African Laughter

by Doris Lessing

  In Britain, if a review or critical piece gives off that unmistakable odour of hate, of envy, it is easy to throw it aside and reach for something more intelligent. Not, however, in Zimbabwe, for there is no alternative.

  I was invited to a meeting of Zimbabwean writers. There were more Party officials and Party watchdogs than writers. The ‘heavies’–never was there a more appropriate word–large and ponderous men in their three-piece suits, looked a different species from the writers. They were. They are. It was painful to watch serious writers patiently and with dignity suffering such thrusts as ‘I see you believe in the ivory tower conception of literature, comrade’–from a young woman activist quivering with pleasure at her political sophistication and know-how–darting looks at us all to invite admiration. All this is so stupid, you think, No, it simply cannot still be going on, but it is going on and good and serious writers are being hurt by it…by this revenge of the second-rate, always finding new ways–particularly political ways–for the operations of Envy. In 1989 the pronouncement went like this: ‘Any writer or novel or poem that gets attention or a review from outside Zimbabwe is by definition petit-bourgeois and betrays the needs of the black people–the writer is a sell-out.’ Seldom are we able to observe Envy so perfectly displayed, a glittering and poisonous circle of hate, excluding everything but itself, ascribing merit only to itself. This particular formula makes sure that any writer in Zimbabwe, past or future, attracting serious attention, is automatically discredited. (This formula is used in Nigeria, for any writer whose novels are taken seriously outside Nigeria: he, she, is a sell-out.)

  In Zimbabwe writers tend to take to drink, or die young, or give up writing altogether. I would too.

  Here are some of the Zimbabwe writers, some of the books I have admired.

  Charles Mungoshi

  Waiting for the Rain

  The Setting Sun and the Rolling World

  Coming of the Dry Season

  Tsitsi Dangarembga

  Nervous Conditions

  Shimmer Chinodya

  Dew in the Morning

  Harvest of Thorns (This is the novel, about the Bush War, which was disapproved of.)

  S. Nyamfukudza

  The Non-Believer’s Journey

  Musaemura Zimunya

  Country Dawns and City Lights

  William Saidi

  The Old Bricks

  Tim McLoughlan

  Karima

  Chenjerai Hove

  Up in Arms

  Bones

  TIME TO GO HOME, FROM HOME

  I decided to make a quick trip to my myth country, perhaps to make sure it was still there, and even visit the dark stuffy bungalow on that hill always steeped in moonlight, starlight, sunlight, and aired by the hundred winds of earth and sky. ‘Hello!’ I might say to those little kids peering out through dirty glass. ‘Hi! How are you doing? Tell me, what is your heart’s desire?’

  But at the turn-off up to the hill where once there was the acacia grove on one side and the mombie kraal on the other, is now a large notice, ‘Trespassers will be Prosecuted’.

  Quite right too.

  The Scriptwriters certainly know their job.

  Before I left Zimbabwe, not far from Harare, just after sundown, I glimpsed the past–all our pasts–in a light-stepping youth returning from a range of low hills, his eyes alert for the ghosts of vanished game. On his back was a spear, in his hand was a catapult, and he was accompanied by three lean hunting dogs.

  THE YEAR OF MIRACLES, 1990

  A young woman is on a plane coming from the eastern Mediterranean, and is joined by a man who says, ‘Tell me what’s been happening in the world. I’ve been in the Himalayas for months, and I’ve not seen a newspaper nor heard the news. Thank God.’

  ‘Well now, let me see,’ says she. ‘The Soviet Union has given up communism, the Soviet colonies have given up the Soviet Union. The Berlin Wall is down and Germany is united. In South Africa they have given up apartheid.’

  ‘Very funny,’ says he, ‘and now tell me what has really happened.’

  In Zimbabwe the election was won by Comrade Mugabe and Zanu PF and no one talks of Tekere. ‘Who?’ they will soon be asking.

  Mugabe still wants a one-party state but his colleagues won’t hear of it.

  1991

  Comrade Mugabe formally abandons communism.

  Who says no one learns from other people’s mistakes?

  But the University of Zimbabwe is still subject to Party control.

  Why?–everyone wonders.

