African Laughter (7 page)

‘And now I’ve got to put up with their bloody Labour Officer telling me what to do. I have to abide by whatever decision
he
sees fit to come up with. I have to do what
he
says.’

After breakfast the Labour Officer arrived. He was on a bicycle. My brother invited him, with cold formality, to sit down. This of course could not have happened in the old days. We three sat on the verandah and Joseph brought out tea. He and the Labour Officer exchanged greetings in the Shona style.

‘Good morning.’

‘Good morning.’

‘Have you slept well?’

‘I have slept well if you have slept well.’

‘I have slept well.’

‘Then I have slept well.’

The Labour Officer was a man of about thirty-five, a strong, healthy, sane, individual with a humorous look imposed on him by this job, which was mostly having to manage difficult, unreasonable, unfair and sometimes abusive whites.

My brother grumbled on and on about the girls who understood nothing about the obligation to give a day’s work in return for a day’s pay, and about the troublemaker who had all the others dancing to her tune.

The officer sat listening. When my brother had to go in to answer the telephone, I asked him about his work. He had been trained in agriculture under the whites, together with hundreds of others: there had been a policy to train black experts to work in the Native Purchase Areas and the Reserves–no, that is what they were called then, they had different names now–luckily for this government, because he was worked off his feet, all the cultural advisers and Extension workers were worked off their feet, there was not enough of them. It would take two to three years, he said, to train the experts Zimbabwe needed. ‘Surely,’ I said, ‘no one’s going to blame you if it takes longer?’ Suddenly a direct look, acknowledging me as a friend, and not an enemy. He grimaced, shook his head, and laughed. ‘They blame us in any case,’ he said, which was his real answer to my question, ‘Do you find this work difficult?’ To which he formally replied, ‘I try to do my best, madam.’

He bicycled off to the village to talk to the girls. Meanwhile my brother grumbled that this Labour Officer ‘or whatever he calls himself’ of course would be on the side of the girls. After a couple of hours the man came back. The tea tray appeared again. He thought he had sorted everything out, but first of all he would like to see the pay books. Tight-lipped, Harry brought out the pay books. For about half an hour the man worked through them, then snapped them shut, and delivered his verdict. ‘The girls told me you hadn’t paid them, but I see you have, sir. My recommendation is you should dismiss Mary…’ (the troublemaker) ‘but you should dismiss Sarah too. She’s the real trouble. You have got it wrong, sir. Mary does what Sarah tells her. I’ve told them that when they get work somewhere else, I’ll be keeping my eye on them.’

Off he went on his bicycle. He told us he was going to visit a farm where a woman had accused another of putting the evil eye on her. As a result, there had been fighting among the farmer’s workers.

‘Did you hear that? The evil eye! That’s what we have to contend with…and those silly girls won’t get work anywhere else, because there isn’t any work. They’ll be jolly sorry they played me up when they find they can’t get work. With so many of us Taking the Gap there’s less work all the time.’

‘Aren’t you pleased at the way that was sorted out?’ I enquired.

‘Let’s go and have lunch.’

An enormous meal of meat and vegetables, baked potatoes, salads, pudding, cheese, biscuits.

‘I can see I am going to eat far too much here,’ I said. ‘No one in England eats anything like this amount.’ I described the evolving food habits of the British, take-away foods, snack foods, convenience foods, freezers, microwaves. I said we ate Indian food, Chinese food, pizzas, pastas and American hamburgers. ‘The old pattern of eating, three solid meals a day and morning and afternoon tea–it’s gone.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that. I believe standards should be kept up.’

After lunch he slept for exactly half an hour, and then we sat on the verandah and drank tea. The two Alsatians lay beside us, one at my brother’s feet and the bitch Sheba at mine. She has been miserable ever since her mistress died. She wants another woman to love her, and hopes this will be me. Her hunger for a woman’s affection makes her trot over to the farmhouse a mile away, where she puts her muzzle into the hand of the mistress of the house, and whines, begging for love. The woman, who understands the dog’s unhappiness, sits down on the verandah or on the lawn beside Sheba and hugs her and sweet-talks, until Sheba licks her face, and trots back home. Sheba is overshadowed by the big dog Sparta, a strong intelligent dog who, when we play with them in the garden, always reaches the thrown stick first, and can pick up in his mouth two, three, four sticks, tossing them and catching them for our applause, like a juggler. Sheba can carry only one stick. Sparta knows how to obey orders, Sit, To heel, Lie down, Fetch it, Bark once–twice–three times. My brother trained Sparta, but Sheba was not trained. She is frantic to be like Sparta, is always watching, to find out how it is done, while Sparta shows off.

