African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [120]
Dorothy remarks that she thinks I will find the train to Bulawayo ‘not very bad’. She thinks it is a pity people sometimes condemn things without knowing enough about them. It turns out that no one present has been on a train recently.
The Team is travelling second class. At the station queues wait to collect already booked tickets, but at the time an official should have appeared–no one. The queue doubles up on itself, and soon the room is so full the queue loses definition. ‘It is not corruption that’s going to do this country in, it’s the inefficiency,’ I hear, not for the first or the twentieth time.
We solve our problem by approaching an official standing at the edge of the crowd, apparently without function. His job certainly is not to deal with us, but he does, from good nature, not for a bribe. And there we are on the platform which I swear has not changed by so much as a nut or a bolt. It still looks as if made from a giant Meccano set…and can that be the same coat of battle-grey paint? The long platform seethes with people. Then the train consisted of half a mile or so of coaches, most of them with a few white faces at the windows, then, further along, a couple of coaches with brown faces–Indians and ‘Coloureds’–a forced conjunction of people guaranteed to cause resentment to both, which it did for all the time of White Supremacy. Finally came a couple of coaches where all the blacks were squashed. This arrangement meant that most of the platform used to be sparsely occupied by whites.
I amuse the Team by a description of those times. They find the past improbable, and laugh at it. Cathie says that South Africa’s segregation patterns, in her time, have never been as rigid as that. Talent who spent all her youth as a guerilla fighter has never known old Salisbury. Chris is still in his early twenties.
Just in front of us is a black woman so burdened it is as if she is there to illustrate some statistic. In her belly is a baby, on her back another, and clinging to her hand a small child. She spreads a blanket on the platform and places on it three more children, twins of about eighteen months, and an older child of about five. The three sit there while tall people mill about them. They are uncomplaining, not fidgeting. I remark that it would be hard to find white children who would sit there stolidly, not making a fuss. Cathie says the children are taught to behave well, but she is convinced it is bad for small children to be forced to sit silent and obedient for so long. I say that if one woman has to cope with several small children it is just as well they have learned to behave. Talent listens to this exchange without comment. We ask her what she thinks, and realize she does not find the sight of this exhausted woman remarkable. Or perhaps she is herself tired. The Team have already said that at the beginning of the present tour of Zimbabwe, five weeks ago, they were all full of high spirits, but now they’re waiting for a second wind. ‘It will be all right when we actually start work.’
The long platform eddies with people, nearly all black. Among them are perhaps a dozen white faces. Chris, yards away, waves to show he has located our places, and pushes his way towards us as the crowd ebbs into the train. The mother of the children is frantically running about, weeping–one of the babies on the blanket has wandered off. She has babies all over her, in her arms, clinging to her knees. They do not cry. Large solemn eyes in small serious faces stare around them, unfrightened, Chris goes to alert some official to her predicament, we go into the train. They have put us three women into a coupé, and Chris into