African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [112]
He is talking about his workforce, paternally, protectively. He and his wife like the Africans. There is never that cold dislike you learn to listen for. And they like him, so he says. ‘They call me the Crazy One, but that’s all right. If I’m an eccentric all it means I get things done in new ways. They come to me, they ask this and that–loans, or to help them with bureaucrats. I pull out their teeth when they ask, I doctor them, we discuss their problems. They listen to me, and I listen to them. But what you must remember is, they are going along with our ways because it’s the modern world and they’re stuck with it, but our ways aren’t their ways, they don’t like them, they like their own ways, it goes against their natures, the way we do things. In the end, it won’t be our ways they choose. Well, all right, it’s their continent, but I hope they’ll let me use a few acres of it. I think they will. You know the important thing about them? All that noise over the War made everyone see things wrong. These aren’t vengeful people. They don’t go in for hating. When you get talking, you know what you find? They’re very philosophical people, they take the long view. So–they’re like me and that’s why we get along.’
The breakfast table is loaded. The maize meal we knew has gone. It was a grainy mass, full of taste, but now the grain is refined and sadza is white, jelly-like, tasteless. The men, who are going to be working hard all day, are eating plates of it. The scrambled eggs are from hens free to choose their diet, insects and plants from the bush, as well as grain thrown down for them. There is fish pate made from fish smoked over a certain acacia wood. Jams and cheese and cereals are all made locally. The yoghurt comes from the farm.
The men are talking about the day’s work, as if no one else around the table exists. Just like then. But the women are discussing a trip into Harare for the day. This emphatically is not like then, when women were imprisoned on the farms, and a visit to a neighbour was a great event. This is such an assault on my memory I postpone the problem till later. Besides, the farmer is talking again. About the AIDS virus. He admires this virus. ‘That is the most cunning little virus. I read the other day that the Devil could have designed it, but no, it is God, giving us a warning. We have all gone mad over sex–the whole world. So God is saying, Now, be careful, I’m warning you again! Next time it will be worse than AIDS, if we don’t listen.’
This takes me straight back to my Old-Testament-dominated father. In his view it was the forthcoming Second World War that was God’s punishment for sin. He and Churchill alone knew what was rushing towards us: it was the Wrath to Come. There I was, sitting in the same landscape, if from this awry perspective, listening to a reincarnation of my father thundering warnings of God’s new punishments, after fifty years, the Second World War, the Bush War, and all the other wars and disasters. A kind of continuity, I suppose.
OVER THE RAINBOW
In Harare they talk endlessly about the new agreement over Namibia in the same way we do about the ending of the Iran–Iraq War, and the end of the invasion of Afghanistan. With every war there is this feeling that it is impossible, it can’t be true, we are dealing in lunacies, there is no reason why it should be happening, it could have been avoided. Yet it is happening, and it seems nothing can stop it. Then–it stops. If it can be stopped, then why did it