African Laughter (36 page)

Says the chairman, ‘If you want to know why your husbands take new women then you have only to look at your wedding photographs.’

This cruel remark causes indignation, not anger as some of the observers thought it deserved.

The women exclaim, exchange irritated remarks. ‘These bad women have only themselves to look after.’ ‘They can afford a new dress and lipstick.’ ‘I can’t afford even to buy soap to wash my children with, let alone myself.’ ‘I haven’t had a new dress for five years.’ ‘Yes, and sometimes a prostitute is maintained by four or five men who give her their money. No wife can compete.’

The chairman, ‘Women are beautiful when they marry, then they neglect themselves.’

‘We are overworked, don’t you understand?’

‘No, he doesn’t understand, because men never work.’

‘Why do you say that when you all know I work hard for you as village chairman?’

‘I wish I had your job.’ ‘Yes, and I do too.’ ‘And I.’ A lot of laughter. The women are looking at him as they might at one of their naughty children.

Then, the question of disabled women. Often men rape these women, then there are children and no one to look after them. The government should help disabled women to get work. And men should be considerate: they shouldn’t sleep with disabled women.

The chairman remarks, ‘She may be crippled but she is all right.’

All through this he maintains a calm, smiling, magisterial look, never loses his dignity for a moment. Is he being deliberately provocative? I can see that Cathie and Talent are whispering together, looking at him, and wondering exactly that. Sylvia is as calm and authoritative as he is, while she disassociates herself from this brutality. Chris the artist–goes on drawing.

‘The men who do these things should be arrested,’ says a woman, challenging the chairman direct, but he merely smiles.

Cathie and Talent suggest the women should make up a song about a man who impregnates a crippled woman and abandons her.

‘And we will make him sing it,’ suggests someone–to the chairman.

‘Yes, I will sing it,’ says he. ‘I have a good voice.’

A pause. Then a middle-aged woman remarks that the old laws were not always good. If a girl fell in love with a man her parents did not like, she could not marry him. The women look at her in a way that says she is telling her own story. There are murmurs of sympathy.

This meeting ends, like the others, with promises from the Team to be back in a few months to collect all the material.

Then, as always, there is a song. The message is vigorous but the tune is sad: it is an old tune. Some of the African songs are as naturally sorrowful as Russian songs, designed to break your heart even when on jolly subjects.

That is one song. Then another:

And now, a hymn tune:

And there is a great circle of women dancing. Women come in from everywhere around, hearing the music. Some drop out and stand ululating and clapping. A few have babies on their backs.

As we go to the car, escorted by everybody, the woman returns who has been at the AIDS meeting. She is half-laughing, half-furious. There is in existence a proper well-made educational film about AIDS, giving facts, explaining dangers. But the local mission nuns have vetoed it. No one seems surprised the nuns have the power to do this. The same nuns, I was told, burned
The Grass is Singing
, my first novel, having remarked it was a good book, but dangerous.

The film actually shown said that AIDS was a danger to homosexuals and to drug-users. But homosexuality is not part of African culture; in Africa AIDS is a heterosexual disease. No one here has heard about drugs stronger than marijuana which grows everywhere and is part of the culture. Several hundreds of school children, some as young as nine or ten, have sat uncomprehending through this film and are at this very moment dispersing, bewildered.

The local doctor has said that five people died of AIDS in the last few weeks, in this area. That is, the acknowledged deaths from AIDS. Since no one knows anything about AIDS, a person may die of it and all you hear is: my brother got too thin, and he had swellings and then he died.

As we climb into the Landcruiser a village man says to me, ‘You have chosen a good time to visit Matabeleland. The Unity Accord has made us happy. The Dissidents have stopped making our lives a misery. We had a good harvest last year. The rains are good this year. And–of course!–there will never be another drought in our Matabeleland.’ Everyone laughs, and to the sound of laughter we leave the Growth Point.

