African Laughter (46 page)

‘It works because we have the goodwill of the people themselves.’

They make many jokes about the experts known as Consultants. ‘Many of them have never set foot outside Harare. If they get down to village level they stay in a three-star hotel and visit the local district offices. They know nothing about local conditions but they lay down the law about what we should do with their Aid money.’

‘Just imagine! We get back from a month’s trip all around the villages and then some Dane, or German, or American tells us, No, the main
thrust
of the problem according to our information is…’

I have a cutting with me.

They lean over the table, reading, their faces slowly spreading into smiles.

‘If we had only a fraction of that money…’

‘Even a thousandth of it.’ ‘Even a millionth of it.’

Cathie produces from a string-bag material for the forthcoming seminars and shares it out. There will be this problem and that problem, says Cathie. The four are leaning forward, looking into each other’s faces, intent. Sylvia speaks, then Talent. If they did not know how to concentrate these moments when they are together, not actually working, nothing would get done. This break under the trees is the equivalent of an organizing meeting, but it is not called that, nor do they think of it as a meeting. If this fragile little organism, so full of life, developing on its own inner impetus, allowed itself to fossilize and demand a structure, then they would need hours-long meetings to get through what they do now in a few minutes.

They are all people under pressure in their ordinary lives. Talent has three small children and takes a good deal of the responsibility for the running of the collective farm. She can only come on these trips because of the support of her husband–it was he who said, ‘There are no men and women, there are only people on this farm.’ Sylvia with her eight children finds the going hard. She is a large, queenly woman, confident, competent. Cathie whose energy incandesces not only her, but everyone else, is the queen-pin of the Team, one of the world’s natural organizers. She has children, and says she could do none of this work without her husband’s help. When the four sit together like this, the ‘family’–for they say they are one–their differences of temperament and style show in every gesture, in how they sit, how they talk. Cathie leans forward, smiling, always smiling, and her hands present her ideas in sympathy with her breathless, tumbling words. Sylvia sits four-square, nodding, or sceptical, magisterial. Talent claims she is shy, and finds it hard to speak, but with her friends she is funny, satirical–a comic. Chris is mostly silent: he watches and he listens, and five minutes later he will pass around a sketch he has made of the three in energetic verbal combat.

A young man comes towards us. He is shy, he hesitates, he waits until Cathie and the others recognise him, welcome him. Last year he worked with the Team in this district, and, knowing they were bound to stop here today has been watching for the coach. He needs advice.

This is his problem. His family are insisting that he marry. He is thirty, and that is old not to be married, in Shona culture. But how can he support a wife? On a tiny salary he earns as a junior welfare worker he already supports an old mother, an assortment of unemployed friends and, too, his brother’s family. This brother, himself fifteen, made a fourteen-year-old girl pregnant. Both youngsters were expelled from school, thus guaranteeing for both a future of unemployment. The girl’s father demanded marriage. These two are still under twenty and have two small children. This young man here supports them all. He is afraid of marriage. His mother was left by his father, and for a long time she fed her children on what she could find in the dustbins of white houses. (I have now heard this tale several times and it is still happening. ‘But now the really good dustbins are multi-racial, so I suppose that is progress.’) This young man wants a real marriage, he says: like Cathie’s, like Talent’s. He has heard them talk about their husbands. He does not want to marry the girl chosen for him by his family, because he does not know her. What should he do? He seems confident they will know the answer. Talent and Cathie consult together. Then Cathie says marriage should never limit you, but add to the possibilities of life. Yes, says Talent, you should have a partner like my husband who makes you think about everything.

The young man says, ‘But how do you know beforehand? I do have a girl and I like her, but how do I know she would turn out to be a real wife, like Cathie and like Talent?’

At this point we are summoned back to the coach.

There are five of us, finding our places in the crowded coach, but we joke there are really six. Everywhere the Team goes, they take a big drum. This is because no meeting can be expected to go well without music. ‘This is the best travelled drum in Zimbabwe,’ says Cathie.

