African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [118]
The women have not expected this. At first they are confused, then they are pleased. Soon they are telling us and each other what they will write. Many of the suggestions are criticisms of the local Party officials. The Team has told me rural people speak their minds about anything and anybody. Behind me sit the Party officials, listening to what, in a really communist country, would be a cause for prison or death.
THE RUINED HOUSE IN THE TRANSVAAL
This meeting was in Marondera, my brother’s nearest town for most of his life and near, where, long ago, the family lay out under trees and were part of the night-time bush. To match that past with the women’s meeting in the local office–impossible, two different worlds, just as it was not possible to imagine telling my brother about the women’s meeting. But I could not have done that anyway, for he was dead. He died in the Transvaal in the car that was taking him to hospital. If it had been an ambulance of the kind we take for granted in Europe, they would have known how to stop him dying of the heart attack.
My brother had visited me twice, in London, and we spent many hours, and days, saying, Do you remember?
He talked about his new life but he did not like the Transvaal. One doesn’t grumble, of course.
One story he told me several times. Every evening he went for a walk into the veld, with–at first–the two dogs, and then with one. He came on a ruined house in the middle of the tramped-down, over-grazed, dirty grass.
‘It’s not the same, not like England, if you found a ruined house here someone would know about it. But there–it made me feel really funny, that old house, someone lived there didn’t they? I wonder what happened to them. I was poking around and there was a potato plant. It had finished flowering so I pulled it up. There was a cache of good potatoes under a cracked bit of cement floor. But that place must have been there empty for years and years. I couldn’t make sense of it. I went poking about in that ruin and I kept coming on potatoes, more potatoes, that plant had put down roots under everything–old bricks, slabs of cement, I couldn’t come to the end of it. There was something about that place the potato liked.’
‘But I thought they didn’t like too much lime?’
‘Not much lime left, I should think. Not after so many years. Anyway, I just went on pulling up bricks until all the potatoes were exposed. There must have been a couple of big sacks of them. Then I didn’t know what to do. In the old days there would have been baboons, or birds, but now there’s nothing. I took some potatoes home. I went back every evening, and there the potatoes were and then one night–they had gone. Probably a herdsboy. At least someone got the benefit. I didn’t like to think of those potatoes working away there, season after season, and no one getting any good out of them.’
IN THE NIGHTCLUB
The next meeting was in Jamaica Inn, once a nightclub for whites, now a Rural Women’s Training Centre. In an office wait thirty women, who at once let us know they have been kept waiting. Cathie humorously apologizes. They humorously accept her apologies. The nearer you get to Harare, I have been told, the better dressed and more confident the women will be: this is a smart and self-possessed crowd.
Three men, local officials, are greeted as allies by the Team. They sit at the back. Now the proceedings are in Shona, and Chris Hodzi, who is sitting beside me making sketches, translates for me. Chris sits through every meeting, listening, choosing moments of tension or drama or humour.
The men interrupt with comments and criticism. Cathie sends me a note saying the men are playing devil’s advocate, giving the women experience in handling hostility. It seems to me one man means every word he says: I am sitting just in front of him. He is a large middle-aged man, a pillar of society in his three-piece