African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [173]
A young man comes towards us. He is shy, he hesitates, he waits until Cathie and the others recognise him, welcome him. Last year he worked with the Team in this district, and, knowing they were bound to stop here today has been watching for the coach. He needs advice.
This is his problem. His family are insisting that he marry. He is thirty, and that is old not to be married, in Shona culture. But how can he support a wife? On a tiny salary he earns as a junior welfare worker he already supports an old mother, an assortment of unemployed friends and, too, his brother’s family. This brother, himself fifteen, made a fourteen-year-old girl pregnant. Both youngsters were expelled from school, thus guaranteeing for both a future of unemployment. The girl’s father demanded marriage. These two are still under twenty and have two small children. This young man here supports them all. He is afraid of marriage. His mother was left by his father, and for a long time she fed her children on what she could find in the dustbins of white houses. (I have now heard this tale several times and it is still happening. ‘But now the really good dustbins are multi-racial, so I suppose that is progress.’) This young man wants a real marriage, he says: like Cathie’s, like Talent’s. He has heard them talk about their husbands. He does not want to marry the girl chosen for him by his family, because he does not know her. What should he do? He seems confident they will know the answer. Talent and Cathie consult together. Then Cathie says marriage should never limit you, but add to the possibilities of life. Yes, says Talent, you should have a partner like my husband who makes you think about everything.
The young man says, ‘But how do you know beforehand? I do have a girl and I like her, but how do I know she would turn out to be a real wife, like Cathie and like Talent?’
At this point we are summoned back to the coach.
There are five of us, finding our places in the crowded coach, but we joke there are really six. Everywhere the Team goes, they take a big drum. This is because no meeting can be expected to go well without music. ‘This is the best travelled drum in Zimbabwe,’ says Cathie.
When we reached the coach terminal in the town there was an official car waiting. Cathie says, ‘You don’t know what this means, look, this is the District Office car. They said they wanted us so badly they won’t let us pay in the training centre. And look–those men are the big bosses for the area. They’ve come to meet us. You don’t know what a change this is.’
We were taken to the training centre, which is built not in the town but well outside it, a large, light, five-year-old building surrounded by expanses of grass, then trees, making an uncompromising statement: Here is Progress, here is the modern world, here is Zimbabwe. It is full every day of the year, with people from every part of Central Province, taking courses on management, book-keeping, accountancy, dressmaking.
The Centre takes a couple of hundred at a time. For the Book Team’s week of seminars thirty women have come, and nine men. That the men should be here, supporting women, for the women’s book, is another revolution and not a minor one. These men must all be extraordinary in some way, for not only are they going against traditional ideas, but must expect criticism, perhaps derision, from other men. The Team congratulate each other about the men’s presence. ‘There you are, Chris, you aren’t going to be the only man now.’
As soon as we got there, the forty or so of us sat in a big circle and introduced ourselves, first the Team, Cathie, Sylvia, Talent, Chris. As each offered