The train to Harare left on time. In the early morning, after coffee and biscuits, I went to stand in the corridor. Six women seemed a lot in that one compartment.

Two windows down a young smartly dressed girl stood watching the bush go past. A couple of duiker grazed their way into a gum plantation. A partridge ran madly beside us, as if racing the train.

A young man, handsome, a dandy, watched the girl from the end of the corridor. He came sauntering down, politely apologized as he squeezed past me, and began with, ‘Where are you going? It’s a nice day, I think. Haven’t I seen you before?’ She jabbed her toe into the corridor wall, and hung her head: maidenly bashfulness a culture away from her dress, her shoes, the pink beret. He chatted on–whimsical, frankly trying to charm her. But the courtship made slow progress. She would not respond, she simply would not, but went on poking her toe at the wood, and hung her head.

Suddenly she could not prevent herself letting out a giggle. He laughed out loud with his victory, clapped his hands and spun around on his heels. After that it took him five minutes to get her to say yes to meeting him in Harare that night, in a bar, for a drink. ‘And who knows? We may like each other and go and eat some sadza together.’ As if that hanging head, the sulky indifference, had never been, she chatted animatedly with him for the remaining hour into Harare.

THE TRAVELLING CLASSES

An evening in Harare spent with academics, journalists from various countries, politicians in and out of office, some farmers, musicians, a mixed lot black and white. What do they all have in common? They travel, they make comparisons, they are of the travelling class.

If it is hard for most of the white people to leave Zimbabwe, then for nearly all the black people it is impossible, and the world outside Southern Africa hardly exists.

The academics present have been out on scholarly missions. The journalists, by definition, get about. The farmers have relatives in Europe. The politicians, like their kind everywhere in the world, are always off on Committees, Commissions, Conferences.

Something extraordinary has happened.

The young Zimbabwe began with the naïvest, most untutored enthusiasm for communism. The newspapers printed nothing critical of communist countries. The Gorbachev revolution was hardly mentioned. The self-criticisms of the Soviet Union went unnoticed. That Stalin is no longer the Father of his people but rather a murdering maniac has passed most people by.

Sometimes one is tempted to believe that the mental attitudes of a country have something to do with its sun and soil. Old Southern Rhodesia was the same, complacently indifferent to the outside world. Leaving it was like leaving a stunned or a drugged country. The only comparable places are in certain Mid-Western States in America, where curiosity about the world ends at, let’s say, the borders of Iowa or Nebraska. A university audience will hardly know where Afghanistan is–or Sri Lanka, or Pakistan. In California sun-drugged youngsters will stare at the mention of Gorbachev.

Similarly, Zimbabwe. You may spend an evening with a professor of history, or of literature, whose attitudes towards the Soviet Union or China are identical with those of thirty years ago. Someone may remark–wearily, since they have learned the uselessness of it–‘But the Russians themselves are debating the forced collectivization of the peasants, Stalin’s purges.’ ‘Nothing but capitalist propaganda’ comes the prompt reply, with all the self-righteousness of the True Believer. An inaugural address to a new year of students may begin with a set-piece of praise for the achievements of our great brother the Soviet Union, but these do not include the courageous self-examination of the last five years, because the illustrious academic has never heard of them. If some intrepid person remarks, ‘But you can hear the Soviet Union’s criticisms of itself, on the shortwave radio, at most hours of the day or night’–then the faces of these survivors, the Stalinists, put on the shrewd seasoned look of those who have known and seen it all: they aren’t going to be fooled, not they!

