African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe

  Roll on the years, not to say decades, and this former idealist poet and I are in the kitchen of a farmhouse in Devon. Improbably, but that is another story.

  He is now a fat man glistening with success. He is Minister for Internal Affairs in one of the more conspicuously unsuccessful of the former colonies.

  I am particularly pleased to run into him, for only last week I was talking to the man who–now again at liberty and lecturing to the universities of America on African affairs–spent the seven years in prison. As it happened, one of these years was in a prison in the territory of this Minister: another fairly improbable story, but Africa is full of surprises.

  ‘Do you remember M.?’ I enquire.

  ‘How could I not remember that very fine comrade?’

  ‘Did you know he was in prison for seven years?’

  ‘I believe I did hear something of the kind.’

  ‘Did you know that for a year he was in one of your prisons?’

  ‘Really? Oh–I am surprised to hear that.’

  ‘As it happened he shared a cell for some months with——’ I mentioned the name of the current President of yet another African country.

  ‘President L.? Yes, I heard that he too had been in prison. In the same cell? That must have been nice for them, to be together.’

  ‘M. told me that the British prison he was in before Liberation was a holiday resort compared with your prison, which nearly killed him and President L.’

  We stood facing each other, while the Devon spring rain darkened the windows. We were far indeed from the hot skies of Africa.

  His eyes had become evasive. He sighed. He glanced at his watch but decided ancient friendship was due another minute.

  ‘Ah, if we knew when we were young how cruel life can be…’ And he gazed mournfully back through the mists of time at our youthful enthusiasms.

  ‘But,’ I persisted. ‘Your prisons. Surely you must know how terrible they are?’

  His eyes hardened, almost certainly on the thought, Once a trouble-maker always a trouble-maker. Then he allowed himself to be overtaken by tears. ‘I often say to my wife, my dear, I say to her, if we had known in the dawn of our struggle what we know now–ah, life is cruel, life is a cruel cruel thing.’

  ‘Not as cruel as your prisons where our old friend M. and President L. nearly died.’

  ‘Sometimes I think there is some kind of curse that turns all our wishes into their opposites.’

  ‘Just a minute. You are Minister for Internal Affairs, aren’t you? Well then! You are responsible for your prisons.’

  ‘And suddenly you are told you are responsible for the suffering of old friends.’

  ‘Well, why don’t you improve the conditions in your prisons? There were days they didn’t get anything to eat at all. They didn’t even have a blanket. They…’

  ‘Cruel…cruel…’ and his eyes shifted over the whitewashed wall he was facing, looking for some place of consolation or comfort.

  ‘You are Minister for Internal Affairs.’

  ‘I am glad we have spoken of these things. Sometimes I think my subordinates do not tell me what they should. I am grateful to you.’ And with this he smiled, but wanly, because of the sadness we both knew ruled Life. He shook his head, gave a brief sobbing laugh, which was cut short by a glance at his watch. He hurried out of the kitchen to his car which nearly filled the country lane.

  One may imagine asking Genghis Khan, ‘How do you feel about killing twenty million people?’

  ‘But it wasn’t my fault,’ he would say indignantly. ‘I was nothing but a straw blown in the winds of history.’

  POLITICS

  In 1956 when I visited Southern Rhodesia and Northern Rhodesia, the 40,000 or so Tonga then living on the shores of the Zambesi river were being moved from their villages on the river bank. Because they most passionately did not want to leave their homes they were forced into lorries, sometimes at gun-point, and driven away to high dry grounds miles away, and there dumped to get on as best they could. Many died. This operation was not one the governments in question could be proud of. The enforced migration of the river Tonga was because of the shortly-to-be completed Kariba dam, and was a big issue with the then young national movements of Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia, Nyasaland. Countless political speeches were made to audiences who cried Shame, Shame, and groaned and even wept. There were riots. There were petitions. The white liberals of the time (or ‘Kaffir-lovers’) were eloquent. The bad treatment of the river Tonga was a symbol of everything wrong with white government.

  When in 1989 I told people at the Training Centre I was about to visit the Tonga, they said, ‘You don’t want to go there.’ ‘They are primitive people.’ ‘They wear skins and sleep in the ashes of their fires.’ I said I had friends who actually knew the Tonga, and they live in huts and wear clothes, but the response was, ‘Then the clothes must be the ones collected from us for charity.’

