African Laughter (50 page)

These men are the second and third generation away from the people who were forced to move. Asked if the Tonga talk about their past, the reply is that old people do, but the children don’t believe their tales.

‘Once we lived on the edge of the water: it was a big river then, it was the Zambesi river. We fished and we hunted and we grew three crops a year in the rich soil. Now we grow one crop a year and we are not allowed to hunt–we are sent to prison if we do. And only a few of us may fish.’

Once we lived in Eden where Nature was so kind we hardly needed clothes and fruit fell from the trees. But then an angel with a flaming sword…

At the beautiful hospital, that has a Spanish feel to it, with tall curving walls and open-work patterns in the red brick, a perfect building for the climate–designed, for once, by a Zimbabwean architect–we sit in a room with a young woman, Shona, who is responsible for the health of the district. She is highly educated, full of energy. She could get a job anywhere, with her qualifications, but she is here, with the Tonga. This makes her unusual, for it is hard to persuade nurses and teachers out into these remote places. This hospital, designed for thirty-six nurses, still only has eighteen. The doctor, much liked, came to grief through drinking too much, and will not easily be replaced. ‘Almost certainly it will be an ex-pat. They don’t mind how hard a job is, they take on the dirty jobs. God knows what these remote hospitals and schools would do without them.’ ‘But,’ says this man’s interlocutor, ‘remember that the ex-pats choose hardship for three or four years and then go back to the flesh-pots. It is understandable these people, experiencing the good life for the first time, find it hard to give it up and sweat it out in the bush somewhere.’ ‘Why shouldn’t they choose hardship for a year or two and then have a good time?’ ‘Ah but you’re forgetting, if you step off the ladder, it’s hard to get back on again.’

The young black nurse is clearly thinking that she has better things to do with her time than sit and talk with us. But she is polite, and smiles. ‘I treat women who have been malnourished since their conception. You never see women like this in any other part of Zimbabwe. You see an adolescent girl, and then you realize she is a woman with five or six children: she has been dwarfed by bad food. We have terrible problems with childbirth. Ninety per cent of these people have bilharzia. There is still some leprosy. Nearly fifty babies and small children died of malaria this last wet season. Malaria is getting worse. Oh yes, AIDS–I knew you were going to ask.’ She makes herself smile. ‘We know about AIDS. But it’s not the worst thing. Are you surprised I say that? Look, you can tell illiterate people that a mosquito will give them malaria. They can see the mosquito. But you try explaining a sophisticated disease like AIDS. “There is a very small thing, but you can’t see it, called a virus, and it can adapt its shape to become like another small thing, which is just a bit bigger and it lives off it and kills it…and remember it can take eight years to become fatal.” These people don’t believe us when we talk about AIDS. We have shelves full of condoms–unused. Yes I see people dying of AIDS all the time but we don’t call it AIDS. No we don’t routinely test for AIDS–that is regarded as an infringement of the liberty of the individual.’ She laughs, but she is angry. I think it is probably a generalized anger: the one we all feel: how can
they
be so stupid? ‘They tell me the campaign against AIDS is beginning to work in other parts of the country, but here…’

Soon she says she has to go, she must, she’ll never get through her work.

We are told that this young woman and a male colleague continuously travel over a large area, exhorting, teaching, holding clinics: that is, when they aren’t holding classes and clinics here. ‘They never stop working. When I see them I believe everything will be all right, Zimbabwe will make it.’

The Outpatients of this hospital is a large space under trees. There is a shed-like building where people can sleep if they want, but most prefer the open air. Women come in from the villages to wait for labour to start, or for treatment. They are all, every one, undersized, apathetic. The comparison between them and the exuberant noisy people at the Training Centre hurts. I wonder if they have ever, in their whole lives, eaten plates loaded with sadza and meat and gravy and vegetables.

