African Laughter (4 page)

When I returned to Zimbabwe after that long absence, I expected all kinds of changes, but there was one change I had not thought to expect. The game had mostly gone. The bush was nearly silent. Once, the dawn chorus hurt the ears. Lying in our blankets under the trees on the sandveld of Marandellas, or in the house on the farm in Banket, the shrilling, clamouring, exulting of the birds as the sun appeared was so loud the ears seemed to curl up and complain before–there was nothing else for it–we leaped up into the early morning, to become part of all that tumult and activity. But by the 1980s the dawn chorus had become a feeble thing. Once, everywhere, moving through the bush, you saw duiker, bush buck, wild pig, wild cats, porcupines, anteaters; koodoo stood on the antheaps turning their proud horns to examine you before bounding off; eland went about in groups, like cattle. Being in the bush was to be with animals, one of them.

Lying inside our leafy circle at night, we listened to owls, nightjars, the mysterious cries of monkeys. Sometimes a pair of small eyes gleamed from the trees over our heads, as a monkey or wild cat watched, as we did, how the roaring fire of early evening sent the red sparks rushing up from the flames that reached to the boughs, but then, later, when it died down, the sparks fled up, but fewer, and snapped out one by one, like the meteors that you could watch too, when the fire had died. Or we might wake to hear how some large animal, startled to find this obstruction in its usual path, bounded away into silence. The moon, which had been pushed away by the roar of the fire, had come close, and was standing over the trees in one of its many shapes and sizes, looking straight down at us.

Every night my father, my brother, myself, fought to stay up around the fire, but my mother wanted us to be in bed in good time, to be fresh for her goal, the actual visit to the school. For what was to us the best–the bush, the animals, the birds, the stars, the fire–was to her a means to the moment when she sat with the other parents on the stands watching her son batting or bowling or fielding or running races with the other little boys in their fresh white clothes. The sports field, a large area of pale earth, lay among eucalyptus trees. The school buildings were of a style called Cape Colonial, or Cape Dutch, white and low, with red tiles, green shutters. Everything was clean and tidy and there were green English lawns. I felt alien to the place. This was because I was alien to the English middle class, playing out its rituals here, as if on a stage. I knew even then they were anachronistic, absurd, and, of course, admirable in their tenacity. These were the ‘nice people’ my mother yearned for, exiled in her red earth district surrounded by people–as she was convinced–of the wrong class. Here we were invited to lunch, tea, supper, with the headmaster, and the other masters and mistresses; the rituals might go on for days, according to strict rules. But often my father was found lying on his back under the gum trees, and would not be budged by my mother, scandalized, hurt, that–as usual!–he so little valued what was her goal, her ambition, her raison d’être. In spite of our poverty, in spite of our struggles as farmers through this terrible Depression, in spite of his lack of interest, we were here, where we ought to be, with our peers, and her son was set on a path proper to him and to us. ‘You go, old thing,’ said my father, lying flat on his back, staring up through the loose green-fledged white arms of the gum trees and the always blue sky. ‘You enjoy it, I don’t.’ He was letting her down and he knew it, so he might get himself awkwardly up off the ground, manoeuvring that clumsy wooden leg of his, and go with her to tea, and to lunch, and to parents’ meetings. Or he might stay exactly where he was. Sometimes he was joined by other fathers, who, seeing him lying there at ease among the scented, brittle, gum-tree leaves, could not resist, so there might be two, three, or ten fathers staring at the blue sky through leaves, until summoned by their wives, while their delighted or shocked children watched them, waiting to hear what their mothers would say. ‘But what are you doing there? What will they be thinking of you?’

