African Laughter (45 page)

What I have told them about the watering hole in the mountains and the elephant hunter has, it seems, silenced them. Often on this trip, on the point of asking a question or adding a comment, inhibition has sat on my tongue, as if this organ were the Culture Gap embodied. Besides, everyone I meet seems to have a raw place where the skin has only just grown over.

‘Excuse me,’ says Poet A. ‘Are you saying a white farmer is taking
our
kids on trips to show them the bush?’

‘Yes, that is what I am saying. An ex-farmer, actually.’

The two young men face me with angry eyes–but that is not the point. They are despondent, hurt.

‘Why should he want to do that?’

With difficulty I make myself say, ‘Because he cannot stand the idea that black children shouldn’t know anything about their bush.’

This remark in itself is taking a lid off impermissibles: it is believed by every black person that all white farmers are as bad as Simon Legree, with never a human impulse between them.

‘I’d like to meet that paragon,’ says one, trying to be humorous, but he laughs, most unhappily.

‘No, I think you probably wouldn’t,’ I say, attempting to match his humour. ‘You have to be brought up with this lot, you know, to understand…’ I definitely falter.

‘Hidden hearts of gold?’ says Poet B. Rather, sneers.

‘No, not exactly. But you know, some of them are trying hard.’

‘I haven’t noticed it.’

‘If they are all paternalists these days then just think what they were like before.’

‘It’s a bit late for paternalism.’

‘Well, you’re all stuck with each other–’ I say, allying myself, as it happens, with Comrade Mugabe, and his ‘We are all citizens of Zimbabwe now.’

The two young men show the signs of being trapped, restless checked movements, restless eyes, and their faces darken even more.

Poet A says, ‘And what does a Honkey know about the bush anyway?’

Here is another moment when my tongue has a weight on it.

‘He knows. My brother was the same. He had an instinct for the animals. If you went out into the bush with him, he would know where a duiker was, or a koodoo–he knew the paths they would take.’ Silence, because I was talking about my brother. Another strand was being woven into the webs of inhibition: family.

‘His cookb–his servant.’

‘OK, his cookboy,’ says Poet B bitterly. ‘Oh don’t worry, my sister’s husband’s got a good job, and she told me a man came asking for work, he said, “Do you want a cookboy, madam?’”

Laughter, this time shared absolutely, with all the history of the country behind it.

‘Your brother’s cookboy?’ invites Poet B, his hands spread open in a gesture of acceptance of fate.

‘He used to come to my brother, and ask him to go with him, and his brother–go hunting. Because my brother always knew where the animals were.’

Silence.

‘When was this?’

‘When there were still animals,’ I say, and my voice is as bitter as theirs.

‘Yes,’ says Poet A.

Poet B says, ‘I was brought up in Harare, so I would have to ask your brother too.’

‘I haven’t been to my village for…well, quite a time, two years…no three…well, it’s probably about five,’ says Poet A.

Here I could have gone on to say that my brother might have understood the ways of animals, but knew about Africans only through the veils of his prejudice–but what was the point, they knew that. My brother, and other white bush-lovers I tried, did not know that a certain tree, the muhacha tree, is sacred to the Mashona, though they must have walked under the tree, with blacks, a thousand times.

‘Really?’ says my brother, as if I were talking about another planet, ‘that’s interesting, I didn’t know that.’

He, like other white bush-lovers interpret the bush–no, not as white people, for that is not the point, but as modern people.

An anthropologist said, ‘When I’m with the old people, I have to remind myself they live in a different landscape. Each rock, tree, path, hill, bird, animal, has a meaning. If an owl calls or you see a certain bird, that is a message from another dimension. A pebble set near a path is part of a pattern. You see a bit of rag tied to a bush–watch out! It’s a bit of magic, most likely.
Don’t disturb!
We don’t live in that world, but the point is, their young people don’t either. They know as little about it as we do. But when I’m with the old ones I sometimes get a glimpse of a landscape that existed everywhere in the world before modern man arrived on the scene.’

