwards slimy, repulsive.

A COMMERCIAL FARM

We drove on the Golden Stairs road, past the Mazoe dam. This area is famous for its oranges, for its various agriculture. The farm is near the Umvukwes, that is to say, Mvuri–or the Dyke. How did it happen that Mvuri, a soft rumbling word, was heard with a clacking k? A mystery. That Chinhoyi should be heard as Sinoia, Gweru as Gwelo, Mutare as Umtali–not hard to understand. Soon we were near the Dyke, with its load of billions of years. I have on my mantelpiece a small slice of rock, once clay, and in it a fossil fish that was blithely swimming along when some cataclysm sunk it in choking ooze. The label says this little fish,
Dapalis Macrurus,
is thirty million years old, a matter for awe, but the clay that surrounds it must be thirty millions old too, but no one slices up and sells ancient clay to sit on people’s mantelpieces with labels that say, This rock is thirty, or three hundred million years old. Clearly, for awe, we need a form, the outline of a fish as delicate as a skeleton leaf; or the Dyke, which we can see dividing the landscape, a visible announcement of extreme age; we need upthrusts of granite which we gaze at and think, Here we touch the archaic, here is real antiquity, as if the soil they are embedded in, a million or so years younger, is worth less of our human respect.