African Laughter (49 page)

Gutsa: as it sounds. Kufa: associations of death, deprivation. Ayrton R. says, ‘I suppose one ought to be pleased that it’s not just the whites who are the villains. But I don’t think I am.’

ON THE VERANDAHS

Someone says that Smith, asked in the States what he thought about the black government, replied that the whites had underestimated the intelligence of the Africans. Everyone is delighted with this little morality tale.

Street children in Harare–gangs of petty criminals, as well as ordinary kids, are playing games based on their traditional stories of hare, tortoise and the other animals. They keep the structure of the tales, the plot, but the characters are called J. R., Bobby, Sue Ellen, and so on.

A man who has been at a celebration for the successful building of more Blair toilets, reports that they are taking off, even in the more remote places, because they are status symbols. ‘It is salutary to meditate on the theme of how much of human progress has been dependent on “I have a Blair toilet, but you don’t have a Blair toilet.”’

The Minister of Justice was in prison for ten years under Smith, tortured, beaten. He is planning to abolish the death penalty, and ‘they’ say he is a good man and concerned about the prisoners. ‘I know what it’s like,’ he is supposed to have said. The dissidents who were in prison at the amnesty at the time of the Unity Accord, and not let out because they had committed crimes of violence are, it is said, shortly to be released. There are no political prisoners in the Zimbabwe jails. Everyone I ask says, ‘No, conditions are good. We are doing all right. We don’t have to be ashamed like South Africa, or Zambia.’ ‘How is the food?’ ‘I’ve never seen an overfed prisoner,’ was one reply.

THE WINDS OF HISTORY

‘What is the most dangerous job in Zimbabwe? “Minister for Internal Affairs: your conscience will kill you.”’

We were talking about the man who ran the prison outside Salisbury during the War of Liberation, when so many people were hanged, beaten, tortured. ‘No, you can’t blame the prison governor, he was only doing his job, it’s the Minister who is responsible.’

But it is probably a mistake to imagine responsible officials with consciences made swollen and tender by remorse.

In London during the 1950s were numbers of men who headed the Liberation movements of British Africa’s colonies. All were poor and many were unable to return home, where they could expect to be put at once into prison, if they had not already escaped from prison. Some kept themselves fed on post office jobs, ever a life-line for people educated above their job possibilities. Others subsisted on hand-outs from well-wishers. There were households where these men could get a meal and meet revolutionaries from other parts of Africa.

My visitors included a school teacher Orton Chirwa who would shortly return to liberated Malawi but there he would spend many years imprisoned by that cruel man President Banda. He is still in prison; a future President; some future Ministers; a trade union leader who would soon die of malaria; a man who, on returning home to the struggle, would spend time in a British jail and then, on Liberation, be made Minister for Economic Affairs but was imprisoned again, as a threat to his country. He was in prison seven years, mostly in solitary. And, too, a youthful hero, round, sweet, radiant with idealism, the pet of all the older men for he was a poet and often moved to spontaneous Odes to Freedom, Liberty, and Justice.

Roll on the years, not to say decades, and this former idealist poet and I are in the kitchen of a farmhouse in Devon. Improbably, but that is another story.

He is now a fat man glistening with success. He is Minister for Internal Affairs in one of the more conspicuously unsuccessful of the former colonies.

I am particularly pleased to run into him, for only last week I was talking to the man who–now again at liberty and lecturing to the universities of America on African affairs–spent the seven years in prison. As it happened, one of these years was in a prison in the territory of this Minister: another fairly improbable story, but Africa is full of surprises.

‘Do you remember M.?’ I enquire.

‘How could I not remember that very fine comrade?’

‘Did you know he was in prison for seven years?’

‘I believe I did hear something of the kind.’

‘Did you know that for a year he was in one of your prisons?’

‘Really? Oh–I am surprised to hear that.’

‘As it happened he shared a cell for some months with——’ I mentioned the name of the current President of yet another African country.

‘President L.? Yes, I heard that he too had been in prison. In the same cell? That must have been nice for them, to be together.’