In 1964 at the Independence Celebrations for Zambia, there was an exhibition of Southern Rhodesian art. Near the door as you went out was a large picture of an ancient tree. The artist stood by the picture with that look often seen in Southern Africa, ‘If you choose to notice me, choose to ask questions, you may get interesting replies.’ My companion and I stop, say, what a fine tree, and wait. The artist, an oldish man, looks closely at us, sums us up, as you may see Africans doing, and says, ‘That tree was the telephone for our village.’

At this point, other people had laughed and walked off.

‘What kind of a telephone?’

‘You people have telephone lines. We had trees. Through this tree the women sent messages to the men out hunting, when are you coming home, what have you killed for us to cook? And the men sent messages, We’ll be back tonight, or, We can’t get back until tomorrow, we are stalking a fine eland.’

‘Why don’t you tell the government how it is done?’ we joke. ‘They’d like to know how to save some money.’

‘Ah. But that’s it, that’s the trouble,’ says the artist. ‘All our old people knew how to do it. And sometimes children can still do it. But young people can’t do it at all. It’s gone.’

‘Can you do it?’

‘When I was a child, the old people used to send me to the tree.’

Similarly, the Bushmen of the Kalahari had, and a few still have, capacities that the young have lost: they knew days beforehand when people were going to arrive, for instance. And in a book about travel in Haiti it was recorded that the people there used trees in the same way: and again, young people had lost the art.

The anthropologist mourning lost landscapes (for the impartiality of the scientist wore transparent when he talked about them) told me this story–not of the past, but of last year, 1988. ‘A young girl refused to marry an old man chosen by her family. They put a spell on her. She weakened and grew ill and tried to drown herself. They pulled her out of the water. She agreed to marry the old man and her family removed the spell.’

‘A horrible story!’

‘Yes, but that is not the point. Have you wondered how often in our culture people put spells on other people–no, no, not witches and that sort of thing…what are spells? Strong wishes. Well, how often do you think families or just spiteful individuals bad-wish someone? Well, think about it then…’

It is certainly true that witchcraft has unsuspected dimensions of usefulness. Ayrton R.’s little cat, now very old indeed, was his mother’s cat, much loved by her. Now Dorothy and George both believe that Ayrton R.’s mother’s spirit is in the cat, who is her mudzimo. ‘A good thing,’ says Ayrton R. ‘It means they treat the cat well when I am away.’

Indifference or cruelty to animals is sometimes a reaction to what is seen as white sentimentality. Or rage at how whites will love animals but are unkind to blacks.

ANIMALS

A joke that is also a popular song. A white man sets off on a car journey. His dog is beside him in the front seat, and his black servant is in the back seat. There is an accident and the man is killed. The police ask the servant what happened. ‘Don’t ask me, ask the dog.’

Some time in the last few hundred years the Zambesi changed its course. Its old exit to the Indian Ocean was where Beira is now. The present delta is a hundred miles or so to the north. ‘What I wonder is, how did the animals take it?’

A small battle in the War between humans and animals. A certain farmer, growing citrus, got a poor crop because of the vervet and simanga monkeys. He put up an electric fence. The monkeys easily jumped over it. He heightened the fence. The monkeys discovered that electric shocks did not kill them. They learned to jump in such a way that the electric shocks knocked them into the orchard where they ate their fill, and then positioned themselves so they were knocked back out of the orchard. The farmer could not bring himself to increase the electric shocks to the point where the monkeys would be seriously harmed. He went back to employing a man with a gun: expensive as well as being less effective.

Simanga monkeys are being resettled in areas where they have gone.

