African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [102]
In the playground of the junior school the children are squatting on the ground, playing that game that looks like draughts, with smooth stones laid out in holes in the earth. They crowd up to the wire of the playground to watch us, laughing and waving and delighted by the cow.
It is midday. Four or five hours before they get anything to eat.
In Jack’s shack we ate bread and tinned herring, feeling like sybarites. Teachers and pupils kept dropping in. What they needed was to see Ayrton R., breathe the same air as he did, be near that elusive paradise, the University of Zimbabwe.
In the afternoon we walked a long way into the bush, which was in the process of ceasing to be bush. Fields were in every stage of preparation. Some had the stumps standing in the bared earth, some stumps were smouldering. There were fields cleared, but untilled. Many trees were ringed for felling. In the bush that was still bush every tree had branches lopped off.
The population of Zimbabwe will triple by 2010. That is, in twenty years. There seems something impossible about this figure.
‘Plant trees, we must all plant trees,’ urges Comrade Mugabe, shoring what must often seem vain hopes against these ruins of bush. And plant trees they do, miles of the fast-growing blue gums, disliked by everybody as much as we hate the conifer plantations that disfigure Britain. The trouble is, the beautiful indigenous trees grow so slowly.
Mushrooms grew in thousands all along the road. The local people say that mushrooms are poisonous, and came to warn Jack not to eat them. He said that in other parts of the country mushrooms are eaten. But they were unconvinced and await–Jack said–his certain death.
When the sun went down we ate our supper of bread and mushrooms, and tried to listen to the radio. It was not working. Is there no radio in the school? Yes, the other teacher has one, but he is not here. The trouble is, it is hard to get batteries; for most Africans impossibly expensive.
In this school and the other one like it twenty miles away there is no electricity, no telephone, unreliable radio. There is nothing in the way of civilization nearer than that hotel where we had lunch, fifty miles away. When Jack wants to ring up his family in England he takes the bus to the hotel and stays the night there, enjoying electricity, clean water and a decent meal. But often the lines are down, or the connection bad and he can’t get through to England on that trip.
His mail comes to the little town where the hotel is. He asks friends to send him books for the school library and we do. The Zimbabwe post office does not encourage an interest in literature. Any parcel of books over about £10, you have to pay to receive. If the friends in England are foolish enough to send two parcels, both under the £10 limit, at the same time, the enterprising Customs officials tape the two together and you pay as if they are one parcel. Jack, ever charitable, says he supposes the officials have trouble feeding themselves and their families–like the teachers here. Jack does not have any money because he ‘lends’ it to the teachers. He has even lent a good bit to the headmaster–the man without a character.
Next day is the last day of term and there are no classes. Some of the senior pupils are planting maize: this school has Agriculture as part of the curriculum. The pupils become barelegged gangs, dozens of them invading a field all at once, dropping the maize seeds into holes along lines determined by strings stretched between pegs. They enjoy this work, and sing and even dance at the edges of the fields. Jack works with them. The other teachers, he says, are too good to work in the fields, but he is white and entitled to eccentricity. The teacher called the Agricultural Instructor did not know when