African Laughter

by Doris Lessing

  A COMMERCIAL FARM (BLACK)

  I meet an Agricultural Extension Worker.

  What is an Agricultural Extension Worker? you may ask, if still capable of being amazed at the jargon of bureaucrats.

  An Agricultural Extension Worker is an expert in Agriculture. But why Extension Worker?

  Don’t ask, just don’t bother to ask, but from one end of the world to the other, people who know about crops and soil and beasts are called Extension Workers.

  Don’t you see? It is an extension of knowledge.

  Never mind.

  This man had been visiting a large farm once owned by whites, which grew tobacco as the main crop.

  ‘Tell me,’ I said.

  The farmhouse and all the outbuildings were crammed with relatives and friends. The manager, a brother of the owner, who is a Chef and a Minister, was in Harare. Another relative took him around. Everybody living there, getting on for a hundred of them, had planted his or her own personal patch of mealies. Many had a cow or two. These beasts were contentedly running together. There were goats. One of the mysteries of Zimbabwe is that you see goats everywhere but these beasts, called ‘firemouths’ in some countries, don’t seem to be doing damage.

  ‘No tobacco?’ I asked.

  ‘No tobacco.’

  ‘Just mealies and mombies?’

  ‘And some nice vegetable gardens.’

  ‘Would you say,’ I cautiously ask, ‘that this is some kind of subsistence farming?’

  He looks defensive, but humorous. ‘Yes, that is what I would say.’

  He does not say: ‘Well, what is the matter with that?’ since it would contradict government policy.

  ‘I don’t see what is the matter with that.’

  ‘I don’t either.’

  TALK ON THE VERANDAHS

  A lot of the whites put on their barrier creams as they get up in the mornings: there is an increase in skin cancer.

  More people get killed by lightning in Zimbabwe than anywhere else in the world.

  Lightning often strikes through the doors of huts, and kills people sleeping around the hearth.

  Why should lightning bother to do anything of the sort?

  Perhaps lightning likes the metal in hoes, or axes, or plates or the bangles on the women?

  I contribute: When I was a girl we used to drive through a bit of bush not far from the farm where every tree had been struck by lightning.

  Then there must be something in the soil, some rock or mineral, that attracts the lightning there.

  A certain academic (white) concerned that so many black girls who get pregnant and want to keep their babies have nowhere to go, because their families throw them out, started a modern refuge, stretching his own and friends’ resources to pay for it. This roused frenzies of anger and disapproval in some people (black) who showed all the self-righteous disapproval we call ‘Victorian’: ‘It’s their fault if they get into trouble isn’t it?’ ‘Why should they expect other people to help them if they are foolish?’

  But why ‘Victorian’? I was told recently, by someone who saw it in one of the smart areas of London, that a young couple, charming products of Mrs Thatcher’s Britain, were driving proudly around in a Porsche with a car-sticker that said, To Hell With the Poor!

  Another person told me she had seen, outside a smart pub in London’s West End, a group of yuppies sitting and drinking. A beggar came up to them: a young woman took out a five pound note and burned it, laughing, in front of him. It is extremely hard not to wish that these unlikeable people are now out of a job, and downwardly mobile.

  A story about the death of Samora Machel supposed to be murdered by the South Africans. Told by a young white woman.

  ‘That was the only time I have been scared in Zimbabwe. The young blacks were rampaging about the streets looking for whites to beat up. They did beat up some old white women. My husband saw it. He was looking down from a high window and thought, What a pretty demonstration, with all those green branches, and then he saw the beatings. I was at a meeting for the death of Samora Machel, and it was being addressed by a famous rabble-rouser, you know, all big mouth and hot air. He was going on about the CIA, they are the scapegoat for anything and everything. He said, “The CIA are well-known for a thought technique of inhibiting you from speaking. I was speaking at a meeting and then suddenly my voice left me. I knew it was them.” The man was crazy, but the audience loved it. He went from bad to worse, and I was so bored I kept falling asleep. I thought, this is dangerous, if they see I am asleep they might start beating me up. One word from this maniac and they’d do anything. I really understood the word rabble-rouser that day.’

