African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [133]
Says the chairman, ‘If you want to know why your husbands take new women then you have only to look at your wedding photographs.’
This cruel remark causes indignation, not anger as some of the observers thought it deserved.
The women exclaim, exchange irritated remarks. ‘These bad women have only themselves to look after.’ ‘They can afford a new dress and lipstick.’ ‘I can’t afford even to buy soap to wash my children with, let alone myself.’ ‘I haven’t had a new dress for five years.’ ‘Yes, and sometimes a prostitute is maintained by four or five men who give her their money. No wife can compete.’
The chairman, ‘Women are beautiful when they marry, then they neglect themselves.’
‘We are overworked, don’t you understand?’
‘No, he doesn’t understand, because men never work.’
‘Why do you say that when you all know I work hard for you as village chairman?’
‘I wish I had your job.’ ‘Yes, and I do too.’ ‘And I.’ A lot of laughter. The women are looking at him as they might at one of their naughty children.
Then, the question of disabled women. Often men rape these women, then there are children and no one to look after them. The government should help disabled women to get work. And men should be considerate: they shouldn’t sleep with disabled women.
The chairman remarks, ‘She may be crippled but she is all right.’
All through this he maintains a calm, smiling, magisterial look, never loses his dignity for a moment. Is he being deliberately provocative? I can see that Cathie and Talent are whispering together, looking at him, and wondering exactly that. Sylvia is as calm and authoritative as he is, while she disassociates herself from this brutality. Chris the artist–goes on drawing.
‘The men who do these things should be arrested,’ says a woman, challenging the chairman direct, but he merely smiles.
Cathie and Talent suggest the women should make up a song about a man who impregnates a crippled woman and abandons her.
‘And we will make him sing it,’ suggests someone–to the chairman.
‘Yes, I will sing it,’ says he. ‘I have a good voice.’
A pause. Then a middle-aged woman remarks that the old laws were not always good. If a girl fell in love with a man her parents did not like, she could not marry him. The women look at her in a way that says she is telling her own story. There are murmurs of sympathy.
This meeting ends, like the others, with promises from the Team to be back in a few months to collect all the material.
Then, as always, there is a song. The message is vigorous but the tune is sad: it is an old tune. Some of the African songs are as naturally sorrowful as Russian songs, designed to break your heart even when on jolly subjects.
People are slow to change, but they do change.
So go slowly and they will change.
That is one song. Then another:
Tell them about development,
Tell them about health.
Don’t tell the people to do what you say,
Tell them to do what you do.
And now, a hymn tune:
God’s love is so wonderful.
Love, love, wonderful love of God…
And there is a great circle of women dancing. Women come in from everywhere around, hearing the music. Some drop out and stand ululating and clapping. A few have babies on their backs.
As we go to the car, escorted by everybody, the woman returns who has been at the AIDS meeting. She is half-laughing, half-furious. There is in existence a proper well-made educational film about AIDS, giving facts, explaining dangers. But the local mission nuns have vetoed it. No one seems surprised the nuns have the power to do this. The same nuns, I was told, burned The Grass is Singing, my first novel, having remarked it was a good book, but dangerous.
The film actually shown said that AIDS was a danger to homosexuals and to drug-users. But homosexuality is not part of African culture; in Africa AIDS is a heterosexual disease. No one here has heard about drugs stronger than marijuana which grows everywhere