African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [168]
He lowered his eyes from the empty blue, he stood gazing around, he was sombre, of course, because of his unhappiness, but now he was bewildered too.
‘You say that wasn’t a safari park?’
‘No. Don’t you see–that’s how things were everywhere then. That was how all the bush used to be. And now on that road all you’d see would be the marks of bicycle tyres.’
‘Probably my bicycle,’ he said, and laughed.
A few days later on the verandah of a certain club in the mountains, referred to–what else?–as a watering hole, I am introduced to a man who would not have disagreed if I had described him as the–once–hardest of hard-line whites. For that is what he had been.
‘I nearly packed up and Took the Gap when we lost the War. The worst mistake of my life, if I had.’
‘So you like the black kids, do you?’ prompt his boon companions, encouraging him as one does a child you hope will show off nicely.
‘I like them all right. They are a fine bright lot of kids.’
He had chanced to discover that black children in the townships knew nothing about the bush, or the animals that live in it, and little about the lives of their grandparents. He set up a camp in still unspoiled bush far from any town, and now takes batches of town children there for a week or so, and he teaches them about the trees, the plants, the animals.
When not with the children his job is culling elephants.
‘Keeping them down to the right number, you know.’
‘Right number in relation to what?’
An ironical grimace. ‘Yes, that’s it. But remember, we’re the only country who has handled the elephants well. Anyway, there are too many of the buggers. We aren’t going to go short of elephants.’
But what he likes best is the time he spends with the black children.
‘I had the wrong idea about the Affs, you know.’
‘I seem to remember quite a few people were saying something along those lines.’
‘Better late than never.’
I tell this story to a couple of black friends, poets. We are on a verandah in Harare, one that is netted and barred like an old-fashioned meat safe: we are sitting inside a cage. The house was burgled last week. The world is more and more a paradise for thieves, we reflect. Will there soon be more thieves than honest people? Should we all join the prospering profession?
These poets are poor: most writers are, here, unless part of the university.
When I am with them it is only a few moments before I begin to feel what they do: it is a sombre mood we share, for these are not people deprived of information–far from it. Africa, the continent, does not inspire anyone with happy and optimistic thoughts, these days. No one likes marxism and the censorship that keeps the newspapers so infantile. They know that in Europe and the Soviet Union communism is very ill, but most poets in this country are young, which means they were part of the euphoria of Revolution, and they are sitting by the deathbed of communism as if by a dying mother or father.
What I have told them about the watering hole in the mountains and the elephant hunter has, it seems, silenced them. Often on this trip, on the point of asking a question or adding a comment, inhibition has sat on my tongue, as if this organ were the Culture Gap embodied. Besides, everyone I meet seems to have a raw place where the skin has only just grown over.
‘Excuse me,’ says Poet A. ‘Are you saying a white farmer is taking our kids on trips to show them the bush?’
‘Yes, that is what I am saying. An ex-farmer, actually.’
The two young men face me with angry eyes–but that is not the point. They are despondent, hurt.
‘Why should he want to do that?’
With difficulty I make myself say, ‘Because he cannot stand the idea that black children shouldn’t know anything about their bush.’
This remark in itself is taking a lid off