African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [105]
The bodies went for an examination at the hospital which was very near. The very first and the obvious targets were the witches. It was an issue debated for a long period. The majority agreed to consult a nganga. Some asked what will be done to the person. One man stood up and said, ‘Let’s not reason like cowards. When a child comes and defecates on my floor, will I just glare at him? No, I will take a stick and break his head.’ The man encouraged the people to take stern measures against witches.
The person suspected was a doddering old woman, probably of ninety. Her speed was fifty metres an hour. She asked them to look at what they had eaten the previous day: it was mushrooms. The truth was starting to reveal itself. Suspicion of witchcraft was still great. Probably they were not cruel but wanted to find a reason for the deaths.
The post-mortem examination revealed that they had eaten some poison.
WITCHCRAFT
This subject arrives in every conversation, sooner rather than later.
The Passionate Apologists at once insist that in Europe ‘everyone’ reads horoscopes, that fortune-tellers flourish, that the United States thinks nothing of voting in a President whose schedule is ruled by an astrologer. How about the revival of witchcraft everywhere in Europe? How about Satanism? What do we have to say about those men of priestly magic who so confidently undertake to exorcize evil spirits? Is it not possible that we may yet see (we: Europe) the burning of witches, and mob violence against Satanism?
(If we have not seen mob violence, we have observed the forces of Reason, that is to say, social workers, using methods of interrogation identical to those once used to convict witches on young people and children suspected of complicity with Satanism.)
In other words, who the hell are you (critics from outside Africa) to talk? Put your own house in order first.
FORTRESS HOUSES
We drove in a few hours right across Zimbabwe, west to east. In Harare we had to drop in at several houses before going home. The verandahs of these houses built for air and sun are barred, making them like cages: all windows are barred now. Around the houses and gardens of the new rich (black) the walls are going up, so that you can’t see inside. Every evening in a certain place you may watch young men being drilled. The unemployed former Freedom Fighters have created an organization that supplies guards for houses. They drill in the late afternoon, using their expertise from the War, and report for duty at the houses as the light goes. They patrol while the owners sleep. As we drive up to the suburb where Ayrton R.’s house is we pass the President’s house. The high walls are heaped with coils of razor wire, and inside patrol guards. When the President drives out through these streets, it is in a limousine with tinted windows, so people cannot see in, and he is in the centre of a motorcade, with armed motorcycle riders. If you are driving through these streets and you hear the sirens of the President’s motorcade, you must drive off into a side street. Otherwise you will be shot at. This is no threat to cow the citizens: people have been known to be shot at if they didn’t get out of the way. I personally know a rather absent-minded young man who was on a motorbike, and did not understand that the sirens meant the approach of the President. People on the pavement yelled at him to stop or he would be killed. He stopped just in time. A doctor was driving along listening to a pop singer called The Wailer on the car radio: he did not hear those other, more urgent, wailers; did not stop or get off the road. His car was sprayed with bullets, though he was unhurt.
When we got home, the house was opened from inside by Dorothy. The locks for the front door are efficient. At night one part of the house, the bedroom part, is locked against the part that can be entered through the glass of the patio. When I