African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [119]
The three men are polite and formal, while the women bring up all the points we have heard at the other meeting–and will hear again. From one end of Zimbabwe to the other, the Team say, the women raise the same problems. Nor do the men react much when the women demand that government representatives–in other words, themselves–should come to the villages to explain their new rights to them: often male officials take advantage of their ignorance. The men start serious heckling when the women talk about prostitution. The Team have said they have found prostitution in every rural area, no matter how remote. Before their travels they believed, like everybody else, that prostitution was a problem for the towns. The man behind me says village women are greedy these days and are not satisfied with their husband’s earnings. Women are not as they used to be. They want careers and they neglect their families. For example, who is looking after your children while you are all enjoying yourselves here? The women laugh, and say neighbours are caring for their children. And what about your husbands? Who is cooking their food? Not one woman asks why the men should not cook their own food; they say their husbands are being looked after.
Women spend money on making themselves up, on clothes, all they care about is we should think they are beautiful and love them–says the conscientious dissenter behind me.
Not at all, says one woman, the others clapping softly to applaud her, it is a question of self-respect, of making yourself look nice.
I hear the male voice behind me, low, intimate, as if spoken into the ear of a woman in his arms, ‘You know what I am saying is true.’
I make the point that these arguments can be heard in every country in the world, but feel ‘the world’ enters this room as an irrelevance.
The women’s demands go on: the men heckle: it is all good-natured enough, and they joke and laugh.
Then the women sing, clapping their hands: it is a song they have made up especially for this meeting. ‘We have come together to work with our hands. Lying under a tree sleeping we have left to the dogs.’
This is the end of the meeting. Just as the women rise, and gather their belongings, the man behind me remarks softly, ‘One of the reasons a man rejects his wife is because she is a witch.’
A silence, a change of atmosphere, a chill. No one laughs.
The silence is a bad one. Everything about this meeting until now, the tone of it, the style, is rational, reasonable, the modern world. But witchcraft is from the past. Yet everyone knows how strong it is. The women do not look at the men. They do not laugh. I would say they are afraid. When I turn to look at the men behind me they seem complacent: they have had the last word.
Again the Team says they will be back here at the stage of the discussion of the submitted material.
And off we go back to town.
THE TRAIN
People telephone to say how much they envy me going off with the Book Team. ‘You get cynical in Harare with all the corruption and bureaucracy. But you won’t feel cynical when you meet the people in the villages, particularly the women.’
We are to go by train.
In 1982 they said the railways were dead, because of lack of capital investment, because white skilled labour had taken itself out of the country, and no one knew how to make the trains work. I stood by the railway lines with a farmer from Mutare and heard his lament: ‘Under our government the trains came through here, dozens of them every day on their way to Beira. They ran on time. They were efficient. Now you get one or two trains a day, and they are filthy, and full of hooligans.’
There is investment again, and the railways are recovering. But when I said in Harare we were going by train, several people said, ‘You can’t do that, it’s dangerous. It’s just possible if you go first class.’
Hearing this, Dorothy remarks that she often goes to Bulawayo, by train, third class. She is serving a table full of people dinner at the time. Ayrton R. has taught her to be a cordon bleu