African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe

  GOOD OLD SMITHIE

  It occurs to me that no one mentions Smith: six years ago they could not stop talking about him. He has been in America, saying that Zimbabwe is more of a tyranny than South Africa. People think that he wants to be arrested, wants to be a martyr. ‘But Mugabe is too clever for him.’

  They tell a story of an incident at the local post office. Mr Smith, Mrs Smith, queue up to be served ‘just like everybody else’–they say, with approval. One day Mrs Smith said to a black woman that she hoped her little girl was well. ‘Do you remember, I used to give her sweets.’

  ‘Yes, I remember, Amai…’ a term of respect for older women. ‘But you see, sweets were not enough.’

  A THINK-TANK

  ‘They’ say that there exists an unofficial Think-Tank, composed of high-level people from both parties. They are all of the travelling class, and do not use the rhetoric of a marxism dead and discredited. Two languages or modes of speaking are used in Zimbabwe, just as was the case in the Soviet Union before Gorbachev: the public, the official one, used as self-protection, and a living language which acknowledges the falseness of the first. It is said that ‘Mugabe himself’ sometimes comes to the Think-Tank evenings. This means that people wish he did, if he does not. The ideas of the Think-Tank filter down, have influence, like a stream of fresh quick-moving water in stale water. But the language used in the Think-Tank would not be used in public, and never in the newspapers. ‘If you get a Cabinet Minister by himself you find they all know what the real situation is. When they are all together in the Cabinet or one of those committees of theirs, then they are afraid to say what they think.’ ‘They’ say that this Think-Tank enjoys so much prestige that very high-level people indeed from South Africa come up to sit in and listen. ‘Who are these people? Liberals?’ ‘Oh no, better than that, you’d be surprised, oh no, the real thing, people from the government.’

  THE OLD FARM

  And now it was time to stop being childish. I had to go back to the old farm. To make sure that the driving wheel would finally be turned on to the right road, I was not going to be behind it. This business of writers’ myth-countries is far from simple. I know writers who very early build tall fences around theirs and afterwards make sure they never go near them. And not only writers: all the people I know from former dominions, colonies, or any part of the earth they grew up on before making that essential flight in and away from the periphery to the centre: when the time comes for them to make the first trip home it means stripping off new skin and offering exposed and smarting flesh to–the past. For that matter every child who has left home to become an adult knows the diminishing of the first trip home.

  A child’s world is full of enormities, every neighbour or uncle or auntie or the shopkeeper on the corner is easily transferable to the world of fairy tales or of comics, but once grown up, she or he goes home to find they are just people after all. And that is the point, finding oneself so diminished because those powerful arbiters are. But in The District–so we referred to it, as if there could be only one district (just as there is no people in the world who has not called itself, in its beginnings, simply, The People)–in The District, Lomagundi, they were all outsize and fit for tales and epics, because the white farmers lived at distances from each other, and everything they did was visible, and everything they said too, because those were the days of the district telephone lines when there might be up to twenty farms on one line. They still exist. Lonely people listened in to conversations, or even joined in. There could easily be a three-way or four-way conversation going on, as if they were sitting together in a room. It was as if they all lived on stage, every characteristic or event enormified by storytelling: the word gossip is surely suitable only for small streets and crammed populations? And the Africans assisted this by their custom of giving the whites names, like those in epics: Angry Face, The Woman With Two Husbands, The Fire-haired Son, The Man Who Barks Like a Dog.

  Take the Matthews, our nearest neighbours. He was Big Bob because he was six foot six, weighty, looked as if he had been carved out of beef well-marbled with fat. She was Little Mrs Matthews, being five feet tall, plump, dainty. His brutalities to the natives were discussed with disapproval. ‘He doesn’t know his own strength, that’s the trouble,’ was the nearest anyone came to acceptance of Big Bob’s excesses, fifty, sixty years ago. He had been a policeman in Glasgow. Easy to imagine him strolling along wet dark pavements, hands behind his back, truncheon under his arm. Easy to imagine her in a pretty-curtained parlour. When my brother and I dropped in on our bicycles she would be in the kitchen cooking: tea cakes, girdle cakes, pancakes, oatcakes, fruit cakes, sponge cakes, tarts, pies, gingerbread, fruit bread, parkin. All these would appear on the table for that supremely Scottish meal, tea. Their house was full of ‘store furniture’, in other words, glossy heavy suites and wardrobes. Sometimes nieces visited, and then Little Mrs Matthews and the girls danced Scottish sword dances, kilts flying, slippered feet as neat as cats’ tripping around the sword hilts. If they had stayed in Scotland would they have been remarkable? But what about the weight of Bob, the height–he would have been material for notoriety wherever he lived, and those fists…‘Good Lord, it would be like colliding with a steam-hammer, being hit by Big Bob.’ The blacks called him Thunder and Lightning and put marks on trees near the paths people used looking for work, meaning, This is a bad farm.