This place was my brother’s place, not mine. Ruzawi was what my mother had to have for him, expressing depths of her nature which we understood and allowed for, even if ‘England’ and ‘Home’ were so far off. The Convent was what she had to have for me. Like Ruzawi it was a snobbish choice. To me it was a dark oppressive place full of women loaded with their black and white serge robes who smelled when it was hot. I knew it was a bad place, but not how bad, until I was grown up. I was there for five years and it did me harm: I am still learning how much harm. That unwritten law, that mysterious ukase that forbids children to say to parents more than ‘It’s all right’, when asked ‘Well, how was school this time?’ made it impossible for my parents to know what went on there. Five years. Five years. Five child-years. What’s five years–when you’re grown up? Immersed in that time, Convent time, nun-time, with aeons to go before holidays came, which were a different time, equally long, endless, thank God, when I could be free and in the bush, I drowned in helplessness. Above all, I was abandoned by my parents. I was homesick to the point of physical illness: I knew why I was always ill at school, though they didn’t. When I asked my brother how he felt about Ruzawi, he said it was all right. But the people who taught him were not nuns, most of them peasants from southern Germany, frustrated and ignorant women. He was taught by brisk, matter-of-fact people who did not hang crucifixes with writhing tortured men on them, or pictures of meaty red hearts dripping with blood, on the walls of rooms where small children slept–children who walked in their sleep, had nightmares and wet their beds. At schools we were in different worlds, he and I, but were in the same world through the holidays. In the bush.

Or in the green circle of the boma. There he might tell stories about the goings-on at his school, but I recognized these as mostly invented to entertain the parents. The convention at his school was that feats and exploits should be described in a way that was both boastful and modest. The feats themselves, climbing dangerous rocks, or forbidden roofs, or trees, or going into pools where crocodiles had been seen–these were boasts, because all were foolhardy. But his descriptions made nothing of the dangers, for that was the modesty prescribed by their school. I recognized the convention from books in the bookcase on the farm:
Stalky and Co
., Kipling generally, Buchan, Sapper, the memoirs of First World War soldiers. You could cross from one side of a deep gorge on a rope the thickness of an eyelash, or go into fire to rescue a comrade, or wriggle yourself on a six-inch outjut three storeys up a building from one window to another, and you could tell everyone about it, but the voice had to have a certain negligent humour about it, and then it was all right.

I would watch my brother’s face, as he told these–permissible–tales out of school. It had the prescribed humorous modesty. Behind that was something else, an obstinate and secret excitement, and for the time he was speaking, he was not there by the fire at all, not with us, he was back in the moment of danger, the thrill of it, the pull of it.

We two had a pact that I don’t remember being made, though it must have been: it was that we should help each other not to fall off to sleep, should unite against our mother’s determination we should. This meant our two piles of sweet-scented grass must be close together, causing humorous comments from the parents, for usually we were not so affectionate. We lay down on our backs, so as not to miss a moment of moon and stars and up-rushing sparks, but with heads turned towards each other.

‘I must stay awake, I must, I must,’ I fought with myself, watching my brother’s long dark lashes droop on his cheek: I put my hand to his shoulder, and he carefully shook himself awake, while I saw how his body began to shape itself into the curve he would sleep in. I might have time to prod him once, twice–but then he was gone, and in the morning would accuse me of failing as a sentry against sleep. Meanwhile I lay rigid, face absorbing moonlight, starlight, as if I were stretched out to night-bathe. I knew that this lying out with no roof between me and the sky was a gift, not to be wasted. I knew already how Time gave you everything with one hand while taking it back with the other, for this lament sounded whenever my parents talked about their lives. This lying out at night might never happen again. On verandahs–yes, but there always seemed to be mosquito nets and screen wire between you and the night. And it didn’t happen again. I never again slept out under the sky in Africa, though I have in Europe. I was right to struggle to stay awake, but soon felt myself failing, and tried hard, and saw my mother bending over the fire in her pyjamas, dropping wood into nests of sparks, her face, for once, not presented to be looked at, but full of emotions I was determined would never be mine. ‘I will not, I will not. Remember this moment, remember it,’ I admonished myself, seeing the fire-illuminated face of that powerful woman, but she looked like a small girl who had had a door slammed in her face. The moment went to join the others on a list of moments that I kept in my mind, to be checked, often, so they did not fade and go. And I fell asleep and woke with the sun on my face, not the moon, my brother curled like a cat, my mother already at work folding up the bedding, and perhaps the ‘boy’ still asleep, his back to us. Or it was in a thick whiteness that sometimes in the very early morning rolled through the trees and over us, a mist that clung to our eyelashes and our skins, and made us all shiver as we sat drinking mugs of hot sweet tea around the revived fire. This mist was the guti of the Eastern districts, and we never saw anything like it in our district, and so it was part of the excitement of these trips, another bonus, to be watched for and welcomed. When it was cold and damp like this, and we sat waiting for the sun to climb higher and dispel the mist, we were kept around the fire and my mother summoned Isaiah–or Joshua, or Aaron, or Matthew, or Luke, or John–away from his little fire and made him sit inside the hot reach of ours, but perhaps a yard further away than we were. ‘You’ll catch cold,’ she fussed at him, as she did at us, pressing on him more mugs of the sweet tea. And then, it seemed always suddenly, the mist thinned and went and left us sitting in the brilliant sunshine.

