African Laughter (54 page)

Now, suddenly, her husband is putting his foot down, saying Enough–and shouting at her, with the barking desperation of a man who feels everything is slipping away from him. The regimes that he has chosen as allies are all collapsing, to the accompaniment of choruses of hatred and contempt, and now this woman, this force of Nature, who is everything to him, has had to be checked…as she shuts herself down, banks her fires, sulks, shows her hurt in a thousand ways, he closes up more and more, just like that acacia frond, subtly trembling even at the approach of a finger. When he shouts at her, forcing her because of his position of authority into obedience, he feels he is cutting himself off from all the secret powers of Nature, while she, obedient, feels that the rush forward of her life, which is based on a confident instinct that lays hold of everything it touches has been checked…unkindly checked, above all
unfairly
, so now she is a prisoner of his cold cautions.

The final scene could be in an airport. He, she, and their entourage are on their way to some International Conference. A terrorist bomb has wrecked the Distinguished Persons’ Lounge, and they are all in a hastily-contrived fenced-off part of the ordinary Departure Lounge. Today they have heard of yet another country’s collapse, and she sees about her faces that were until recently those of Prime Minister, Cabinet Ministers, still among the small gathering of Distinguished Persons, though probably they will not be entitled to be here for much longer. Into this area comes that day’s fallen Leader, with his family, and he goes straight to her husband, begging him for shelter. He is bluffing and boasting, pretending it is only a temporary rejection by his People, and he will soon be back in power. She whispers to her husband that on no account must this fugitive be given asylum, because they will be associated with him in the public mind. She is speaking out of the ancient instinct that to be near defeat is bad luck, though she uses the language of reason. Her husband, principled as always, offers the hospitality of their country to this disgraced leader: ‘Of course one must help friends in trouble.’

She knows that his ‘friend’ is one that in fact he does not much like; it is she who has liked him, admired him, and still does, though he is regarded (the newspapers say) as a tyrant, a thug, a murderer, a hangman.

She is standing rather to one side, looking at this man she has married, in conversation with the refugee President and his family. He is awkward, unbending, stiff…‘arrogant’ they call him, though she is pretty sure he isn’t that…. what exactly is the word that goes with all these qualities of his that have turned out to be right all the time? As she stands there, a pathetic figure, though she is not aware of that, holding herself upright and defiant, a group of women from their own country comes into the Lounge–that is, into the area for common people, just on the other side of the quickly contrived rope that keeps them out. They are off on a delegation to Indonesia, for a Woman’s Conference on Alternative Technology. They see her, the Mother of their Country, and stop, stand whispering to each other. She was at school with the two women leading the delegation, who come forward to the rope barrier, softly clapping their hands in greeting.

She claps hers, in the manner of one waiting to see what is expected of her.

‘Do you remember us, Mother?’ asks her ex-school fellow. ‘Yes, I remember you. Of course.’

They stand looking at each other, the Great Lady and the humble ex-schoolfellows.

Then one says, ‘Remember us, Mother.’ Softly and turns away.

The other says, ‘Remember us, Mother.’ And turns away.

One after another the women come forward, stand in front of The Mother, but on the other side of the rope, and say, ‘Remember us, Mother’–and turn to walk back to the group, where they stand with their backs to her.

(There are several women of this type in high positions in various parts of Africa.)

VIEWS ON THE FUTURE OF
SOUTHERN AFRICA

A prominent South African lawyer, a liberal: ‘Everyone is hypnotized by the political stereotypes. All they can see is the injustice of apartheid. But the country is roaring ahead, the blacks are roaring ahead in spite of everything, and they are so full of talent and energy. Yes I suppose there will be some bloodshed…’ here he impatiently waves his hand, ‘but not nearly as much as everyone expects. You’ll see, we’ll come to an agreement. And then–the sky’s the limit. In fifteen or twenty years it will be one of the most exciting parts of the world. The brakes will be off, full steam ahead.’

