African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [142]
THE RESETTLEMENT AREA
Off we drove on the road east, then turned off on to a bad road, unsurfaced, then, many miles further on, were on a rutty track, all the time in wild and beautiful country. The soil is pale: this is Class Four soil, and was not bought from white farmers Taking the Gap, for it was unallocated government land. This government, always cautious about resettling people, making sure that there was at least some kind of administrative focal point, water, transport, is now even more so, because something is coming to the fore that was not thought of earlier. Conservation. The precious, precarious, so-easily destroyed soil.
The Coffee Farmer is now a conservation representative for Manicaland. He works under a Chief, whom he describes as a very sound type, a good chap, you know. It is his task to keep an eye on the sufferings or health of the earth. As we drive rocking along the track he keeps exclaiming, ‘Look at that! See that field! It’s gone to hell since I was here last. See those ruts–that’s erosion.’ Or, ‘Look, that chap there, he knows how to do it, that’s a perfect field. But look at that one on the other side of the road, it’s a mess, there won’t be any soil at all next year if…’ He clutches the wheel, he suffers, he could easily, we soothe, have a heart attack. But it is no good: if he sees a patch of sick soil it is as if he himself were ill. A happy and well-looked-after piece of earth makes him content. ‘Look at that gully. It wasn’t there last year. What does that chap think he is doing?’ And he stops the car, so the car behind has to stop. Everyone gets out of the car, to look at him standing over the raw scar in the earth. He points at it like the judgement of God: ‘Just look at that.’
‘I simply do not understand it,’ says he, pointing first at the eroded field. ‘It’s just as easy to do things well as badly, so why doesn’t this chap do it as well as that chap?’
He appears to think that this is a simple question, one that can be answered with a sentence beginning, Well, you see, it’s like this…
On, on, on we drive, many miles from Mutare. We pass Growth Points, all new ones. We pass notices that say ‘Welcome to——School’. We drive past lines of women and children selling mangoes. This is mango country. You may have tasted mangoes but never mangoes like these. Why are they not known world-wide? Transport, that’s why: great distances, bad roads.
We are giving lifts all the time: the once-bitten-twice-shy cautions of the sophisticated areas are not appropriate here.
One elderly man, who sat for a few miles holding tight to the side of the jolting lorry, a quiet, unremarkable, smiling man, who walked off into the bush with a smile and a wave when we set him down, has three sons. One is being trained in Czechoslovakia to be an aircraft engineer, for he did well in his examination. One has just taken his O-levels and everyone is waiting for the results. The third failed his exams. The contrast between the futures of the first son and the third was in all our minds; one will live in the modern world, the other as if it scarcely exists.
I remark how strange to pick up a poor man in the middle of the bush whose son is at university in Europe, but am rebuked with, ‘There are many like him.’ I wish I believed there were many like his oldest son being educated in Britain.
We are now miles, worlds, away from anywhere. Leaving the cars, we walk into the bush and sit around on rocks under the light airy dry trees that shed a shifting fragrant shade. It is midday. An emerald spotted dove calls: is answered.
There is a village near here, though we cannot see it. People come from the village and sit with us. Children. Men. No women. But there are women, with us, officials; two people we gave lifts to are here to take a census and they sit apart under a tree with the headman, conferring earnestly over charts and notebooks. An Extension Worker, a woman, is here to check on the state of the rains, the crops. During the hour we sat and lazed