African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [139]
‘So you don’t hate Tekere any more?’
‘Hate Edgar Tekere? Certainly not. He’s a good chap.’
‘How many Squatters were there, do you suppose?’
‘Probably several hundred. Well, it was ridiculous wasn’t it? No idea of conservation, no idea of…if you’re going to farm in mountain country then you’ve got to know what you are doing.’
‘Yes, yes, all right…Did you know the blacks think of you as very rich? Those rich Vumba farmers, they say.’
‘Do they! Well, most of us nearly went bankrupt last season. It was a terrible season. Did you know that the X’s just saved their farm? They had the best crop of kiwi fruit ever, but the prices went to nothing because all the Third World countries are growing kiwi fruit, it is grown so easily–as for us coffee farmers we are surviving only because we grow quality coffee–Arabica. Did you know our coffee is a favourite with the buyers?’
The pride of old Southern Rhodesia, the pride of new Zimbabwe, rings in his voice. We always did know how to do things–is the unvoiced message.
What else?
‘We are putting in another dam. Another drought like the last and we’ll be done for.’
He tells this story. A certain new length of pipeline was losing its rubber seals and gushing water. Someone was stealing the rubber. ‘We put our chaps on to find out who was stealing…’
‘Wait a minute, what exactly does that mean?’
‘Never mind. Well, if you must know, we found out which of the kids had new catapults in the school playground. We went to the headmaster. We told him he had to punish the boys. The trouble was, the kids had already been beaten by their fathers. So they were beaten twice. They won’t go stealing our rubber again. But I keep remembering what fun I used to have with my catapult when I was a kid.’
So I tell the Chekhov story about the peasant who steals nuts from the railway sleepers. The local landowner is the magistrate and he asks the peasant why he does this dangerous thing? There have been train accidents, has he never thought it is his fault people have been killed? ‘Well, your honour,’ he says, ‘it’s like this. I like to fish. Those nuts from the sleepers make perfect sinkers for catching some kinds of fish.’ ‘Do they?’ exclaims the landowner. ‘What kinds? I didn’t know that.’ He likes to go fishing too. The peasant and the landowner discuss the different depths certain fish are to be found in the rivers, what bait they like, the best sinkers to use on the lines. They are expert, know everything about fish and their ways. But the time comes when the magistrate has to take over from the landowner, and he sentences the peasant to so many years exile. The man goes off, incredulous: he cannot believe that this fellow fisherman who has been talking to him man to man about the ways of fish, is now turning on him. ‘But I have no alternative,’ says the magistrate. ‘You stole the nuts, didn’t you?’
The Coffee Farmer listens to this tale with his characteristic small smile: Yes, well, that’s how things are, whether you people like it or not!
Easy to say, ‘A story that could have come from old Rhodesia’ if it were not that savage beatings regulate the new schools. It is against the law, but in some countries–Britain for one–adults seem to feel beating children is their right.
Jack later wrote, ‘He has gone, and the new headmaster is in. He works hard, and so far spends all his time in the school. But he drinks and beats the kids. He beats them so hard we…’ (meaning the white ex-pat teachers) ‘go to him to ask if it is necessary. He beats the small kids too, even if they are late because the rivers are up because of rain.’
Whenever you meet teachers they talk, horrified, of the beatings.
‘Did they beat their children in the old days?’
‘Yes, they did. And the women too. Incredible beatings. Horrible. Terrible. When we expostulate they think, oh, that’s just a Honkey talking.’
All right, so what else has happened?