African Laughter (30 page)

Five of us set off on a walk around the farm, or to use the old manorial style, around the lands. I am going down on the lands, he is on the lands, she is on the lands but I’ll tell her when she gets back from the lands that…

Late afternoon. The sun is preparing to become a sunset. The birds’ conversation is still full of daytime concerns, but will soon change key into the minor mode, and what sounds like regret that the day is over. We leave behind in the house various growing children, a fiancée, her brothers, and an assortment of visitors and friends, as in a Russian novel.

We listen to the farmer, whose discourse is a lament for the way we use the world.

‘No, you don’t understand, if you want to understand agriculture you must look at everything differently. All farming is unnatural, it is an assault on Nature. The moment the first farmer put a spade into the earth it was the beginning of our war on Nature. And now we have reached the point where it is a race between Man and Nature. Who is going to win? I tell you who, it is Nature.’ We stand on a muddy track between fields of tobacco, smelling strong because of the rain that is lying in deep puddles along the ruts. ‘We fill fields full of just one plant, that isn’t Nature’s way, it is our way. Nature attacks with a disease or a bug. So we attack Nature with a chemical. Nature evolves the plant so it can deal with the chemical, or the bug mutates. We make another chemical. All these fields are soaked with chemicals. Last year we were spraying this field when the rain came down hard suddenly. We ran for it. The rain washed the poison down into the earth, there wasn’t time for it to get weak in the sun and the air. And now look.’ At the edge of the field was a twenty-yard area where the tobacco plants were stunted. ‘Poisoned. Sometimes you can see what we are doing with our poisons. That one was for eelworm. Do you want to see eelworm?’

We stumble about among plants that send up rank sweet fumes into our brains, tobacco, as seductive green as it is when dry and ready to smoke, and the farmer pulls up a deformed plant and stands holding it in both hands, looking down at it with respect, an enemy contained, not defeated. ‘Nature comes up with eelworm. We poison it. But a newly stumped-out field has no pests. You have a couple of years’ grace before the pests build up. We laugh at the African’s old way, stumping out a bit of land, using it, then moving on–they didn’t have the build-up of pests. Of course there isn’t land enough in the world now to farm like that. If we farmed like that in Zimbabwe everyone would starve.’

We walk on, listening, avoiding puddles. ‘It’s all a balance, and you have to understand that. We stake our claim–unnatural practices, plants we grow in fields of hundreds of acres, but Nature likes a mix. She takes a step forward–so do we, it’s a race. We have to be a step ahead all the time, but where is it going to end? I’ll tell you, we’re too damned clever by half and Nature is going to have the last word.’

Now on one side of the road is bush, real bush, and the farmer’s wife directs our attention to some orchids. We all step into the bush and admire the plants: there are several in that small patch of bush. ‘There you are,’ says the farmer, coming to stand by us. ‘We don’t know why that plant has decided to grow just there, why it likes just this bit of soil. But look…’ And he stands feet apart, and lifts up a double handful of the earth, which is a mix of soil crumbs, leaf mould, birds’ droppings, and minerals washed from the stones. He gazes down at the earth in his hands. ‘There, that’s real soil,’ he says. ‘Not the rubbish we have in our fields, full of chemicals, that’s not soil. If you saw them without plants…the soil is like brick rubble, it’s dead. No, that’s not earth. This is it.’ His hands hold the bush soil delicately, with respect. We stand for a while in silence. The sun is down behind the trees, outlining them in yellow, and the birds’ voices make the transition to evening sadness. ‘There, look at it,’ says he, ‘just look.’ And he lets it trickle through his fingers, back on to the floor of grasses and flowers and weeds. ‘There, you see? I’ve disturbed the balance just doing that. We stand here and we don’t know what damage we are doing with our feet, what organisms we are killing, what pests we have brought in from the road. We are going to step back on to the road and Nature will have to work hard to put right the damage we’ve done. Before the whites came the blacks moved about in the bush but they didn’t harm it, not until they started turning the soil over and planting crops. What crops? Most of them are imports. Look at maize. How do we know what bugs the Portuguese brought in with maize? We don’t know! We don’t care! Well, don’t care was made to care…you ought to be able to stick a finger easily into real soil.’ He bends and does so. ‘See that? Better have a good look, because with what we are doing to the world we won’t see that anywhere, soon.’

