African Laughter (38 page)

The animals I met last time? Clever little Vicky was run over by a drunk driver at the Club. Old Annie the bull terrier was killed by a wild pig. The lanky ridgeback with legs that splayed and slipped about over the polished cement turned out to be too stupid to live, and found an early grave. The little black cat was allowed to keep a kitten from her last litter but the father was a bush cat, and this kitten, a strong brave young male, took to the bush. He comes to visit his mother, and they sit nose to nose where the trees start behind the house.

A new bull terrier lies on his back and moans with pleasure when the fires are lit in the evening. There is a young black dog, Seamus, part Newfoundland.

What about that great black dog, Tarka, who used to wake me every night by putting his nose into my hand, or my face, lonely because his people were away? He is too old to be running around at nights now, he stays at home. When there is a party at the Club, he stands on the edge of the room, a stiff old dog with a greying muzzle, looking in at young Seamus prancing and jumping among the dancers who say, ‘Look, Seamus is dancing with us–come Seamus, dance with me…’ And the young dog, almost weeping with pride, is steered for a few steps, his front paws carefully held up, while people applaud him. This is the dog who, a few months ago when the Coffee Farmer fell off the dam wall on a black night and could not walk, having cracked his hip, stayed by him, and when the Coffee Farmer was recovered enough to crawl home, adjusted his pace and positioned himself so the farmer could put his weight on his back. It took hours to cover the mile of rough road.

A PARTY

A big dinner party: everyone comes. You would not easily get this food in Britain. The vegetables have never heard of insecticides, fertilizers: they live on compost. No one has heard about hams being injected with water. The smoked beef has not had hormones fed into it.

It is a noisy enjoyable party, with a lot of young people. The little girls of the previous visit have grown up, and are in different parts of the world: there are new little girls, and they are all in love with a handsome young man visiting from Sandhurst. What has happened to the parachutist? Oh, he’s off farming somewhere, doing well, they say.

Not a suggestion in any of this talk of the peevish complaint of six years ago. They might be different people: they are different people, all involved with development projects.

Even more than last time they plan to diversify: the crash of kiwi fruit prices was salutary. And they might be growing one of the most sought-after coffees in the world, but there is a coffee mountain…

These few families are also growing soft fruit, macadamia nuts, pecans, vegetables for the Mutare market, the new small pawpaws. In one kitchen a farmer’s wife began making cheese from the surplus milk: now she cannot produce enough of her cheese to satisfy the hotels and the embassies in the cities. Last time I watched her work on her kitchen table: now she has special rooms kept at the right temperatures, and employs others.

The talk goes like this:

I heard Bob is doing well with his eland, how do you think eland would do up here? (Eland grown like cattle, for meat.)

Zebra…would it be too high for zebra here?

If camembert is a success here, why not try…?

I’m putting in five acres of granadillas this year.

Ostrich feathers are back…

In Peru they…

In Mexico…

In Arizona…

I’m getting fifty more hives of bees. Killer bees they call them in America. They get hysterical about the slightest thing in America.

I said: ‘My brother had two hundred hives. When I told him they were called killer bees he only laughed.’

‘Anyway, you can breed aggression out of bees. I don’t see the problem.’

Mangoes…pineapples…strawberries…papayas…Some of these are grown to dry and crystallize: there is a good market for them abroad.

The new sheep…the new pigs…the new fish…

The whole world comes on to these verandahs when they are discussing how to find new crops, new ideas.

And then, which certainly could not have happened last time: ‘I don’t understand why the Africans don’t try this…try that.’ ‘I don’t see why in the Communal Areas they shouldn’t…’ ‘I’m going to have a word with the Minister next time he’s down and suggest…’

A GOVERNMENT OFFICE

In fact, on this trip, not much time was spent in the mountains.

