African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [177]
In a week as lively as any I can remember, some incidents stand out.
Cathie is standing by the blackboard, making diagrams of statistics. She says that she is going to skip the next page of the draft book because it is too difficult. She means the statistics are too detailed to be illustrated in this way, but one of the women, misunderstanding, says sweetly: ‘Just try us. It is possible we may have the intelligence to understand.’
A local official, a man, says, ‘I don’t know why it is that people who do the most work, nearly always women, working all day, walking long distance, get paid practically nothing, while men sitting in offices get paid ten or twenty times as much.’ Because he is one of the men sitting in an office, he is applauded and at once they make up a song about it, which they sing to him, clapping and ululating.
Judges can be very harsh, particularly with women. A woman had a third child and killed it: she was supporting her mother and father and her grandmother. ‘I cannot support all these people on my wages.’ She got a prison sentence and her children were taken into care.
Another woman killed her ninth baby, was imprisoned, and her eight children were put in care. The welfare official said, ‘We decided to find out how they were doing. Eight child allowances were being paid to a relative, who doesn’t know where the children are. We have lost eight children. Where are they?’
A discussion on why the judges are so inflexible: the conclusion is because they are new to this job. ‘People can only be flexible when they are sure of themselves. But while they are learning to be sure of themselves, we have a bad time.’
(There are several legal systems in Zimbabwe. Shona customary law. Ndebele customary law. Mbacha customary law–which is a mixture of Shona and Shangaan. Roman-Dutch law. English common law.)
Several times in the workshops women complained that poor black women farmers are employed by richer black farmers, particularly women, who pay them badly or do not pay them at all, only giving them some food. ‘We have no alternative, we have to work for them, we have to feed our children somehow.’
One evening after supper a woman sat herself by me and asked, ‘Have you ever seen people as poor as we are?’
‘Much poorer, in some other countries.’
‘I have never been outside this province. It seems to me we are very poor. If you do not have enough to eat sometimes, isn’t that being very poor?’
I said to her, ‘There are parts of the world where people just suffer poverty. But if you people are in a bad situation you try to think of ways out of it. If you have a problem, you decide to solve it. That in itself makes you rich compared to them. And you are all so full of energy and determination.’
She thought hard, for quite a long time: a minute–more. When I believed the conversation was over, she remarked, ‘And yet we owe so much money.’
I said, ‘The total debt of all the African countries is less than the debt of any one South American country.’
‘You mean that Africa is richer than South America? Have you been to South America?’
‘In Brazil.’
‘It is worse than here?’
‘Yes, it is. For one thing, there are greater differences between rich and poor.’
‘We’ve got rich people here too, now. Haven’t you seen them?’
‘Nothing like as bad or cruel as in places like Brazil.’
She sat quietly beside me, thinking. Then: ‘Why is it poor people in some countries don’t complain?’
‘Sometimes it is because they haven’t energy, they are so badly fed or full of diseases. Sometimes it is because of a religion that makes them suffer in silence.’
‘But I am religious and I am complaining. I complain all the time. My husband says to me, Woman, why are you complaining? I say, Your life is all right, but my life is very hard and that is why I am complaining.’ She laughed, loudly, so that people turned