My brother seemed helpless with Sheba, did not know how to gentle the dog’s pain, which is so like his. But later, when Sheba found that no woman came to live in the house, she attached herself to my brother, and bested Sparta in the way of affection, for he could not compete with her need to be one person’s dog, with her fierce devotion. She slept on my brother’s bed, was always beside him, her head near his hand, or lay with her eyes on his face. When my brother Took the Gap, the dogs went with him. Quite soon Sheba got herself coiled in some wire left loose at the end of a fence. She strangled to death, though there was a man present, with wirecutters in his pocket, the white stock manager of a local ranch. He said he wasn’t going to risk being bitten by an Alsatian.

Later a neighbour telephoned to say he had driven into Marondera for the mail, and could not buy a newspaper: they had all been sold. There had been an ‘incident’ on the Victoria Falls road from Bulawayo. Terrorists had captured tourists. ‘Of course they aren’t going to tell us the truth in our papers,’ said the neighbour. ‘Ask your sister to ring London.’ I did this and found that the Terrorists, supposed to be Joshua Nkomo’s men, had captured six tourists, but released three women. The men would be killed if Mugabe did not release some Nkomo men in prison.

‘There you are,’ says Harry, ‘you have to telephone Home to get the facts.’

Which were all on the television news.

‘There
you
are,’ I said.

But he went off into The Monologue. By then I had understood the whites were in a state of shock, just as if there had been an accident, or a disaster. I was irritated with myself for not seeing earlier what could have been foreseen before even leaving London.

After supper we argued: of course I should have known better. He got a bit tight and talked about the innate inferiority of the blacks. I was to discover this happens often with whites when they get drunk. Not all of them, though; and it is interesting to try and guess which old Rhodie will start spouting racialism when they have had a drink or two, for they might just as well reveal admiration of a wistful Rousseau-like kind: ‘They are much better people than we are, you know.’ But some whites define themselves by insisting on the inferiority of the blacks. What deep insecurity, what inadequacy, does this insistence on other people’s inferiority conceal? (In 1991 I sat in a London restaurant with black Zimbabweans who talked to Indian waiters with the same cold insulting dislike once used by the worst of the whites to the blacks.) I said he talked as if the whites of Southern Rhodesia were all remarkable and valuable, but many were poor material from any point of view. When they were good they were very very good, skilful, adaptable, full of expertise, but the rest were limited, unintelligent, with that kind of complacency that can only go with stupidity. They would not easily get jobs anywhere else and the blacks were only too lucky to have got rid of them. Harry was hurt. He was bitter, accusing; could not believe I had said these things or could think them.

Next morning, friends dropped in from Banket, among them an old woman I had known when we were children. There is a convention among adults that because they are friends, their children must be too. This girl and I were sent off to play together when our parents visited each other. At once we began to play Do You Remember, the game so useful when other conversation is difficult. I remembered that on hot days we were put into a tin bath under a big mulberry tree and cold water poured over us. Snakes love mulberry trees, and we kept looking up into the innocent branches for a stealthy slithering green coil, a flickering tongue. We were both teased ‘unmercifully’, as was then prescribed, because we were plump. We both played up to what the adults wanted, squealing and splashing water about. She did not remember this. What she knew was that we were sent off into the fields to collect ‘witch grass’, the witchweed or fireweed the farmers don’t like. We were paid pocket money, a few pence for each bundle. ‘I don’t remember that,’ I said, and she was affronted, insulted. ‘But whenever I think of you, you are standing in the mealies holding a big bundle of witchgrass.’ She turned away from me and went to sit at the table on the verandah. In denying her this memory, part of herself, a ‘nice’ memory, chosen from others to enable her to think pleasantly about an unsatisfactory childhood friend, I only deepened what she already felt about this deceiving, treacherous and above all unfair time that was taking everything away from her. She and her brother, my brother and a couple of neighbours sat drinking tea and then beer, while they recited versions of The Monologue. I sat a little away from them, and read one of the novels by African writers I had bought only two days ago. There I sat, apart, reading, just as I had as a child…they sat together, leaning a little forwards, their shoulders hunched and defensive, sometimes sending me accusing glances from inside their little lager. Their voices were miserable, full of betrayal, sorrow, incomprehension.