Down the mountain road we go to Mutare where in a certain office we tackle Bureaucracy. Today we are three: the Coffee Farmer, a woman visitor from South Africa, and me. These days white people don’t just wander around villages whenever they feel like it: too much of a reminder of the old days. Besides, one is South African: the fact she does not admire her government is not written on her face. But the Coffee Farmer knows one of the officials well. During the War, the peaceable character sitting behind the desk was a well-known Commander, and he and the Coffee Farmer were enemies. Many a time had the Commander crossed the farm, at night…The two men enjoy the Ho-ho-ho type of male friendship. ‘You never knew how often I was back and forth across your farm.’ ‘Then it was probably you I was taking a pot shot at that night.’ Sometimes they go off to a bar and drink on it. My father used to visit a German smallworker not far from our farm. The two men were in the trenches opposite each other early in the First World War. In Harare I was told of a certain famous guerilla leader who regularly allowed a government security officer through his territory because he was taking medicines to villages; this mission of mercy completed, they resumed hostilities. The two men are now good friends. Clearly there are few closer bonds than having tried to kill each other.

This young man is thoroughly enjoying his position of being able to say yes or no. You can positively see him thinking that it will do the South African good to be petitioner to a black. The Coffee Farmer does not enjoy having to beg. Not for himself: as a conservation officer he can go where he likes. I am the worst problem: a really suspicious character, it seems. It is no good saying I have a journalist’s pass. The young man says, ‘That does not recommend you. We have given permission to journalists before, with bad results.’ ‘But she is a friend of Zimbabwe,’ says the Coffee Farmer. ‘There are friends and friends,’ says the official. With relish. With the robust enjoyment that goes with certain kinds of political debate. I say that I was a Prohibited Immigrant in this country for thirty years and it is a bit hard to be under suspicion again under this government. ‘Ah,’ ripostes the official, ‘then you are in that area, the political area, and we have to be cautious.’ ‘Surely not as cautious as all that?’ ‘And after all there were many Prohibited Immigrants.’ ‘True, but I have the honour to have been personally Prohibited by Lord Malvern himself.’ ‘And how do you happen to know a thing like that?’ ‘He told me so.’

We eye each other; seasoned politicos. His face is full of dramatic disbelief, eyebrows raised, chin forward, lips compressed. His hand is lifted, palm forward, as if to say, This far and no further. He slowly lowers his hand, places the palm judiciously on the desk, sits with eyes lowered, thinking. He says ‘Excuse me’ and goes out to make a telephone call from another office.

He comes back, smiles all round. Now he confides that he is a writer himself, and would like to be a novelist. We discuss the problems of literary creation. In his case, he has to spend too much time on administration. Shaking his head at his fate, office life, he sends us off with underlings into the bush.

There are two cars, the one from the office, one the Coffee Farmer’s lorry.

THE RESETTLEMENT AREA

Off we drove on the road east, then turned off on to a bad road, unsurfaced, then, many miles further on, were on a rutty track, all the time in wild and beautiful country. The soil is pale: this is Class Four soil, and was not bought from white farmers Taking the Gap, for it was unallocated government land. This government, always cautious about resettling people, making sure that there was at least some kind of administrative focal point, water, transport, is now even more so, because something is coming to the fore that was not thought of earlier. Conservation. The precious, precarious, so-easily destroyed soil.

The Coffee Farmer is now a conservation representative for Manicaland. He works under a Chief, whom he describes as a very sound type, a good chap, you know. It is his task to keep an eye on the sufferings or health of the earth. As we drive rocking along the track he keeps exclaiming, ‘Look at that! See that field! It’s gone to hell since I was here last. See those ruts–that’s erosion.’ Or, ‘Look, that chap there, he knows how to do it, that’s a perfect field. But look at that one on the other side of the road, it’s a mess, there won’t be any soil at all next year if…’ He clutches the wheel, he suffers, he could easily, we soothe, have a heart attack. But it is no good: if he sees a patch of sick soil it is as if he himself were ill. A happy and well-looked-after piece of earth makes him content. ‘Look at that gully. It wasn’t there last year.
What does that chap think he is doing
?’ And he stops the car, so the car behind has to stop. Everyone gets out of the car, to look at him standing over the raw scar in the earth. He points at it like the judgement of God: ‘
Just look at that
.’

