African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe

  Memories of Macheke came from different layers of the past, and the first was when I was still a young girl. From a car window I saw dusty blue gums by the railway lines, and under them two sad baboons with chains around their waists attached to ropes which were fastened to the tree trunks. And why was that so hurtful a sight? Because it was a reminder of another. I was five years old, and in London after Persia but before Southern Rhodesia, and just as you went into the London Zoo was a cage of black iron bars, like a parrot’s cage, and in it was a gorilla or a chimpanzee, I don’t remember which, only my horror at this creature in a cage just large enough to accommodate it, hands grasping the bars, small red eyes glaring in a rage of hate and misery. On the packed brown earth under the blue gums the two baboons lived out (I hope) short lives, tormented by louts of all ages who came to jeer at them.

  Later, during the War, it was under these eucalyptus trees that we, the group from Salisbury, sat drinking white wine from Portuguese East Africa, and where ‘we’, the group at Mashopi, drank white wine, with the railway lines a few paces away on one side, and the main road, Salisbury to Umtali, on the other.

  As the sad black youth and I approached Macheke, I said I wanted to stop for a little, because I had been here during the War. But understood even as I spoke that he would think that I meant the Bush War, ‘his’ war. The mists of history had begun to seethe and billow like boiling milk and I did not even attempt to explain.

  ‘How long?’ he demanded, at once suspicious. I recognized the tone. He thought I was putting him off with a lie, and wanted to get rid of him. Here was another white cruelty and I was reverting to type.

  I had hoped to stop here, perhaps for a cup of tea, at the Macheke Hotel, for old times’ sake, but now knew that this must not happen. Because times had changed we–black and white–might drink a cup of tea together, but that was not the point. I wanted the past to envelop me, but the pressure of his misery would make that impossible. I said, ‘Just for a few minutes, that’s all.’

  ‘I can walk,’ he said, bitterly.

  ‘No, no. I’ll just slow down for a minute or two.’

  But now two landscapes were in my mind and I could not make sense of what I saw. The main road was in a different place. Yes, there was the garage, post office, store, a bar…and a hotel. A hotel in that place? I asked him, ‘Do you know if they have changed the route of the main road?’

  He said, ‘It has always been the main road.’

  In his lifetime, the main road had always run here.

  I turned off to the left, where the railway had to be, and there were the dusty, dispirited blue gums and the railway lines beyond. The same. I stopped the car. Where was the hotel? Surely that could not…it was derelict, unused. A low brick building, like a long shed, had a couple of small doors into rooms that were evidently small, and another door into the bar. Yes, I had seen the wonders of the great world since I was in Macheke or Mashopi, but surely this could not be the Macheke Hotel where through all those weekends we drank, danced, flirted and played politics? How many couples had actually been able to dance in the smallish room I saw through dirty windowpanes? And was that the dining-room where we ate those lengthy and companionable meals, Mrs Boothby maternally on the watch. (I was working hard to retrieve her real name.) How many tables would it, did it, hold? And the bar? It had been crowded with men in the Air Force uniform farmers. But it was a narrow cubbyhole of a place. Yet I had been a grown-up person here, not a child; I was not an adult visiting scenes from childhood…the verandah that ran all along the building did have room for a couple of small tables: it was more of a passage than a verandah. Yet here we had certainly sat drinking…yes, of course, people sat all along that low wall, which was by the main road from Salisbury to Umtali, and part of the pleasure was watching the occasional car whirl past in clouds of pale dust (sandveld dust, not the heavy red dust of Lomagundi) or perhaps it stopped, and out stepped…a stranger, or someone we knew who had driven down from Salisbury to join us…or driven up from Umtali, knowing we would be there. A stranger would at once cease to be one, absorbed at once into the elation, the high spirits, for we were good company, and–I later realized–surprising company, because we were such a mixed group, people who in England could never meet because of that class system of theirs, but here cockneys, Brummies, Scotties, everybody, joked with young men who had interrupted Cambridge and Oxford to learn to fly and–possibly–die over Europe, or Burma, or India. And the local girls, and girls from Britain and South Africa or who were refugees from somewhere or other. And yet all these people had squashed ourselves along that verandah? No, that was why we spent so much time under the blue gums, near the tracks, where there was room to spread out.

