African Laughter (25 page)

The farm is an old one, that is to say, was ‘opened up’ not long after the Colony began. The farmhouse is old and comfortable, with the deep verandahs of those days, like big shady rooms. But first we sit out under trees. Under layers of leafy branches, we sit and listen to ring doves, cinnamon doves, the emerald spotted dove, and the different kinds of louries. The heat is heavy, and the bird sounds, by long association, seem the voice of the heat. The temperature is well up into the nineties, but it is the dry snapping highveld heat that does not sap and undermine like the wet heat of sea coasts. We drink tea. We drink varieties of fruit juice. We discuss, what else, politics. I am on the alert for the babyish querulous grumbling of the whites only six years ago, but no, all that has gone. This is what I listened to all through my childhood on the verandahs: farmers grumbling about the government which always and in every country is hostile to farmers. The government and the weather, between these two anarchic tyrants farmers are for ever ground down, no matter what powerful lobbies they operate, no matter how well they are doing.

The Commercial Farmers have an energetic organization and meet continually with government, to the point that other groups complain the Commercial Farmers are unfairly represented. The Commercial Farmers are always being told how much they are valued, are proud they produce difficult crops that bring in the needed foreign currency.

My room in Harare is now full of reports, analyses and abstracts and those dealing with the Commercial Farmers–still mostly white–are interesting for the number of times they will repeat that Commercial Farmers have nothing to fear. This is because the masses of the black landless look with impatience at these big farms of rich good soil and complain that large areas are not being used. But a recent UN Report has said that on the whole the Commercial Farms are properly used. Here is hidden something else, seldom spoken of openly. It is a Grey Area. Everyone knows the bush of Zimbabwe is disappearing, erosion threatens, soil is overused. But it is in the overcrowded communal areas that the bush is going. You can tell when you pass from a Commercial Farm to a Communal Area not only because the soil often changes from red or chocolate to pale colour but because at once the bush is only a ghost of itself. The comparatively undamaged bush on the Commercial Farms is an asset for the whole country. Yet a thousand polemical articles demand that the Commercial Farms should be expropriated. The government says improperly used farms will be compulsorily bought. But improperly used farms are often owned by rich blacks–Mugabe’s supporters.

Recently very large areas of the country have been freed from tsetse fly, and this means that beasts can now live there and the land distributed to the landless. The conservationists are saying: That means a lot more of Zimbabwe will become semi-desert.

On the walls of the farm office are two aerial photographs, one taken when the farm was bought, in the 1950s, and one last year. The early map shows large areas of uncultivated land, now very little is left unused. Any committee, commission, or government inspector coming to assess the situation on this farm will at once be shown these maps.

When this farmer said, ‘I’ll show you around,’ it was with the anxious pride that is the note of
now
. First, to the tobacco barns, whose design does away with the old technology that kept young farm assistants or struggling farmers awake half the night to check barn temperatures. The leaves are strung on movable racks, the furnace uses a minimum of fuel, the whole operation needs little supervision. What has also changed is the number of workers needed to run these barns: just like everywhere else in the world technology has thrown people desperate for work out of a job. The farmer is proud of his barns. ‘We developed this technology,’ says he, and the
we
means, here, ‘we, the white farmers of Southern Rhodesia’ and not, as it usually does these days, ‘we, Zimbabwe’. The design of these barns has been copied in other countries, and so have devices invented by this same farmer. ‘I invented this…’ ‘I invented that…’

We are driven around the fields. It is midday, hot, hot. The farm is still growing maize, which more and more is being grown by the small black farmers, it grows tobacco, and, a new venture, granadillas, or passion fruit. There are fields of these, the vines strung along wires. The plants are being attacked by some new disease but the farmer is not worried, for he has confidence that whatever Nature comes up with will get short shrift from science. In the middle of a field are grazing some duiker and a couple of bush buck. Surely these animals lie up in hidden shady places in the daytime and graze at night? To see them here in the blaze of midday upsets my idea of the proper order of things, like the rains coming in November instead of October. ‘My chaps are forbidden to kill game on this farm,’ says the farmer. ‘Of course they do, when I’m not looking. Not that there’s much left. Do you remember when…’

He talks all the way around the farm, and, as we sit in the shady living-room, waiting for lunch, he cannot stop talking about his accomplishments, the new techniques, new crops, new ideas–full of a restless energy that keeps him on the move: when he sits down he is up almost at once to reach for a pamphlet, an article, a book.

