African Laughter (29 page)

This girl took six O-levels. She passed two, was ‘the second-best girl’. She got an A in Shona. She passed maths, the hardest exam. She failed English. Later she retook exams, and now is in teacher training college.

Out of the more than eighty who sat English, six passed. But last year no one passed English.

In Zimbabwe today you need five passes to get a job. With three you can train to be a nurse.

Here is a letter from the school magazine:

And

A DISASTROUS MEAL

WITCHCRAFT

This subject arrives in every conversation, sooner rather than later.

The Passionate Apologists at once insist that in Europe ‘everyone’ reads horoscopes, that fortune-tellers flourish, that the United States thinks nothing of voting in a President whose schedule is ruled by an astrologer. How about the revival of witchcraft everywhere in Europe? How about Satanism? What do we have to say about those men of priestly magic who so confidently undertake to exorcize evil spirits? Is it not possible that we may yet see (we: Europe) the burning of witches, and mob violence against Satanism?

(If we have not seen mob violence, we have observed the forces of Reason, that is to say, social workers, using methods of interrogation identical to those once used to convict witches on young people and children suspected of complicity with Satanism.)

In other words, who the hell are you (critics from outside Africa) to talk? Put your own house in order first.

FORTRESS HOUSES

We drove in a few hours right across Zimbabwe, west to east. In Harare we had to drop in at several houses before going home. The verandahs of these houses built for air and sun are barred, making them like cages: all windows are barred now. Around the houses and gardens of the new rich (black) the walls are going up, so that you can’t see inside. Every evening in a certain place you may watch young men being drilled. The unemployed former Freedom Fighters have created an organization that supplies guards for houses. They drill in the late afternoon, using their expertise from the War, and report for duty at the houses as the light goes. They patrol while the owners sleep. As we drive up to the suburb where Ayrton R.’s house is we pass the President’s house. The high walls are heaped with coils of razor wire, and inside patrol guards. When the President drives out through these streets, it is in a limousine with tinted windows, so people cannot see in, and he is in the centre of a motorcade, with armed motorcycle riders. If you are driving through these streets and you hear the sirens of the President’s motorcade, you must drive off into a side street. Otherwise you will be shot at. This is no threat to cow the citizens: people have been known to be shot at if they didn’t get out of the way. I personally know a rather absent-minded young man who was on a motorbike, and did not understand that the sirens meant the approach of the President. People on the pavement yelled at him to stop or he would be killed. He stopped just in time. A doctor was driving along listening to a pop singer called The Wailer on the car radio: he did not hear those other, more urgent, wailers; did not stop or get off the road. His car was sprayed with bullets, though he was unhurt.

When we got home, the house was opened from inside by Dorothy. The locks for the front door are efficient. At night one part of the house, the bedroom part, is locked against the part that can be entered through the glass of the patio. When I am in my room at the end of the house, I have the door open, but the moment I leave that room, which is on the garden, I lock it and remove the key, inserting a little barrel-like device that makes it impossible to open the door from the outside. The windows of the rooms are barred. At night the car is locked with a chain around the steering wheel. Ayrton R. has had one car stolen already. Everyone you meet has had a car stolen.

Harare is turning itself into a copy of Johannesburg, where for a long time houses have had night watchmen and guard dogs and barred windows, and where in the townships it is taken for granted that whatever can be stolen, will be.

A COMMERCIAL FARM (BLACK)

I meet an Agricultural Extension Worker.

What is an Agricultural Extension Worker? you may ask, if still capable of being amazed at the jargon of bureaucrats.

An Agricultural Extension Worker is an expert in Agriculture. But why Extension Worker?

Don’t ask, just don’t bother to ask, but from one end of the world to the other, people who know about crops and soil and beasts are called Extension Workers.

Don’t you
see
? It is an extension of knowledge.

Never mind.

This man had been visiting a large farm once owned by whites, which grew tobacco as the main crop.

‘Tell me,’ I said.

The farmhouse and all the outbuildings were crammed with relatives and friends. The manager, a brother of the owner, who is a Chef and a Minister, was in Harare. Another relative took him around. Everybody living there, getting on for a hundred of them, had planted his or her own personal patch of mealies. Many had a cow or two. These beasts were contentedly running together. There were goats. One of the mysteries of Zimbabwe is that you see goats everywhere but these beasts, called ‘firemouths’ in some countries, don’t seem to be doing damage.

‘No tobacco?’ I asked.

‘No tobacco.’

‘Just mealies and mombies?’

‘And some nice vegetable gardens.’

‘Would you say,’ I cautiously ask, ‘that this is some kind of subsistence farming?’

He looks defensive, but humorous. ‘Yes, that is what I would say.’

He does not say: ‘Well, what is the matter with that?’ since it would contradict government policy.

‘I don’t see what is the matter with that.’

‘I don’t either.’

TALK ON THE VERANDAHS

A lot of the whites put on their barrier creams as they get up in the mornings: there is an increase in skin cancer.

More people get killed by lightning in Zimbabwe than anywhere else in the world.

Lightning often strikes through the doors of huts, and kills people sleeping around the hearth.

Why should lightning bother to do anything of the sort?