  And now for the bedrooms…the strongest, the most disturbing of all my memories of old Macheke was at the back of the hotel, the bedroom block. There were ten or twelve rooms, in two lines, back to back, opening on to narrow verandahs. With an apology to the young man, who was now bent sideways against the seat, an arm over his face, to shut out the cruel and deceiving world–shut me out, probably, who for no reason at all had stopped by this building fit only for demolition–I quickly got out and went around the old hotel to the back, and saw only rubble, crowding overgrown shrubs, trees. I was looking up to find the bedroom block, for it was higher than the hotel itself. When I came out of my room (shared, I was married then), I looked down over a flight of steps into the kitchens and the dining-room windows. I used to stand at the top of stone steps and stare and stare at a moon so bright, so large, I have never seen another like it. Yet most of the nights of my life on the farm were spent sitting out in front of the house watching the sky. There was something about the air of Macheke that enhanced and enlarged the moon–probably my feverish, self-hypnotized state. Yes, in Macheke the moon was always full or near full, no matter what weekend we went down, or if half-grown, then in the shape of a pistachio nut, silver on hazy blue-black. I was always stopping myself outside the bedroom to say: Look at it, there will never be another moon like this one, there couldn’t be–while the voices of my friends and comrades rose from the bar or the dining-room. And there hasn’t been…for the good reason that pollution has overtaken the skies of Africa, just like everywhere else. You forget how skies used to be. Not long ago, in north-west Argentina I went out into the night and thought, My God, look, there it is, that’s the night sky–like a Christmas tree, or a jeweller’s window, the stars so brilliant and so close you could reach up and pick them one by one out of the dark.

  Floating on moonlight, and on a hundred intoxications, I stepped carefully down, down the stone steps that were edged with the sweet-smelling plants Mrs Boothby (Mrs Who?) was so fond of and crammed into every crevice, and then…but it was impossible to see anything through this litter of planks, rubbish, broken bricks, neglected shrubs. No, this was impossible, there was perhaps another hotel…no, nonsense, this was the hotel, and here was the bar and here…if I were to sort out what had been here, and what I had made of it, then it would take…how long? Weeks? No, it was silly, useless, what was the point, and I must in any case drive on, because of this man beside me who sat squeezing his hands between thin chilly knees, while the tears fell steadily over his already crumpled suit.

  I wished there was something in the car to eat. Perhaps I should look for a store and buy him…it occurred to me this renewed weeping was because we were about to leave Macheke, this metropolis of urban delights, the last before his exile must begin.

  I drove back to the new main road, recognizing among smart new buildings paltry survivors from the very first days of the Colony. I tried to make out where we had walked away from the little township on a narrow sandy track into the kopjes and vleis where butterflies and birds and grasshoppers were so plentiful that I have only to remember how we, the group, walked there to hear a shrilling of birds, the somnolence of doves, the clicking of grasshoppers. And the scents, the smells, the warm dry herby odours…well, enough.

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bsp; About five miles from Macheke the poor young man said, ‘It is here.’ I stopped. We were nowhere. I mean, we were on the road, but around us were miles of grass, a clump or two of trees, and the blue mountains. He did not at once get out, but sat staring miserably ahead.

  He said violently: ‘I shall never see any of my friends again. I shall never see you again. I shall never…’ He scrambled out of the car, and went off into the long grass by the road, clutching his little suitcase. I watched his head and shoulders move above the grasses, and then he was not there.

  This year, 1991, it is thought that there are a million unemployed in Zimbabwe.