  But the question is, what was it in Big Bob, and in Little Mrs Matthews that took them out of Glasgow before the First World War to farm in old Southern Rhodesia among all those wild animals and the savages? What restlessness, or ambition, or crime, or romanticism, well concealed behind conventional looks, took them so far from home? And, similarly, with all the rest of our neighbours. If you saw them at Church on Sunday–Presbyterian and Church of England services alternated at the village hall–those sober Sunday-dressed-and-hatted people, eyes down over hymnbooks, their voices measured to ‘Rock of Ages’ and ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’, it was easy to imagine them back ‘Home’ from where, surely, they need never have taken flight? But that wasn’t true. Every one of them had something concealed, not evident but powerful, which had brought them out here to The District to spread themselves over so many acres of land stolen from the blacks, farming with all the energy of poor people who remember poverty.

  The District was full of misfits, for better or worse, who had found England, Scotland, too small.

  Now when I think of these people, among whom I grew up, this is what interests me: what were they before they sold up their furniture, put themselves on the slow boats to Cape Town or Beira, and then on the trains to Salisbury, there to scatter and look for land, risking everything in a country they knew nothing about? Every one of them arrived in The District in the same state as the families stepping off ships on the shores of New England or Virginia, their minds full of tales of danger and riches. And, too, of thoughts of freedom.

  Going back to the farm, so commonsense told me, not to mention friends, was bound to be an anti-climax. This turned out not to be true, though I did not expect to have my ideas shifted about as they were.

  First, there was this business of the weather, or, if you like, the climate. On that day I was driven by Ayrton R. to The District, everyone was worried about the rain. After those satisfactory but brief rains weeks ago no rain, none. Yet it was late in November. Tucked away at the back of our minds is the notion that our new weather sciences should be bringing the weather to heel: that when we say the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone the words should be enough to force the masses of warm wet air that rise off oceans and forests into the right place so they may clash with the high pressure areas south-east near Mozambique. But the skies were a bright calm blue, not a sign of rain-tension, black silver-edged clouds unfolding up into the zenith, lightning flickering low on a horizon, thunder like a promise. Everyone was thinking ‘a drought’, but no one was saying it, yet: superstition. If you say ‘drought’ then that makes it
real.

  I did not want to see the old farm thinned by dryness and dimmed by smoke from bush fires: a harsh and denuded thing is the bush before the rains have come, like a literal depiction of a state of mind I was afraid of–though I had dreamed it often enough. Isolation. Being excluded. Exile from the possibilities of the world outside the farm. I wanted the bush in its lush and luxuriant aspect, the rainy season landscape, and I was almost sure I would find it. After all, reports did say it had rained in the north-east, if not enough. Above all, the migrant birds had arrived. Even when the dry season dust was still velvet on your skin, those travelling birds announced the rainy season. And, better even than that, in that long-ago then storks and swallows brought news of places it was hard to believe I would ever see, for England was situated in a region of the mind as different from Africa as the atmosphere of one recurring dream is from another. There were snows, mists, shallow sunlight, long twilights in a pastel country where birds cried along chalky shores they never left. Here the sun got up and went down pronto at six and six, the colours were strong, the heat burned and snapped, you lived high on the Altitude, among dramatic skies. It never snowed. When I was young I was infinitely separated from Europe. Except through literature. When I came to England and became Prohibited, the Africa I knew was out of reach. Separation of my landscapes has always been my fate. But, a few days after I returned to London after this trip in 1988 I saw a weatherman point to the weather map on television and remark that the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone over Southern Africa was influencing the air masses, hot and cold, to the north of it, and they in turn were shaking and shocking the weather in our skies, the skies of England. I sat on my London sofa, the curtains drawn tight to keep out December, and the certain and immutable walls that had kept my inner landscapes apart vanished in a chart of rivers of wind and oceans of air, the two worlds joined more swiftly than Concorde can do it, or those machines still being evolved which one day will travel from London to Harare, London to Tokyo, in a couple of hours.

  But this resolution of impossibilities was still a month ahead.

  No, it was distance, what had happened to distance, which was the real theme of my return to the farm.

  It was a brilliant day, when Ayrton R. and I set off. We went through the northern suburbs of Harare while I ticked off events and people: this happened here, this happened here; no, it is not possible that people survive what they do survive, what we all survive, that is the point–and thank God we do forget it all, except on voyages like this one.

  But wait…is that true…perhaps it isn’t true? Suppose one was able to keep in one’s mind those childhood miseries, the homesickness like a bruise on one’s heart, the betrayals–if they were allowed in lie in the mind always exposed, a cursed country one has climbed out of and left behind for ever, but visible, not hidden…would then that landscape of pain have less power than I am sure it has? There is a fish called the Angler Fish, that looks as evil as if it has chosen to illustrate a morality tale. It cruises just under the surface of the sea, watching for migrating birds who decide to risk a few hours sleep rocking on the waves. Then this brute of a fish sneaks up, snatches at sleep-loosened feet and drags the bird down, down…

