African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [113]
But now the mood is optimistic. If They can stop the Namibian War, then They can stop the slaughter in Mozambique. Obviously it is only a question of time.
And even cocky: ‘Now the Third World Groupies will take themselves off to Namibia and we’ll get them off our backs. They are packing their bags already.’
‘Perhaps they will find their paradise in Namibia.’
‘Somewhere, over the rainbow…’
IN THE OFFICES
I have spent a day…two days…three days, in offices in Harare. Not an easy business: security is a problem. At the entrances to government offices there may be guards, in Aid offices doors are anxiously unlocked to let you in, and then locked again. ‘Skellums’ of all kinds abound, the young unemployed, some of them children, and the ex-soldiers, subsisting somehow in holes and corners of this populous city on petty crime and not so petty crime. ‘None of that kind of thing under us, under the whites,’ you hear, in the sniffy voice of the black-disliker, ‘we used to just stroll in off the street any time we liked to have a chat about our problems.’ ‘Who strolled in? The whites strolled in, the blacks were seen as potential thieves.’
Government offices, Aid offices, in both the words most often heard are Infrastructure, Extension Worker, Aid Money and–of course–Comrade Mugabe.
I sit and listen. Not only for the facts and figures which are after all in the pamphlets and reports that now cover every possible surface in my room, but for the tones of a voice. Passionate Protagonists to a woman and a man, but some sound as desperate as parents with a sick child, and others are, there is only one word, cynical. The new rich class, the corrupt elite, that’s the problem.
‘You go down to the villages, you see how they are working; you see how optimistic they are, and the poverty, the terrible poverty, then you come back to Harare and watch these fat cats swanning around I tell you, it makes me want to…’
On the wall of a government office I see a poster.
The Boss drives his men,
The Leader inspires them.
The Boss depends on authority.
The Leader depends on goodwill.
The Boss evokes fear.
The Leader radiates love.
The Boss says ‘I’.
The Leader says ‘We’.
The Boss shows who is wrong.
The Leader shows what is wrong.
The Boss knows how it is done.
The Leader knows how to do it.
The Boss demands respect.
The Leader commands respect.
So be a leader,
Not a boss.
They say this exhortation is on the walls of every government office in the country.
FAT CAT ADMONISHED
In a certain Aid office I was told this story, to persuade me–persuade himself?–that things were not so bad, really.
A very high-up official, a woman, ‘one of the good ones, you know’–kept close contact with her village, which is in a remote area, far from Harare. She insisted a male colleague should come with her to visit it. ‘How long since you visited your village?–Very well, you must come with me to mine.’ He agreed, grumbling. The first night she broke him in gently, at a decent hotel, but the next night it was a terrible hotel. ‘People have to use it, don’t they?’ she said. ‘Why shouldn’t you?’ He complained and suffered all the way. From the last little town on the road they had to walk through miles of bush to her village. She introduced this man to women working in the fields, and they at once started to shout at him that if he was a Chef then what did the government think it was doing? He complained, ‘They shouldn’t be talking to me like this, they should show respect.’ A child had been sent to fetch the old men. Ten or twelve of them arrived, together, and the oldest said, ‘Sit down, my child, and now you must listen to us.’ The great official obediently sat. ‘My child,’ said the spokesman, ‘you have done very