African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [170]
At this point, other people had laughed and walked off.
‘What kind of a telephone?’
‘You people have telephone lines. We had trees. Through this tree the women sent messages to the men out hunting, when are you coming home, what have you killed for us to cook? And the men sent messages, We’ll be back tonight, or, We can’t get back until tomorrow, we are stalking a fine eland.’
‘Why don’t you tell the government how it is done?’ we joke. ‘They’d like to know how to save some money.’
‘Ah. But that’s it, that’s the trouble,’ says the artist. ‘All our old people knew how to do it. And sometimes children can still do it. But young people can’t do it at all. It’s gone.’
‘Can you do it?’
‘When I was a child, the old people used to send me to the tree.’
Similarly, the Bushmen of the Kalahari had, and a few still have, capacities that the young have lost: they knew days beforehand when people were going to arrive, for instance. And in a book about travel in Haiti it was recorded that the people there used trees in the same way: and again, young people had lost the art.
The anthropologist mourning lost landscapes (for the impartiality of the scientist wore transparent when he talked about them) told me this story–not of the past, but of last year, 1988. ‘A young girl refused to marry an old man chosen by her family. They put a spell on her. She weakened and grew ill and tried to drown herself. They pulled her out of the water. She agreed to marry the old man and her family removed the spell.’
‘A horrible story!’
‘Yes, but that is not the point. Have you wondered how often in our culture people put spells on other people–no, no, not witches and that sort of thing…what are spells? Strong wishes. Well, how often do you think families or just spiteful individuals bad-wish someone? Well, think about it then…’
It is certainly true that witchcraft has unsuspected dimensions of usefulness. Ayrton R.’s little cat, now very old indeed, was his mother’s cat, much loved by her. Now Dorothy and George both believe that Ayrton R.’s mother’s spirit is in the cat, who is her mudzimo. ‘A good thing,’ says Ayrton R. ‘It means they treat the cat well when I am away.’
Indifference or cruelty to animals is sometimes a reaction to what is seen as white sentimentality. Or rage at how whites will love animals but are unkind to blacks.
ANIMALS
A joke that is also a popular song. A white man sets off on a car journey. His dog is beside him in the front seat, and his black servant is in the back seat. There is an accident and the man is killed. The police ask the servant what happened. ‘Don’t ask me, ask the dog.’
Some time in the last few hundred years the Zambesi changed its course. Its old exit to the Indian Ocean was where Beira is now. The present delta is a hundred miles or so to the north. ‘What I wonder is, how did the animals take it?’
A small battle in the War between humans and animals. A certain farmer, growing citrus, got a poor crop because of the vervet and simanga monkeys. He put up an electric fence. The monkeys easily jumped over it. He heightened the fence. The monkeys discovered that electric shocks did not kill them. They learned to jump in such a way that the electric shocks knocked them into the orchard where they ate their fill, and then positioned themselves so they were knocked back out of the orchard. The farmer could not bring himself to increase the electric shocks to the point where the monkeys would be seriously harmed. He went back to employing a man with a gun: expensive as well as being less effective.
Simanga monkeys are being resettled in areas where they have gone.
A Story of Two Unimportant Creatures
In a house in Harare a large black dog, half Newfoundland, half Rottweiler, welcomes the visitor with a determination that you notice him: bold, not to say commanding, eyes watch your every movement. He accompanies you as you walk about the house, then the garden, always one step to heel, his nose at your hand. When you stop to turn, his head is there to be stroked and