When they went off, Harry asked what was I reading, and I told him about the good African writers. Had he ever thought of reading them? He had never heard of them. If he did read them, then perhaps he would understand better how the Africans were thinking? He said he understood quite well what they were thinking, and he couldn’t say he liked it much. Encouraged by this note of humour, I handed him a couple of books. During the next few days, I left them lying around, and even read him a paragraph or two. He listened as if to news from a foreign country.

I had no better luck in any of the white households I visited on that trip. In not one was anyone prepared even to open an African novel; I was challenging, threatening, some well-out-of-sight, or even out-of-consciousness, prohibition.
No
said all these faces, when I asked, These are books written by your fellow citizens. Aren’t you even interested?

Next day we drove into Marondera to shop. Grumble grumble all the way because there were gaps on the shelves where imported goods used to be. I pointed out there was plenty to eat. Bickering, we drove to the post office, where a group of whites stood talking in a tight circle, faces close, their shoulders repelling invisible bullets. Cheerful blacks milled about, talking, laughing, calling out to each other and took no notice at all of the whites.

On the way home we stopped at a roadside stall to buy mushrooms, and the seller asked if we could lift his wife to the turn-off. With bad grace, my brother said yes. The girl, pregnant and holding a new baby, sat by me on the driving seat. When we had set her down, Harry kept saying, ‘But it’s no distance,’ which statement had layers of meaning. One, that Africans had not lost the use of their legs, as we had, and this was both a matter for admiration, and a symptom of being primitive. Two, he did not see why he should give free lifts to people who had just unfairly beaten his side in the War.

My smug disapproval about the whites not giving lifts was to take a knock, for six years later I found that no one, not ‘liberals’ or the religious; not ‘progressives’ or ‘reactionaries’, no one at all, gave lifts to any person, black or white, whose face was not familiar. It was too dangerous: there had been too many muggings, hold-ups, ‘incidents’ of all kinds.

We went to take morning tea on another verandah full of wonderful dogs, and luxurious cats, who had to be spilled off the chairs so we might sit down, and I heard The Monologue spoken, first by the wife, and then at lunch, which was served by a black girl wearing a uniform not unlike an Edwardian maid’s, black, with white cuffs and lace. This time the husband said The Monologue. Then everyone sneered at President Banana’s funny name.

We walked around the garden. Again a garden ‘boy’–the old word still used, quite unself-consciously, watered a variety of lawns and shrubs, and when his employers were not listening, asked if he could come and work for me, he needed to better himself. He had an O-level, and was only a gardener because he had not yet found a good job. I live in London, I said. He asked if it was in America, because if so, he would come and work for me. I said in America black people did not necessarily have an easy time. He said he had seen rich black people on television and in films, and he wanted to be like them. This took me back thirty odd years, to when I used to sell communist papers around a certain ‘Coloured’ (that was the correct word politically then for people of mixed race) suburb in old Salisbury. While I preached informed opposition to white domination, I was being stopped on every street corner by aspiring young men who wanted to go to America where everyone was rich. I used to give them gentle lectures on the need to think of the welfare of All before self-advancement. What a prig. What an idiot. I can see myself, an attractive but above-all self-assured young woman, in a clean and perfectly ironed cotton dress–which in itself was a luxury for people living crammed in shabby rooms; wheeling a nice clean bicycle too expensive for almost everyone I met, and on the carrier piles of newspapers and pamphlets advocating varying degrees of social discontent, with revolution as a cure for everything.