African Laughter (28 page)

The parents in such villages are still close to subsistence farming, and must find thirty pounds a year for a child to attend secondary school, to pay for uniforms and exercise books. If they have several children in school, the burden keeps them, often, short of food and clothing for themselves.

We ask Jack how many of these enthusiastic young people will pass their O-levels.

‘I don’t think many of this lot will pass them.’ He is embarrassed, and makes excuses for them. ‘I don’t think you understand…for instance, there was an exam paper set in Britain, one of the questions had the word “shutter”. These people don’t have shutters. One of the meanings of the word was a camera shutter. Most of them have never seen a camera, let alone used one.’

Ayrton and I are asked to address this year’s O-level class. Few visitors come to this school. Our visit is an event, and not because of the presence of this author, far from it. The star is Ayrton R. who is from the University of Zimbabwe, that abode of the fortunate. The teachers here, with their one or two O-levels each, the one teacher who has an A-level, dream of it…the further off, the more unattainable a place is, the more it seems subject, in the imagination, to fortunate chance. It is not easy to imagine oneself suddenly transported to the teachers’ training college one hundred and fifty miles away: one would need the requisite number of Certificates, but the University of Zimbabwe–
who knows
?–it might happen, somehow, some time, somewhere.

As for the children here, they have not yet had their results, and the University of Zimbabwe is still part of the landscape of their dreams.

Ayrton R. speaks first. Listening, I understand this is going to be as hard as anything I have done. He is emotional, persuasive, and has behind him the experience of having talked to so many groups of pupils, on so many levels. He makes a statement…a suggestion…offers a thought–there is the intense and baffled silence which means an idea has not been taken in. He rephrases, tries again. The trouble is, the language he uses, the words, do not find a mirror in the minds of the listeners. In other words, here is the culture gap, illustrated. At the end, trying to give them hope, he says that there is no need to despair, to give up, if they do not pass O-levels, for there are technical schools and this country needs technicians. Their silence is sorrowful, disappointed, if polite.

It is my turn. I have spoken to many different kinds of audiences in many countries, some of them, as we put it, disadvantaged. This is not the first time I say to young people who will never reach university that there are ways of learning open to them, and no one can stop them learning if they want to learn. With a library and perhaps some sympathetic adult to advise them, there is nothing in the world they cannot study. A good library–I am well used to saying, reminding people of our remarkable inheritance–is a treasure house, and we take it for granted. It is possible to pick up a book, perhaps by chance, when you are a child, and find in it a world existing parallel to the one you live in, full of amazements and surprises and delights; you can pursue any interest through different countries and cultures, diving back into history and forward into the future; you can exhaust one interest and then find another; or, turning over books, chance on a subject you had never suspected existed–and follow that, with no idea when you begin where it will lead. With a library you are free, not confined by certainly temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one–but no one at all–can tell you what to read and when and how.

The only trouble with this exhortation, which I have to say has set young people off on explorations of all kinds, was that there was no proper library within three hundred miles. And so I was unable to produce more than a few sentences, while they were thinking, Well, we have a library, don’t we?

Then I began to talk about how one becomes a writer, since I’ve learned that in any audience anywhere there are always people who write novels, or intend to. This went better because there was in fact a man there who was writing, a teacher from another school some miles away.

Jack said afterwards, ‘It doesn’t matter. What mattered was that someone thought it worth it to come and talk to them. No one takes any notice of them, you see.’ And he went on to tell us how ‘one of those fat cats from Harare came, an inspector’.

Jack was delighted, hoping he would point out deficiencies to the negligent headmaster. The pupils waited for days in expectation of the event, a visitor from Harare. ‘But he went around the school as fast as he could, didn’t stop in any class longer than a minute, in some of them he didn’t even sit down. He didn’t notice the lack of textbooks, he didn’t ask questions. Then before he left he said the washing-line should be moved from where it was to somewhere else. The teachers obediently moved it, and moved it back when he left. Off he drove, sweating into his three-piece suit.’