  I began watching the sides of the road for someone to lift. Far from the big town Harare, still a good distance from the smaller big town Mutare, there were fewer people waiting at the bus-stops–places by the road where people came to wait, with perhaps a kiosk for soft drinks, or nothing at all, not even a turn-off to somewhere else. When I slowed the crowd surged forward, but I drove on until I saw by the road, by themselves, three men who looked pleasant, so I stopped. They were going to Mutare and would be my companions for the rest of that journey. They were all three middle-aged, or at least, not young. They were shabby. But they were amiable and I knew I had found what I had been wanting, people of the country, black people, I could talk with. Talk, that is, without being overheard by antagonistic whites, by the new breed of ideological blacks.

  The two men in the back seat spoke a little English. The man beside me spoke it well. I at once said I was from England, without going into complicated histories, and he said I was welcome, and he hoped I would stay, because all the whites were leaving the country. I asked if he liked Mugabe, Yes, he liked Robert Mugabe very much, but he didn’t like the Comrades. If Mugabe knew what the Comrades did, he would punish them, but perhaps no one told him. I have heard this in too many countries, or read it, not to find it discouraging, so I asked about the War. And that was what we mostly talked about for the rest of the journey. He had spent the first part of the War in his village, not very far from here (close to where De Waal and Venter decided to buy their farms), in a district where the government troops and the guerillas came all the time, both sides taking people away for questioning, beating up even children, even girls. The women couldn’t get to work in the gardens, they were too afraid, so everyone was always short of food. If there was food in the huts, soldiers of both sides might take it. Cows and goats disappeared, and soldiers of either side might have driven them off. It all got so bad he left his village with his family and went to live with relatives in Mutare. The War was horrible. No one could know, if they hadn’t lived through it.

  The man in front, whose name was Gore, referred continually to the men at the back, and they said Yes, Yes, and sighed, and shook their heads and clicked their tongues, and as we passed this gully or that kopje, or apparently friendly piece of bush, one, then all, might point and say, There…they killed three people there…all the huts burned in that village…there was a terrible fight on that hill…the helicopters came down there and shot bullets into the bush, and afterwards there were dead people lying everywhere.

  The helicopters had to be Smith’s men, but otherwise there was no way of knowing who ‘they’ had been, in this incident or that.

  In England, I said, we had read about the War in the newspapers and sometimes seen it on television, but Gore shook his head and said, No, newspapers do not tell you what a thing like that is like. Newspapers can only say, This happened, That happened, but they do not tell you what is in the hearts of the people. We lived all the day and every night afraid. We were afraid to sleep. If you slept you might wake to find the thatch over your head on fire. And who had done it? It could be someone living in the next hut. If someone disappeared you’d know that person was a spy for the government or for one of the armies. Someone you had known since you were both children could be paid money to kill you. Children disappeared and then you heard they were in the bush with the fighters. You knew they might appear any minute with guns. Because they knew about the village and could guide the others. The War made soldiers out of ten-year-olds. And what will happen to them now? They never went to school.

  ‘The Comrades had schools for the children,’ said one of the men at the back, being fair.

  ‘Yes, but what could they learn?’

  ‘The Comrades taught them to read and write.’

  ‘Some of them can read and write a little. And they learned a lot of other things. Will they forget those things?’

  They sighed, they shook their heads, they smiled, while we drove along this road that for me meant memories of many decades ago, but for them meant war. Ambushes, bombs, mines, armoured vehicles, prowling aircraft, and helicopters who might use it to land on, scattering troops like seeds of death into the bush on either side.

