African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [117]
‘But,’ said Cathie, in her breathless way that combined enthusiasm with apprehension because of what she had taken on, ‘they help us more and more, they even send us messages to come to their districts.’
We were off down the Mutare road, five of us together, late for a meeting, while I gave up any idea of watching for landmarks–balancing boulders, rivers, crags–for while I sat by Sylvia, who drove, my head was turned so that a flood of information and statistics emanating from Cathie in the back could enter my right ear and, with luck, assemble themselves usefully in my already swollen-with-facts brain.
The meeting is in a local government office. An office is an office is an office. We have sped from Harare in what seems a few minutes: some of these women have travelled hours, even a day, to get here. Twenty of them are waiting, a serious, sober, attentive little crowd. I understand the phrase ‘to hang on’ words: they are hanging on every word spoken, in this case by Cathie, who is using English. Every syllable, hesitation, nuance, is being assessed. These are poor women. They feed and clothe families on very little–some on twenty or thirty pounds a month. (Yet the Team has said these are comparatively well-off women: wait till you get to Matabeleland next week, then we will be with really poor women.) It is pleasant watching these shrewd, humorous faces, and how they turn to their neighbours with a joke, a comment, and then laugh–and the laugh spreads around the room. One woman and then another says the weeks she has spent covering a ward or district were heavier than the organizers seem to realize. Am I sensing: ‘It’s all very well for you, rushing around the country in a car, while we use our legs, or bicycles.’ I think I am. But ‘you’ does not only mean Cathie, the white woman, but Chris, the black man, as poor as they are, and Talent who lives on Simukai, a farm which can scarcely be described as rich, and Sylvia, who has as many children as they do.
Cathie has said that everything about making this women’s book is revolutionary, cuts across custom: now I begin to see what she means.
She is telling the women the response to the book is very good, women everywhere are working on it. Now she wants every woman in this room to talk to the women on either side of her, and discuss ideas they want to be in the book.
This way of conducting a meeting is revolutionary. In fact, what it reminds me of is stories about early days in the Russian Revolution, when idealism still governed events, and young activists went out into the countryside to ask villagers to take charge of their own lives. One difference: there is not one word about politics. Not one slogan. No rhetoric.
These women are not only being asked to take control of their lives, without submitting to men, but to overcome reluctance to talk to women who might come from an area a hundred miles or so from their own. Here, we are cutting across tribal and clan divisions. This is Mashonaland, certainly, but the Mashona are an infinitely subdivided people. This women’s book is subversive in ways immediately evident to the women themselves–and the local officials, who are sitting at the back of the room, watching.
Soon the women are in lively discussion. Then each one in turn puts forward an idea. These having been written down, the initiative is again passed back to them with, ‘And now we want you, the women, to write the book. If you don’t know how to write, tell a neighbour who can write to take down what you say. You can send in stories,