African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe

  I remark how strange to pick up a poor man in the middle of the bush whose son is at university in Europe, but am rebuked with, ‘There are many like him.’ I wish I believed there were many like his oldest son being educated in Britain.

  We are now miles, worlds, away from anywhere. Leaving the cars, we walk into the bush and sit around on rocks under the light airy dry trees that shed a shifting fragrant shade. It is midday. An emerald spotted dove calls: is answered.

  There is a village near here, though we cannot see it. People come from the village and sit with us. Children. Men. No women. But there are women, with us, officials; two people we gave lifts to are here to take a census and they sit apart under a tree with the headman, conferring earnestly over charts and notebooks. An Extension Worker, a woman, is here to check on the state of the rains, the crops. During the hour we sat and lazed there, a good deal of business was done. As much, certainly, as if it were a meeting in an office.

  The talk turns to Mozambique, which is so close, and to the people who keep coming here through the bush to get food. ‘How can we feel safe in Zimbabwe when the Mozambique War goes on and on?’ ‘It will never end. It is in South Africa’s interests to keep it going.’

  A Mozambique joke: What is a sardine? A sardine is a whale that has gone through seven stages of socialist transformation.

  An old man tells the children that once Mozambique was a rich country, and there was plenty of food. The children sit shaking their heads, disbelieving: for all their lives Mozambicans have crept through the bush to beg food from them.

  ‘Why are they so poor?’ asks a boy of about ten.

  ‘There’s a war,’ says the old man.

  ‘Wasn’t there a war here?’ asks a teenage girl, who dimly remembers something of the kind.

  ‘No, we haven’t had a war,’ says the ten-year-old.

  The adults look at each other, black and white, shake their heads, laugh.

  I ask: ‘If there was one single thing you could have here, in this area, what would you ask for?’

  ‘Money,’ said the headman. They all laugh.

  ‘Well all right. You have fifty thousand pounds. What would you spend it on?’

  The vastness of this sum makes them laugh again. They argue for a while, and finally agree, ‘A dam. That’s what we need most. We should dam that river that runs under those hills.’

  I tell them about the garden I saw in Matabeleland: poor soil, but successful, because of the water. They are at once interested, come closer, ask questions: how much water? Is fertilizer being used? Where did the money come from?

  I ask what people in this village do for entertainment.

  ‘The government sent its film unit around last year,’ was the grave reply: then they all laughed about something in the film that was shown them. They did not say what was so funny about the film.

  And when there is no film unit?

  They sit in their homes and talk and tell stories in the evenings, and sometimes there is a dance.

  There is a bus that comes, takes us to the Growth Point. We can shop there.

  Sometimes we go into Mutare and visit relatives, but it is a long way off, over a hundred miles.

  Later that day in another place, another meeting, conducted under a tree.

  The local village representatives came to meet visiting Extension Workers and a local Extension Worker, who is a woman, one of the twenty per cent now coming out of agricultural colleges. She is young, smartly dressed, married, with three children. Around a table set under the tree there are about ten people conducting village business.

  They do not seem pleased to see officials from Mutare. When one of the men goes from the lorry to the table, they all at once begin joking about some advice he gave them last time he was here. There are two kinds of people here, it is easy to see: the villagers, and the experts and officials.

  I was told in Harare, ‘These new experts coming out of agricultural colleges, think they know everything. They go into the villages and tell people who have farmed in those conditions for centuries what to do. You have to do so and so–say the experts. But it won’t work–say the villagers, and it is hard to know when this is peasant conservatism talking, and when it is the voice of experience.

  I have been given research papers, much of it from the university, defending traditional agricultural practice. The villages know everything about how to look after soil in a drought year, how to grow crops on this and poor soil, how to keep beasts well when fodder is short. But if the experts on a university level are full of praise for traditional practices, this does not mean these are being taught in agricultural colleges. It always takes a long time for the results of research to reach school and college syllabuses.

