African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [147]
THE MASHOPI HOTEL
On the way back from Mutare to Harare I stopped in Macheke, outside the old hotel, which was no longer boarded up and derelict but again recognizable as the hotel of those long-ago weekends. I asked to see the manager, who turned out to be a young black man orchestrating a team of enthusiastic helpers. I told him that in the old days this hotel was popular, always full. But this could only mean popular with whites, and he didn’t care about that. I said that in the War the RAF used to come out from Salisbury for weekends: sometimes there were parties that went on for days. But he thought I was talking about the Bush War, and had never heard of the RAF: the Second World War was over before he was born. I asked if I could go over the place for old times’ sake. He was polite, amused. At the back the bedroom block was again visible and identifiable, and being added to, and the flight of steps I could not find in 1982 appeared among the new rubble of building work. A garden café with sunshades and tables had replaced shrubs. The bar was where it had been, but extended, and curved into the place where we had danced, now a drinking room. In the dining-room, exactly as it was, I had lunch, and could have believed the door would swing open and admit ghosts brought back by this resurrection of old haunts. ‘You see?’ I silently addressed them. ‘It has all happened, just as we said it would…well, not just as we said…’ Rather I could have addressed them, imagining the precise degree of irony each face would show, if I was not in such a hurry. I thanked the manager. I looked across the road to the scruffy gum trees, making sure those miserable baboons had not reappeared. Then I left, on the road to Harare.
GOOD OLD SMITHIE
It occurs to me that no one mentions Smith: six years ago they could not stop talking about him. He has been in America, saying that Zimbabwe is more of a tyranny than South Africa. People think that he wants to be arrested, wants to be a martyr. ‘But Mugabe is too clever for him.’
They tell a story of an incident at the local post office. Mr Smith, Mrs Smith, queue up to be served ‘just like everybody else’–they say, with approval. One day Mrs Smith said to a black woman that she hoped her little girl was well. ‘Do you remember, I used to give her sweets.’
‘Yes, I remember, Amai…’ a term of respect for older women. ‘But you see, sweets were not enough.’
A THINK-TANK
‘They’ say that there exists an unofficial Think-Tank, composed of high-level people from both parties. They are all of the travelling class, and do not use the rhetoric of a marxism dead and discredited. Two languages or modes of speaking are used in Zimbabwe, just as was the case in the Soviet Union before Gorbachev: the public, the official one, used as self-protection, and a living language which acknowledges the falseness of the first. It is said that ‘Mugabe himself’ sometimes comes to the Think-Tank evenings. This means that people wish he did, if he does not. The ideas of the Think-Tank filter down, have influence, like a stream of fresh quick-moving water in stale water. But the language used in the Think-Tank would not be used in public, and never in the newspapers. ‘If you get a