Visiting European politician: Not a hope! Not because of Zimbabwe but because of South Africa. South Africa’s going up in flames and Zimbabwe will have to be involved. Look at the past if you want to see the future: Zambia weakened itself helping Zimbabwe and now it’s a disaster. Zimbabwe weakens itself helping Mozambique. It’s no good being a strong swimmer surrounded by drowners.

South African liberal: Why should South Africa solve its problems? It never has. It has been a brutal and repugnant and successful tyranny ever since I can remember and that’s fifty years. Look north: Botswana has a tiny population and an atmosphere of get-rich-quick. Zambia can’t feed itself. Zimbabwe can feed itself but it is not taking care of its soil. Namibia and Angola and Mozambique are ruined by war. The whole of Southern Africa will be another disaster area, full of repressive corrupt governments.

A Zimbabwe academic has been on a visit to Zaire and reports: ‘Towns that ten years ago were operating as towns are derelict. No electricity, no transport, no mails, the hotels don’t work, no petrol. I visited the central library. Once it was a good library. The librarians haven’t been paid for years and they have fed their families by selling the books. Empty shelves–nothing. The schools aren’t working…no textbooks. You can’t say, It’s gone back to Africa, because the infrastructure wasn’t African. It’s weird, it’s creepy, it’s like a fantasy film…you go into a suburb you remember as a rich suburb and all you see is the smoke from hundreds of cooking fires outside every house burning up the trees and the shrubs and when those are gone, what then? How did it all begin? Electricity cuts. One by one, the services collapsed. Now no infrastructure left at all.

‘Can’t you see what is happening in Zimbabwe? We have been having electricity cuts for weeks. The railway system is not working. The telephones work or not.
*
They can’t even get coal from the coalfields to the hospitals–this week no operations in Harare’s main hospital. No coal for the tobacco barns and tobacco is the main foreign exchange earner. They borrow six locomotives from South Africa, and in the first week two are a write-off–two more are disabled and need repair. At a time when Zimbabwe is grinding to a halt Mugabe hands over fifty-five per cent of the railway capacity to ferry Zambia’s freight to the ports. The roads–there is no way this country can maintain its road system, not without handouts. I go to X province, the roads are being done up, I hear. The Swedes are paying for it. Next day on a new road: the French are paying for it. Are we going to go on like this, living on handouts? Gimme, gimme, gimme, give us libraries, give us new locomotives, give us the bloody lot.’

SO WHAT SHOULD BE DONE?

Marxist student: The Bourgeois Revolution has failed. Now we must have a Revolution of the Proletariat.

Black farmer: Transport, it’s all transport. If only Comrade Mugabe would organize our transport…

White man, (born in the country, plans to stay in it, on innumerable boards, committees, charitable governing bodies): First you take the brakes off investment. But that won’t change anything until something else happens. Money has been poured into this country–millions. Most of it wasted. The Aid agencies, they don’t understand the priorities, they don’t understand the level they should have started at. The railways will work when these chaps have been trained to understand the mechanics. Industry will work when there’s a trained personnel. Look at Zimbabwe airlines–they fly, don’t they? They don’t just fall out of the sky? No, they decided to have an airline–all these countries have to have one, they’re prestige. But they put money into training the chaps to teach. Because they had to. If I had my hands on this Aid money I’d set up colleges to train the teachers. There’s a gap–that’s the gap. And make it prestige. Mugabe should be right in there making speeches and dishing out prizes. Do you know what has happened? These young black chaps, they want to study literature, God help us, they’ve inherited all that snobbery from England where engineers are dirt. When I was in the States last year I kept meeting engineers in the aeronautics industry, English, Scottish, they are working in the States and in Europe where engineers are valued. But here it is a matter of life and death for engineers to be trained and then valued. Until we’ve got this layer of properly trained black chaps it’s pouring money down the drain.

‘Did you know that every year the Japanese train 400 times more engineers and technicians than we do?’ (‘We’: The British.)

‘Training, training, training, TRAINING,
TRAINING–it’s training that we need. TRAINING.’

POLITICS

A Commercial Farmer (white) in the high-tech district, where not so long ago Selous bartered with Lo Magondi, applied to become a member of Zanu PF. He was interviewed by two important members of the Party.

