African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [159]
‘No, I am sorry, it is my voice.’
Later his wife took the eleven children back to the home in the Communal Area. Soon there would be twelve, proving that she is still a woman, so she had stopped being depressed. But she returned almost at once with the new baby and some of the smaller children.
Ayrton R. looked the other way.
‘You would think that in eight months nothing much could change.’
‘Things have certainly changed in this household–no, not George having too many children, and anyway that’s only our way of looking at it.’
George’s oldest daughter, she who has the Spirit, is now in competition with her cousin, George’s brother’s daughter, about which of them has inherited their grandfather’s Spirit: he was an nganga. The real ngangas have finally refused to accept the gardener’s daughter as a medium. The fact is, she is now evidently crazy and getting worse. Her parents want her to go home and live in the village, but she says, at first calmly, then shouting and screaming, that the house in Harare is her home and she has no intention of ever leaving it. She sleeps on the floor in the kitchen separating the gardener’s room from Dorothy’s room and there she entertains men. It is a shame and a disgrace for parents to overhear the love-making of a child, but that is what they are forced to do. Dorothy is also forced to overhear. Her man, whom everyone deplores, begging her to throw him out, has sex with the gardener’s daughter just through the wall from where Dorothy has her bed. Why does she not throw him out? But this woman with three children who has never been married hopes he will make an honest woman of her. If you remember, the gardener’s daughter had sex with all eight security guards at an institution where she was cleaning. The security guards are policemen. Fifty per cent of the police and the army rumoured to be HIV positive. (This figure has not yet been released by the government: meanwhile there are those who say it is much higher.) It was Dorothy who said that all people with AIDS should be put to death. This is the tragedy that is silently unfolding in the crowded servants’ quarters.
‘The government may be coming clean about AIDS at last, because AIDS isn’t a plot by the Honkies any longer, but they still pull their punches. The new AIDS poster you see everywhere has a prostitute standing in the shadows while a man debates whether to have sex with her. But it is the army and the police who are worse infected–well, as far as we know. The poster ought to be of a man in uniform and a woman deciding not to have sex with him. But everything is slanted against women in this culture and that is too much to expect, I suppose.’
And now, to ‘cheer me up’, Ayrton R. takes me to the supermarket.
‘I am afraid we have to accept the fact that citizens everywhere are going to judge their government by how well they eat, never mind about democracy.’
THE SUPERMARKET
Zimbabwe goes short of very little. People who cannot live without olive oil, tinned fish, some spices, arrange for friends to bring them. Everyone who goes out of the country comes back again with whisky. But there are always new goods on the piled-high shelves as food enterprises start up. The freezer units are full. Stacked high from one end of the shop to the other are some of the best beef in the world, bacon and ham that is not injected with water, and first-rate sausages and salamis. There are ranks of chickens and ducks. The cheeses are good if limited in variety. The bread is excellent, and so are the fruit and vegetables. The maize meal for sadza is here in its different varieties, but this shop has more black people than white in it and they are not confining themselves to sadza. Row after row of shelves are loaded with spirits and liqueurs, all brand names made on licence. (On a van outside a store in a small town near the Zambesi Valley: Cinzano, the Drink of Africa!) The beers are good. Zimbabwe wines, not long ago undrinkable, are winning