African Laughter (34 page)

‘But surely you must see how much it has changed. Being here is like being in a slow earthquake. I’m surprised any of you can keep a balance.’

‘It seems to us everything is going very slowly.’

Early next morning, when the waiter brings the tea, biscuits, it is raining. I sit up in bed surrounded by the Team’s books and look through the second one, called
Building Wealth in our Villages: An Introduction to Rural Enterprises
.

All cartoons. An attractive young woman says: Zimbabwe’s economy is one of the most heavily dependent on external capital in black Africa. About seventy per cent of the capital is controlled by foreigners, mainly by one hundred and thirty British companies and forty-three South African companies. Foreigners own sixty per cent of Zimbabwe’s industries, ninety per cent of the mines, and nineteen per cent of the farms. Between 1980 and 1983 profits sent outside Zimbabwe amounted to at least 3,330 million dollars.

A young woman exhorts: So it will be a slow and difficult process to change the economy in a way that reduces the gap between the villages and the urban modern sector, and reduces Zimbabwe’s dependence on foreign capital and technology. Another young woman: As village people we should be very actively involved, well informed and well organized for this process, as it is a task the government cannot carry out alone. And for this we need a basic knowledge of Zimbabwe’s economy.

What is economics? One reply is spoken by a middle-aged village woman, another by a middle-aged man.

What is production? Production is the act of transforming the things that come from Nature into usable goods. In order to produce we need the following: Natural Resources, Labour, Capital.

When Chris Hodzi makes these cartoons, he uses people he has seen, watched, listened to, at the meetings he sits through, usually unobserved, sketching. It occurs to me that the books will be a record of the types and kinds of people of this time, everywhere in Zimbabwe, what they wore, how they looked, stood, talked.

No one planned it: but usually the most valuable things just happen.

The books will be in every village in Zimbabwe. The first one is already in every village. Even where schools are bad these books, if they are read, will be as good as an education in citizenship. That wasn’t planned either.

By eight we were in an office for the delayed meeting. It was conducted in Ndebele: both Cathie and Talent speak it. The women come from the poorest areas that have suffered years of drought. They all know about the women’s book, and there is the sense of an important occasion, of hope.

Two memorable moments, both from the past. One when an older woman put the conservative view–there is always one who does, and always the younger women listen in a way that says part of them has to agree. ‘Not all the old ways were bad. We must keep what is valuable in our traditions.’

And the other, when an old woman rebuked a girl who said the law should protect women against rape. Women, she said, have forgotten how to protect themselves. How about that old technique: a girl in a forest is being chased by a man. She lifts her skirts as she runs, shows everything, the man gets weaker and weaker, cannot run, cannot catch her…Everybody laughs, then they remember Chris is there, the only man present. He laughs too, saving the situation.

The meeting ends in laughter and in last minute exhortations from the Team: Matabeleland South is famous for music, remember we need songs and poems for the book. Make up poems and songs if you like.

Then down the stairs we go and into a Toyota Landcruiser supplied by a local office: the work of the Team is valued here. This vehicle is a development of a landrover, larger, more comfortable, high off the earth. You float in it. It can carry a lot of people, and today this is useful because every minute someone else asks if they can come too.

It is still quite early. If you wake at five or six, with breakfast at six-thirty, it can seem the day is half done when it is only eleven. It is grey, it is chilly, and there are puddles. Bulawayo, however, has a festive and even frivolous look, because sky-blue lamp posts adorn every street, so you expect them to have holiday garlands or coloured ribbons.

One woman with us represents yet another organization, but it is not possible to keep count of them all. Long before Liberation she married a black man–she is white–brought up his children, and has gone through all the harassment that went with this situation. She says that bad old Southern Rhodesia has quite gone.

We are on the road north, which would lead to the Victoria Falls if we stayed on it. It was the road where, in 1982, Terrorists kidnapped tourists and then killed three of them. No one remembers this now. The bush on either side is fresh, young, glossy, full of juices. Last time I saw Matabeleland everything was brown and dusty, which is its usual condition. At every turn of the road there are fat goats and cattle. The goats wander about apparently untended, the cattle are behind the fences: these are Commercial Farms, and so the bush is whole and healthy. No game, though: plenty of animals, but they are cattle, goats or donkeys. Animals are animals, I try to tell myself. But sometimes a pair of guineafowl run beside the road, or partridges. At this time of the year the guineafowl are not in flocks, they are pairing, but someone remarked that last year, up near the Wankie coal mine there were so many guineafowl it seemed the earth was moving: there were hundreds of them.

THE GARDEN

People talk about the garden as they did about that potent little shed near Harare. Something about this garden delights them all, but they say, Wait and see. Half way to the Falls we turn off into a Communal Area. In spite of all the rain the bush is thin and scrubby, semi-desert, with low dry hills. Suddenly, in this apparently infertile waste, there is a large lush garden. Out we all pile, and stand together to listen to the story of this garden…we stand shivering, for you simply do not take jerseys to baking Matabeleland and none of us is properly dressed.

All around here are extremely poor villages. On the radio there was a government-inspired talk about ‘projects’, that is, how villages can improve their situation. A garden was mentioned. But this is dry country, with pale Class Four soil…but there was a worked-out gold mine, which had a borehole…

This time it was men and women together who started the garden. It is growing tomatoes, onions, cabbage, mealies, carrots, spinach: you would never believe this soil could do it.

Twenty-four women and nine men invited anyone interested to join the new co-operative. Women work harder than the men, but the men help them, because the family eats better, both because of the garden and what it earns.

We stand looking at half a dozen women working, bent double, knees straight: impossible to work like this, you think, but they do, for hours. Their feet are bare, because of the mud.

