African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [106]
Harare is turning itself into a copy of Johannesburg, where for a long time houses have had night watchmen and guard dogs and barred windows, and where in the townships it is taken for granted that whatever can be stolen, will be.
A COMMERCIAL FARM (BLACK)
I meet an Agricultural Extension Worker.
What is an Agricultural Extension Worker? you may ask, if still capable of being amazed at the jargon of bureaucrats.
An Agricultural Extension Worker is an expert in Agriculture. But why Extension Worker?
Don’t ask, just don’t bother to ask, but from one end of the world to the other, people who know about crops and soil and beasts are called Extension Workers.
Don’t you see? It is an extension of knowledge.
Never mind.
This man had been visiting a large farm once owned by whites, which grew tobacco as the main crop.
‘Tell me,’ I said.
The farmhouse and all the outbuildings were crammed with relatives and friends. The manager, a brother of the owner, who is a Chef and a Minister, was in Harare. Another relative took him around. Everybody living there, getting on for a hundred of them, had planted his or her own personal patch of mealies. Many had a cow or two. These beasts were contentedly running together. There were goats. One of the mysteries of Zimbabwe is that you see goats everywhere but these beasts, called ‘firemouths’ in some countries, don’t seem to be doing damage.
‘No tobacco?’ I asked.
‘No tobacco.’
‘Just mealies and mombies?’
‘And some nice vegetable gardens.’
‘Would you say,’ I cautiously ask, ‘that this is some kind of subsistence farming?’
He looks defensive, but humorous. ‘Yes, that is what I would say.’
He does not say: ‘Well, what is the matter with that?’ since it would contradict government policy.
‘I don’t see what is the matter with that.’
‘I don’t either.’
TALK ON THE VERANDAHS
A lot of the whites put on their barrier creams as they get up in the mornings: there is an increase in skin cancer.
More people get killed by lightning in Zimbabwe than anywhere else in the world.
Lightning often strikes through the doors of huts, and kills people sleeping around the hearth.
Why should lightning bother to do anything of the sort?
Perhaps lightning likes the metal in hoes, or axes, or plates or the bangles on the women?
I contribute: When I was a girl we used to drive through a bit of bush not far from the farm where every tree had been struck by lightning.
Then there must be something in the soil, some rock or mineral, that attracts the lightning there.
A certain academic (white) concerned that so many black girls who get pregnant and want to keep their babies have nowhere to go, because their families throw them out, started a modern refuge, stretching his own and friends’ resources to pay for it. This roused frenzies of anger and disapproval in some people (black) who showed all the self-righteous disapproval we call ‘Victorian’: ‘It’s their fault if they get into trouble isn’t it?’ ‘Why should they expect other people to help them if they are foolish?’
But why ‘Victorian’? I was told recently, by someone who saw it in one of the smart areas of London, that a young couple, charming products of Mrs Thatcher’s Britain, were driving proudly around in a Porsche with a car-sticker that said, To Hell With the Poor!
Another person told me she had seen, outside a smart pub in London’s West End, a group of yuppies sitting and drinking. A beggar came up to them: a young woman took out a five pound note and burned it, laughing, in front of him. It is extremely hard not to wish that these unlikeable people are now out of a job, and downwardly mobile.
A story