African Laughter (35 page)

‘During the Bush War the Comrades used to listen to the people and take our advice. Now they have forgotten to do this.’

‘The once-honoured word Comrade should be shed or used for crooks and criminals. They have given up using it in some communist countries. When people start using the word sarcastically, then it’s enough.’

They talk about Joshua Nkomo, with affection, with approval. It is forgotten he was so long in the wilderness, accused of every kind of rebellion and sedition, and it is as if he has always been up there among the Chefs, an architect of Zimbabwe, and a good man.

There is a story going about. Nkomo visits a certain shrine in the Matopos, and there the ngangas greet him as Lobengula: he is the old king reincarnated, or at least, he is animated by the old king’s spirit.

‘You would not listen to us when you were Lobengula,’ he is chided by the wise ones. ‘You did not listen when you fought the British and were defeated, as we warned you would happen. Are you now that Lobengula who was disobedient to the voices of the ancestors, or are you he who will do what we say?’ Joshua says humbly: ‘I am he who will do what you say.’ ‘Then you will have honour, a long life and a great public position.’

Is this story true? It illustrates a feeling about Joshua Nkomo, as much as it does the need for continuity in a society that has been so violently and so often disrupted in the last hundred years.

In the hotel at dinner there are a lot of us, and we sit a long time talking. Sylvia is at the head of the table; her daughter, who is learning the hotel trade, is at the bottom. It is Sylvia’s turn to tell us the story of her life. We listen as people seem to do at this time, judging it as a strand in that epic, the Making of Zimbabwe.

Sylvia was the child of a polygamous marriage, was brought up to obey, to say no more than Yes or No in the company of her elders, never dared to criticize her parents. But she is married in the modern way with a husband who helps her, takes equal responsibility for everything, and when she is on these trips is responsible for the children–women’s work, according to the old ideas. Her daughter has taken just as large a step forward. I cannot see any difference between her and any seventeen-year-old girl from Europe. She is pretty, lively, independent.

We ask her to tell us what the new generation is thinking.

She replies smiling, with a relish and pleasure in what she is saying, knowing how it must strike us, and particularly her mother. She is not being unkind, her manner says, but she has been asked to say her piece: clearly all this has been discussed with her friends. She is indeed speaking for her generation.

‘First of all,’ says she, taking sips from her glass–Zimbabwe wine, which she is judging as a student in training–‘we stay at home with our mothers as long as possible, because that means we don’t have to get married and have a husband telling us what to do. We aren’t going to get married until we are independent in our work and can do as we like. Secondly, we aren’t at all grateful for all the sacrifices our parents have made for us–we don’t care about the War of Independence and all the people who have died for our sake, and the people who went without an education because they were fighting–all that. We want to have a good time. We are going to have a good life. We know we are selfish. But that’s how we are. You asked.’

Her eyes are bright with mischief. We have listened to her with, we hope, good grace. Talent is the one who has sacrificed most for Zimbabwe, but tonight she is tired and only smiles. Cathie, I think, is genuinely shocked. Sylvia, the mother, a handsome queenly downright woman, who you might expect to react strongly, is looking humorous. Chris, the same generation as the girl, is regarding her from the point of view of one much less privileged. He has a hard life, for you don’t earn much’ money drawing cartoons for these books.

The girl goes on to tell us how she has planned her life. When she has graduated–very well, this goes without saying–she will make sure she is in a really good hotel in Harare and then she will go to a good hotel in Europe.

When she has gone to bed I point out that her speech could have been made–is being made–word by word, by young people in the Soviet Union: I read about it only a week ago. ‘We don’t care about your war, your sufferings, your sacrifices…we don’t care about you. You’ve made a mess of it, and now we are going to look after ourselves.’

Has it occurred to you–someone said–that it was the generation with all those high ideals and beautiful thoughts that did make such a mess of so much? What makes us think these selfish children will do worse?

Before I go to bed–late, it is nine o’clock–a visiting United Nations official buys me a coffee and supplies me with the international point of view.