‘M. told me that the British prison he was in before Liberation was a holiday resort compared with your prison, which nearly killed him and President L.’

We stood facing each other, while the Devon spring rain darkened the windows. We were far indeed from the hot skies of Africa.

His eyes had become evasive. He sighed. He glanced at his watch but decided ancient friendship was due another minute.

‘Ah, if we knew when we were young how cruel life can be…’ And he gazed mournfully back through the mists of time at our youthful enthusiasms.

‘But,’ I persisted. ‘Your prisons. Surely you must know how terrible they are?’

His eyes hardened, almost certainly on the thought, Once a trouble-maker always a trouble-maker. Then he allowed himself to be overtaken by tears. ‘I often say to my wife, my dear, I say to her, if we had known in the dawn of our struggle what we know now–ah, life is cruel, life is a cruel cruel thing.’

‘Not as cruel as your prisons where our old friend M. and President L. nearly died.’

‘Sometimes I think there is some kind of curse that turns all our wishes into their opposites.’

‘Just a minute. You are Minister for Internal Affairs, aren’t you? Well then!
You
are responsible for your prisons.’

‘And suddenly you are told you are responsible for the suffering of old friends.’

‘Well, why don’t you improve the conditions in your prisons? There were days they didn’t get anything to eat at all. They didn’t even have a blanket. They…’

‘Cruel…cruel…’ and his eyes shifted over the whitewashed wall he was facing, looking for some place of consolation or comfort.

‘
You
are Minister for Internal Affairs.’

‘I am glad we have spoken of these things. Sometimes I think my subordinates do not tell me what they should. I am grateful to you.’ And with this he smiled, but wanly, because of the sadness we both knew ruled Life. He shook his head, gave a brief sobbing laugh, which was cut short by a glance at his watch. He hurried out of the kitchen to his car which nearly filled the country lane.

One may imagine asking Genghis Khan, ‘How do you feel about killing twenty million people?’

‘But it wasn’t my fault,’ he would say indignantly. ‘I was nothing but a straw blown in the winds of history.’

POLITICS

In 1956 when I visited Southern Rhodesia and Northern Rhodesia, the 40,000 or so Tonga then living on the shores of the Zambesi river were being moved from their villages on the river bank. Because they most passionately did not want to leave their homes they were forced into lorries, sometimes at gun-point, and driven away to high dry grounds miles away, and there dumped to get on as best they could. Many died. This operation was not one the governments in question could be proud of. The enforced migration of the river Tonga was because of the shortly-to-be completed Kariba dam, and was a big issue with the then young national movements of Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia, Nyasaland. Countless political speeches were made to audiences who cried Shame, Shame, and groaned and even wept. There were riots. There were petitions. The white liberals of the time (or ‘Kaffir-lovers’) were eloquent. The bad treatment of the river Tonga was a symbol of everything wrong with white government.

When in 1989 I told people at the Training Centre I was about to visit the Tonga, they said, ‘You don’t want to go
there
.’ ‘They are primitive people.’ ‘They wear skins and sleep in the ashes of their fires.’ I said I had friends who actually knew the Tonga, and they live in huts and wear clothes, but the response was, ‘Then the clothes must be the ones collected from us for charity.’

It is true the river Tonga are as poor as any people I saw in Zimbabwe. They are thin and some are stunted. Their villages are shabby. (Not however the villages of the Chiefs, which are of fine big huts, well built.) The lives of the Tonga since they were taken from their land, their shrines, and the graves of their ancestors, have been hard, have been painful, a struggle year in, year out, and from season to season. Unable to fish, removed from the rich alluvial soil that produced two or three crops a year, they tried plants that withstand dryness, like millet, rapoka and other small grains, but flocks of quelea birds waited for these to be ripe and even when women and children stood for days and weeks banging bits of iron and saucepans, the birds descended in clouds so thick they darkened the sky, and ate up everything, as thorough as a swarm of locusts. The quelea are those multitudinous flocks that we watch swirling so attractively about on our television screens. Then the Tonga tried maize, but had to reckon with elephants, who love maize. The elephants had visited just before we did, and had devastated the fields.