  When I said to the Coffee Farmer, ‘Even the old missionaries and explorers talked about what good farmers these people were,’ he replied, ‘You don’t understand. That was then–very few people and plenty of land. They haven’t changed their practices to suit the new conditions. I keep telling them…’

  It is the evening of the same day, the sun gold and low, making shadows. We are standing by a strong new fence, paid for by some foreign Aid source.

  Handsome black and white cows are crowding up to the fence to look at us.

  The Coffee Farmer is holding forth. ‘Look at this fence. I know what it costs. You don’t get fence of this quality under X pounds a kilometre. To fence this bit of bush must have cost ZY pounds. It will last Z years. Yes, first-class fence, bloody marvellous. But if you had slung that wire from tree to tree, doing it properly so the trees are not hurt, then it would have cost XZ pounds and you could have fenced in three times the area.’

  He stands on his two solidly-planted feet, hands on his hips in front of a group of Africans, who are listening gravely. I and the South African woman, both appreciating this traditional scene, white man lecturing blacks, catch each other’s eyes, carefully do not smile, turn our attention to the cows who both wish and do not wish to become acquainted. That is, they come, drawn by curiosity, to a point about five feet away, then stand ready to jump back and off at the slightest movement from us.

  We hear, ‘That is the trouble with all this Aid money. They just waste it and waste it. But why didn’t you tell them…why didn’t you simply put your foot down and…’

  All this is nonsense, because everyone knows that when international experts descend on an area they will decide exactly what they want done, and the locals will like it or lump it. We can just imagine saying to some well-conducted Swede or German, ‘Never mind about steel fence stanchions, just sling the wire from tree to tree and…’

  ‘It’s all heartbreaking,’ we hear. ‘The one thing that is essential, the key to everything, the priority is fencing land properly so the mombies can’t get on it and so it can rest and come back and there won’t be erosion…just look at this.’

  He is leading his class to look at a fenced area that has no mombies on it. ‘Look. That soil has rested for two years and you can see how the bush is coming back. See that plant? When you see that plant it means there hasn’t been a beast on it for at least two seasons. You see my point? If you use trees instead of metal stanchions then you could enclose three times the area.’

  Across the fence where the beasts are is a commotion. Another group of cattle approaches the first, pale dust rising about their hooves and dulling the shine of their hides. It is led by a bull. The first group is led by a bull. The invading bull comes forward, presumably to negotiate with the first about sharing this bit of grazing. The two bulls stand nose to nose snorting while the cows meet and mingle and begin to graze. A newly-born calf, as loose and sinuous and shining as an empty black silk glove stands with his nose to the fence, his back to the herd, staring at us with a look of wild affront.

  ‘And there’s another thing,’ says the Coffee Farmer. ‘Money wasted, wasted, wasted on status symbols. Now the fashionable thing is to have a house made of burned brick. But making bricks means you h
ave to burn wood. You waste wood. Why not kimberly brick? It is perfectly good. Did you know there are countries in the world that never use burned bricks, they use bricks made of mud and water and they last for centuries. Why do you people insist on…’

  The two bulls have come to some agreement and are now peaceably co-existing.

  ‘It makes me absolutely wild,’ says the Coffee Farmer. ‘I go around the villages and everywhere I see these kilns, what for, money wasted, all the wood wasted…’

  When the Coffee Farmer is out of earshot we ask the officials and the villagers if they mind being lectured.

  They do not look at each other. Then they smile and after a pause one of the villagers says, ‘No, we don’t mind. We know he wants to help us. He is a good man.’

  It is impossible to know if they are being polite. We discuss the incident and decide they mean it, that is, the villagers do, but the officials may be a different matter.

  We go back into the cars. We drive back on the long long roads through the sunset bush, back to Mutare and up the mountains.