A young woman sits directly in the dust under a tree. A small child sits quietly beside her. The woman is making a basket. The Tonga baskets must surely be the most beautiful anywhere. Between her thin dusty hands this miraculous thing is coming to life. Inside that head of hers, which seems more like a child’s head, and is dusty, are the subtle patterns that her fingers are making. The baskets are famous and sell for two, three, four Zimbabwean dollars, to enthusiasts who travel through the villages. The baskets get sold for another dollar or two to the local shops. But by the time they reach the smart shops in the towns they cost many times more. The Tonga stools are also famous. We sat with a Tonga stoolmaker who squatted in the dust near his fire where tools were pushed to become red hot. Blocks of wood stood about under the trees waiting for him to transform them. A new stool is sometimes buried, to give it a look of age: tourists prefer them like that. This stoolmaker is asking five, six, seven dollars for a stool. It takes him two days to make one, so he earns less than the minimum wage. In the National Gallery in Harare I saw the same stools selling for one hundred, and a hundred and twenty dollars.

Everyone agrees the Tonga are wonderfully artistic. The baskets and stools will find themselves in rooms all over the world, where visitors will say, What a beautiful stool, what a beautiful basket.

The young teachers, in whose house I am staying, have bought a few things to take back to the Mid-West of America, as presents.

They are religious, and work very hard. Other teachers in other houses are not religious and also work hard.

One ex-pat teacher, from near Chicago, is appalled because most of a mathematics class don’t understand what she has been teaching. ‘They sit there, it seems they understand–then you discover they haven’t understood a thing.’ Eight of the class of forty she believes have a chance of passing O-level if properly coached. It is holiday time, but every day she drives herself on terrible roads to the school, and there is met by the eight pupils who have come in from their villages, some walking miles. She sits with them for hours, going over and over the problems. This same girl tells me a story. In Harare she was standing for the three or four hours that it is customary to have to wait for anything of a bureaucratic nature. She was the only white person in a line of hundreds. The young black clerk who was pushing people’s fingers into ink to make prints did not look up at the faces of the people who moved past her. When she saw the white hand, she did look up, then said sharply, ‘Have you washed your hands?’ ‘No.’ The clerk had said this to no one else. ‘Then go and wash them.’

This incident is a mirror of the arbitrary white treatment of blacks in the old days.

It must not be thought that all the ex-pat teachers or Aid workers are useful. I was in a village when a young Englishman who was working in the fields with the villagers came over. He was leaving that day and he was miserable. ‘It was the best thing I ever did, coming here. It’s taught me everything. They are a wonderful people.’

I asked the Extension Worker who had brought me about this youth. Some villagers were there. He said, ‘They send us these young people. They are supposed to be teaching us. They want to help us. But we have to teach them what they are supposed to be teaching us. When they arrive they have no manners, they don’t know how to behave. What do they learn in their schools? This one had a breakdown. Sometimes they drink because they are so lonely. They find it hard to be friends with us.’

The woman in whose hut the young man had been living, with her son, said, ‘But he is not a bad person. He wants to be kind.’

The Extension Worker: ‘These young people get paid to come here and teach us. But we don’t get paid for teaching them everything.’

The hostess woman, who is large, literally shining with health, has suddenly become someone else: she has become the young man. Every bit of her body pleads as she stands in a curve, head poked forward, chin thrust out, eyes moving from one face to the next in a mix of aggression and apology. She is the poor young man who can be seen at this very moment, a forlorn figure, holding out his hand that has a store biscuit in it, to a small child who is shyly taking it. Becoming herself, the woman stands laughing. Everyone laughs with her.

LOVE OR SOMETHING. I

In a remote part of Zimbabwe, two American ex-pat teachers live together in a minute house on the edge of a dusty village, near a school that is built in the middle of a vast dusty space. They both come from well-off families, in a large city in the Mid-West. They are used to an easy life. One evening, having finished supper, they are sitting side by side at the little table they eat their meals off, correcting homework by candlelight. There is a knock on the door. They open it and in step an old man and two young men: a local minor Chief with his attendants. ‘Drat,’ think the girls. ‘It is already eight-thirty, and it is bedtime, if we want to get up at five tomorrow.’ The candle is subsiding in a puddle of grease, and they quickly light another. ‘Come in, come in,’ they cry, ‘sit down, take a seat, would you like a beer–tea–coffee–mineral water?’ The old man sits, and his two young men stand behind him.

The girls know the old man. He is the father of two of their pupils.

‘I have come on a serious matter,’ says the old man.

The girls exchange looks: this must mean that it is Gwenda he wants to speak to, for his daughter is a girl who often gets into trouble with her teacher, Gwenda.

