African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [134]
The local doctor has said that five people died of AIDS in the last few weeks, in this area. That is, the acknowledged deaths from AIDS. Since no one knows anything about AIDS, a person may die of it and all you hear is: my brother got too thin, and he had swellings and then he died.
As we climb into the Landcruiser a village man says to me, ‘You have chosen a good time to visit Matabeleland. The Unity Accord has made us happy. The Dissidents have stopped making our lives a misery. We had a good harvest last year. The rains are good this year. And–of course!–there will never be another drought in our Matabeleland.’ Everyone laughs, and to the sound of laughter we leave the Growth Point.
The train to Harare left on time. In the early morning, after coffee and biscuits, I went to stand in the corridor. Six women seemed a lot in that one compartment.
Two windows down a young smartly dressed girl stood watching the bush go past. A couple of duiker grazed their way into a gum plantation. A partridge ran madly beside us, as if racing the train.
A young man, handsome, a dandy, watched the girl from the end of the corridor. He came sauntering down, politely apologized as he squeezed past me, and began with, ‘Where are you going? It’s a nice day, I think. Haven’t I seen you before?’ She jabbed her toe into the corridor wall, and hung her head: maidenly bashfulness a culture away from her dress, her shoes, the pink beret. He chatted on–whimsical, frankly trying to charm her. But the courtship made slow progress. She would not respond, she simply would not, but went on poking her toe at the wood, and hung her head.
Suddenly she could not prevent herself letting out a giggle. He laughed out loud with his victory, clapped his hands and spun around on his heels. After that it took him five minutes to get her to say yes to meeting him in Harare that night, in a bar, for a drink. ‘And who knows? We may like each other and go and eat some sadza together.’ As if that hanging head, the sulky indifference, had never been, she chatted animatedly with him for the remaining hour into Harare.
THE TRAVELLING CLASSES
An evening in Harare spent with academics, journalists from various countries, politicians in and out of office, some farmers, musicians, a mixed lot black and white. What do they all have in common? They travel, they make comparisons, they are of the travelling class.
If it is hard for most of the white people to leave Zimbabwe, then for nearly all the black people it is impossible, and the world outside Southern Africa hardly exists.
The academics present have been out on scholarly missions. The journalists, by definition, get about. The farmers have relatives in Europe. The politicians, like their kind everywhere in the world, are always off on Committees, Commissions, Conferences.
Something extraordinary has happened.
The young Zimbabwe began with the naïvest, most untutored enthusiasm for communism. The newspapers printed nothing critical of communist countries. The Gorbachev revolution was hardly mentioned. The self-criticisms of the Soviet Union went unnoticed. That Stalin is no longer the Father of his people but rather a murdering maniac has passed most people by.
Sometimes one is tempted to believe that the mental attitudes of a country have something to do with its sun and soil. Old Southern Rhodesia was the same, complacently indifferent to the outside world. Leaving it was like leaving a stunned or a drugged country. The only comparable places are in certain Mid-Western States in America, where curiosity about the world ends at, let’s say, the borders of Iowa or Nebraska. A university audience will hardly know where Afghanistan is–or Sri Lanka, or Pakistan. In California sun-drugged youngsters will stare at the mention of Gorbachev.
Similarly, Zimbabwe. You may spend an evening with a professor of history, or of literature,