African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [111]
My room, at the back of the house, is vast. There are toys pushed to the backs of cupboards. As well as screening for mosquitos there are heavy bars on the windows: the Bush War was bad in these parts. This kind of country, all kopjes and heaped boulders and ravines and thick trees, was made for guerilla war. In the bathroom spiders and flying ants and moths make for the light or fall into the bath. In London one spider demands appropriate measures: a towel draped over the bath so the creature can climb out, or a tin lid for water, somewhere low, since they die of thirst: they go in search of water under our taps. Here you take no notice, it is Africa, there are too many of them. Once I was visiting a farm near Nairobi, which I remember most for its posse of Arab horses that were brought up to the house to be petted and fed sugar lumps. But I also remember the caterpillars. Occasionally caterpillars invaded the house in thousands, and one had simply to wait for them to go away, brushing them off chairs, beds, the dining table. After a bit you hardly notice them–I was told.
I wake in the night to listen–what for? The tom-toms that used once to beat all night from every farm compound. But it is as if a pulse has ceased to beat. The night is dark and almost silent. Through the bars come the small sounds that say the bush is awake, birds and small animals and once a dog barking from the farm village.
In the morning we wake at different times and sit on the verandah drinking coffee. The farmer’s wife is out riding. The farmer has already been out on the lands, and now he is entertaining us. This morning it is medicine. ‘We need a cure for a disease, but the doctors don’t know about it. We get it often, whites and blacks. Your limbs are like lead, you have a sore neck and shoulders, and you can’t move them, everything aches, you wish you were dead. Then it goes. I think it is an insect bite, perhaps it is like tsetse or malaria. You have a certain kind of stomach upset. You go to the doctor, he says it is flu. It isn’t flu. The Africans know it isn’t flu. We know it isn’t flu.’
The farmer’s wife comes back, and we set off for a walk, all of us.
The farm’s pigs are–it goes without saying–allowed to forage for themselves, no battery pigs on this farm. They are a small energetic company, who present themselves for recognition and greetings.
The farmer says everyone underestimates the intelligence of animals. If we knew what they thought of us, we wouldn’t like it. Also, their sense of humour. Pigs play practical jokes on each other. So do calves. Young animals play games, like children. Sometimes he takes himself into a field where the calves are and he sits down quietly under a bush until they forget he is there, and he watches them play king-of-the-castle, pushing each other off an anthill until one of them wins. Then the winner comes down and they start the game again. It is nearly always the same calf that wins: the aristocracy of Nature, you have to understand it, Nature knows nothing about democracy. There is always a buffoon in a crowd of young animals, a prankster who makes the others laugh. You think animals don’t laugh? Don’t you believe it! See that little pig over there? He’s the runt of the litter, he’s full of tricks and they laugh at him.
We are shown the vegetable garden. ‘If we were allowed to be subsistence farmers we could live like kings on ten acres. Everything grows here. We already grow more vegetables on half an acre than we can possibly use–the Africans get most of them, and we grow things for them they like to eat and we don’t. We have cows and pigs. We are self-sufficient already, but we are committed to this business of over-production. What am I growing tobacco for? To earn foreign currency for Mugabe but I’m not allowed any to buy spare parts and new machines. Rich farmers they call us, Commercial Farmers, all they see is the amount of land, not the risk of it. We can be wiped out in a hailstorm in ten minutes. We watch the skies all through the rainy season, the clouds pile up, my