African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [129]
A politician from Harare meets an old friend, an ex-Freedom Fighter, now a Chef, in the street in Bulawayo. This Chef had been in the papers that week for a particularly flagrant bit of theft. The first one says, ‘I don’t think I can afford to be seen with you this week.’ The delinquent one says, ‘What a pity, I was going to ask you to dinner.’ ‘Another time,’ says the first. ‘No, I have the solution,’ says the Chef. ‘Come and stay the night with me, you won’t have to be seen with me in public. And I’ll take you to the house I show the government watchdogs when they come around to see if I am infringing the Leadership Code. I wouldn’t compromise you by showing you my farm, my store, my hotel, my other house, my…’
The Leadership Code imposed by Comrade Mugabe, is supposed, like the Romans’ Sumptuary Law, to check this greedy tide.
They tell a story from Manicaland. ‘Aren’t you ashamed to be so rich, so quickly? Aren’t you afraid the government will punish you?’ ‘No, this government is on the side of the poor, isn’t it? Well, I was a poor man and so the government must be on my side.’
A story about a politician whose wife is infamous for her greed: ‘Oh, he’s a good man, we all know that, he’s incorruptible, who could ever say a word against him? But if you sleep with corruption, then what do you call that?’
In the middle of the jokes and anecdotes there is always the moment when someone says, ‘They think we are stupid because we are poor people. The Chefs forget we are watching them. We know who is good and who is bad.’
‘A lot of corruption is small corruption, but behind every small corruption is a big man’s approval. They should remember it is dangerous to take a government car to ferry rhino horns to the dealers. Rhino poaching has powerful people behind it. The poachers carry powerful guns. Who can afford to pay for such big guns? Only the Chefs.’
‘During the Bush War the Comrades used to listen to the people and take our advice. Now they have forgotten to do this.’
‘The once-honoured word Comrade should be shed or used for crooks and criminals. They have given up using it in some communist countries. When people start using the word sarcastically, then it’s enough.’
They talk about Joshua Nkomo, with affection, with approval. It is forgotten he was so long in the wilderness, accused of every kind of rebellion and sedition, and it is as if he has always been up there among the Chefs, an architect of Zimbabwe, and a good man.
There is a story going about. Nkomo visits a certain shrine in the Matopos, and there the ngangas greet him as Lobengula: he is the old king reincarnated, or at least, he is animated by the old king’s spirit.
‘You would not listen to us when you were Lobengula,’ he is chided by the wise ones. ‘You did not listen when you fought the British and were defeated, as we warned you would happen. Are you now that Lobengula who was disobedient to the voices of the ancestors, or are you he who will do what we say?’ Joshua says humbly: ‘I am he who will do what you say.’ ‘Then you will have honour, a long life and a great public position.’
Is this story true? It illustrates a feeling about Joshua Nkomo, as much as it does the need for continuity in a society that has been so violently and so often disrupted in the last hundred years.
In the hotel at dinner there are a lot of us, and we sit a long time talking. Sylvia is at the head of the table; her daughter, who is learning the hotel trade, is at the bottom. It is Sylvia’s turn to tell us the story of her life. We listen as people seem to do at this time, judging it as a strand in that epic, the Making of Zimbabwe.
Sylvia was the child of a polygamous marriage, was brought up to obey, to say no more than Yes or No in the company of her elders, never dared to criticize her parents. But she is married in the modern way with a husband who helps her, takes equal responsibility for everything, and when