The girl who is not Gwenda discreetly withdraws to the kitchen where she stands correcting exercises by the light of another candle.

Gwenda smiles encouragingly.

‘I have come to ask you to be my second wife,’ says the old man.

‘Excuse me?’

‘I love you. You must be my wife,’ he insists.

At last: ‘Do you think we could work out a relationship?’

‘Yes. I love you.’

‘But your first wife would be unhappy. She would be jealous.’

‘Jealousy is unknown among us.’

Oh yes?–the girl in the next room, eavesdropping, can positively be heard thinking: the house is so small everything done and said can be heard by everyone. This makes Gwenda even more nervous.

‘But you are older than my father.’

‘That does not matter. In our culture it is not important.’

Gwenda stands with an unopened beer bottle in her hand, staring at him. Then, an inspiration: as she speaks she knows she is saved. ‘But my parents would never hear of it, they would never agree to my living so far from them. They would not give their permission.’

‘In that case,’ says the old man, ‘I have no more to say.’

The beer bottles are opened. The two young men are urged to sit down. The two young teachers and their guests converse for an hour or so, and then all agree yes, they will be good friends.

LOVE OR SOMETHING. II

It is in the same little house, the same two girls, and about the same time at night. A commotion outside. They draw back a curtain. A young man they know professionally, a community worker, is staggering about in the dust, drunk. ‘Gwenda,’ he howls, ‘Gwenda.’

‘But I haven’t done anything to encourage him,’ protests Gwenda, to her colleague’s satiric look.

‘Don’t you dare go out,’ she says.

Gwenda is not, as might be thought, an extraordinary beauty. She is pretty. So is her friend, who has also had her opportunities.

But Gwenda is kind-hearted: if not succoured, the young man will probably fall down.

‘Well now,’ she says smartly, ‘it is time you were in bed.’

‘Gwenda,’ he shouts, embracing her, ‘I’ve had a terrible day. I’ve just been helping to rebury six Freedom Fighters who were killed in this village. I love you. I want to have a white girlfriend.’

She pushes him off, with, ‘But I don’t want a black boyfriend. Inter-cultural marriages are very difficult. Besides, I have a boyfriend at home.’

‘Yes, yes. You must think about it. I love you.’

She says severely, ‘You are very selfish. You have to learn to see other people’s points of view.’ And goes indoors.

Next day they meet in the supermarket. It is a small supermarket, which you would easily mistake for a village shop. It is not a place where you can avoid unfortunate encounters.

He says, ‘They tell me I behaved unkindly to you last night.’

‘Yes, you did.’

‘Then I’m very sorry. I feel really sad this morning.’

‘Your apology is accepted.’

A Jesuit priest said, ‘The Feast of All Souls has a new meaning. The souls are the souls of the dead fighters, killed in the War, and left unburied.’

All over Zimbabwe teams of former Freedom Fighters are being sent to areas where they fought, to try and remember where fighters were killed and carelessly buried, or not buried at all. The corpses or bones are buried with appropriate rites. It is believed by many that the country is full of dissatisfied and vengeful ghosts, and it is they who are responsible for Zimbabwe’s many problems.

TWO WHITE FARMERS AND
THE BOOK TEAM

We are back with the farmer who last year sang us his hymns to the soil, and we are watching gangs of seasonal workers plant tobacco. This is far from the chancy operation of the old days, which depended on the coming of the rains. Pierced pipes and long hoses now make planting possible weeks earlier. ‘Water, we have so much water now,’ cries the farmer, meaning the new dam, full because of the good rain, and already irrigating the farms around here. This soil is producing three crops a year. ‘Soilmining,’ says the farmer, irritable because of his conflict, loving real earth, but working with this, which is like brick dust and soaked with chemicals. This earth is no pleasure to look at or to touch. Not in this field are we likely to see the farmer bend to lift a handful of earth and marvel at it–an act of worship. But he is pointing at another farm just across a river. ‘Now there’s a farmer!
He
never wastes time lying awake at night wondering what Nature’s going to wham us with. His farm is really high-tec, they’ve got everything, you should see it. I tell you, Israel’s got nothing on us in this district…yes of course he’s white. The Affs don’t have any feel for this kind of farming, and good for them. I’d like to believe they never will.’