These were near the villages behind Binga, which is on the other end of the Kariba lake away from the Kariba township on its hills, with its tourist hotels and tours and tour guides–quite one of the most attractive places in Zimbabwe, where you think these are shores in Greece or Sicily, wild pale rocky hills and islands and the blue water and the blue sky, and with all the attractions of elephants who appear even in the town itself, or herds of buffalo, and birds and buck…these shores and their delights are for the visitors who bring in essential foreign currency, and take photographs of the game, and on the lake itself, of crocodiles and hippos.

But crocodiles tear the frail nets of Binga’s fishermen, and hippos threaten their boats.

Binga is expanding fast. It consists of several acres of small two- and three-room houses of the kind described as medium-density housing, and here set at angles in the thick pinky-white dust where soon gardens will spring up. The air smells of donkeys and goats and cows, and roosters wake you at their appointed times through the night. It was full moon in Binga. Outside many of the little houses flickered the cooking fires found more attractive than the kitchens and stoves favoured by the whites. Binga is crowded with every kind of Aid worker. They are a dedicated lot. They would have to be. For one thing the temperature can stand at over a hundred for days at a time. To get there you drive miles on a dirt road that demands serious vehicles, like landrovers.

Electricity was soon to arrive in Binga: the great power lines were in place, ready to come to life. People will no longer have to sleep at eight-thirty, their eyes strained by candlelight. A new hospital, a fine place, a gift from the United States, was just finished. It is a high-tec hospital, and needs electricity to work as planned. But this electricity will not benefit the villages. The great dam which deprived the Tonga of their homes has not benefited them. The lake does not irrigate the land around its long shoreline: Kariba is a vast lake, like a sea. I can recommend travellers to visit Kariba, for there is nothing like it anywhere else in the world. But do not visit the river Tonga, for they will break your heart.

We sat in the shade with the Tonga fishermen under great trees like green towers, on the Tonga stools that fetch high prices in the tourist shops. The fishermen tell us their story: two of us speak their language. Settled far from the lake and ordered to become farmers, they did badly, and a few crept back to the shore to catch fish, for their families were starving. At last the authorities stopped arresting them, and they were permitted to make a fishing collective. There are forty of them, and they have four boats. No more fishermen nor boats will be permitted to join the collective. Some children were energetically playing around the huts. Because these children ate fish they were healthy, unlike the apathetic children we had already seen in villages a long way from the shore. But these were not really supposed to be here: the fathers bring them into this man’s village, to feed them up, in the school holidays. The fishermen themselves eat little fish: they sell it to pay for their children’s schooling, for like every parent in the country they are determined their children will get the education that will admit them to the modern world, far from this poverty.

Because families are not allowed into the fishermen’s village, it is men who mend the fishing nets draped everywhere over lines, and which are often torn by the crocodiles. The nets are expensive and a torn net is a tragedy. The fishermen’s lives are a guerilla war with crocodiles and hippos, just as their wives miles away fear elephants. The spectral trees that still stand up everywhere in the water, the remains of the forest that was drowned by the rising waters, are a bonus: the fish like the old trunks, and the fishermen row quietly from one dead tree to another, after the fish. But the crocodiles know fish like the dead trees and they are there too.

The fishermen are humorous. They are philosophical. They laugh as they talk of their poverty and the indifference of officials. Told that one of their visitors is a writer, they suggest that their lives should be described because–they seem to feel–if the authorities
really
knew, their hearts would be less hard. They laugh when they tell us how they may not now row their boats across the lake to visit their relatives on the Zambian shore. ‘The police there will only talk to us with guns.’ ‘Passports are not for poor people.’ ‘Why should I have to get a passport to row half a mile to villages where my own family lives?’ One fisherman remarks that he enjoys seeing photographs in the newspapers of Presidents Mugabe and Kaunda embracing with fraternal emotion: it makes him feel so much better about not being able to visit his Zambian family.