The farmer’s wife silently indicates some Christmas lilies on an antheap. They are also called spider lilies. Each bloom is like a delicate red and yellow claw and once we used to pick them in armfuls to decorate our houses at Christmas. No one would pick them recklessly now. She shows us another plant. ‘The horses like this one. We don’t know why. When they come in from the bush you can always smell the plant on their noses.’

The men stride off into a field. The farmer’s wife and I stand looking at the reddish gold light of sunset touching the white flowers on a bauhinia tree. These flowers are delicate, like the spider lilies or the orchids: the high veld’s flowers are never heavy and damp and solid-fleshed like those of the tropics. They are fragile, and light, and their smell is dry, teasing, spicy.

The sunset leaps up the sky in a wash of reddish gold. The trees are black and silent and the birds, if they are awake, have nothing to say. We walk in silence along the farm track. A long way behind us the farmer’s lament can just be heard, but now it is hard to distinguish it from the voices coming from the farm township over the ridge–where, of course, side by side with the farm workers, live so many other people who officially are not there at all.

We walk companionably back to the house in the dark. An owl…another. The smell of horses. A soft whinny greets the farmer’s wife and she calls softly to them. There is a rush of hooves in the dark, and for a while she stands by the fence, a small dark figure reaching up to the horses’ heads, brought into sight by white-fringed ears, or the blaze on a forehead.

We join the men as the farmer is saying, ‘The blacks are not interested in our ideas about efficiency. Look…’ A man on a bicycle emerges from the dark. The farmer commands, ‘Stop.’ The man’s dark shape becomes defined as he halts, one foot on the ground. He is smiling. ‘Have you got brakes on your bicycle?’ asks the farmer. ‘No.’ ‘I can see you haven’t got a light.’ No reply. ‘All right,’ says the farmer, ‘that’s all, off you go.’ ‘Good night,’ says the man, and pedals off.

‘There must be dozens of bicycles on the farm and not one of them has lights, not one has brakes that work. They ride the bikes everywhere, through the bush, up hills, along dongas. Slowly everything falls off, brakes, mudguards, handlebar grips, pedal rubbers, everything. Or if they don’t fall off they are stolen, and no one bothers to replace them.’

We stand in the dark looking at the black shape of the low wide house, which is spilling out yellow light, and we are thinking, or Africa thinks through us, ‘What do you need lights for, when you know the tracks so well? You don’t really need brakes, you can always use a foot. Why grips on handlebars? All you need for a pedal is a bar for your foot. Why make life so complicated? The bike goes doesn’t it? It carries you from place to place? Well, then, what’s the fuss about?’

‘Ye-e-e-yes,’ says the farmer ‘that’s how it is.’

And we go in to supper. All the food came off the farm. There was no servant, he had gone home. The family laid the table, served, cleared it and washed up.

At supper I ask about the people who used to live on the farms near here. Some names are instantly remembered. ‘Of course! So and so! He had the farm across the river. Yes, and
they
were there until the War. Of course we remember.’ But other names get no response at all, yet they were people who lived on farms next to the people who are remembered. ‘Who? I’ve never heard that name. Commander Knight, you say?’

‘Yes, he was a character, everyone knew him. He was one of the eccentrics–you know, the larger-than-life characters of those days.’ Here various members of the family give the farmer significant looks and smiles which he acknowledges, good-humouredly. ‘He was on the farm just four miles away. He tamed leopards. Or tried to.’

‘Never heard of him.’

After supper we lolled about over sofas and enormous chairs, arms around dogs and cats. There is an old-fashioned wind-up gramophone, restored as an antique by someone in Harare, and cases of records stand waiting for someone to wind up the gramophone and play them. Ancient tunes like ‘Paloma’, and ‘Red Sails in the Sunset’ resound tinnily and I explain to disbelieving youngsters that once on these verandahs were dances that went on until dawn, with no more music than these same wind-up gramophones, that had to be attended to hour after hour by relays of people, wallflowers or people prepared to sacrifice themselves. They murmur that they wish they had been taught to dance, in the same tones one might use to say, What a pity we don’t dance the minuet. I say that in Britain this kind of dancing is fashionable again, but their faces have that look: it is interesting to hear of the customs of far-off places.

