African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [131]
‘This country isn’t.’
‘Not yet.’
‘What an optimist.’
‘I’ve spent too much time in Africa.’
We discuss why African states become corrupt. ‘After all, no new Party or leader decides, Now we are going to have a corrupt country.’
‘No, corruption just creeps up on them,’ he says.
‘Perhaps it just crept up on Zambia and Tanzania and the rest, but it can’t just creep up on Zimbabwe, because they have the example of the others.’
‘It has just crept up on them.’
‘But Mugabe is trying,’ I said.
‘I see you’ve succumbed to the place. People do,’ he said. ‘What you don’t see is that Mugabe can’t really do anything because if he put all the crooks in prison he wouldn’t have any supporters left.’
‘Nonsense. You never leave Harare or Bulawayo, you people.’
And next day at breakfast very early in the dining-room, I hear an Aid worker, American, telling the same United Nations man, ‘If Mugabe misses this chance, if he screws it up then it’ll be a tragedy. How often does a leader have all this energy behind him? The Revolution might have gone bad up there…’ (he means Harare) ‘but down in the villages it is still the future. What will it be like if all this optimism goes sour? This level of expectation is not something you can call into being with a few speeches or a Party rally–no, what goes on in the Communal Areas and Resettlement Areas has all the War of Liberation behind it. It is the Revolution.’
‘Well,’ says the United Nations, ‘I’m going to have to take your word for it.’
But this corruption everyone talks about, day and night, obsessed with it, which, so it is claimed, makes investment in Zimbabwe an impossibility: compared to the financial scandals that perennially rock Britain, Japan, the United States, France, Germany, it is rather like some delinquent adolescent robbing a child’s piggy bank. Later, in London, I put this point of view to a money man, a City of London man, and he said, obviously surprised at my inability to grasp essentials, ‘Don’t you see? Before a country can go in for that kind of thing it has to have a decent infrastructure.’
And now it is the next day and we are driving south through the Matopos, handsome granite bush-covered hills and I find myself agreeing with Dorothy and with Ayrton R. who say this is the best part of the country. It is not only beautiful, but full of shrines and magical places. Then the hills are left behind and we are in a part even poorer than yesterday.
‘This lot complain all the time, they’re not like the people we met at the garden.’
Someone suggests that there isn’t that energetic individual who so often originates change. Cathie, that fireball of a woman, who sparks off effort and enterprise anywhere she is, does not find it easy to agree because she is committed on principle to groups working together. But in the end it is agreed that when you go to an area and find ‘projects’ successful and people optimistic then the reason often is that some woman, some man–an individual–has been the yeast.
Soon we are in a Growth Point and the office is in fact the old farmhouse of a bought-out white farm, and sixty or so people, mostly women, are on and around the big verandah where for so many years a thousand tea trays, drink trays, were brought by black servants for the farmer, his family, his guests. Presumably that square shed at the back was the kitchen. In front the bush is sparkling and fresh, and a dozen goats are making the most of it.
Just as the meeting begins, one of our company says she has heard there is a meeting about AIDS just down the road, and off she goes to find out about it.
There are five men present, one the village chairman. They sit quietly while Cathie and Talent say this book for women will be written by the women themselves, and ask them to suggest subjects. Which turn out to be the same as we have heard at the other meetings.
The tone changes when a woman demands