  I try to put myself in Mugabe’s place and find I am suffering all the emotions of the elderly who experience what they valued quietly slipping through their fingers. This is a proud man, an austere man, a man of principle. That shield and buckler, the Fifth Brigade, became the most hated people in Zimbabwe. The People’s Hotel and Party HQ and the Sports Stadium, all copied from the communists, are white elephants. His colleagues and comrades have taken to thievery as if born to it. Communism has gone, the one-party state has been rejected, the economy of Zimbabwe is in disarray, just like every other communist-influenced economy. But, there is the University of Zimbabwe, and at least that can be controlled.

  and Again, in Passing…

  1992

  Kenneth Kaunda is no longer President of Zambia. He resigned. Voluntarily. His successor’s task in that mismanaged country is unenviable.

  In Zimbabwe they are not saying, ‘Why doesn’t Mugabe…?’ ‘Mugabe should…’ The people have given up hopeful expectation.

  The currency has been devalued. The Zim dollar is worth a quarter of what it was. The already desperately poor are even worse off. A new acronym, ESAP, sums up a new economic policy. It means, wait for it, Economic Structural Adjustment Policy. Or, how to get the advantages of capitalism without giving up socialism. The Povos, instructed to tighten their belts, say it means Extra Suffering for the Poor, or, The Sugar is Over. (A Shona phrase.) The sugar crop failed because of the drought. The leaders are begging for international investment while still heaping abuse on the multinationals. They, perhaps, are waiting for the telephones to work and red tape to be made less. In the farming districts some farmers have given up expecting anything from telephones and have reverted to the radio networks set up during the Bush War. Jokers say, ‘Why not use talking drums? The Africans did well enough with them.’

  At a meeting a man called out to Mugabe, ‘We did better under Smith.’ He was hauled off to prison. But up and down the land they are saying the same. And, ‘At least Smith was honest.’ And, even, ‘We need a new leader’, for, like other apparently more sophisticated countries they believe a change of leader must mean a change for the better. It is likely, so rumour goes, that they will soon have a new leader: Mugabe, they say, will resign. They are saying, ‘Poor Robert’s heart has been broken by the bad Chefs.’

  The word Chef is heard less often. Was it after all a term of affection?

  Sally Mugabe, Robert Mugabe’s wife, has died. They say that pity for him united the country–at least for a time.

  Famine threatens. In the past there was a policy to keep a year’s supply of grain in the silos. This year’s reserves have been given away, notably to the famine areas in Ethiopia, or sold to Mozambique. Meanwhile the government discouraged the growing of maize, the staple crop, telling the farmers to grow crops that bring in Foreign Exchange. It seems advice from the experts of the IMF and the World Bank was partly responsible for this stupidity. Then the rains failed. So now Zimbabwe is buying grain from South Africa, herself short of maize because of drought, and paying Foreign Currency for it. This inspired bit of planning will insure that Zimbabwe will be holding out a begging bowl this year. And if the rains are bad again next year?

  The Book Team has had a difficult twelve months. Two Ministries found the women’s book unpalatable. High level intervention saved the book. Its title, Building Whole Communities, reflects the women’s belief that they are not valued in the community.
Eight local Book Teams have been established. In some areas local Book Teams are spontaneously forming themselves.

  The young teacher in the bush school is reunited with his wife.

  The farm assistant, the champion parachutist, is now a preacher in a charismatic Christian sect.

  Dorothy’s two younger children are being sent to school by Ayrton R. Under ESAP school fees have been introduced for many children. He buys them clothes and books. They are angry: they do not like school, mostly because their school friends bully them, saying, ‘Why should we be at the same school as the children of domestic workers?’ But: they will be educated and their parents are not. They are angry too because Ayrton R. has a nice house and they do not.

  The Herald, the country’s main newspaper is lively and critical, no longer sounds like Pravda. There are good magazines, and new independent newspapers and magazines are planned.

  In a crowded government office an official was rude to an old white woman who complained she had been waiting for five hours. A black man said to the official: ‘Don’t speak to the old woman like that, we don’t like it.’ The others agreed with him, ‘Yes, we don’t like your behaviour.’ The official became polite.

  An Irishman, Declan Gould, who has spent seven years helping the homeless and the poor, has been deported, made a Prohibited Immigrant, under the same laws Southern Rhodesia used, which have been kept, unchanged.

  When something goes wrong it is still being blamed on South African sabotage. Many Zimbabweans have apparently not noticed that there is a new situation in South Africa.

