African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe

  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.

  Next day Harry said he would take me to the Club some miles away. I knew he did not want to go, but he said it would do him good. Since his wife died he had got out of the habit of socializing. But I wasn’t to expect a good time. Because so many people had Taken the Gap, the Club was nearly empty these days. Once there were two hundred, three hundred people on Saturdays and Sundays, and people had to queue to use the tennis courts or to get drinks at the bar. Yes, yes, he would go, he felt he should: people kept insisting that he must go out to lunch, or to supper, or to the Club. They meant to be kind, he knew that.

  When we got there, the Club was a low brick building in the bush, with tennis courts, a squash court, a bowling green. It seemed the weekend before several cars full of youngsters had come down from Harare for a party, and some were still here, lolling on the verandah. A couple slept flat on their backs under a tree, their arms flung out, faces scarlet. On one sun-inflamed forearm sat a contemplative green grasshopper. The cold-thinned musasa trees of winter laid shifting mottled shadow over them. There was a bleak and dusty wind.

  ‘Stupid to drink yourself into this state,’ said Harry authoritatively, and shouted: ‘Thomas. Thomas!’

  A black man in a servant’s white uniform appeared on the verandah, said calmly to him, ‘Good afternoon, sir,’ and walked slowly over.

  ‘They shouldn’t be lying here like this, they’ll get pneumonia.’

  Thomas looked down at the unconscious pair, and then at Harry, saying with his eyes that it was not part of his job to tell the two young whites how to behave.

  ‘Is there a blanket? Anything to put over them?’

  The servant strolled off, and came back with his arms full of checked tablecloths, which he and my brother placed in layers over the sleepers.

  Among the hungover youngsters, and in a quite different style, were the older people, the Club’s real users, mostly farmers. Not many now, and they were putting a good face on things, being brave. They were pitiable.

  Harry and I played bowls. He has always been easily good at any physical thing…the first time he was put on a bicycle, the first time he took up a cricket ball…and he would shin up any tree as soon as look at it. It was not that I was bad, but the comparison with him made me the clumsy one, and so I was styled through my childhood. Later I realized I had been nothing of the kind. Such is family life.

  When he had beaten me at bowls, someone challenged him, and I retired to the verandah, sat by myself and watched. The rooms of the Club were half empty, full of the ghosts of the departed whites. And would it fill soon with blacks?

  At the next table sat a group of middle-aged farmers, talking about the Bush War. Among them sat a man who was silent while they went on about the iniquities of the blacks, and recited versions of The Monologue. He was a farmer of about forty. He was apart from them, just as I was. Yet he had been fighting in the Bush War. His silence was felt, and they began teasing him, trying to be pleasant, but sounding peevish, because he was not about to Take the Gap, as they were. He had decided to stay in Zimbabwe, to stick it out. He had made inner psychological adjustments, and was no longer uncritically one of them. He did not look too happy: these were his neighbours, his tribe.

  As the sunset began to fire the sky, my brother took on another challenger: he had beaten the first.

  The group at the next table broke up. The odd-man-out sat looking at me for a while, then came over. He knew I was my brother’s sister, and had funny ideas.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ve been wondering what you’re making of it all.’

  His manner was conditionally friendly. I decided not to choose my words. He listened, sitting back in his chair, nodding sometimes, but I could see from his eyes that he was matching what I said with scenes or events he was remembering and the words I used did not fit. ‘Everyone’s entitled to their opinion,’ he summed up. Then I said there were things I would like to ask my brother, but could not: the Bush War, for instance, for he simply clammed up.

  ‘You should remember there’s a difference between his generation and our lot.’

  ‘What difference?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘Were you brought up in this country?’

  ‘Canada.’

  ‘Ah, I see.’

  ‘All right, what do you want to know?’

  ‘For instance why was it in the Bush War, the black civilian casualties were always so high when “incidents” were reported?’

  He sat thinking for a while. Then: ‘All right, I’ll tell you the story of something that happened. In the Rhodesia Herald it said, “One member of the Security Forces killed, five civilians, eleven Terrorists.”’

  THE BUSH WAR

  He was with five others on patrol in the bush. They were travelling fifteen to twenty miles at night, and lying low in the day. He was patrol leader. They each carried food for eight days.

  ‘I h
ad a self-invented muesli, of milk powder, oats, wheatgerm, raisins, and bits of salami. I ate one pound of this a day, with half an onion. We sucked dew off the grass in the morning, if we didn’t come on any decent water. The muesli was in a plastic bag and that was good because it didn’t make a noise: tins clash, and give you away. Everybody made up their own rations. Biltong came into its own, I can tell you. We saw two men lurking about outside a village. We thought they looked suspicious, probably spies for the ‘terrs’. You acquire an instinct, after a bit of practice. We took them prisoner. So there were eight of us. They didn’t mind going along with us. We didn’t even have to tie their hands. They had no spirit, those chaps, poor buggers, government forces or the ‘terrs’, they got it in the neck either way. Then we heard the ‘terrs’ singing their freedom songs in a village we didn’t know was there. It was just luck. We knew they didn’t know we were there. All the different groups of ‘terrs’ told each other of their whereabouts, or where we were, through their talking drums. We usually had some Aff with us who could tell us what the drums were saying, but not that trip. But the ‘terrs’ wouldn’t have been singing their heads off if they knew we were half a mile away. We left the two prisoners with two guards. One was shitting in his pants with fear. That is what is meant by the smell of fear.’

  The four crawled up to the edge of the village in the dark. It was cold. They lay in the grass just far enough away from the firelight. There was no moon. ‘It was the usual thing. A song, and then a speech. Then a song and another speech.’