The farmer is describing his dream: he would like this farm to become a kind of commune, though he does not use the word. The newly engaged couple are already established in the house built for them a hundred yards away. Another little house accommodates parents. A son would like to buy the farm along the road: he has all the qualifications for this kind of high-tec farming. ‘Families should stay together,’ says the farmer, using the same words used by the black agricultural expert or Extension Worker on the Jesuit farm near Harare. The two men have everything in common, not only their knowledge of farming, for one is a patriarch by tradition, the white man by chance of character. And what do the children of the patriarch think of these plans? They smile, but do not say. And what of a daughter, married to a South African who only understands streets and offices, and could not farm? ‘That will be easy,’ says the farmer, but frowning a little. He has planned it all out. The daughter can come here for she is a Zimbabwean, and bring her husband. The couple can run canoe trips and manage tourist chalets on the edge of the lake that will soon be here, only three or four miles away. The farmer has agreed to lose forty acres of his farm to the new lake, but he intends to reap the benefits.

‘Chalets and canoe trips,’ I protest, for he is talking about a particularly magnificent bit of wilderness under the hills.

Ayrton R. protests, ‘It will be just like Kariba.’

‘Not at all. These things can be done with taste.’

My room, at the back of the house, is vast. There are toys pushed to the backs of cupboards. As well as screening for mosquitos there are heavy bars on the windows: the Bush War was bad in these parts. This kind of country, all kopjes and heaped boulders and ravines and thick trees, was made for guerilla war. In the bathroom spiders and flying ants and moths make for the light or fall into the bath. In London one spider demands appropriate measures: a towel draped over the bath so the creature can climb out, or a tin lid for water, somewhere low, since they die of thirst: they go in search of water under our taps. Here you take no notice, it is Africa, there are too many of them. Once I was visiting a farm near Nairobi, which I remember most for its posse of Arab horses that were brought up to the house to be petted and fed sugar lumps. But I also remember the caterpillars. Occasionally caterpillars invaded the house in thousands, and one had simply to wait for them to go away, brushing them off chairs, beds, the dining table. After a bit you hardly notice them–I was told.

I wake in the night to listen–what for? The tom-toms that used once to beat all night from every farm compound. But it is as if a pulse has ceased to beat. The night is dark and almost silent. Through the bars come the small sounds that say the bush is awake, birds and small animals and once a dog barking from the farm village.

In the morning we wake at different times and sit on the verandah drinking coffee. The farmer’s wife is out riding. The farmer has already been out on the lands, and now he is entertaining us. This morning it is medicine. ‘We need a cure for a disease, but the doctors don’t know about it. We get it often, whites and blacks. Your limbs are like lead, you have a sore neck and shoulders, and you can’t move them, everything aches, you wish you were dead. Then it goes. I think it is an insect bite, perhaps it is like tsetse or malaria. You have a certain kind of stomach upset. You go to the doctor, he says it is flu. It isn’t flu. The Africans know it isn’t flu. We know it isn’t flu.’

The farmer’s wife comes back, and we set off for a walk, all of us.

The farm’s pigs are–it goes without saying–allowed to forage for themselves, no battery pigs on this farm. They are a small energetic company, who present themselves for recognition and greetings.

The farmer says everyone underestimates the intelligence of animals. If we knew what they thought of us, we wouldn’t like it. Also, their sense of humour. Pigs play practical jokes on each other. So do calves. Young animals play games, like children. Sometimes he takes himself into a field where the calves are and he sits down quietly under a bush until they forget he is there, and he watches them play king-of-the-castle, pushing each other off an anthill until one of them wins. Then the winner comes down and they start the game again. It is nearly always the same calf that wins: the aristocracy of Nature, you have to understand it, Nature knows nothing about democracy. There is always a buffoon in a crowd of young animals, a prankster who makes the others laugh. You think animals don’t laugh? Don’t you believe it! See that little pig over there? He’s the runt of the litter, he’s full of tricks and they laugh at him.