African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [143]
The talk turns to Mozambique, which is so close, and to the people who keep coming here through the bush to get food. ‘How can we feel safe in Zimbabwe when the Mozambique War goes on and on?’ ‘It will never end. It is in South Africa’s interests to keep it going.’
A Mozambique joke: What is a sardine? A sardine is a whale that has gone through seven stages of socialist transformation.
An old man tells the children that once Mozambique was a rich country, and there was plenty of food. The children sit shaking their heads, disbelieving: for all their lives Mozambicans have crept through the bush to beg food from them.
‘Why are they so poor?’ asks a boy of about ten.
‘There’s a war,’ says the old man.
‘Wasn’t there a war here?’ asks a teenage girl, who dimly remembers something of the kind.
‘No, we haven’t had a war,’ says the ten-year-old.
The adults look at each other, black and white, shake their heads, laugh.
I ask: ‘If there was one single thing you could have here, in this area, what would you ask for?’
‘Money,’ said the headman. They all laugh.
‘Well all right. You have fifty thousand pounds. What would you spend it on?’
The vastness of this sum makes them laugh again. They argue for a while, and finally agree, ‘A dam. That’s what we need most. We should dam that river that runs under those hills.’
I tell them about the garden I saw in Matabeleland: poor soil, but successful, because of the water. They are at once interested, come closer, ask questions: how much water? Is fertilizer being used? Where did the money come from?
I ask what people in this village do for entertainment.
‘The government sent its film unit around last year,’ was the grave reply: then they all laughed about something in the film that was shown them. They did not say what was so funny about the film.
And when there is no film unit?
They sit in their homes and talk and tell stories in the evenings, and sometimes there is a dance.
There is a bus that comes, takes us to the Growth Point. We can shop there.
Sometimes we go into Mutare and visit relatives, but it is a long way off, over a hundred miles.
Later that day in another place, another meeting, conducted under a tree.
The local village representatives came to meet visiting Extension Workers and a local Extension Worker, who is a woman, one of the twenty per cent now coming out of agricultural colleges. She is young, smartly dressed, married, with three children. Around a table set under the tree there are about ten people conducting village business.
They do not seem pleased to see officials from Mutare. When one of the men goes from the lorry to the table, they all at once begin joking about some advice he gave them last time he was here. There are two kinds of people here, it is easy to see: the villagers, and the experts and officials.
I was told in Harare, ‘These new experts coming out of agricultural colleges, think they know everything. They go into the villages and tell people who have farmed in those conditions for centuries what to do. You have to do so and so–say the experts. But it won’t work–say the villagers, and it is hard to know when this is peasant conservatism talking, and when it is the voice of experience.
I have been given research papers, much of it from the university, defending traditional agricultural practice. The villages know everything about how to look after soil in a drought year, how to grow crops on this and poor soil, how to keep beasts well when fodder is short. But if the experts on a university level are full of praise for traditional practices, this does not mean these are being taught in agricultural colleges. It always takes a long time for the results of research to reach school and college syllabuses.
When I said to the Coffee Farmer, ‘Even the old missionaries and explorers talked about what good farmers these people were,’ he replied, ‘You don’t understand. That was then–very few people and plenty of land. They haven’t changed