  Things are not well at the University of Zimbabwe. When it was set up, under Federation, it was given a liberal constitution of the kind usual in democratic countries. Under a new law, The University Amendment Act, the university will be controlled by the government, that is, by Zanu PF. The Vice Chancellor will be able to get rid of any academic who doesn’t please him–without appeal. Students will have a worse time. Academics who can leave are leaving, or plan to leave. People are hoping this retrogressive law will be done away with.

  The writers of Zimbabwe held a meeting this month, January, to protest the harassment of its members by the Central Intelligence Organization, whose stupidity and heavyhandedness is probably due to their having been trained by the secret police of the infamous Ceasescu. People want to know why a democracy needs a secret police.

  On a Commercial Farm–white, I was told disgusting racial jokes, inspired by the government’s incompetence. But: there should be 200 people on this farm, the workers and their families. There are seven hundred. The farmer says: ‘I would have 4,000 by now, but I have to send them away. I don’t like doing it. They want to be here because they do better with me than in the Communal Areas. All the white farms carry more people than the same amount of land in the Communal Areas.’ He is irrigating large fields, using precious water he could use to grow the profitable crops the government asks for, so as to feed the seven hundred through the drought. ‘I’ll see my own people fed, at least, since those fools can’t do it. And what about all the others that keep coming up begging for food? I have to send them away or I won’t have enough for my people. How do you imagine I feel doing that?’

  A new law provides for the taking of land without appeal from white farmers in certain designated areas. The perennial threats to do this means that a productive part of the agricultural economy is kept in a state of uncertainty, farmers beginning to refuse to invest in their farms, and trying to put money into movables. Meanwhile the government has large areas of land still not allocated. It is being said that this law is designed to distract the attention of the Povos from the government’s mistakes.

  Zimbabwe plans to shoot 30,000 elephants this year instead of the usual 3,000 or 3,500. Otherwise the herds would start to die from hunger. But: an enterprising young man says it is not true that African elephants are untrainable. He is training elephants. So perhaps some elephants may become working elephants.

  The herd of free-range pigs, as happy as house dogs, showing how a pig’s life must have been in Eden, have had to be penned, for they do too much damage.

  The noble and sagacious dog Seamus, his master’s friend, has died.

  A group of seven zebras at their toilet in the bush. First one rubs her cheeks, and her forehead, then both sides of her neck, against a tree. Then first one side, and the other, most methodically. She stands under a low branch and rubs her back. Then chooses a sapling, positions herself, and walks forward over it so that the branches scratch her stomach. Another goes through the same performance. Then another, and all of them. They are watched by a male zebra who is turned on by this and has an erection like a yard of rubber hose. But he only watches them and when they have finished uses the same trees to rub and scratch himself. The zebras took no notice of us watching them from ten paces away.

  The drought is so bad in some areas that not only cattle, but hardy goats and the wild animals are dying. They are shooting calves as they are born.

  At the Victoria Falls Hotel, old colonial, one of the world’s great hotels, spacious, dreamy, slow, cool in the great heat, like a setting for an Merchant Ivory film, a young black man peacocked in new jeans stylishly slit at the knees, the slits adorned with coloured safety pins. He swaggered, mocking himself, accepting applause with an air.

  No one knows how to assess the long-term results of the calamity AIDS, which the government says will kill at least a million people by the year 2000, in a population of nine million. Women in Africa south of the Sahara have the highest rate of infection in the world–one in forty women. In Zimbabwe’s rural areas many women sleep with men for money to feed children and dependants, pay school fees. They are described as prostitutes. In an urban clinic recently one out of four babies tested was HIV positive. Most men refuse to wear condoms. Promiscuity is admired. That is, in men. ‘A Shona good bull impregnates many women.’

  An editor: ‘Only one thing would save this country. The government must stop repeating mantras, like ESAP. It should look coldly at the situation, without distorting it by ideology. It should examine criticism, instead of regarding all criticism as hostile. It should then describe our situation as it is. Then act. But is our government capable of it?’

  A letter: ‘When I think of our dreams at Independence I want to cry for Zimbabwe. Oh it is so sad, so sad, don’t you think so? I do cry, sometimes.’

  But: A visitor returned from Zaire, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, said: ‘Let me tell you! In comparison with any of those Zimbabwe is up to its armpits in jam. In Nairobi the shanty towns stretch for miles and no one cares. In Zimbabwe they are ashamed and try to rehouse homeless people.’