‘I simply do not understand it,’ says he, pointing first at the eroded field. ‘It’s just as easy to do things well as badly, so why doesn’t this chap do it as well as that chap?’

He appears to think that this is a simple question, one that can be answered with a sentence beginning, Well, you see, it’s like this…

On, on, on we drive, many miles from Mutare. We pass Growth Points, all new ones. We pass notices that say ‘Welcome to——School’. We drive past lines of women and children selling mangoes. This is mango country. You may have tasted mangoes but never mangoes like these. Why are they not known world-wide? Transport, that’s why: great distances, bad roads.

We are giving lifts all the time: the once-bitten-twice-shy cautions of the sophisticated areas are not appropriate here.

One elderly man, who sat for a few miles holding tight to the side of the jolting lorry, a quiet, unremarkable, smiling man, who walked off into the bush with a smile and a wave when we set him down, has three sons. One is being trained in Czechoslovakia to be an aircraft engineer, for he did well in his examination. One has just taken his O-levels and everyone is waiting for the results. The third failed his exams. The contrast between the futures of the first son and the third was in all our minds; one will live in the modern world, the other as if it scarcely exists.

I remark how strange to pick up a poor man in the middle of the bush whose son is at university in Europe, but am rebuked with, ‘There are many like him.’ I wish I believed there were many like his oldest son being educated in Britain.

We are now miles, worlds, away from anywhere. Leaving the cars, we walk into the bush and sit around on rocks under the light airy dry trees that shed a shifting fragrant shade. It is midday. An emerald spotted dove calls: is answered.

There is a village near here, though we cannot see it. People come from the village and sit with us. Children. Men. No women. But there are women, with us, officials; two people we gave lifts to are here to take a census and they sit apart under a tree with the headman, conferring earnestly over charts and notebooks. An Extension Worker, a woman, is here to check on the state of the rains, the crops. During the hour we sat and lazed there, a good deal of business was done. As much, certainly, as if it were a meeting in an office.

The talk turns to Mozambique, which is so close, and to the people who keep coming here through the bush to get food. ‘How can we feel safe in Zimbabwe when the Mozambique War goes on and on?’ ‘It will never end. It is in South Africa’s interests to keep it going.’

A Mozambique joke: What is a sardine? A sardine is a whale that has gone through seven stages of socialist transformation.

An old man tells the children that once Mozambique was a rich country, and there was plenty of food. The children sit shaking their heads, disbelieving: for all their lives Mozambicans have crept through the bush to beg food from them.

‘Why are they so poor?’ asks a boy of about ten.

‘There’s a war,’ says the old man.

‘Wasn’t there a war here?’ asks a teenage girl, who dimly remembers something of the kind.

‘No, we haven’t had a war,’ says the ten-year-old.

The adults look at each other, black and white, shake their heads, laugh.

I ask: ‘If there was one single thing you could have here, in this area, what would you ask for?’

‘Money,’ said the headman. They all laugh.

‘Well all right. You have fifty thousand pounds. What would you spend it on?’

The vastness of this sum makes them laugh again. They argue for a while, and finally agree, ‘A dam. That’s what we need most. We should dam that river that runs under those hills.’

I tell them about the garden I saw in Matabeleland: poor soil, but successful, because of the water. They are at once interested, come closer, ask questions: how much water? Is fertilizer being used? Where did the money come from?

I ask what people in this village do for entertainment.

‘The government sent its film unit around last year,’ was the grave reply: then they all laughed about something in the film that was shown them. They did not say what was so funny about the film.

And when there is no film unit?

They sit in their homes and talk and tell stories in the evenings, and sometimes there is a dance.

There is a bus that comes, takes us to the Growth Point. We can shop there.

Sometimes we go into Mutare and visit relatives, but it is a long way off, over a hundred miles.

Later that day in another place, another meeting, conducted under a tree.

The local village representatives came to meet visiting Extension Workers and a local Extension Worker, who is a woman, one of the twenty per cent now coming out of agricultural colleges. She is young, smartly dressed, married, with three children. Around a table set under the tree there are about ten people conducting village business.