African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [178]
During one workshop a terrible story was told of cruelty, of official stupidity. The whole room was laughing, forty or so people. I said to the man next to me, ‘Why are you laughing? That’s a terrible story.’ ‘That is why we are laughing,’ he said.
A certain man who had been hostile to the women during the last visit of the Team, was here again, claiming he had had a change of heart: now he knew he had been wrong. But, said he, it hurt him to hear women criticize men, who all loved women. ‘For my part I think women are a gift from God.’ For all of that day, when it was felt that the proceedings were becoming too heavy, someone remarked, ‘Women are a gift from God,’ and everyone laughed, the men too.
These men know they are revolutionaries to be here at all. They like to be asked what makes them special, more enterprising, than other men.
Here is an autobiographical piece submitted to a workshop.
In 1965, on the 9th day of May, a baby boy was born at Masvingise, a small village in the Chivu Communal Lands. ‘He shall be called Amos’ they finally agreed.
Shining with youthful freshness and innocence the baby could not foresee the misery that was heralded by his birth. He only managed to have a glimpse of his father seventeen years later, and that was that.
Unlike other children in the village I managed to go to a mission school at Bergena in 1980 for my secondary education.
I became a shining example and many male parents sent their children to school. I am now working, and I owe everything to my mother who worked so tirelessly to make me what I am. However, I miss my father, but I am not sure he would have made me what I am now. Amos Sithole. Co-operative Assistant. Gutu.
I take the opportunity of being with so many people of so many different kinds, to ask what they think about Edgar Tekere, whose name is in every newspaper as a threat to the government, to order, to security and to Robert Mugabe.
But no one is talking about Tekere and his new party. For that matter no one mentions the Unity Accord. This is Central Province and not Matabeleland, but the whole country was celebrating the Unity Accord only a few months ago. People soon take good fortune for granted.
Tekere? We aren’t going to vote for him. We are just stupid village people, don’t forget, and we don’t want another war.
Tekere? He’s useful in opposition, he keeps them awake for us, but he’s not steady enough to be a leader.
Tekere? I like him because he’s an alternative. But they say at the next election we can vote for people we put forward ourselves, not from a list Mugabe has chosen. If that happens, then everyone will forget about Tekere.
As the week goes by, the Team visibly tire. They put so much energy into the workshops and seminars, and into the discussions that go on every evening in the bedrooms. And, again, they have already been on the road for weeks. The women are worrying about children and husbands. Chris talks about his girlfriend.
When they get back to Harare there will be rooms-full of material from these workshops and from past ones. Chris will have to make many drawings and submit them to the Team.
No area or district must be favoured at the expense of another.
When Cathie gets home she will not rest, for she has so much correspondence. From all over Zimbabwe requests for the Book Team to visit them come pouring in. Cathie has no secretarial help. How does she get everything done? She herself doesn’t know: the more you have to do the more you do, she says. But she is worried. ‘Sometimes I think it is not possible to do what we are doing.’
‘Of course it is impossible,’ says Talent. ‘That is why we are doing it.’
The Team is worried, too, because they do not always have this welcome. They have enemies. And it will not be easy to get ‘them’ to accept this women’s book, so full of explosive ideas. ‘We don’t know who our enemies are. No one is going to say anything openly against us now, because the village people like us, but suddenly you come up against a block and then you know…’
‘But often