African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [0]
African Laughter
Four Visits to Zimbabwe
With our short memory, we accept the present climate as normal. It is as though a man with a huge volume of a thousand pages before him–in reality, the pages of earth time–should read the final sentence on the last page and pronounce it history. The ice has receded, it is true, but world climate has not completely rebounded. We are still on the steep edge of winter or early spring. Temperature has reached mid-point. Like refugees, we have been dozing memoryless for a few scant millennia before the windbreak of a sun-warmed rock. In the European Lapland winter that once obtained as far south as Britain, the temperature lay eighteen degrees Fahrenheit lower than today.
On a world scale this cold did not arrive unheralded. Somewhere in the highlands of Africa and Asia the long Tertiary descent of temperature began. It was, in retrospect, the prelude to the ice. One can trace its presence in the spread of grasslands and the disappearance over many areas of the old forest browsers. The continents were rising. We know that by Pliocene time, in which the trail of man ebbs away into the grass, man’s history is more complicated than the simple late descent, as our Victorian forerunners sometimes assumed, of a chimpanzee from a tree. The story is one whose complications we have yet to unravel.
Loren Eiseley, The Unexpected Universe
Contents
Epigraph
Map
Then
1982
Next Time
1988
And, Again…
1989
And Again, in Passing…
1992
Glossary
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Praise
Other Books by Doris Lessing
Copyright
About the Publisher
Map
Then
1982
Early next morning we left the river and journeyed through a region the scenery of which was exceedingly pretty–more picturesque I have hardly ever seen. Hills and valleys, spruits and rivers, grass and trees–all combined to present a most charming variety of landscape views.
Major Johnson and I were driving in a cart some distance ahead of the waggon, and, when we arrived at the summit of a small hill, we stopped and waited for Mr Rhodes and Dr Jameson. I was so struck with the beauty of the country there that I decided to choose the site of the farms, which Mr Venter and I were to have in Mashonaland, at the foot of that hill. Mr Rhodes soon guessed my thoughts, for when he came up to our cart he said to me, before I had spoken a word, -
‘Don’t tell me anything De Waal, and I shall tell you why you’ve stopped the cart and waited for me!’
‘Well, why?’ I asked.
‘Because you wish to tell me that you have here chosen for Venter and yourself the site of your farms.’
‘Precisely,’ I replied, ‘you have guessed well.’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ve just been speaking to my friends in the waggon about the grandeur of the place, and I told them that I was sure you would not pass it by without desiring a slice of it.’
Mr Rhodes then requests Mr Duncan, the Surveyor-General of Mashonaland, who was with us just then, to measure out two farms there, one for Mr Venter and one for myself. I am sure the landed property in that part of the country will soon become very valuable, especially when the railway runs–as it soon will–between Beira and Salisbury.
D. C De Waal, With Rhodes in Mashonaland
This excerpt describes the country near Rusape, on the road between Salisbury and Umtali. The journeys were made in 1890 and 1891, during the Occupation but before the military conquest.
A LITTLE HISTORY
Southern Rhodesia was a shield-shaped country in the middle of the map of Southern Africa, and it was bright pink because Cecil Rhodes had said the map of Africa should be painted red from Cape to Cairo, as an outward sign of its happy allegiance to the British Empire. The hearts of innumerable men and women responded with idealistic fervour to his clarion, because it went without saying that it would be good for Africa, or for anywhere else, to be made British. At this point it might be useful to wonder which of the idealisms that make our hearts beat faster will seem wrong-headed to people