‘There are three stages in the flight from the Reserve,’ said Ayrton R., ‘All right, a Communal Area. The first, a tie. The second, a jacket. The third, a three-piece suit. Then you’ve made it. You’re free for ever from the bush.’

We walk back. The cow, thwarted at the fence, is standing outside the window of a store shed. In the glass she can see another cow who is tossing her horns, and snorting at her. The cow is in two minds about putting her horns right through the glass. Some small children stand watching. They are amused by the deluded cow. Jack calls them, and together they all shoo away the cow from her threatening rival, and persuade her to return to the water tank where there is some new grass. The cow, goes, but looks back at the window where she saw the other cow who, she obviously thinks, might decide to pursue her.

In the playground of the junior school the children are squatting on the ground, playing that game that looks like draughts, with smooth stones laid out in holes in the earth. They crowd up to the wire of the playground to watch us, laughing and waving and delighted by the cow.

It is midday. Four or five hours before they get anything to eat.

In Jack’s shack we ate bread and tinned herring, feeling like sybarites. Teachers and pupils kept dropping in. What they needed was to see Ayrton R., breathe the same air as he did, be near that elusive paradise, the University of Zimbabwe.

In the afternoon we walked a long way into the bush, which was in the process of ceasing to be bush. Fields were in every stage of preparation. Some had the stumps standing in the bared earth, some stumps were smouldering. There were fields cleared, but untilled. Many trees were ringed for felling. In the bush that was still bush every tree had branches lopped off.

The population of Zimbabwe will triple by 2010. That is, in twenty years. There seems something impossible about this figure.

‘Plant trees, we must all plant trees,’ urges Comrade Mugabe, shoring what must often seem vain hopes against these ruins of bush. And plant trees they do, miles of the fast-growing blue gums, disliked by everybody as much as we hate the conifer plantations that disfigure Britain. The trouble is, the beautiful indigenous trees grow so slowly.

Mushrooms grew in thousands all along the road. The local people say that mushrooms are poisonous, and came to warn Jack not to eat them. He said that in other parts of the country mushrooms are eaten. But they were unconvinced and await–Jack said–his certain death.

When the sun went down we ate our supper of bread and mushrooms, and tried to listen to the radio. It was not working. Is there no radio in the school? Yes, the other teacher has one, but he is not here. The trouble is, it is hard to get batteries; for most Africans impossibly expensive.

In this school and the other one like it twenty miles away there is no electricity, no telephone, unreliable radio. There is nothing in the way of civilization nearer than that hotel where we had lunch, fifty miles away. When Jack wants to ring up his family in England he takes the bus to the hotel and stays the night there, enjoying electricity, clean water and a decent meal. But often the lines are down, or the connection bad and he can’t get through to England on that trip.

His mail comes to the little town where the hotel is. He asks friends to send him books for the school library and we do. The Zimbabwe post office does not encourage an interest in literature. Any parcel of books over about £10, you have to pay to receive. If the friends in England are foolish enough to send two parcels, both under the £10 limit, at the same time, the enterprising Customs officials tape the two together and you pay as if they are one parcel. Jack, ever charitable, says he supposes the officials have trouble feeding themselves and their families–like the teachers here. Jack does not have any money because he ‘lends’ it to the teachers. He has even lent a good bit to the headmaster–the man without a character.

Next day is the last day of term and there are no classes. Some of the senior pupils are planting maize: this school has Agriculture as part of the curriculum. The pupils become barelegged gangs, dozens of them invading a field all at once, dropping the maize seeds into holes along lines determined by strings stretched between pegs. They enjoy this work, and sing and even dance at the edges of the fields. Jack works with them. The other teachers, he says, are too good to work in the fields, but he is white and entitled to eccentricity. The teacher called the Agricultural Instructor did not know when to plant the maize, and asked Jack, who did not know, but found out. The maize from last year’s crop was improperly stored, because of the no-good headmaster, and it all went bad. It is still sitting, full of weevils, in a shed.

