African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [116]
There came into being–though not at once–a team consisting of herself, with two small children, Talent, the young mother of three children and former Freedom Fighter, Sylvia, a handsome and vibrant lady, mother of eight, and Chris Hodzi, a shy and sensitive young man, in the way artists are supposed to be and still sometimes are.
At the time they invited me the Team had already finished two books. Each book is in fact several, for they are translated into six languages. The first was, Let Us Build Zimbabwe Together (the title had been suggested by the village people themselves), a handbook on overcoming civic problems, and how to cooperate in a practical way, ignoring the slogans and rhetoric that cause political activists to believe that if you shout sequences of words long and loud enough, that process in itself is enough to change things.
The second book was still being put together. It explains economic problems in detail. How to get a bank loan, open a bank account, use book-keeping, assess the chances of success for a dam…a new borehole…a vegetable garden…a village store, or even a roadside stall. Each book is a mix of text and cartoons, like a book of comic strips.
Now the Team was planning the third book. It is for women, and will be the most controversial because while rural women are acknowledged to be the liveliest agents for change, they have to contend every minute of every day with traditional attitudes about the inferiority of women. Zimbabwe is not the only country in the world where a new government has announced that old attitudes about women are retrograde and inefficient–‘We will give women equality in law and in the work-place’–and then had to contend with the past. One is Libya. Another, Iraq (whether we like it or not). But if you speak to women from Libya, from Iraq, you learn that theory is one thing and practice another. So with Zimbabwe.
‘As we all know, we can change laws, but then we have to change hearts.’ (Who? Lenin? Stalin? Mao? Rosa Luxemburg? Emmeline Pankhurst? Mrs Thatcher?)
Making these books is not at all a question of sitting in an office in Harare and writing down inspirational precepts.
With the first it was Cathie and Chris who travelled around and across and back and forth all over Zimbabwe, seeking out and talking to people they had been told were outstanding in local affairs, or who had the potential to be. Sometimes they had to contend with antagonism from local officials. They had very little money. They often lived on bread and oranges. They were fed by idealism and the response they got from the villages. What they were offering, expertise, information, was what these people, still recovering from the civil war, half-educated or uneducated, yet expected to be modern people in a modern world, were hungering for. ‘I knew there was a need,’ said Cathie. ‘Not until we actually got into villages did we realize just how enormous a need it is. Every time we got to a village we were welcomed as if we were actually bringing the goods then and there–that was because of all that hot air from the government. But what we were saying was, This is how you do it. As soon as they understood that, the word went around and then we were inundated with demands to visit them. So then the Team became four instead of two.’ And, soon, officialdom noticed them, saw how good these people were, and offered support.
Making the book for the women was being done in stages, just like the other books. First, the Team went around the whole country, finding women who already represented others. Each had to be persuaded to take on even more work: many said they had too much to do already. Yet now their task was to go around the villages, to other women as individuals or in groups, and persuade them to take part in the making of this new book. Having set the women’s book in motion, the Team went back to Harare to finish the second book, and arrange for the translation of all three. Then out they went again, for the women’s book, all over Zimbabwe, to meet the women. At the point I joined them