  To supper comes the man who used to do the job of the official in the office in Mutare. For years he was resettling people all over the Eastern districts. He knows it all. What I have to remember, says he, is that in the early idealistic days Mugabe envisaged collective farming, like the Russian kolkhozes, where land was owned in common. The idea has worked no better here than in Russia, or in Tanzania where they tried it. It is a failure and everyone knows it. But to know it is one thing, to admit it publicly another. What works is when farmers are given land and then pool machinery and facilities. Is it really their land? Well, here is another of the famous Grey Areas. It is government land but it is also theirs. What they want is to own land, with proper title deeds, which they can hand on to their children. Things seem to be developing along these lines, while the legalities remain ambiguous. And there is another thing, immediately much more tricky. A condition for being given land in a Resettlement Area is that a commitment must be made to that way of life: you agree to be a farmer, nothing but a farmer. But they want the same conditions as in the Communal Areas where at least one member of a family will have a job in the nearest town. The poverty in the Resettlement Areas is worse than in the Communal Areas–and that is why, say the resettled farmers.

  But the government says: If you commit yourself totally to this way of life, give all your energies to it, then the Resettlement Areas will be transformed, they will be rich…

  Well, yes, in time. A generation? Two?

  In the Resettlement Area we were shown the house of a good farmer, who satisfied the Extension Workers, and who is a credit and an inspiration to everyone. His house is a little brick house, with a couple of rooms and a kitchen. It has a nice garden. The field at the back is green and properly contoured. But the youngsters growing up in this house, a hundred miles from that metropolis Mutare, will do everything to go into town. At any cost. Even if it means living crowded with twenty other people in a poor room.

  LEGENDS

  Now we are driving south from Mutare along the edge of the Resettlement Area we were in yesterday. We are on our way from one centre of order, comfort–civilization–to another. For an hour the pale dryness of Class Four soil accompanies us, and we know the many villages hidden from us in the bush are the same as the few we looked at. We know because the Resettlement Officer of then is with us, and he knows every inch of this bush, every hut, every new Growth Point. He identifies with the efforts of the resettled ones with the same passion as the Coffee Farmer suffers in his own flesh the struggles of the soil. When we say we have been talking about what we saw yesterday, and found it discouraging, he says if we had known the area before we would be impressed.

  This former Resettlement Officer is also an historian and knows all the history of this area. This means that the frontier with Mozambique, so close to us, is in his mind no more than a temporary political whimsicality, just as it must seem to the villagers who see their tribe arbitrarily divided.

  One view of a future Mozambique reflects the past. The eastern districts of Zimbabwe and Mozambique are a historical and geographical unity. When? These ideas need something of the quality of those stretches of time that will see the Indian Ocean spilling into Mashonaland. No, the new Monomotapa will hardly need a million or a thousand years to take shape, but a hazy landscape of Time is best suited to a region already populated with legendary kings and old ruined cities waiting unexcavated in forests and jungles along the shores of the same ocean. One of the worst things about taking power, if you are a leader, a party, a junta, must be that henceforth your dreams have to narrow themselves to the necessities of power-keeping. The Freedom Fighters in the bush may sit around the fire at night talking: ‘I wonder if one day this frontier will disappear and this tribe can live as they did. All these frontiers are arbitrary anyway, invented by the whites, so why should we take any notice of them?’ But, the War over, and you are no longer sitting among trees watching firelight make moving patterns on leaves and grass, conversations of this kind must be held in closed rooms, when you have made sure no one, not even a servant, is listening. How many armies have come out of the bush, forests, mountains, to find they have lost the freedom to dream they had when they owned the rags they wore and the weapons they carried?

  PLEASURE

  Today rain threatens from every quarter of the sky. Rain fell in grey sheets behind us, then around us, then–as we ran through the hills–we emerged into sharp stinging downpours that kept pace until we left them in sullen purple-black masses that blotted out the mountains: saw an intense orange sunlight ahead and thought we would reach that but no, at another turn of the road the bruise-coloured clouds were ahead, and we were into a new storm that lashed the car with hail. At midday, in a space of sun, we stopped by a river at a place that combined wildness and remoteness with the convenience of a picnic table and a bench. While we sat there three men emerged from a landrover and came to look at the river. Two tourists and their tour-guide. We guessed Swedish, German, Danish, American, but heard Italian. These were rich Italians in elegant clothes, and they could afford an individual guide who had brought them to stand above a tempestuously-running river, full of rain, before speeding on up to Mutare. Then on we drove in the opposite direction, through wilder and more mountainous country, with never a car in sight, while the storms still deployed around us until finally everything was grey rain. We arrived at the Chimanimani Hotel in rain and found a vast fire burning in a vast living-room. The hotel is spacious, every room large with high ceilings, the bedrooms large with verandahs from which you look at mountains and more mountains, and, close to, the decorous blue swirls of a swimming bath. Old Colonial, which has made some of the pleasantest hotels in the world, but it was nearly empty. How can such a hotel not be permanently full? It seems one of the problems is that it is near Mozambique and a couple of years ago a party of Renamo Terrorists came through these mountains. Well, and what of it? No one stops using the roads when they read the statistics for car accidents. There is no accounting for what people choose to be afraid of.