When we reached the coach terminal in the town there was an official car waiting. Cathie says, ‘You don’t know what this means, look, this is the District Office car. They said they wanted us so badly they won’t let us pay in the training centre. And look–those men are the big bosses for the area. They’ve come to meet us. You don’t know what a change this is.’

We were taken to the training centre, which is built not in the town but well outside it, a large, light, five-year-old building surrounded by expanses of grass, then trees, making an uncompromising statement: Here is Progress, here is the modern world, here is Zimbabwe. It is full every day of the year, with people from every part of Central Province, taking courses on management, book-keeping, accountancy, dressmaking.

The Centre takes a couple of hundred at a time. For the Book Team’s week of seminars thirty women have come, and nine men. That the men should be here, supporting women, for the women’s book, is another revolution and not a minor one. These men must all be extraordinary in some way, for not only are they going against traditional ideas, but must expect criticism, perhaps derision, from other men. The Team congratulate each other about the men’s presence. ‘There you are, Chris, you aren’t going to be the only man now.’

As soon as we got there, the forty or so of us sat in a big circle and introduced ourselves, first the Team, Cathie, Sylvia, Talent, Chris. As each offered little autobiographies to the company, everyone leaned forward, in the absolute silence of concentration. Not all had been here months before, when the Team came to say that the women’s book was to be decided by them. Impossible for them not to think, What an unexpected combination of people: how did they come to work together? just as the observers–myself, and two area officials–wondered how the people who were prepared to give so much time, so much effort, to the book had chosen themselves, or were chosen, for they were very different, well-dressed, poorly dressed, confident, or fighting shyness. Two women can illustrate the range of difference. Mrs Berita Msindo, with eight children, said she had always worked, first as a teacher, then as a senior development officer. She was proud of being the first woman in the Province to ride a motorbike. She has just returned from a study tour in Rome. ‘All my children are successful,’ she remarked, just as if this were not an extraordinary thing. The two oldest are university graduates, one in England studying agriculture and economics. Another two are school teachers. The four younger ones are doing well at school. Mrs Msindo says her husband is proud of her: without him she could not have done so well. She is a large, handsome woman, humorous, pleased when everyone claps as she finishes.

The other woman is thin, tentative, anxious: she comes from an area debilitated by drought. She and the other village women get up at three or four every morning to walk to the borehole some miles away to fetch enough water to drink and to cook with: washing has become a luxury. In her area they are all short of food. Her eyes shine with passionate admiration when she listens to Mrs Msindo talk about her life. She says that when the rains come and things get easier she wants to take an O-level. She knows she could pass examinations well if she had time and opportunity. And now everyone applauds her and it seems as if she gently fills, as she sits there smiling gratefully, with their sympathy, their encouragement.

This business of our becoming a company, a communion, takes about three hours. When a woman claims an achievement, people softly clap, when the men speak they are especially applauded. The local officials who sit slightly apart, watching and listening, never opening their mouths after the first formal welcome, are impressed and say so. ‘You people are doing wonderful things,’ says the district representative. He sounds bemused, probably wondering how this atmosphere of mutual help, trust, community, is achieved, when at other times, with other people, it doesn’t happen at all.

These introductory proceedings over, the women dance, singing their welcome to the Team.

The evening meal was in progress when we got to the food hall. It is a large hall, with four tables down its length. At the end is the serving place, and queues of women and men, mostly young, were being handed plates heaped with sadza, meat, green vegetables. As usual I was astonished at the amount of sadza on every plate, at least two pounds of it. It is a thick porridge, not unlike polenta. The meat was beef, braised, very good, with a rich gravy. The cabbage was well-cooked. The meal would please a hungry Italian. But the surprising thing is, this amount is eaten three times a day, and often with plenty of thick-cut white bread. Unless a stomach is full and heavy there has not been a real meal. Often Africans invited to a ‘white’ meal will go home and fill themselves up with sadza. When Jack took his aspiring young journalists to a restaurant in Harare they complained, only half-joking, there had been no sadza. This surely must be an emotional thing. In Japan, because of the starvation after the Second World War, when even a few grains of rice were precious, rice has become an emotional necessity even though food is plentiful. The rice bucket is there, and people will eat a little spoon or two after a long meal. It is a reassurance, a manna. Sadza is served at every meal cooked in the homes of the new rich, though the menu is usually ‘white’ food.