There is a new word for certain African governments: they are kleptocracies, he says. But yes, Zimbabwe does have something the others don’t. Let’s hope Mugabe recognizes it. There has never been a country that began with such a fund of goodwill. But he treats his people as if they were enemies.

I say it is because–from what people say–he never meets any of the ordinary people, he lives in an ivory tower surrounded by sycophants.

But, says he, that’s what all these leaders do. They meet no one but each other, at international conferences, and since they are all crooks they think everyone is.

Mugabe, I say, is not a crook. I tell him this story–heard from guess who, an Extension Worker–that morning: ‘Comrade Mugabe? Yes, he has his faults, he is a human being. But look at Tanzania, there they have a saint for a leader and look at the trouble they are in. How about Zambia?–you could say Kenneth Kaunda is a quarter of a saint. Who would want to be in the trouble Zambia is in? No, we don’t want a saint for a leader.’

‘That’s quite sophisticated,’ concedes the United Nations.

‘They are sophisticated.’

‘Village people, you said?’

‘You should try meeting some.’

‘If they’re still telling jokes then they’re lucky. You can’t make jokes in Zambia. If you so much as ask them the time they look over their shoulders to see if the secret police is listening. They are not only authoritarian and corrupt but it’s a mess and a disaster.’

‘This country isn’t.’

‘Not yet.’

‘What an optimist.’

‘I’ve spent too much time in Africa.’

We discuss why African states become corrupt. ‘After all, no new Party or leader decides, Now we are going to have a corrupt country.’

‘No, corruption just creeps up on them,’ he says.

‘Perhaps it just crept up on Zambia and Tanzania and the rest, but it can’t just creep up on Zimbabwe, because they have the example of the others.’

‘It
has
just crept up on them.’

‘But Mugabe is trying,’ I said.

‘I see you’ve succumbed to the place. People do,’ he said. ‘What you don’t see is that Mugabe can’t really do anything because if he put all the crooks in prison he wouldn’t have any supporters left.’

‘Nonsense. You never leave Harare or Bulawayo, you people.’

And next day at breakfast very early in the dining-room, I hear an Aid worker, American, telling the same United Nations man, ‘If Mugabe misses this chance, if he screws it up then it’ll be a tragedy. How often does a leader have all this energy behind him? The Revolution might have gone bad up there…’ (he means Harare) ‘but down in the villages it is still the future. What will it be like if all this optimism goes sour? This level of expectation is not something you can call into being with a few speeches or a Party rally–no, what goes on in the Communal Areas and Resettlement Areas has all the War of Liberation behind it. It
is
the Revolution.’

‘Well,’ says the United Nations, ‘I’m going to have to take your word for it.’

But this corruption everyone talks about, day and night, obsessed with it, which, so it is claimed, makes investment in Zimbabwe an impossibility: compared to the financial scandals that perennially rock Britain, Japan, the United States, France, Germany, it is rather like some delinquent adolescent robbing a child’s piggy bank. Later, in London, I put this point of view to a money man, a City of London man, and he said, obviously surprised at my inability to grasp essentials, ‘Don’t you see? Before a country can go in for that kind of thing it has to have a decent infrastructure.’

And now it is the next day and we are driving south through the Matopos, handsome granite bush-covered hills and I find myself agreeing with Dorothy and with Ayrton R. who say this is the best part of the country. It is not only beautiful, but full of shrines and magical places. Then the hills are left behind and we are in a part even poorer than yesterday.

‘This lot complain all the time, they’re not like the people we met at the garden.’

Someone suggests that there isn’t that energetic individual who so often originates change. Cathie, that fireball of a woman, who sparks off effort and enterprise anywhere she is, does not find it easy to agree because she is committed on principle to groups working together. But in the end it is agreed that when you go to an area and find ‘projects’ successful and people optimistic then the reason often is that some woman, some man–an individual–has been the yeast.