  On we drove over the good smooth urban roads, but when memory expected a sudden bumpy encounter with the country roads nothing happened, on we went rolling high and safe, infinitely far from the bush and the past. Yes, I had been in The District only a few weeks ago, and on a farm not far from ours, but the approach had been on a different road, one that did not share my childhood, or those journeys of then, the interminable journeys in child-time…‘When will we get there?’ ‘Soon.’ ‘But when’–as the valleys and hills jogged slowly by, the road twisting among clumps of tall grass and piles of rock. It was over this road I drove my father into Salisbury, in the old car, he a diabetic in danger of coma, my mother beside him in the back seat, watching his face, her calm fingers on his pulse. The road then was a track, corrugated in long slow waves of soil from Salisbury all the way north to the Zambesi. If I drove fast, the corrugations jarred the sick man so that he gasped out pleas for me to stop. So I stopped, then drove slowly at about five miles an hour, up and down, from the ridge of one corrugation to the next, dodging between potholes…essential to get him to hospital fast, at once, but if I went fast those corrugations would kill him. How many times did we make that journey? But I have forgotten. And then they built the strip roads. Roaring north now on this wonderful road I searched for the old strip roads, broken threads that appeared by the railway lines and disappeared into grass. Those fragile foot-wide ribbons of tarmac marked a stride forward into a new technology–Southern Rhodesia invented the strip roads–and thereafter journeys into Salisbury were no longer nightmares, took only three or four hours of careful driving. As for the old dusty and muddy tracks that were the first roads, they are no longer visible, though I daresay if one stopped the rush northwards, got out of the car, climbed down the embankment and searched in the thick after-rains grass, there would be traces of those roads we dawdled, slid and skidded over, or waited on patiently for hours so a river might go down. But now you don’t notice the rivers running full with rain or sluggish under the bridges. Soon, long before memory and dream landscapes say is possible, there is the Dyke. That chain of mountains full of crystalline lights and blue distances, what a pity my mother did not know they are linked with the Rift Valley and the Indian Ocean, or are for romantics who refuse to listen to pedantic objections. Her memories, her talk, were full of the sea. She was London-bred, made by streets, but the sea was her mind’s hinterland, and a tumble of granite rocks, or ruffling sweeps of white cloud high above a red sunset brought out of her talk of waves crashing on reefs or storms at sea. Later I discovered that her mother, Emily Flower, she who died in childbirth with her third, was the daughter of a lighter-man on the Thames, so seas and rivers were in her blood. As we say. She was proud she was such a good sailor, that on that terrible journey on the oil tanker on the Caspian, when her husband and children were ill with seasickness, and later on the voyage out to Africa when the gales were so bad all the other passengers lay in their bunks longing for death, she was up on the bridge with the captain. On the farm, six thousand feet up, she yearned for the sea but we could not afford it. She was shockingly imprisoned on that farm. No one we knew went to England for holidays. If someone in The District went Home then it was for medical treatment or to say final farewells to aged parents. Even the ‘cheque-book farmers’ on the other side of The District went Home seldom, and we all talked about their trips as travellers’ tales out of our own experience. The richer farmers did go to Durban; we did not.

  But if it had been known then the continent would split and the Indian Ocean…then sea-spume and sea-winds and Arab trading ships would have been added, in the talk we listened to as children, to the gold-bearing reefs, quartz outcrops, Arab trading safaris and Arab miners who in those days were supposed to be the reason for the ancient mine workings that we stumbled on as we picked our way through long grass.

  If only we had known the real history of that area…We believed it had been inhabited when the whites came by people not much more advanced than hunter-gatherers; yes, they did have unimportant little fields of grain and gourds. The fact was that for centuries it was a tale of large and small kingdoms, wars, conquests and coups, traitors, treaties and spies, with the Portuguese there not only as traders, far from it, they were sometimes king-makers and more than once rulers, too. It was all like Shakespeare’s plays about the Plantagenets, much more satisfying than sentimental notions about the Arabs.

  From Harare to the Dyke was a moment, while I kept trying to slow the journey to match this turn of the road, that descent of a hill, with the past, but it was no use, the Dyke was behind us and in no time at all we would be in Banket.

  It was on this trip that I understood, in my own self, in my bones and my blood, how this had happened once, long ago, in Europe. Big towns were so far o
ff that people might go there once in their lives, or they knew people who had. The village where they bought what they did not grow needed a day to reach, walking, or on horseback. A fearful or excited night in an inn, and then home, with tales to surprise the neighbours. And then suddenly, happening within a generation, good roads, coach travel, and the world shrank. What had been out of reach was within touching distance. The rough tracks that had followed paths discovered by the necessities of walking, of getting somewhere on foot, paths that wound and hesitated and curved and detoured around hillocks and searched for shallow places in rivers–they disappeared, were swallowed in grass, and then in scrub and then in trees. This revolution has still to take place in some countries of Africa. It has still to happen in some parts of Zimbabwe, for you can speed to the end of the tarmac and see before you the sandy bumps of a bush road whose course was determined by feet walking a path. The car that was speeding straight through the infinite variations of the bush has to slow and match itself to a walker’s landscape.