But sadza is no longer a ‘black’ food. The son of a privileged white family, asked what he wanted for his birthday meal, said nothing would do but sadza and stew. Sadza is served in every restaurant, every hotel, at every barbecue. In the courtyards of the country hotels, along with the barbecues, are the great pots for sadza. Nothing is more satisfying to the ironies-of-history nerve than to watch those whites who stay in Zimbabwe but preserve their feelings of superiority, filling their plates with sadza.
Then
–in the old days–sadza was kaffir food and no white would dream of eating it.

The meal in the hall that night–and all the other meals–was noisy and exuberant, with an atmosphere of holiday. To most of the people here taking courses, this training college in the bush represented a time of affluence. Few people can afford to eat meat at every meal, or even every week, and certainly not great slabs of it. And when we went off to the bedrooms, the shower block was full of women showering. Like a party it was, a water festival. There they stood under the streams of hot water and called out to each other their pleasure and their surprise at the lavishness of it all. No one in the villages has unlimited streams of hot clean water. Some women had showers several times a day, just as they ate as much as they could.

Chris was sleeping on the men’s side of the building. Talent and Cathie were in one room, Sylvia and I in another. The four of us crowded on to Talent’s bed, for discussion on next day’s strategies. It was an atmosphere pleasantly reminiscent of after lights-out at school.

‘We must take things slowly,’ said Cathie. ‘We forget, we’ve done this so often, but for nearly everyone on this course it’s new. It’s worth taking the trouble to explain and explain. This is the first time ever people have been asked to choose their own themes, and then write their own articles and poems and stories and then comment on it all. We mustn’t let them be shy. We must watch out for the ones who don’t speak and encourage them.’

Talent has had her experience in the army and then at the collective farm. ‘We must split them into smaller groups to discuss the material, between every session. Then they will support each other, and it’ll be easier for them to criticize us.’ She is always the first to translate theory into practice.

Talent and Cathie began a close, expert, detailed discussion on the right sizes of groups for different purposes. Sylvia was tired, she wasn’t sleeping: she wanted to go to bed. The room was divided by a partition for privacy but it was easy to talk. We talked until late, just as Cathie and Talent were doing in their room. From every room in this women’s wing, until late, came voices, laughter and, once or twice, singing. Sylvia was not laughing. She was telling me about a close friend whose marriage had broken up, and in a way she often uses: she does not want me to make quick judgements about manners and mores she is sure are hard for me to understand. They often are.

There are several children, the oldest nearly twenty, the youngest still a baby. The husband is a civil servant. The marriage was always difficult: he was for some time an alcoholic, she saw him through it, protected him, interceded with superiors. Then there was another woman and a baby: she took him back. Only a few weeks ago she discovered that he now not only has another woman but a new baby: she knew nothing about this until someone told her the baby was being christened. She accused her husband: he said he wanted her to accept a polygamous marriage. She said, ‘When we married you had the choice of a Christian monogamous marriage, and a marriage according to our customs. You chose a Christian marriage.’ ‘I have changed my mind,’ said he. She refused to accept a polygamous marriage. He is spending all his time with the new wife and baby, and if he does come home it is only to shout at her. Meanwhile she is supporting the children, almost entirely, because his money is going on the new wife, the baby, a new house. The new wife’s relatives say he must not have anything to do with his old wife and come to threaten her. Under the new law she could force her husband to support the children, but she is afraid. Sylvia says she is ashamed to tell me this story. I say I don’t see the difference between many men in so-called Western culture and this husband. Monogamy, polygamy, what’s in a word? Many Western marriages are polygamous, and more and more couples break up, remarry, and the children may have a place, even a room, in two homes. Sylvia does laugh at the idea of a child having a whole room to itself, let alone two, in two houses.