Lunch is served by the black servant, and is the meal that will survive in these British outposts long after it is forgotten in Britain. We eat roast beef. Roast potatoes. Badly cooked vegetables. A heavy pudding. That this should all go on with the temperature at nearly a hundred is certainly an invitation to remember commonplaces about national characteristics.

Through lunch we talk about the unemployed youngsters in the farm village. Of course: everyone talks about the unemployed. On this farm live many times more people than should be here. We discuss the word ‘should’ in this context. The regular workers–that is, the workers who get the proper wage–are a minority. The seasonal workers come and go. Every hut or small house is crammed with people, mostly relatives, and relatives of relatives, here because of the rights of the extended family.

‘They break my heart,’ says the farmer’s wife. ‘What’s going to happen to them?’

She says that the young people come up to this house to ask if they can borrow her books. She gives them detective stories, crime stories. She can’t keep up with the demand for her books. Ayrton R. protests that they are ready for much better. For instance, a young boy he knows of, from a rural school, reads Thomas Hardy. He has suggested Hardy to teachers in the remotest rural schools: with success. The farmer’s wife sounds unconvinced, but says she will offer more difficult books. The conversation slides into a familiar track with, ‘One of these Aid agencies could set up mobile libraries. They should offer everything from Enid Blyton to Garcia Marquez.’ ‘I simply don’t understand these Aid people. I wish I had the handling of some of that money.’ We amuse ourselves mentally setting up projects that would cost a fraction of the vast sums often wasted by the Aid agencies.

Then, the talk returns to the government: I am listening to what I now know is this time’s Monologue–or one of them.

Mugabe’s economic policy is ruining Zimbabwe because it is creating stagnation. Zimbabwe is desperate for investment, but why should people invest when they are allowed to take out of the country only five per cent: of course they invest in the Pacific Rim, where everything is booming. Socialist dogma is a killer, as they have found in every country in the world. You aren’t allowed to sack an incompetent worker: that means that you don’t employ them, for you have to carry them. This is only one of the policies you’d think were designed to prevent economic growth. Another is not being allowed to import farm machinery or even spare parts. You can only buy new machines through complicated deals that go like this. Someone outside the country sends a letter, backed by a bank, to the effect that he, she, is prepared to pay for–whatever it is, a tractor, a lorry. These documents are sent by a Zimbabwe bank to the foreign firm who will then supply the machine. But what of those people who don’t have relatives or friends outside Zimbabwe prepared to pay for the machines? As for spare parts…the government will not allot the currency, so machines stand idle, or you have to make trips down south to The Republic to get them, or you smuggle them in, or, using the famous ingenuity Southern Rhodesia was, and Zimbabwe is, so proud of, you invent spare parts or run machines on “faith, bits of string, rubber bands. But you can’t do that for ever”. The only people getting anything out of all this are the crooks in government who set up all kinds of rackets importing spare parts: that is one reason we don’t expect the policy to change. Too many people do well out of it. Or when Mugabe does permit a factory to make some machine, he says there can only be one factory, so, no competition and the prices are several times what they should be: all the disadvantages of monopoly capitalism, but in the name of Socialism.’

That is one Monologue.

Another overlaps the first. ‘Eight years this lot have been in power! Heroes of the Revolution! Look at them! What a bunch of crooks! One of them came visiting our school last month…’ (A school teacher is speaking, an idealistic young black man) ‘Where do they get all that fat from, the Chefs? If you pricked him great spurts of pure white pig’s fat would come out. He didn’t care about our pupils. He didn’t know about our problems. All he cared was to get through his inspection–but he didn’t know how to inspect, he didn’t even go into a classroom. He wanted to get back to Harare and feed his fat buttocks and his fat pig’s belly.’