Soon we are in a Growth Point and the office is in fact the old farmhouse of a bought-out white farm, and sixty or so people, mostly women, are on and around the big verandah where for so many years a thousand tea trays, drink trays, were brought by black servants for the farmer, his family, his guests. Presumably that square shed at the back was the kitchen. In front the bush is sparkling and fresh, and a dozen goats are making the most of it.

Just as the meeting begins, one of our company says she has heard there is a meeting about AIDS just down the road, and off she goes to find out about it.

There are five men present, one the village chairman. They sit quietly while Cathie and Talent say this book for women will be written by the women themselves, and ask them to suggest subjects. Which turn out to be the same as we have heard at the other meetings.

The tone changes when a woman demands to know why they are not allowed to do other kinds of work: why can’t they drive buses, for instance?

The chairman says that women are not built physically for driving buses: they can’t climb up to the top of buses to lift down luggage.

A woman: ‘Suddenly we hear about our weakness. No one mentions our weaknesses when we are planting the crops and growing the crops and hoeing the crops and harvesting the crops and cooking the food and bringing up the children and building the houses and putting roofs on the houses…’ she would go on, but the chairman stops her: he is not the chairman of this meeting, and some women shout at him, saying so.

He says, ‘It is your duty to do these things for your husband.’

‘And whenever we criticize the men for being lazy, then suddenly the talk is of Duty.’

‘But,’ the man insists, full of calm conviction, ‘it is your duty.’

At this, in comes that older woman who has to speak for tradition: she says there was good in the old days and the baby must not be thrown out with the bath-water, freedom for women is for outside the home, but inside the old ways are best. ‘Well spoken, mother,’ says the chairman.

Groans and laughter. There seems to be something in this particular mix of people that makes for confrontation. Yet it is not ugly: there is laughter, joking, nothing of the cold vindictive hatred of men some feminists make their rule and try to enforce on others.

‘Why is it there are still so few women in leadership?’ a man asks. He is not being provocative.

‘Because men say that equal rights do not mean
they
should look after children and cook food.’

‘My husband sits around waiting to be served even when I have done all the work and I am sick and he hasn’t worked all day.’

Another woman says, ‘I came home from the field yesterday, my husband says, Why isn’t the water ready for me to wash?–I put on the water, and he says, Why is my food not ready?–I take the washing water off and I put the porridge water on and he says, What is this, why have I not washed?’

The traditionalist woman says severely, ‘Some women are too lazy to build a fire large enough to take two pots.’

‘But I did not have time to go for firewood because the goats were in the field and I had to protect the plants. You forget, now the children are in school, we do not have their help.’

A silence. Everyone wants the children to be in school, but their labour is missed. The women’s lives are even harder.

‘And,’ goes on the complaining woman, ‘my husband would not help me with the goats when I asked him.’

‘Because it is not men’s work,’ says the chairman.

‘What then is man’s work?’ enquires a woman sweetly. She is one of the large formidable females who, I am told, are often the will behind a local women’s group. She is typically middle-aged, her children are grown-up, she may well be without a man. She is likened to the market mammies of West Africa, financially resourceful, hard-working traders. But here she does not have her niche, as she does in West Africa: she still has to make a place for herself.

The chairman confronts her, ‘God has ordained the differences between men and women.’

At this one of the white participants, from America, asks, ‘Then why are the roles of men and women different in every part of the world? Now everyone moves about the world so much, we know how different all the cultures are and we can no longer say, God has ordained this and that.’

A woman remarks, with humour, that she has never travelled further than Harare, to visit her sister, and there her sister complains about her husband just as she does.

And now the subject of Maintenance, which has been discussed with passion at every meeting. There is a new law, welcomed by liberals and progressives, that men abandoning women must be made responsible for the children. In the villages this law is seen differently; the respectable married women are angry.

‘Already our husbands have two families, a new one in the town, leaving their real wives at home. They spend all their money on the new women. Our children go hungry. These town women are prostitutes. If they are given money for their children by the government then our husbands will find it even easier to abandon us.’