‘First of all,’ says he belligerently, ‘I have to tell you three things. One, I have a big mouth and I’m not going to change.’ (He had been famous for attacks on government policy.)

‘And what else, comrade?’

‘I’ve been farming thirty years in this country, and I’m going to go on farming the way I know best.’

‘And what else?’

‘I’m never going to leave this country. If you burned my house down around my ears and told me to live in a mud hut I’d stay.’

‘Welcome to Zanu PF, comrade.’

GIVING UP

People leave Zimbabwe for apparently minor reasons: straws that break…

‘You are leaving because of
what
? You’re mad.’

‘If you like. I moved house. I put up a dura wall around the garden.’ (A type of cement fencing.) ‘All day in the department I hear, “So you’ve put up a dura wall, just like a white, you all put up fences.” But everyone knows the first thing a Chef does when he buys a house, before he even moves in, is to put up his dura wall. All I hear is the whites this, the whites that. I’ve had enough of this racism. It’s getting worse. I’m off.’

A scientist left because, having many times applied unsuccessfully for some laboratory equipment, refused on the grounds of shortage of foreign exchange, he stood at the airport watching ‘Dozens of these damned Chefs off to one of their conferences somewhere. There’s always enough money for that.’

The last straw for another was a new history book for use in schools, designed to correct the errors of the white version of African history. First. There is one short chapter on the hundred years of white domination, which transformed black culture. ‘It’s called Positive Discrimination.’ Then, hunter-gatherers are described as inhabiting the Middle East until one thousand years before Christ. ‘You can’t have black kids knowing there were scintillating civilizations around the Mediterranean long before they were ever heard of.’ And then, that polyglot band of desperate, penniless, hard-drinking adventurers who arrived to take their chances in the Kimberly diamond mines are described as ‘capitalists’. And then, in a book meant for both girls and boys, the pupils were invited to imagine themselves king in medieval Africa, loaded with finery, and waited on by his wives. ‘Not a word about all the important roles the women had, they were not just wives to the king, that’s just rubbish. No, I’m a historian. That means
facts
. If these people want to go in for all this political rubbish then–I’m off.’

But
: the man who left because of the fence is back. ‘I’d like to take the bloody place by the shoulders and shake some ordinary bloody commonsense into it. But I don’t want to live anywhere else.’

Nor is it unknown for black Zimbabweans, and even a Chef or two, to be found far from home. After an evening spent playing that game known as
choosing one’s words
, you may hear, ‘Yes, that’s how it goes…funny how things turn out, sometimes.’

THE VERANDAH IN THE MOUNTAINS

Again I look down on hills, lakes, rivers and forests and above them is a baby aeroplane, owned by a local farmer, and in it with him is the Coffee Farmer. They are circling the mountains, and the valleys, and the Communal Areas looking for signs of soil erosion, which will then be reported to the Soil Conservation Committee.

Through the days and the evenings I sit listening to the ideas bubble.

Everywhere in the Communal Areas you see these fat goats. How is it the blacks don’t make goat cheese? They like strong tastes. Surely they’d like it. Why don’t…?

A woman has just come back from Argentina, with, ‘They grow the same crops as here. Maize, pumpkins, tomatoes, legumes, potatoes. But the poor people make dozens of different dishes with them. Why can’t Argentinian know-how be introduced here?’

It has occurred to an old-timer that the shifts and contrivances, the improvisation, of the white homesteads of the early days, where there was no electricity, refrigerators, running water, could be used now in the poorer Communal Areas. For instance, the coolers that were supplanted by refrigerators. Shelves are enclosed by walls of chicken wire, but doubled, an inch or so apart, the space filled with charcoal. Around the top of this safe is a metal groove that has very small holes in it. It is filled with water that slowly trickles down through the charcoal, so the walls of the safe are always wet, and the evaporation cools the inside of the safe, where butter and milk and meat wrapped in pawpaw leaves to tenderize it are kept at temperatures degrees lower than outside.

Canvas water coolers were hung from rafters or tree branches, and had in them lemonade and cold tea as well.