African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [115]
Shortly after this the government changed policy, and Zimbabwe began an efficient campaign.
An official: you have to remember Zimbabwe is one of the successful African countries. Ten per cent of the population have clean water, eighty-six per cent of the children are immunized against measles, polio, tetanus, whooping cough. Infant mortality is sixty-one per thousand. Life expectancy is fifty-seven years for a man, sixty-one for a woman. Literacy rate is seventy-five per cent. There is a country-wide network of clinics, pretty basic, but the infrastructure is there. And now for the bad side: there is periodic malnutrition, associated usually with poor rainfall. The population growth is equal to Kenya’s, the highest in the world. This is partly due to the government claim–at the beginning of Zimbabwe–that any suggestion women should not have as many children as possible was a plot on the part of the whites against the blacks. Without AIDS the population will treble in twenty years. AIDS is the joker in the pack, just as it is in every African country south of the Sahara.
It is said that the Cuban soldiers now going home are all full of AIDS.
SERVANTS
Dorothy is asked what kinds of people make the best employers. She says the ex-pats are the best. Then, the old Rhodies: ‘At least we understand them and their ways. On the whole they are fair.’ She hates, with all her heart, the new rich black class who, she says, treat servants badly, underpay them, do not give them proper time off. She tells all kinds of stories about bad behaviour. For one thing, they exploit relatives. A Chef, asked about this, says she is biased: ‘Of course we make mistakes.’ But she must know that every successful black person is besieged by out-of-work or out-of-luck relatives, whom he is bound to support. Every Chef’s house is full of poor relations. In return for their board and lodging they do housework and odd jobs. The Chef pays school fees for the children and buys their clothes. Sometimes a Chef will be sending as many as thirty children to school. Back we go to Dorothy. ‘Sometimes that is true,’ she says. ‘I didn’t say they were all bad. But these days a lot of the rich people behave like whites, they don’t help their families.’
AID WORKERS TALK
‘I don’t know what it is about this country. It just gets you. I’ve worked in a lot of Third World countries but this one…you really care what happens to it–perhaps because they have a chance of making it. But I think it is the people. I don’t want to leave them. I know when they send me on somewhere else, I’m going to spend half my time worrying about what’s going on here, if they are getting it together.’
‘Why do you get so fascinated by this place? That’s easy! Are the good guys or the bad guys going to win!’
THE BOOK TEAM OF THE COMMUNITY
PUBLISHING PROGRAMME
And now that stroke of luck travellers dream of, which we cannot plan, expect, order, or foresee: I was invited to go with a team of people making instructional books for use in the villages. These people, their ideas, their work, are revolutionary, truly so, not in a political sense. The originator, Cathie, a South African who had worked in rural areas there, was shocked by the ignorance of village people in Zimbabwe about modern living, even the household technology everyone in Europe takes for granted. Besides, what of the waste of talent, of potential? ‘The most important resource of the country is being wasted–the intellectual and creative energies of the people living in the rural areas which no one recognizes or bothers to develop.’ There was a gap here, an insufficiency, something needed to be done, so she decided