GIVING LIFTS

It took me two hours to drive that short distance from Harare to Marondera, not because the car went so slowly; on the contrary, it was a powerful car that did not like being slowed. I kept stopping to salute this view, that cluster of toppling boulders, or at a turn-off to a farm I used to visit. No, the landscape had not lost its magnificence, nor grown smaller, the way things do, although I had seen the Arizona deserts, and California and Australia, been immersed in space and emptiness in various parts of the world. The road still rolled high in sparkling air, and, as you reached the crest of one rise, blue distances unfolded into mountains and then chains of mountains. But there was a new dimension to the landscape, because the War had ended only two years ago, and I was looking at a country where contesting armies had moved, often secretly, often at night, for, a decade. In these distances you do not see villages, it is still, apparently, an empty land, but that is only because huts melt and merge into trees, hills, valleys.

I had been told by white friends, ‘On no account give any lifts to the blacks, it is dangerous.’ Public transport is bad and large crowds of black people waited at every stopping place. If a car showed signs of slowing, they crowded after it, shouting and waving. I stopped at a bus-stop and at once the car was surrounded. Such a scene would have been impossible in old Southern Rhodesia, where blacks had to know their place. I said to an old man who bent to peer into the seat near mine, ‘Get in,’ and he beckoned peremptorily to two women in the crowd. He opened the door for them to get into the back seat, and he got in beside me. He made threatening gestures at the crowd, who were expressing loud dissatisfaction. ‘Go on,’ he said to me, in the same peremptory way. I tried to start a conversation with him but he answered Yes and No, or not at all. I tried with the women, but he said, ‘They don’t know what you are saying.’ I could see from their faces this was not true. I said to him, ‘I am back in this country after twenty-five years. I was brought up in Lomagundi.’ He did not reply, and I was stupidly disappointed. What did I expect? My intelligence expected one thing, and my emotions another. About ten miles further on he commanded, ‘Stop here.’ I stopped. I could not see a building or road or even a path, only bush. He got out and went off, leaving his women to follow. They could not manage the door handle, and wrenched at it, irritated and angry, meaning these emotions to show. I opened the door for them. They got out and followed their man. Husband? Father? He wore long khaki trousers and a good thick jersey. They wore short colourful dresses and cardigans. Even thirty years ago, in country districts, this group could easily have been a man with an animal skin over his shoulders–monkey, leopard, or buck–and a loincloth, and he would be carrying a bunch of spears. Behind him women in the traditional blue-patterned cloth balanced pots on their heads. The man would have to go first to protect them from enemies or wild animals. These women still walked behind, when all three disappeared into the bush.

There was little traffic. The pipeline bringing oil from Beira to Mutare had just been cut again in Mozambique by Renamo, the South African-backed rebel army, and petrol was hard to get. The newspapers were full of exhortations to save petrol. I did not stop to give a lift again on that stretch of road, because I was soon to see my brother, after so many years, and this needed all my attention.

Going to see my brother was by no means as simple a thing as it might seem to people with normal family relationships. Normal? While the British Empire lasted (a short-lived empire, as empires go) it was common for families to be split, a son or brother somewhere in the army, female relatives working as missionaries (my mother’s best friend’s sister was in Japan) or (my uncle) being rubber planters in Malaya. When I was growing up in the bush, my parents so woefully in exile, the family was in England: step-grandmother, uncles, aunts, cousins. Since I have lived in London, the family has been in various parts of Southern Africa.