  It is true the river Tonga are as poor as any people I saw in Zimbabwe. They are thin and some are stunted. Their villages are shabby. (Not however the villages of the Chiefs, which are of fine big huts, well built.) The lives of the Tonga since they were taken from their land, their shrines, and the graves of their ancestors, have been hard, have been painful, a struggle year in, year out, and from season to season. Unable to fish, removed from the rich alluvial soil that produced two or three crops a year, they tried plants that withstand dryness, like millet, rapoka and other small grains, but flocks of quelea birds waited for these to be ripe and even when women and children stood for days and weeks banging bits of iron and saucepans, the birds descended in clouds so thick they darkened the sky, and ate up everything, as thorough as a swarm of locusts. The quelea are those multitudinous flocks that we watch swirling so attractively about on our television screens. Then the Tonga tried maize, but had to reckon with elephants, who love maize. The elephants had visited just before we did, and had devastated the fields.

  These were near the villages behind Binga, which is on the other end of the Kariba lake away from the Kariba township on its hills, with its tourist hotels and tours and tour guides–quite one of the most attractive places in Zimbabwe, where you think these are shores in Greece or Sicily, wild pale rocky hills and islands and the blue water and the blue sky, and with all the attractions of elephants who appear even in the town itself, or herds of buffalo, and birds and buck…these shores and their delights are for the visitors who bring in essential foreign currency, and take photographs of the game, and on the lake itself, of crocodiles and hippos.

  But crocodiles tear the frail nets of Binga’s fishermen, and hippos threaten their boats.

  Binga is expanding fast. It consists of several acres of small two- and three-room houses of the kind described as medium-density housing, and here set at angles in the thick pinky-white dust where soon gardens will spring up. The air smells of donkeys and goats and cows, and roosters wake you at their appointed times through the night. It was full moon in Binga. Outside many of the little houses flickered the cooking fires found more attractive than the kitchens and stoves favoured by the whites. Binga is crowded with every kind of Aid worker. They are a dedicated lot. They would have to be. For one thing the temperature can stand at over a hundred for days at a time. To get there you drive miles on a dirt road that demands serious vehicles, like landrovers.

  Electricity was soon to arrive in Binga: the great power lines were in place, ready to come to life. People will no longer have to sleep at eight-thirty, their eyes strained by candlelight. A new hospital, a fine place, a gift from the United States, was just finished. It is a high-tec hospital, and needs electricity to work as planned. But this electricity will not benefit the villages. The great dam which deprived the Tonga of their homes has not benefited them. The lake does not irrigate the land around its long shoreline: Kariba is a vast lake, like a sea. I can recommend travellers to visit Kariba, for there is nothing like it anywhere else in the world. But do not visit
the river Tonga, for they will break your heart.

  We sat in the shade with the Tonga fishermen under great trees like green towers, on the Tonga stools that fetch high prices in the tourist shops. The fishermen tell us their story: two of us speak their language. Settled far from the lake and ordered to become farmers, they did badly, and a few crept back to the shore to catch fish, for their families were starving. At last the authorities stopped arresting them, and they were permitted to make a fishing collective. There are forty of them, and they have four boats. No more fishermen nor boats will be permitted to join the collective. Some children were energetically playing around the huts. Because these children ate fish they were healthy, unlike the apathetic children we had already seen in villages a long way from the shore. But these were not really supposed to be here: the fathers bring them into this man’s village, to feed them up, in the school holidays. The fishermen themselves eat little fish: they sell it to pay for their children’s schooling, for like every parent in the country they are determined their children will get the education that will admit them to the modern world, far from this poverty.

  Because families are not allowed into the fishermen’s village, it is men who mend the fishing nets draped everywhere over lines, and which are often torn by the crocodiles. The nets are expensive and a torn net is a tragedy. The fishermen’s lives are a guerilla war with crocodiles and hippos, just as their wives miles away fear elephants. The spectral trees that still stand up everywhere in the water, the remains of the forest that was drowned by the rising waters, are a bonus: the fish like the old trunks, and the fishermen row quietly from one dead tree to another, after the fish. But the crocodiles know fish like the dead trees and they are there too.

  The fishermen are humorous. They are philosophical. They laugh as they talk of their poverty and the indifference of officials. Told that one of their visitors is a writer, they suggest that their lives should be described because–they seem to feel–if the authorities really knew, their hearts would be less hard. They laugh when they tell us how they may not now row their boats across the lake to visit their relatives on the Zambian shore. ‘The police there will only talk to us with guns.’ ‘Passports are not for poor people.’ ‘Why should I have to get a passport to row half a mile to villages where my own family lives?’ One fisherman remarks that he enjoys seeing photographs in the newspapers of Presidents Mugabe and Kaunda embracing with fraternal emotion: it makes him feel so much better about not being able to visit his Zambian family.

  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.’