As we drove back to Harare there was a road block, to check for licences and the conditions of tyres. The death-traps, the rattle-traps, of six years ago are being cleared off the roads.

In 1982 the road blocks were feared. They were often operated by soldiers, and the raw mood of that time made it a nervous business, stopping so that the inside of a car, the boot, even the engine, could be checked for weapons. Now a smiling young man asked some routine questions and glanced at the tyres.

‘Have you work for me?’ he asked Ayrton R.

‘What sort of work?’

‘Any sort of work. Gardener, housework–I can learn to cook.’

‘I am sorry, but I don’t have any work.’

‘I am sorry you don’t have work for me.’

‘Goodbye. Go well.’

‘Go well. Goodbye.’

We drive on. It seems that whenever you are stopped by the police on a country road, they ask for work. ‘They want to be in town. That is the great basic fact about this country. Everyone, but everyone, wants to be in the towns. Any town. Why should Zimbabwe be any different from the rest of the world? Other countries haven’t solved the problem, why should we be expected to? Is Mugabe going to pass a law forbidding people to come into the towns? If he did, there’d be another revolution and he knows it.’

A TEA PARTY

The room is full of elderly people, white, middle class. They are retired civil servants, widows of public servants. The atmosphere is pale, relaxed, and I see I have been meeting only passionate partisans of Zimbabwe, whether for idealism or self-interest. It is often said of these people that they might never have left Tunbridge Wells or Cheltenham. This is only partly true. For one thing their side was badly defeated in a war and that means they have had to accommodate failure.

The new Zimbabwe, chaotic, ebullient, violent, full of energy, full of optimism, is not a match for their natural temper, which tends toward the ironic, the philosophical. They cannot leave here, because pensions are not paid outside Zimbabwe. But would they if they could? Probably not. People who precipitously left for South Africa have come back. ‘Once we lived in a wonderful country called Southern Rhodesia. Now we live in a wonderful country called Zimbabwe.’ Outside a gate in one of the suburbs the house’s name is announced as ‘The Gap Took Us’–from a family who Took the Gap and returned. Where in the world would these ageing people be able to live as they do here, soaked in sunlight and able to afford a servant? But many do not have servants, pride themselves on their self-sufficiency. The worst is that they cannot now make trips to Britain. The money allotted for travelling is very little. If you do not have well-heeled relatives able to pay for you, then you stay here. ‘There are worse places to be stuck in,’ I observe and am told: ‘It’s all very well for you, you fly in, you fly out, but you have no idea of the cultural isolation. The newspapers only carry local news or if it’s foreign news it’s communist propaganda. Thank God for the BBC. We can’t afford to subscribe to overseas newspapers on our pension.’

These people do not talk about politics, or say, ‘Why doesn’t Mugabe…’ They cultivate their gardens, and go in for charitable works, just as they would at Home.

But they are not the only refugees from the past. Today, being driven through the most prestigious suburb of them all, I was told it is full of well-heeled whites who are born-again Christians. ‘Yes, that’s how losing the War took them! They can’t face life just as themselves, without holding on to God’s hand. No, this whole suburb is jumping with God, comrade, jumping with God.’

GARFIELD TODD

Garfield Todd, ex-Prime Minister, now a hero of the Revolution, magnificent, white haired, eighty years old and alive with energy and optimism, sits on the verandah of his daughter’s house. But it is not really a verandah. Hearing she meant to build herself a house, he said, ‘You aren’t going to have another of these houses, a string of rooms with a verandah along them? No, I shall design you a house.’ So it is more like a Spanish house, Mediterranean, with a central atrium full of plants, and rooms off it. Where we sit is a room that does not have a fourth wall.

He dismisses what everyone else is talking about, the corruption scandals, with ‘These little incidents…’

He says, ‘Eight years, all this in eight years. It’s a miracle. They’ve achieved so much. I know we said they could but who would have believed it, in such a short time? You go into an office or a bank, you look at them, so full of confidence and ability, and remember the old days, when they had all their confidence knocked out of them. You meet young people now who don’t remember the bad old days.’