  AT A SLIGHT ANGLE

  This Commercial Farm is only five miles from our old farm where I still cannot bring myself to go. Ayrton R. thinks–and so do I–that my neurotic behaviour cannot be permitted to go on, and meanwhile this visit will be a bridge–a stepping-stone–a gentle breaking-in.

  The hills I grew up with, not to mention the Dyke, are all present, but at an angle.

  Where this farm is now was land not ‘opened up for development’, for it was still bush when as a girl I used to visit a farm just over a ridge from here, for a week or so at a time. The attraction of that farm was stronger than any other because it was full of books, different from those in our bookcases, mostly modern novels of the kind my mother was sure were corrupting. I used to walk by myself in bush different from ours, although so close, for everywhere were kopjes crammed with granite boulders. The house itself was on a hill of boulders, inserted among them, accommodating itself to them, and most of its fabric was granite. What effect on us all did this granite have? I wonder. All the time I was there I was forced to check on ‘the view’, the hills I knew so well, but this askew perspective created valleys and crags invisible from our verandah. To be whisked from one landscape immovably the same for years through every change of sun and cloud to another, only slightly different, is an assault on some inner balance you have learned to rely on. To return after years to your childhood landscape pulled slightly out of whack tests the landscape you remember, filling you with doubt as dreams do.

  We arrived on this new farm in the late afternoon, the shadows black on sunny grass, just as the farmer’s wife was leading half a dozen horses towards their field. She didn’t feed them, she said, they fed themselves off the bush. Didn’t we think they looked well? They never got sick, she never had to dose them, the vet was never needed. They were splendid horses, glowing in the sun, pleased with themselves after their day free in the bush.

  And there was the deep verandah, full of furniture designed for lolling about in. This farmer is middle-aged, lean, brown, taut with energy and ideas and before we have sat down he is off–the government, the wrong-headedness of Mugabe, the impossibility of farming without spare parts and machinery, but this complaint is not where his heart lies, for what we then listened to was a cataract of ideas about farming, a philosophy.

  At once I am taken right back to then because there was always at least one farmer in The District who was obsessed, possessed, with news emanating from some research institute or university–the States, Argentina, Scotland, South America–which would condemn all present farming ideas to the rubbish heap. No need to weed the fields, one should plant among weeds; no need to use fertilizer, if one didn’t fertilize the soil itself would adjust and find sustenance in the air; a waste of time to stump out trees and make fields: much better plant among the trees. These ideas and a hundred others appeared on the verandahs, usually because of one farmer. My father for a time was that farmer. More accurate, I think, to see this character, wild, inventive, iconoclastic, less as a person than as an abiding layer or subsidiary personality in every farmer, for one never knew when some chance remark would bring it to the surface. ‘Oh, by the way, did you read in the Farmer’s Weekly that letter saying the way to stop flocks of guineafowl following the planters and eating up the seed as it falls is to perfume the seed-hoppers
with garlic, or, better still, plant a clove of garlic with each maize seed?’ Expensive? Well, yes, but why be petty? What matters is the idea, the perfection of it, abolishing a problem with one majestic flash of the imagination.

  Five of us set off on a walk around the farm, or to use the old manorial style, around the lands. I am going down on the lands, he is on the lands, she is on the lands but I’ll tell her when she gets back from the lands that…

  Late afternoon. The sun is preparing to become a sunset. The birds’ conversation is still full of daytime concerns, but will soon change key into the minor mode, and what sounds like regret that the day is over. We leave behind in the house various growing children, a fiancée, her brothers, and an assortment of visitors and friends, as in a Russian novel.

  We listen to the farmer, whose discourse is a lament for the way we use the world.

  ‘No, you don’t understand, if you want to understand agriculture you must look at everything differently. All farming is unnatural, it is an assault on Nature. The moment the first farmer put a spade into the earth it was the beginning of our war on Nature. And now we have reached the point where it is a race between Man and Nature. Who is going to win? I tell you who, it is Nature.’ We stand on a muddy track between fields of tobacco, smelling strong because of the rain that is lying in deep puddles along the ruts. ‘We fill fields full of just one plant, that isn’t Nature’s way, it is our way. Nature attacks with a disease or a bug. So we attack Nature with a chemical. Nature evolves the plant so it can deal with the chemical, or the bug mutates. We make another chemical. All these fields are soaked with chemicals. Last year we were spraying this field when the rain came down hard suddenly. We ran for it. The rain washed the poison down into the earth, there wasn’t time for it to get weak in the sun and the air. And now look.’ At the edge of the field was a twenty-yard area where the tobacco plants were stunted. ‘Poisoned. Sometimes you can see what we are doing with our poisons. That one was for eelworm. Do you want to see eelworm?’