One of the bad effects communism has had on the West, perhaps the worst, is that generations of politicoes have learned politics from what is described as ‘the communist style of work’. ‘The Leninist style of work’. This style of work demands a sneering jeering language, based on a moral contempt for opponents, which suffuses the mind and character and prevents any kind of thinking that isn’t on the level of the school playground. I grew up when ‘everyone’ was a communist. (‘Everyone has been a communist; no one remains a communist.’) People like me can recognize from one look at some representative of the ‘hard left’ on television, that scarcely-concealed glitter of mendacity, the pride at cleverness that knows how to outwit opponents with election rigging, or the fixing of statistics, character assassinations, the whole ‘bag of tricks’. This immediately recognizable look, the equivalent of laying a finger against a nose with a slow wink is, unfortunately, not recognized by people who were not young when ‘everyone’ was in ‘The Party’. And that means they have no defence against it.

The upheavals in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe send shockwave after shockwave to undermine the old guard, but in more isolated parts of the world, tucked away in university departments and institutes of higher learning, they survive, proud of ‘the bag of tricks’, the ‘style of work’, deliberately refusing to know not only that their great exemplars have self-destructed, but that all the mental attitudes associated with them have gone too. These little crooks can never see themselves as others see them, since they identify with Lenin the pure. They do great damage, because the idealism of young people who learn to see through them goes sour, for they become angry, then cynical and are often turned away from any kind of politics, or even ordinary service to the community.

In Zimbabwe, 1988, the travelled ones know what goes on in the Soviet Union and China, the communist world to which, in theory, they belong, and will discuss it all with sophistication and worldly wisdom. But the ordinary citizens know nothing. Privilege in our world often resides in this: that people have information. Did anyone plan this? Of course not. It just happened, this mental tyranny; and it is perpetuated by Stalinist woodenheads who are fighting to hold their places in the seats of high learning, for they would not get jobs anywhere else. They are infinitely skilled in political intrigue and infinitely unscrupulous. The decent and informed people in their departments succumb to despair, and take their skills elsewhere, when they can, because their energies have to go not on teaching, but on trying to maintain a position against colleagues they despise, but cannot ignore.

Meanwhile, in schools all over Zimbabwe children dream of the distant shores of learning, in the University of Zimbabwe, which they probably will never reach because they are not clever enough.

Research into the workings of the mind shows that a percentage of people are incapable of changing their minds, no matter what the evidence. If they have been imprinted at some point in their lives with, let’s say, the information that all cats are black, then for ever after they will say all cats are black, even if white cats are paraded before them with labels saying White Cats.

This is hard to believe–unless you see it. Most of us by now have seen it…for instance, there was a young woman brought up in the top echelons of the Communist Party of East Germany, and knew it all from the inside, who then was for seven years at the Moscow University; she married an Englishman, and lived at an English university. Knowing all about communism, she was not a communist, but would have been happy to discuss what she knew. But left-wing circles in the university refused to have anything to do with her. She was a reactionary, a fascist; she was probably CIA.

‘Mugabe ought to do something about it.’

‘What, precisely?’

‘Well, he could make a speech of some kind.’

‘But he is a marxist. And the revelations of the Gorbachev era didn’t emerge in a single speech, they unfolded over months and years, people had time to get used to them.’

‘Then he should instruct the newspapers…’

‘But we don’t approve of him instructing newspapers, do we?’

‘Then he shouldn’t discourage lively and critical editors.’

‘How do we know
he
does.’

Oh surely it can’t be Mugabe himself: Mugabe is
of course
on the side of the good, which in this case means the availability of information. Conversations can go on for a whole evening where it is assumed that Mugabe has been misinformed: he is surrounded by yes-men and they don’t tell him the truth.

Someone remarks that every leader that arises anywhere is assumed–in the West, particularly in Britain–to be a giant of liberal democracy. If Ghengis Khan appeared now in no time the London leader-writers would be reassuring us that he liked Western films, subscribed to the
Guardian
, supported Amnesty International, had a wry sense of humour.

We–that is, Europeans, people with an experience of democracy as practised in Europe–assume the countries we colonized were taught democracy. In Southern Rhodesia a lively democracy was enjoyed by the whites, but was never extended to the blacks who experienced only various forms of repression under the whites. Why then should they not have turned to communism?