African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [101]
Ayrton R. speaks first. Listening, I understand this is going to be as hard as anything I have done. He is emotional, persuasive, and has behind him the experience of having talked to so many groups of pupils, on so many levels. He makes a statement…a suggestion…offers a thought–there is the intense and baffled silence which means an idea has not been taken in. He rephrases, tries again. The trouble is, the language he uses, the words, do not find a mirror in the minds of the listeners. In other words, here is the culture gap, illustrated. At the end, trying to give them hope, he says that there is no need to despair, to give up, if they do not pass O-levels, for there are technical schools and this country needs technicians. Their silence is sorrowful, disappointed, if polite.
It is my turn. I have spoken to many different kinds of audiences in many countries, some of them, as we put it, disadvantaged. This is not the first time I say to young people who will never reach university that there are ways of learning open to them, and no one can stop them learning if they want to learn. With a library and perhaps some sympathetic adult to advise them, there is nothing in the world they cannot study. A good library–I am well used to saying, reminding people of our remarkable inheritance–is a treasure house, and we take it for granted. It is possible to pick up a book, perhaps by chance, when you are a child, and find in it a world existing parallel to the one you live in, full of amazements and surprises and delights; you can pursue any interest through different countries and cultures, diving back into history and forward into the future; you can exhaust one interest and then find another; or, turning over books, chance on a subject you had never suspected existed–and follow that, with no idea when you begin where it will lead. With a library you are free, not confined by certainly temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one–but no one at all–can tell you what to read and when and how.
The only trouble with this exhortation, which I have to say has set young people off on explorations of all kinds, was that there was no proper library within three hundred miles. And so I was unable to produce more than a few sentences, while they were thinking, Well, we have a library, don’t we?
Then I began to talk about how one becomes a writer, since I’ve learned that in any audience anywhere there are always people who write novels, or intend to. This went better because there was in fact a man there who was writing, a teacher from another school some miles away.
Jack said afterwards, ‘It doesn’t matter. What mattered was that someone thought it worth it to come and talk to them. No one takes any notice of them, you see.’ And he went on to tell us how ‘one of those fat cats from Harare came, an inspector’.
Jack was delighted, hoping he would point out deficiencies to the negligent headmaster. The pupils waited for days in expectation of the event, a visitor from Harare. ‘But he went around the school as fast as he could, didn’t stop in any class longer than a minute, in some of them he didn’t even sit down. He didn’t notice the lack of textbooks, he didn’t ask questions. Then before he left he said the washing-line should be moved from where it was to somewhere else. The teachers obediently moved it, and moved it back when he left. Off he drove, sweating into his three-piece suit.’
‘There are three stages in the flight from the Reserve,’ said Ayrton R., ‘All right, a Communal Area. The first, a tie. The second, a jacket. The third, a three-piece suit. Then you’ve made it. You’re free for ever from the bush.’
We walk back. The cow, thwarted at the fence, is standing outside the window of a store shed. In the glass she can see another cow who is tossing her horns, and snorting at her. The cow is in two minds about putting her horns right through the glass. Some small children stand watching. They are amused by the deluded cow. Jack