African Laughter (55 page)

I said, ‘Outside our house was an enormous metal tank where on hot days the water got so hot you couldn’t put your hand into it. Now I find it hard to believe it never occurred to us to use the water for baths or washing clothes.’

‘Why don’t they…?’

‘Why don’t we…?’

‘What if…?’

In the coffee valley the government AIDS campaign is working. ‘Not just the government, we are at them all the time too. But it’s sad, because at the beer drinks and dances they are afraid to get drunk and have a good time. Now they’re all getting religion instead, you know, the song and dance religion. A good thing, because they have hard enough lives without not having any fun at weekends.’

The Coffee Farmer has been mugged in Mutare in the middle of the day. He had just been to the bank to deposit cheques. The muggers thought he had been in to collect the month’s wages for his workers. ‘They certainly knew what they were doing,’ says the Coffee Farmer, with more than a hint of admiration. ‘One tripped me, and the other frisked me. They were off before I got up off the pavement. I ran to the corner but the car was too far off to see the number plate. They must have been watching for the moment when only one person was on the street. Well, bad luck, I only had a couple of dollars on me.’

A PASSIONATE PROTAGONIST

In Harare’s beautiful park I was the victim of clever pickpockets. Two engaging youths approached me and a companion and asked if we would sponsor a walk in aid of something or other. One suggested I should spread the form where I would note my contribution on his back, which he helpfully turned so I could sign. While I signed, my hands were occupied, and he slid his own back and into my bag, where he lifted over a hundred pounds. Meanwhile his associate engaged the attention of my friend.

When I told this story to a woman who cannot endure the slightest criticism of Zimbabwe, she at first looked anguished, but rallied. ‘You say it was a clever operation?’ ‘Oh yes, brilliant, I can’t imagine pickpockets in London with such charm, such persuasiveness.’ She sat back, with a satisfied sigh, like a proud mother.

HOT SPRINGS

Under the whites this was a popular resort, but it is ruinous now, the pool and bathing cabins unused. Of the old amenities only a kiosk remains for the sale of cold drinks. Young men are crowded on benches around trestle tables drinking beer and playing draughts with paper boards and beer tops for counters. At a separate table an old man holds court, surrounded by young men and boys listening to his reminiscences. They sit as if hypnotized by their attention to him, sit motionless, but often laugh and then sit silently again for fear of missing anything. This scene, in its wildly beautiful surroundings, reminds me, again, of Italy, the zest of it, the enjoyment. Only sit near the draughts players and you are charged with the spirit of enjoyment.

I think of Guy Clutton-Brocks’, ‘They are the happiest lot in the world. They get enjoyment out of anything, anywhere, at any time. And we are the most joyless.’

Ever since I can remember, I’ve listened to groups of whites speculating about why this should be so, every level from ‘What the hell’s wrong with us, anyway?’ to, ‘What is there in our culture, where did it start, what happened to make it so hard for us to enjoy ourselves? The northern climate? Protestantism? The Industrial Revolution?’ (‘When in doubt blame the Industrial Revolution.’)

So bullied are we all by ideologues, it is hard to say the Africans have anything whites do not, or that we have anything they do not, but the fact is, up and down Africa, as travellers have always averred, they enjoy themselves.

Missionary Moffat (the elder) wrote in his diary how he lay awake in his camp bed on a moonlit night and listened to how across the river the poor black savages were dancing and singing to their drums and generally enjoying themselves. He saw it as his God-given task to put an end to all this sinful pleasure. Well, they certainly tried.

For hours on that afternoon young men came drifting in to drink beer and play draughts; some went over to join the old man’s audience.

Where in Europe now would you see young men and boys crowding to listen to an old man telling tales?

If it is being asked, And where were the women?–they were building the fires and cooking the supper for these men, washing the children and putting them to bed, having hoed the fields and weeded the fields and harvested the crops and mended the hut walls and thatched the roofs.

THE STORYTELLERS, THE WRITERS

Tales, stories, jokes, anecdotes come spinning off people’s lips like soap bubbles. You could say gossip, too, but there is always an epic quality to it, because Zimbabwe is felt to be important, and that is because memories of the old kingdoms, like Monomotapa (rather, Munhumotapa) are still near. When, later, the white colonialists said, God’s own country, they did not know their pride was from long before they came, and would continue when they were gone.

Zimbabwe has good writers, surprisingly many, and they have written good novels, but the form of the short story suits them well, perhaps just because when a group of people sit together and the entertainment is ‘gossip’, then accounts of what neighbours or the Chefs are up to fall naturally into shape as tales. As well as the writers who write in English, there are many who use the other languages, Shona, Ndebele and the rest, and these are seldom translated. What are they like? Violent, is the report: they are full of murder, crime, passion, incest, and are bought and read in large numbers.

When the women who came to the Book Team meetings were invited to make up stories, poems–women who first exclaimed, Oh no, and were shy, but almost at once began to suggest ideas, the beginnings of tales–then I was seeing the birth of writers whom we may well hear of sooner or later. Or at least an atmosphere where writers may be engendered.

There is already a good novel by a woman, Tsitsi Dangarembga, but it did not have an easy birth.
Nervous Disorders
was rejected by four Zimbabwe publishers. The Women’s Press in London published it, and only after that the Zimbabwe Publishing House had the courage to do it. It was criticized for being ‘negative’, presenting an unfair picture of the lives of black women, who for their part say things like, ‘This is the first time I have seen my life as a Shona woman clearly.’ In short, it is a revolutionary book. The critics were all male, all hostile. They continue to be.

Zimbabwe critics are mostly bad, but they have the strength of their ignorance, and the backing of ideology. Not only did the academics not have access to news about the Soviet Union and communist countries, but they knew nothing of the many novels where the jargon and pretensions of marxism were mocked. These novels were not allowed in.

There are groups of new writers who deny any talent to ‘the fathers of Zimbabwe writing’, such as Charles Mungoshi. One might be tempted to cry Impossible!–if the phenomenon had not so often been observed in other countries.

For instance, in the 1970s in Sweden and Norway, newly-arrived writers dismissed all their elders as talentless, using marxism to justify their envy of them: marxism was ever envy’s most useful accomplice. The information about the state of literature in communist countries, where ‘socialist-realism’ and marxist criticism had been reigning for decades, was available to them all, yet their drive to do down their predecessors was so strong they were able to persuade themselves that ‘socialist-realism’ was alive and well. The ’70s in Sweden and Norway are now referred to as the Dark Ages, not least by the writers who helped to create them.

In Britain in the ’80s something similar happened, in this case fuelled by the competitive slash-and-burn known as Thatcherism.
She
spoke of ‘one of us’, of ‘us and them’ ‘not one of us’–and so did the new young group, who claimed talent only for themselves and their cronies, and imposed a style of criticism so vindictive that European colleagues often enquired, Just what has got into you people? Thatcher! the reply often was, but it was only an old phenomenon in a different guise. A whole generation of new readers and writers now believe that malice and rancour is inseparable from literary criticism and reviewing, just as in Zimbabwe a generation believes that criticism has to use the jargon of marxism.

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.

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.