African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [157]
Enough.
My heart hurt, not for my parents, who after all hadn’t done too badly, though that was not how they saw it, but for my brother, who had so suffered from coming back here. Well, every day there are more people everywhere in the world in mourning for trees, forest, bush, rivers, animals, lost landscapes…you could say this is an established part of the human mind, a layer of grief always deepening and darkening.
After that we drove fast, taking only a few minutes, to the Ayreshire Hills, where the new dam is. Mazwikadei, the name is. In 1956 I stood on a hill above a landscape soon to be flooded by the Kariba dam, then just completed, the tall curving white walls standing high about the Zambesi. All that magnificence soon to be drowned. ‘Why not? There’s plenty of Africa, isn’t there?’ And now the Kariba lake is enormous, it dominates the map and the minds of the people of those parts, just as the Dyke does further south.
After one good wet season this new dam is nearly full.
My brother and I used to take the rifle and walk through the bush to the Ayreshire Hills, moving silently like the black people, having learned from them, listening to the cicadas and for the movements of animals, watching the birds. The big vlei on our farm, full of thorn trees, is as it used to be, but it is silent. It used to sound with the cooing of doves, the ones with the delicate black rings around their necks. Everywhere in that bush were doves and go-away birds and other louries and above all that sorrowful enchanter the emerald spotted dove whose cry, the Africans say, sounds like, ‘My mother is dead, my father is dead, all my relatives are dead, oh, oh, oh, oh…”
We crossed the Menene river on stepping stones, watching for crocodiles. After that came the Mukwadzi, just below the hills, the river that is newly dammed. We used to squat on a certain long slope of rough warm granite and look across a small gorge and wait, keeping our voices a murmur, trying not to move. Soon the baboons would come, dozens of them, guarded by a big male who kept his eye on us, warning his people with grunts and barks if we moved carelessly. We watched them all go down to the river to drink, perhaps fifty or so of them, the little ones on their mothers’ backs. Then they merged back into the hills, the big male going last, sending us across the river a final admonishing bark.
All that land is going under the water. Going, going…
Well, what of it, says the voice of commonsense–mine, at least sometimes. This happened in Europe centuries ago. A continent does not have to be inhabited by its own real animals, its original indigenous trees. Europe is doing fine. It is beautiful. People come from everywhere in the world to admire it. Well, then? We are doing all right–aren’t we?
and, Again…
1989
One world generates another.
Santayana
AIR ZIMBABWE
I am sitting next to a Chef, a mini-Chef, with a new job in some department, and he has been out of Zimbabwe for the first time in his life. To New York. To a conference. His story is, must be–how could it be otherwise?–rags-to-riches. Yes, he went from his village near Rusapi when he was eighteen to join the Comrades in the bush, but he was lucky, he only once saw something bad, when a friend was killed by a mine exploding, but for months and months he did not get enough to eat. ‘I was so thin my mother cried when she saw me. But the girls didn’t cry. I was too good-looking.’ After the War he was a clerk in an Harare office working for a Chef who had been his commander in the bush. Then when this man was promoted even higher, he was offered the empty place. ‘Three of us hoped for that job and when they said it was my job, I went home and told my wife and we cried so much!’ He was a fat and self-important man, but his delight at the fine world now his kept dissolving his pomposity into a sighing laughter. An excess of pleasure pressed his plump hands together, and he could not prevent them softly clapping, applauding his good fortune. Or he shook his