  We stumble about among plants that send up rank sweet fumes into our brains, tobacco, as seductive green as it is when dry and ready to smoke, and the farmer pulls up a deformed plant and stands holding it in both hands, looking down at it with respect, an enemy contained, not defeated. ‘Nature comes up with eelworm. We poison it. But a newly stumped-out field has no pests. You have a couple of years’ grace before the pests build up. We laugh at the African’s old way, stumping out a bit of land, using it, then moving on–they didn’t have the build-up of pests. Of course there isn’t land enough in the world now to farm like that. If we farmed like that in Zimbabwe everyone would starve.’

  We walk on, listening, avoiding puddles. ‘It’s all a balance, and you have to understand that. We stake our claim–unnatural practices, plants we grow in fields of hundreds of acres, but Nature likes a mix. She takes a step forward–so do we, it’s a race. We have to be a step ahead all the time, but where is it going to end? I’ll tell you, we’re too damned clever by half and Nature is going to have the last word.’

  Now on one side of the road is bush, real bush, and the farmer’s wife directs our attention to some orchids. We all step into the bush and admire the plants: there are several in that small patch of bush. ‘There you are,’ says the farmer, coming to stand by us. ‘We don’t know why that plant has decided to grow just there, why it likes just this bit of soil. But look…’ And he stands feet apart, and lifts up a double handful of the earth, which is a mix of soil crumbs, leaf mould, birds’ droppings, and minerals washed from the stones. He gazes down at the earth in his hands. ‘There, that’s real soil,’ he says. ‘Not the rubbish we have in our fields, full of chemicals, that’s not soil. If you saw them without plants…the soil is like brick rubble, it’s dead. No, that’s not earth. This is it.’ His hands hold the bush soil delicately, with respect. We stand for a while in silence. The sun is down behind the trees, outlining them in yellow, and the birds’ voices make the transition to evening sadness. ‘There, look at it,’ says he, ‘just look.’ And he lets it trickle through his fingers, back on to the floor of grasses and flowers and weeds. ‘There, you see? I’ve disturbed the balance just doing that. We stand here and we don’t know what damage we are doing with our feet, what organisms we are killing, what pests we have brought in from the road. We are going to step back on to the road and Nature will have to work hard to put right the damage we’ve done. Before the whites came the blacks moved about in the bush but they didn’t harm it, not until they started turning the soil over and planting crops. What crops? Most of them are imports. Look at maize. How do we know what bugs the Portuguese brought in with maize? We don’t know! We don’t care! Well, don’t care was made to care…you ought to be able to stick a finger easily into real soil.’ He bends and does so. ‘See that? Better have a good look, because with what we are doing to the world we won’t see that anywhere, soon.’

  The farmer’s wife silently indicates some Christmas lilies on an antheap. They are also called spider lilies. Each bloom is like a delicate red and yellow claw and once we used to pick them in armfuls to decorate our houses at Christmas. No one would pick them recklessly now. She shows us another plant. ‘The horses like this one. We don’t know why. When they come in from the bush you can always smell the plant on their noses.’

  The men stride off into a field. The farmer’s wife and I stand looking at the reddish gold light of sunset touching the white flowers on a bauhinia tree. These flowers are delicate, like the spider lilies or the orchids: the high veld’s flowers are never heavy and damp and solid-fleshed like those of the tropics. They are fragile, and light, and their smell is dry, teasing, spicy.

  The sunset leaps up the sky in a wash of reddish gold. The trees are black and silent and the birds, if they are awake, have nothing to say. We walk in silence along the farm track. A long way behind us the farmer’s lament can just be heard, but now it is hard to distinguish it from the voices coming from the farm township over the ridge–where, of course, side by side with the farm workers, live so many other people who officially are not there at all.