Two end-of-term parties were in preparation. Form One’s meal was to be stewed goat and sadza. The goat had been killed and its parts were divided into bloody heaps on the ground. The good bits were already stewing. Form Four were having superior food–white bread, a treat. Jack had ordered twenty loaves from the store. They would be eaten without butter or jam. When he was invited to supper with the parents of a pupil, he was offered white bread and tea, and they said, ‘We are poor people, we can’t afford margarine.’

Before we left we tried to visit the clinic but it was closed. One of the teachers said bitterly that there was nothing in it but anti-malaria pills and aspirin. Another said, smiling apologetically, we should take no notice of the first–he was exaggerating, we must understand they were all feeling sad because it was the end of term. A doctor visited the school once a month. When there was an accident or someone got really ill, they were taken to hospital. Please remember that not long ago there was no clinic here at all.

It was hard to say goodbye to Jack. By then we had understood that it was he who was running–or at least tried to–this school. His was the real authority. An impossible position, for no one could acknowledge that he was: not he, not the other teachers.

We drove away under the cold sky, and to the hotel and found the space of the dining-room wantonly, wastefully large after the tiny rooms in Jack’s house. We ate cold meat and salad, apple pie and ice-cream, surrounded by black people, mostly local businessmen, shopkeepers and Chefs, all lucky enough not to be in a bush school with little hope of escape. We thought–of course–of how electric light and clean lavatories, a telephone and running water were not to be taken for granted; reminded ourselves that both of us had been brought up in the bush in houses that had no electric light or running water or indoor lavatories. We were afflicted by that sense of division, foreboding, and anxious incredulity that comes from moving too quickly from utter poverty to the amenities of the hotel in the little provincial town which owes its importance to being on the road north to Zambia.

Then we visited a woman who is involved with the recruiting and supervision of teachers from America and countries in Europe. She said, ‘You would be surprised how many of the headmasters go bad.’ We told her a version of the current joke: What is the most dangerous occupation in Zimbabwe these days? Answer: Headmaster. You’ll be lucky to get away with five years. (Told us by a teacher in Harare, when he heard we were off to visit a secondary school.) She said that when a headmaster ‘goes bad’ often his school is run by youngsters from Britain, Sweden, Germany, but she tells them, ‘Don’t do it. Do what you are supposed to do, no more: you are doing these people no favour by taking over the responsibility. All right–the place goes to pieces. Then one of them will have to face up to it.’ She said it was very hard for young people full of idealism to stand by and watch things go to pieces when they have skills to deal with them. She tells them, ‘You must remember that from the moment you were born you’ve been absorbing the skills of the modern world–you’ve acquired them without even knowing it. But they haven’t. How do you think they are going to learn if you just do it all for them?’

One of the Chefs has just made a speech saying that the ex-pat teachers should all be sent home, there was no need for them. How did she feel about that, we asked?

‘If you’re going to get upset by that kind of thing, you shouldn’t be in Zimbabwe,’ said this strong-minded lady. ‘Anyway, half the speeches they make are for popular consumption.’

We have come away with copies of the school magazine, which Jack started: there wasn’t one until he came. He has taught the senior pupils elementary journalism and lay-out, and has taken them for trips into Harare–at his expense–to visit printing works and the offices of newspapers.

Because of Jack fifty or so of these young people can claim they know at least the basics of how to make a newspaper.

Here is a poem written by one of the brightest girls, who has succeeded in spite of difficulties at home in finding a place and light enough to study, or even read. Her father has three wives, her mother being the senior wife. There are twenty children. She is the seventh of eight children. Her family has great expectations for her. She has a thirty-year-old brother who is a primary school teacher.

Where next dear Brothers and Sisters?