African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [107]
‘That was the only time I have been scared in Zimbabwe. The young blacks were rampaging about the streets looking for whites to beat up. They did beat up some old white women. My husband saw it. He was looking down from a high window and thought, What a pretty demonstration, with all those green branches, and then he saw the beatings. I was at a meeting for the death of Samora Machel, and it was being addressed by a famous rabble-rouser, you know, all big mouth and hot air. He was going on about the CIA, they are the scapegoat for anything and everything. He said, “The CIA are well-known for a thought technique of inhibiting you from speaking. I was speaking at a meeting and then suddenly my voice left me. I knew it was them.” The man was crazy, but the audience loved it. He went from bad to worse, and I was so bored I kept falling asleep. I thought, this is dangerous, if they see I am asleep they might start beating me up. One word from this maniac and they’d do anything. I really understood the word rabble-rouser that day.’
AT A SLIGHT ANGLE
This Commercial Farm is only five miles from our old farm where I still cannot bring myself to go. Ayrton R. thinks–and so do I–that my neurotic behaviour cannot be permitted to go on, and meanwhile this visit will be a bridge–a stepping-stone–a gentle breaking-in.
The hills I grew up with, not to mention the Dyke, are all present, but at an angle.
Where this farm is now was land not ‘opened up for development’, for it was still bush when as a girl I used to visit a farm just over a ridge from here, for a week or so at a time. The attraction of that farm was stronger than any other because it was full of books, different from those in our bookcases, mostly modern novels of the kind my mother was sure were corrupting. I used to walk by myself in bush different from ours, although so close, for everywhere were kopjes crammed with granite boulders. The house itself was on a hill of boulders, inserted among them, accommodating itself to them, and most of its fabric was granite. What effect on us all did this granite have? I wonder. All the time I was there I was forced to check on ‘the view’, the hills I knew so well, but this askew perspective created valleys and crags invisible from our verandah. To be whisked from one landscape immovably the same for years through every change of sun and cloud to another, only slightly different, is an assault on some inner balance you have learned to rely on. To return after years to your childhood landscape pulled slightly out of whack tests the landscape you remember, filling you with doubt as dreams do.
We arrived on this new farm in the late afternoon, the shadows black on sunny grass, just as the farmer’s wife was leading half a dozen horses towards their field. She didn’t feed them, she said, they fed themselves off the bush. Didn’t we think they looked well? They never got sick, she never had to dose them, the vet was never needed. They were splendid horses, glowing in the sun, pleased with themselves after their day free in the bush.
And there was the deep verandah, full of furniture designed for lolling about in. This farmer is middle-aged, lean, brown, taut with energy and ideas and before we have sat down he is off–the government, the wrong-headedness of Mugabe, the impossibility of farming without spare parts and machinery, but this complaint is not where his heart lies, for what we then listened to was a cataract of ideas about farming, a philosophy.
At once I am taken right back to then because there was always at least one farmer in The District who was obsessed, possessed, with news emanating from some research institute or university–the States, Argentina, Scotland, South America–which would condemn all present farming ideas to the rubbish heap. No need to weed the fields, one should plant among weeds; no need to use fertilizer, if one didn’t fertilize the soil itself would adjust and find sustenance in the air; a