African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [145]
We go back into the cars. We drive back on the long long roads through the sunset bush, back to Mutare and up the mountains.
To supper comes the man who used to do the job of the official in the office in Mutare. For years he was resettling people all over the Eastern districts. He knows it all. What I have to remember, says he, is that in the early idealistic days Mugabe envisaged collective farming, like the Russian kolkhozes, where land was owned in common. The idea has worked no better here than in Russia, or in Tanzania where they tried it. It is a failure and everyone knows it. But to know it is one thing, to admit it publicly another. What works is when farmers are given land and then pool machinery and facilities. Is it really their land? Well, here is another of the famous Grey Areas. It is government land but it is also theirs. What they want is to own land, with proper title deeds, which they can hand on to their children. Things seem to be developing along these lines, while the legalities remain ambiguous. And there is another thing, immediately much more tricky. A condition for being given land in a Resettlement Area is that a commitment must be made to that way of life: you agree to be a farmer, nothing but a farmer. But they want the same conditions as in the Communal Areas where at least one member of a family will have a job in the nearest town. The poverty in the Resettlement Areas is worse than in the Communal Areas–and that is why, say the resettled farmers.
But the government says: If you commit yourself totally to this way of life, give all your energies to it, then the Resettlement Areas will be transformed, they will be rich…
Well, yes, in time. A generation? Two?
In the Resettlement Area we were shown the house of a good farmer, who satisfied the Extension Workers, and who is a credit and an inspiration to everyone. His house is a little brick house, with a couple of rooms and a kitchen. It has a nice garden. The field at the back is green and properly contoured. But the youngsters growing up in this house, a hundred miles from that metropolis Mutare, will do everything to go into town. At any cost. Even if it means living crowded with twenty other people in a poor room.
LEGENDS
Now we are driving south from Mutare along the edge of the Resettlement Area we were in yesterday. We are on our way from one centre of order, comfort–civilization–to another. For an hour the pale dryness of Class Four soil accompanies us, and we know the many villages hidden from us in the bush are the same as the few we looked at. We know because the Resettlement Officer of then is with us, and he knows every inch of this bush, every hut, every new Growth Point. He identifies with the efforts of the resettled ones with the same passion as the Coffee Farmer suffers in his own flesh the struggles of the soil. When we say we have been talking about what we saw yesterday, and found it discouraging, he says if we had known the area before we would be impressed.
This former Resettlement Officer is also an historian and knows all the history of this area. This means that the frontier with Mozambique, so close to us, is in his mind no more than a temporary political whimsicality, just as it must seem to the villagers who see their tribe arbitrarily divided.
One view of a future Mozambique reflects the past. The eastern districts of Zimbabwe and Mozambique are a historical and geographical unity. When? These ideas need something of the quality of those stretches of time that will see the Indian Ocean spilling into Mashonaland. No, the new Monomotapa will hardly need a million or a thousand years to take shape, but a hazy landscape of Time is best suited to a region already populated with legendary kings and old ruined cities waiting unexcavated in forests and jungles along the shores of the same ocean. One of the worst things about taking power, if you are a leader, a party, a junta, must be that henceforth your dreams have to narrow themselves to the necessities of power-keeping. The Freedom Fighters in the