African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [128]
The man continues to stand in front of her, accusing.
‘You bought chickens, and within a year you had made that one hundred dollars into five hundred, so you told me…well, is that true?’
The man laughs and says it is.
‘There you are. How many people have been given hundreds and hundreds of dollars and there is nothing to show for it?’
‘Yes, we know that is true, but we are not that kind of people.’
‘What we are talking about is money for a borehole and my organization doesn’t deal in that kind of money.’
‘Then what are we to do?’
‘You should talk to this man here–if you can talk him into it, he’s the person.’
This man here, one of those who had come with us from town because he knew there would be a visit to the garden, goes aside with the villagers to talk about the possibilities of the borehole.
Our group is now scattered about, and I am standing by myself, when an Extension Worker–in this case a man of about forty, muddy because he had been helping to clear a flooded irrigation ditch–comes hastening up to me. He is laughing in that way which says you will soon be laughing too.
He comes to a stop in front of me, puts on a grave look, and says, ‘You see, Mrs Lessing, you do not understand our problems.’
These words, used by the whites in the old days every time some visitor criticized them, duly make me laugh, and he nods, to register that I had got the point and he could proceed.
‘We are now a civilized country,’ he pronounces, and waits for my response so he can go on with the punchline.
‘I can see that for myself,’ I say.
‘Like every other civilized country we have a corrupt ruling elite,’ says he, and starts shaking all over with laughter.
We laugh. Then he goes back to supervize the irrigation ditch, shaking his head and laughing.
The point was, there had recently been another corruption scandal in Britain.
The people who work this garden are proud, like the people of the shed, that their facilities are free to people who are not members. They can get free seedlings. In return for contributing manure from their beasts, they are given free vegetables.
The gardeners have decided to give up using fertilizer if they can get enough manure. The vegetables grown with fertilizers don’t taste good, they say. If you have one line of vegetables grown with fertilizers and one with manure, you can tell the difference from the first mouthful.
We are shown, with pride, how inside the fence where the garden has been left room to grow, there are holes full of wilting weeds left to rot and make food for the pawpaw trees, guavas and oranges that will be planted soon. With pride, we are shown how, outside the garden, the Blair toilets are half-concealed by masses of feathery pink and white cosmos. The fence is well-kept. The village huts are well thatched.
As we go off towards the Landcruiser, the women come up to sell us vegetables. The housewives among us buy eagerly: vegetables like these cannot be easily found. The women have made a few cents, and they are pleased and proud. This garden, this achievement, which is changing all their lives, has put two thousand dollars into the bank. This is a very great sum to them, even though it must be shared by many people. Nothing could bring home the level of the poverty here more than this: the pleasure of these women because of these few coins, a couple of dollars altogether for a great heap of vegetables. In this poor district, sharply improving the level of a family means being able to buy a pair of shoes for a child at school, or a jersey for a cold day like this one, or a kerosene lamp so that the children can do homework.
I am told there are two good primary schools in the area. The two secondary schools are in the same condition as the one I saw a week ago. The headmaster of one is being charged with embezzling school funds.
All the time we stop to pick people up from the side of the road, and set them down again. The Landcruiser is being seen as a bus, and on this bush road no one seems afraid of giving lifts. What