  During a game of Epitaphs, it was decided there was only one possible epitaph for Robert Mugabe: ‘A good man fallen among thieves.’ Rejected epitaphs: ‘God will reward him for trying.’ ‘Here lies a tragic hero: he destroyed himself by paranoia, not understanding how much goodwill there was for him among the people.’

  A meteorological expert: ‘Corruption? Don’t make me laugh. Compared to someone like Robert Maxwell they are babies. Bad planning? So what! They’ll learn. No, Southern Africa is drying up, that’s the news. That is the only news.’ But: ‘We survived the War. We’ll survive the drought.’ A village woman, from Masvingo, where it has rained very little for ten years.

  LETTERS, TELEPHONE CALLS, APRIL 1992

  ‘The rainy season is over for this year: seven months to go before the rains. Even if we get good rains this year it will take three or four years to make up the damage. The chicken farmers are killing their flocks–no feed. The pigs are being killed: no food. The mombies are dying in hundreds of thousands already. I’ve been out in the Eastern Districts: you hear them bellowing and groaning as they die. What are we going to do? No one knows what to do.’

  ‘The Povos are angry. Oh, you can believe me, they are angry! If the Government held an election now there would not be one vote for Mugabe. All over the country they are saying, Wh
y did we fight that war? What for? We might just as well have kept Smith…Yes, there’s going to be a storm all right, but it won’t be a rain storm.’

  “Mugabe is trying to distract the attention of the Povos by saying the white farmers are hoarding grain, but they aren’t. The Povos are better fed on the white farms than they are in the Communal Areas. They try to get on to the white farms.’

  ‘If Mugabe resigns, who are we going to get instead?’

  ‘Who cares whether this is just a little temporary blip on the weather graph? Or a permanent major shift in the climate? The farmers don’t care, hungry people don’t care. All people care about is, Are the rains going to come in November?’

  A LITTLE MORE HISTORY

  Southern Rhodesia became a self-governing colony in 1924, though both Defence and Native Policy remained subject to British supervision. The British never, not once, protested against Southern Rhodesian Native Policy, which was always modelled on the repressive policies of South Africa. When the proposed Federation of Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland failed, because of the opposition of the blacks, Northern Rhodesia got its independence and became Zambia in 1963. Southern Rhodesia demanded independence at the same time but was refused, unless the whites promised to grant black majority rule within a reasonable period. The whites rejected this and Britain applied sanctions. Ian Smith, on behalf of the whites of Southern Rhodesia proclaimed themselves independent of Britain, in a Unilateral Declaration of Independence, known as UDI. Minor acts of sabotage; riots, protests, had been going on in Southern Rhodesia for years, but the UDI in 1965 can be regarded as the beginning of the War of Independence, as the various parties and then armies formed and took to the bush. The main parties were ZANU, Zimbabwe African National Union, under Robert Mugabe, and ZAPU, Zimbabwe African People’s Union, under Joshua Nkomo, who had spent over ten years in a detention camp, in a remote and desolate place, without amenities. ‘Like the dark side of the moon,’ he described it. These armies and other lesser armies sometimes collaborated with each other, and sometimes did not during the guerilla war against the government forces, a confused scene not made any clearer by the numbers of black soldiers fighting for the government–a majority of the government forces were black. When it was at last acknowledged by the whites that they could not win this war, Britain negotiated peace terms which included an election in which all the blacks voted, and for the first time. They voted for Robert Mugabe and ZANU, and Mugabe became Prime Minister. Joshua Nkomo was offered the job of President but refused. Then began a time when he was regarded as an enemy of Mugabe and the government. It was easier to see the disagreement like this because Robert Mugabe represented the Shona and Joshua Nkomo the Matabele. The Shona, or Moshona, are the indigenous people of the area. The Matabele were an offshoot from the Zulu nation in South Africa, for they left, trekking north to escape from the tyrannical and militaristic Zulu kings. They set up in what is now the south-west of Zimbabwe a militaristic and tyrannical regime with Bulawayo as their city. Bulawayo means The Place of Killing, and at the time when Lobengula the king was tricked out of his land by the whites it deserved its name. Historians disagree over the extent of the Mata-bele harassment of the Mashona, who were never a warlike people.