  Gore asked about Britain, and his two friends leaned forward to hear what I said. I talked, knowing the images my words made had little to do with Britain. Gore had always lived in his village with his wife and children till they moved to Mutare, and now they were in a single-roomed hut in a township outside Mutare. He worked in a garage. One of the men at the back was a watch-mender and had never been far from Mutare. He had not even visited Harare. The third was a watchman in a hotel in Mutare’s main street. The big hotel, he said, with pride, but laughing, mocking the hotel’s pretensions and his pride in it. There people came who had been in every country in the world! As for him, he had visited relatives in Portuguese East, before the War. Mozambique, Gore corrected him. He said, laughing and shaking his head, ‘It’s hard to remember all the new names. I sometimes say Salisbury, and then somebody says, Watch out, or you’ll be reported to the Comrades.’

  ‘Soon everyone will forget,’ said Gore. ‘Only old people like me will remember Mutare was called Umtali.’ And he shook with laughter, the marvellous African laughter born somewhere in the gut, seizing the whole body with good-humoured philosophy. It is the laughter of poor people. If we were not talking about the War, when they were tense and sombre, they laughed.

  They wanted to know what changes I had seen since I had left so long ago for England.

  I wanted to talk about the emptying and thinning of the bush, how the animals had gone, and the birds and the insects, how this meant everything had changed; how myriads of small balances, hundreds in every small patch of bush, necessary for water, soil, foliage, climate, had been disturbed. I had already begun to suspect that these changes were more important than, even, the War, and the overthrow of the whites, the coming of the black government. Now, years later, I am sure of it. But I could not talk like this to these people then, at that time. It would have sounded an irrelevance: at best, like one of the eccentricities the whites go in for.

  It is, I think, almost a law that what one is afraid to say because it will be rejected by the atmosphere of a time, will turn out to be a few years later the most important thing of all.

  So I did not say anything about that; instead, that when I had left in 1949 there had been a quarter of a million whites, and one and a half million blacks. Now, so the experts claim, it is eight million. Eight million of mostly very young people. In a generation there will be twenty-five million.

  ‘Eight million,’ said Gore, laughing and shaking his head. Because of the word million, as much a block to his imagination as it is to mine. Mutare, his ‘big city’ had never had more than thousands in it.

  ‘We are poor people,’ he said, gravely, when he had stopped laughing.

  This was a comment, not only on the eight million, who would have to find food to eat and clothes to wear, but on what I had been saying about Britain.

  I knew what he found particularly interesting in what I told them, when he translated it for his friends. He at once translated when I talked about unemployment benefit, which for them was like news from another galaxy; about the Underground system in London; when he heard that every child went to school until the age of sixteen; that there the shops we
re full, and there were no shortages of anything, ever. He did not translate when I was ready to talk about our system of government, political parties, elections, town councils.

  For the two hours it took to reach Mutare I was with men who knew about what other people had from the talk of travellers, from newspapers, from television–but they seldom saw television or films; they saw aeroplanes in the sky and sometimes got lifts in cars, but they would never travel in an aeroplane or own a car. They were excluded from the marvels of modern living but had come close when for ten years they had been in the front line of a war fought with modern weapons, for about these they talked with knowledge and expertise. In short, they were like most of the people in the world.

  Their way of telling me what their lives were like was quiet, ironical, in stories where poverty was something like a character in a folk tale.

  I put them down in Mutare’s main street, and was sorry to see them walk away, turning to wave and call back farewells. Then I parked and went into the new hotel.

  FATHERS AND SONS. NOT TO MENTION MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS

  I sat in the Leisure Area. I do not see how it could be called a lounge or even a sitting-room. I was reflecting that recently, in one of the most expensive hotels in the world, the Four Seasons in Hamburg, I had breakfasted in that dining-room once found in every hotel, a long tall-ceilinged room with chintz curtains at long windows. There were white damask tablecloths, heavy cutlery and–this is what marked it out from your common hotel–jam in pots, with a spoon. Old-fashioned charm is what rich people want to pay for. No doubt, quite soon, a hundred thousand characterless modern hotels will be pulled down and replaced with loving copies from the past. Meanwhile, new countries hastening to prove their worth in the company of nations, are building modern hotels.