  We walk companionably back to the house in the dark. An owl…another. The smell of horses. A soft whinny greets the farmer’s wife and she calls softly to them. There is a rush of hooves in the dark, and for a while she stands by the fence, a small dark figure reaching up to the horses’ heads, brought into sight by white-fringed ears, or the blaze on a forehead.

  We join the men as the farmer is saying, ‘The blacks are not interested in our ideas about efficiency. Look…’ A man on a bicycle emerges from the dark. The farmer commands, ‘Stop.’ The man’s dark shape becomes defined as he halts, one foot on the ground. He is smiling. ‘Have you got brakes on your bicycle?’ asks the farmer. ‘No.’ ‘I can see you haven’t got a light.’ No reply. ‘All right,’ says the farmer, ‘that’s all, off you go.’ ‘Good night,’ says the man, and pedals off.

  ‘There must be dozens of bicycles on the farm and not one of them has lights, not one has brakes that work. They ride the bikes everywhere, through the bush, up hills, along dongas. Slowly everything falls off, brakes, mudguards, handlebar grips, pedal rubbers, everything. Or if they don’t fall off they are stolen, and no one bothers to replace them.’

  We stand in the dark looking at the black shape of the low wide house, which is spilling out yellow light, and we are thinking, or Africa thinks through us, ‘What do you need lights for, when you know the tracks so well? You don’t really need brakes, you can always use a foot. Why grips on handlebars? All you need for a pedal is a bar for your foot. Why make life so complicated? The bike goes doesn’t it? It carries you from place to place? Well, then, what’s the fuss about?’

  ‘Ye-e-e-yes,’ says the farmer ‘that’s how it is.’

  And we go in to supper. All the food came off the farm. There was no servant, he had gone home. The family laid the table, served, cleared it and washed up.

  At supper I ask about the people who used
to live on the farms near here. Some names are instantly remembered. ‘Of course! So and so! He had the farm across the river. Yes, and they were there until the War. Of course we remember.’ But other names get no response at all, yet they were people who lived on farms next to the people who are remembered. ‘Who? I’ve never heard that name. Commander Knight, you say?’

  ‘Yes, he was a character, everyone knew him. He was one of the eccentrics–you know, the larger-than-life characters of those days.’ Here various members of the family give the farmer significant looks and smiles which he acknowledges, good-humouredly. ‘He was on the farm just four miles away. He tamed leopards. Or tried to.’

  ‘Never heard of him.’

  After supper we lolled about over sofas and enormous chairs, arms around dogs and cats. There is an old-fashioned wind-up gramophone, restored as an antique by someone in Harare, and cases of records stand waiting for someone to wind up the gramophone and play them. Ancient tunes like ‘Paloma’, and ‘Red Sails in the Sunset’ resound tinnily and I explain to disbelieving youngsters that once on these verandahs were dances that went on until dawn, with no more music than these same wind-up gramophones, that had to be attended to hour after hour by relays of people, wallflowers or people prepared to sacrifice themselves. They murmur that they wish they had been taught to dance, in the same tones one might use to say, What a pity we don’t dance the minuet. I say that in Britain this kind of dancing is fashionable again, but their faces have that look: it is interesting to hear of the customs of far-off places.

  The farmer is describing his dream: he would like this farm to become a kind of commune, though he does not use the word. The newly engaged couple are already established in the house built for them a hundred yards away. Another little house accommodates parents. A son would like to buy the farm along the road: he has all the qualifications for this kind of high-tec farming. ‘Families should stay together,’ says the farmer, using the same words used by the black agricultural expert or Extension Worker on the Jesuit farm near Harare. The two men have everything in common, not only their knowledge of farming, for one is a patriarch by tradition, the white man by chance of character. And what do the children of the patriarch think of these plans? They smile, but do not say. And what of a daughter, married to a South African who only understands streets and offices, and could not farm? ‘That will be easy,’ says the farmer, but frowning a little. He has planned it all out. The daughter can come here for she is a Zimbabwean, and bring her husband. The couple can run canoe trips and manage tourist chalets on the edge of the lake that will soon be here, only three or four miles away. The farmer has agreed to lose forty acres of his farm to the new lake, but he intends to reap the benefits.