When this garden was started there was only poor dry soil. An Extension Worker came and told them how to make irrigation trenches, and contour ridges, and a fence around the whole garden because of the goats. This commune is now closed to new members, but if there was money for a new borehole, another garden could be started. Now everyone wants to start a garden. The whole district is improved because of this one garden.

How are they to get a new borehole? The village representatives men, and women, are hoping the Aid representatives among us will help them.

One of the women with us, representing a modest, not one of the rich, international organizations, was asked for money a couple of years ago, and offered one hundred dollars–about thirty pounds. The man talking for the village is reproachful, if humorous. ‘One hundred dollars,’ he says. ‘What could we do with that?’

The Aid woman says, ‘But I think you told me you had done very well?’

The man continues to stand in front of her, accusing.

‘You bought chickens, and within a year you had made that one hundred dollars into five hundred, so you told me…well, is that true?’

The man laughs and says it is.

‘There you are. How many people have been given hundreds and hundreds of dollars and there is nothing to show for it?’

‘Yes, we know that is true, but we are not that kind of people.’

‘What we are talking about is money for a borehole and my organization doesn’t deal in that kind of money.’

‘Then what are we to do?’

‘You should talk to this man here–if you can talk him into it, he’s the person.’

This man here, one of those who had come with us from town because he knew there would be a visit to the garden, goes aside with the villagers to talk about the possibilities of the borehole.

Our group is now scattered about, and I am standing by myself, when an Extension Worker–in this case a man of about forty, muddy because he had been helping to clear a flooded irrigation ditch–comes hastening up to me. He is laughing in that way which says you will soon be laughing too.

He comes to a stop in front of me, puts on a grave look, and says, ‘You see, Mrs Lessing, you do not understand our problems.’

These words, used by the whites in the old days every time some visitor criticized them, duly make me laugh, and he nods, to register that I had got the point and he could proceed.

‘We are now a civilized country,’ he pronounces, and waits for my response so he can go on with the punchline.

‘I can see that for myself,’ I say.

‘Like every other civilized country we have a corrupt ruling elite,’ says he, and starts shaking all over with laughter.

We laugh. Then he goes back to supervize the irrigation ditch, shaking his head and laughing.

The point was, there had recently been another corruption scandal in Britain.

The people who work this garden are proud, like the people of the shed, that their facilities are free to people who are not members. They can get free seedlings. In return for contributing manure from their beasts, they are given free vegetables.

The gardeners have decided to give up using fertilizer if they can get enough manure. The vegetables grown with fertilizers don’t taste good, they say. If you have one line of vegetables grown with fertilizers and one with manure, you can tell the difference from the first mouthful.

We are shown, with pride, how inside the fence where the garden has been left room to grow, there are holes full of wilting weeds left to rot and make food for the pawpaw trees, guavas and oranges that will be planted soon. With pride, we are shown how, outside the garden, the Blair toilets are half-concealed by masses of feathery pink and white cosmos. The fence is well-kept. The village huts are well thatched.

As we go off towards the Landcruiser, the women come up to sell us vegetables. The housewives among us buy eagerly: vegetables like these cannot be easily found. The women have made a few cents, and they are pleased and proud. This garden, this achievement, which is changing all their lives, has put two thousand dollars into the bank. This is a very great sum to them, even though it must be shared by many people. Nothing could bring home the level of the poverty here more than this: the pleasure of these women because of these few coins, a couple of dollars altogether for a great heap of vegetables. In this poor district, sharply improving the level of a family means being able to buy a pair of shoes for a child at school, or a jersey for a cold day like this one, or a kerosene lamp so that the children can do homework.

I am told there are two good primary schools in the area. The two secondary schools are in the same condition as the one I saw a week ago. The headmaster of one is being charged with embezzling school funds.

All the time we stop to pick people up from the side of the road, and set them down again. The Landcruiser is being seen as a bus, and on this bush road no one seems afraid of giving lifts. What we are discussing is every kind of problem and crisis, but we laugh all the time, particularly at the corruption scandals, and everyone tells stories.

A politician from Harare meets an old friend, an ex-Freedom Fighter, now a Chef, in the street in Bulawayo. This Chef had been in the papers that week for a particularly flagrant bit of theft. The first one says, ‘I don’t think I can afford to be seen with you this week.’ The delinquent one says, ‘What a pity, I was going to ask you to dinner.’ ‘Another time,’ says the first. ‘No, I have the solution,’ says the Chef. ‘Come and stay the night with me, you won’t have to be seen with me in public. And I’ll take you to the house I show the government watchdogs when they come around to see if I am infringing the Leadership Code. I wouldn’t compromise you by showing you my farm, my store, my hotel, my other house, my…’

The Leadership Code imposed by Comrade Mugabe, is supposed, like the Romans’ Sumptuary Law, to check this greedy tide.

They tell a story from Manicaland. ‘Aren’t you ashamed to be so rich, so quickly? Aren’t you afraid the government will punish you?’ ‘No, this government is on the side of the poor, isn’t it? Well, I was a poor man and so the government must be on my side.’

A story about a politician whose wife is infamous for her greed: ‘Oh, he’s a good man, we all know that, he’s incorruptible, who could ever say a word against him? But if you sleep with corruption, then what do you call that?’

In the middle of the jokes and anecdotes there is always the moment when someone says, ‘They think we are stupid because we are poor people. The Chefs forget we are watching them. We know who is good and who is bad.’

‘A lot of corruption is small corruption, but behind every small corruption is a big man’s approval. They should remember it is dangerous to take a government car to ferry rhino horns to the dealers. Rhino poaching has powerful people behind it. The poachers carry powerful guns. Who can afford to pay for such big guns? Only the Chefs.’