Perhaps lightning likes the metal in hoes, or axes, or plates or the bangles on the women?

I contribute: When I was a girl we used to drive through a bit of bush not far from the farm where every tree had been struck by lightning.

Then there must be something in the soil, some rock or mineral, that attracts the lightning there.

A certain academic (white) concerned that so many black girls who get pregnant and want to keep their babies have nowhere to go, because their families throw them out, started a modern refuge, stretching his own and friends’ resources to pay for it. This roused frenzies of anger and disapproval in some people (black) who showed all the self-righteous disapproval we call ‘Victorian’: ‘It’s their fault if they get into trouble isn’t it?’ ‘Why should they expect other people to help them if they are foolish?’

But why ‘Victorian’? I was told recently, by someone who saw it in one of the smart areas of London, that a young couple, charming products of Mrs Thatcher’s Britain, were driving proudly around in a Porsche with a car-sticker that said, To Hell With the Poor!

Another person told me she had seen, outside a smart pub in London’s West End, a group of yuppies sitting and drinking. A beggar came up to them: a young woman took out a five pound note and burned it, laughing, in front of him. It is extremely hard not to wish that these unlikeable people are now out of a job, and downwardly mobile.

A story about the death of Samora Machel supposed to be murdered by the South Africans. Told by a young white woman.

‘That was the only time I have been scared in Zimbabwe. The young blacks were rampaging about the streets looking for whites to beat up. They did beat up some old white women. My husband saw it. He was looking down from a high window and thought, What a pretty demonstration, with all those green branches, and then he saw the beatings. I was at a meeting for the death of Samora Machel, and it was being addressed by a famous rabble-rouser, you know, all big mouth and hot air. He was going on about the CIA, they are the scapegoat for anything and everything. He said, “The CIA are well-known for a thought technique of inhibiting you from speaking. I was speaking at a meeting and then suddenly my voice left me. I knew it was them.” The man was crazy, but the audience loved it. He went from bad to worse, and I was so bored I kept falling asleep. I thought, this is dangerous, if they see I am asleep they might start beating me up. One word from this maniac and they’d do anything. I really understood the word rabble-rouser that day.’

AT A SLIGHT ANGLE

This Commercial Farm is only five miles from our old farm where I still cannot bring myself to go. Ayrton R. thinks–and so do I–that my neurotic behaviour cannot be permitted to go on, and meanwhile this visit will be a bridge–a stepping-stone–a gentle breaking-in.

The hills I grew up with, not to mention the Dyke, are all present, but at an angle.

Where this farm is now was land not ‘opened up for development’, for it was still bush when as a girl I used to visit a farm just over a ridge from here, for a week or so at a time. The attraction of that farm was stronger than any other because it was full of books, different from those in our bookcases, mostly modern novels of the kind my mother was sure were corrupting. I used to walk by myself in bush different from ours, although so close, for everywhere were kopjes crammed with granite boulders. The house itself was on a hill of boulders, inserted among them, accommodating itself to them, and most of its fabric was granite. What effect on us all did this granite have? I wonder. All the time I was there I was forced to check on ‘the view’, the hills I knew so well, but this askew perspective created valleys and crags invisible from our verandah. To be whisked from one landscape immovably the same for years through every change of sun and cloud to another, only slightly different, is an assault on some inner balance you have learned to rely on. To return after years to your childhood landscape pulled slightly out of whack tests the landscape you remember, filling you with doubt as dreams do.

We arrived on this new farm in the late afternoon, the shadows black on sunny grass, just as the farmer’s wife was leading half a dozen horses towards their field. She didn’t feed them, she said, they fed themselves off the bush. Didn’t we think they looked well? They never got sick, she never had to dose them, the vet was never needed. They were splendid horses, glowing in the sun, pleased with themselves after their day free in the bush.

And there was the deep verandah, full of furniture designed for lolling about in. This farmer is middle-aged, lean, brown, taut with energy and ideas and before we have sat down he is off–the government, the wrong-headedness of Mugabe, the impossibility of farming without spare parts and machinery, but this complaint is not where his heart lies, for what we then listened to was a cataract of ideas about farming, a philosophy.

At once I am taken right back to
then
because there was always at least one farmer in The District who was obsessed, possessed, with news emanating from some research institute or university–the States, Argentina, Scotland, South America–which would condemn all present farming ideas to the rubbish heap. No need to weed the fields, one should plant among weeds; no need to use fertilizer, if one didn’t fertilize the soil itself would adjust and find sustenance in the air; a waste of time to stump out trees and make fields: much better plant among the trees. These ideas and a hundred others appeared on the verandahs, usually because of one farmer. My father for a time was that farmer. More accurate, I think, to see this character, wild, inventive, iconoclastic, less as a person than as an abiding layer or subsidiary personality in every farmer, for one never knew when some chance remark would bring it to the surface. ‘Oh, by the way, did you read in the
Farmer’s Weekly
that letter saying the way to stop flocks of guineafowl following the planters and eating up the seed as it falls is to perfume the seed-hoppers with garlic, or, better still, plant a clove of garlic with each maize seed?’ Expensive? Well, yes, but why be petty? What matters is the
idea
, the perfection of it, abolishing a problem with one majestic flash of the imagination.