  We ate dinner in the capacious and almost empty dining-room, listening to the laughter and hullabaloo of general enjoyment coming from the outside bar–for that is packed every night, even when bars inside the hotel remain underused. That night the hotel was enclosed in a hush of rain, but by morning the rain had become mist. We drove around and around mountains, each known intimately to the two men who had walked over them. Then, from the mountains, to the Bridal Veil Falls. (In every part of the world savagely beautiful falls of water are diminished and domesticated by being called bridal veils.) The water smashes, crashes, plunges, in cascades of white hundreds of feet over rocks into a pool. On either side of the falls are steep escarpments full of the homes of birds, and the place is enclosed in that silence that is made by a continuous rushing noise. Banana trees grow there showing all the cycles of their lives. For when they have flowered at last they die: new
saplings spring up among giants whose sagging limbs show they are due to rejoin the soil. They have red ribs and a glossy jewelled look. We were sitting on a grassy lawn between rocks when the Coffee Farmer remarked, ‘During the War a bunch of ‘terrs’ murdered some tourists here. The locals won’t come near the place. Just near where you are sitting actually.’ We did not rise to this. Whatever vibrations of fear or horror there were have long ago left this place: a more exquisite one cannot exist. Besides, we remarked there must be few places in the world where there have not been murders, battles, deaths. Also, of course, love, kisses, picnics and good times. Then off we went on yet another road through mountains, seeing no one at all, only some fine cattle who stared nervously at us as beasts do who seldom see vehicles clambering past their lonely altitudes. All morning we drove, with the mountains of Mozambique on our right hand, sometimes along ridges looking down into valleys where there are farms, dams, plantations, sometimes through forests that are still whole and healthy. We drove slowly and kept stopping because we did not want the journey to end. When we joined the main road we knew we left behind one of the few places in the world still owned and managed by Nature. Well, more or less.

  THE MASHOPI HOTEL

  On the way back from Mutare to Harare I stopped in Macheke, outside the old hotel, which was no longer boarded up and derelict but again recognizable as the hotel of those long-ago weekends. I asked to see the manager, who turned out to be a young black man orchestrating a team of enthusiastic helpers. I told him that in the old days this hotel was popular, always full. But this could only mean popular with whites, and he didn’t care about that. I said that in the War the RAF used to come out from Salisbury for weekends: sometimes there were parties that went on for days. But he thought I was talking about the Bush War, and had never heard of the RAF: the Second World War was over before he was born. I asked if I could go over the place for old times’ sake. He was polite, amused. At the back the bedroom block was again visible and identifiable, and being added to, and the flight of steps I could not find in 1982 appeared among the new rubble of building work. A garden café with sunshades and tables had replaced shrubs. The bar was where it had been, but extended, and curved into the place where we had danced, now a drinking room. In the dining-room, exactly as it was, I had lunch, and could have believed the door would swing open and admit ghosts brought back by this resurrection of old haunts. ‘You see?’ I silently addressed them. ‘It has all happened, just as we said it would…well, not just as we said…’ Rather I could have addressed them, imagining the precise degree of irony each face would show, if I was not in such a hurry. I thanked the manager. I looked across the road to the scruffy gum trees, making sure those miserable baboons had not reappeared. Then I left, on the road to Harare.