A Story of Two Unimportant Creatures

In a house in Harare a large black dog, half Newfoundland, half Rottweiler, welcomes the visitor with a determination that you notice him: bold, not to say commanding, eyes watch your every movement. He accompanies you as you walk about the house, then the garden, always one step to heel, his nose at your hand. When you stop to turn, his head is there to be stroked and patted, and his eyes never leave your face. Another dog, a small Alsatian, is lying in a dusty hollow near the back door. He watches, his whole body saying, I am not worthy to be noticed, while his eyes crave affection. When you go to pet this dog, the big dog’s nose, head, then shoulders are interposed between your hand and the smaller dog’s head. Again and again this happens: it is not possible to caress the Alsatian, for the big dog will not allow it. The Alsatian knows your goodwill, but knows too it has no alternative but to ask for nothing as it lies in its dusty place. It came as a refugee to this friendly house, full of people of all colours, and of cats, monitored by this jealous dog. Its owners went south to The Republic–they Took the Gap, and left it behind. This Alsatian, say its new owners, making a joke of it to black guests, is a racist. It has been taught to attack black people. Now its skills, for which it was valued, applauded, and given titbits, are reproached: when it performs as it was trained to do, it is chastised and rebuked. This confused and unhappy dog is determined on one thing: that it will not lose this home where at least it is fed and has a place to sleep. As it watches the confident and successful dog, the Alsatian seems to be silently weeping. If it were human, it would be saying, ‘I am sorry, I can’t help it, I don’t know why I am wicked.’

THE BOOK TEAM

We take a coach to a town in Central Province. The coach is efficient, well-driven, punctual. Gone are the days when the Team went on long journeys by bus, for the authorities saw a humorous cartoon by Chris of the Team standing bedraggled in the rain near a broken-down bus, and insisted they should travel less dangerously: in the five weeks of my trip the newspapers reported four major accidents with buses. ‘We don’t want to lose the whole Team all at once!’ cried the officials. Nor is their diet restricted to oranges, bread, milk. ‘It was a healthy diet, at least,’ says Cathie. But even on this trip, at the end when funds ran low, I heard the Team telling Cathie that she really must not expect them to put up with it, if she fed them all on five dollars after a hard day’s work. ‘I lose pounds on every trip,’ says Chris, who is too thin.

At the half-way stop, we sit around under trees in a café garden, and I listen while Talent, Sylvia, Cathie, and Chris give each other information–through chat, gossip. An apparently casual process. The Team are at that stage when they must be conscious of what their strengths and weaknesses are. These four small vulnerable people are besieged with demands. Every village in Zimbabwe would like the Team to visit. In Harare the telephone never stops ringing. Aid organizations, government departments, ‘Third World Groupies’ sense that here is something extraordinary. The Team now begin to see that they are strong, because of how other people see them. And how can they cope with what is asked of them if they are weak? They discuss their ‘styles of work’, and gently criticize each other. I realize I am watching a process that was the aim of the old communist activists. But not one of these people is a communist: they share an ironical patience with the political circus. When I ask if they have read how in old Russia idealists ‘went to the people’ with their skills and their enthusiasm, they say no: but they are interested to hear about it. ‘I don’t think it’s strange that we are the same,’ says Talent. ‘They had people who needed a lot of help and so do we.’

Contemplating the extent of help needed, the depth of need, the four involuntarily laugh, and look at each other, sharing humorous incredulity.

It is the level of expectation that surprised them…that supported them…that inspires them. And, often, dismays them. What they are doing is, in fact, impossible.

Two springs, or rivers–or floods–fed that expectation. One was, that the whites had gone, with their persistent denigration of everything black, their cold, sniffy, self-righteous disapproval. The Africans, with that pressure off them, felt that now everything was possible. The other was, the rhetoric of Revolution, promising everything. ‘In that dawn…’ There wasn’t a woman, man, or child in Zimbabwe who did not expect the good life to begin almost at once. But nothing much happened, except that the new bureaucracy creaked and groaned and tangled them in old and new regulations. Then, up there in Harare the fat cats…Into this vacuum came the Team who said, ‘You can do anything you want to do, all you need is the expertise, and this is what you have to know. And now, learn how to do it for yourselves.’ In the case of the women’s book, they were told,
You
decide the topics,
you
bring in the material, you write the book.

Now, while we drink Coca-Cola and eat meat pies, I listen while they share scorn for the big Aid organizations. ‘They sweep into Harare, can’t even begin without offices, word processors, computers, a staff, and enormous funds.’

Cathie says, ‘I still only have a desk and we use the house telephone, and I only have a typewriter, no machines at all.’

‘And yet we have a network of people working for the Team all over Zimbabwe.’