African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [180]
Other women come to sit with us. ‘Now everyone knows the women do all the work, the Chef’s wives and all kinds of career girls descend on the villages dressed up like fashion models, their hair straightened and their cheeks glowing orange from skin lighteners. They congratulate the village women, and return to politicking in Harare.’
In Harare I heard an Extension Worker say she refused to go into a Communal Area unless she could stay in a village, having heard a song made up about patronizing visitors. ‘Now work hard, ladies, keep it up, Zimbabwe is proud of you, here, have a sweetie, have a bit of cake.’
The village women are scornful of the smart city girls who ‘want to be white blacks’. The chemists are full of skin-whitening creams, some with chemicals that have been banned in other countries.
The villagers do not admire Harare. The word can mean an attitude of mind. Perhaps they talked of Babylon thus.
Stately Look
Harare
a
prostitute
trying
on
new york’s
oversized
suit
import
quality
Simbarashe R. Johnson
(From Tso Tso, a new magazine.
Tso Tso means twigs.)
None of us wants to leave this optimistic, energetic place.
‘I don’t know why it is,’ says Cathie, ‘but in the offices in Harare they talk as if these people are stupid. It can take me hours to get a point across to officials there that these people get at once. They are much more quick-witted. The political women are all intellectual and abstract.’
In only one way does this training centre, run by socially concerned and optimistic staff, resemble the school in the bush.
If you look closely, some of the parquet tiles are missing or loose. Curtains are falling down. Shower curtains are torn. Strips of wood are coming off the edges of tables, and some chairs are shaky or useless because screws have come out. There is a look of mild dilapidation. Yet a young man who has attended courses in various training colleges remarks, ‘I like coming here best: it is so well maintained.’ A mystery. Nothing is wrong here that could not be put right by an efficient housewife with some glue, a screwdriver, a needle and cotton, a step-ladder. One evening a hosepipe ran water for hours beside a path where staff constantly passed, and this in a water-short district.
‘They should train a team of young women to cope with minor wear and tear and send them from institution to institution.’
‘Why doesn’t one of these Aid organizations…?’
‘Why doesn’t Mugabe…?’
On the way back in the coach, we pass one of the largest black townships.
THE NEW TOWNSHIPS
In the old days black townships around cities were assemblies of any kind of cheap housing, sometimes brick ‘lines’–single rooms built in strips, without even lavatories, or sheds of corrugated iron, like factories. Sometimes local authorities built suburbs of hundreds, or even thousands of identical little brick houses, perhaps single rooms with kitchens, and communal lavatories at the back, or, if luxurious, two rooms. Now the new suburbs qualify as towns in their own right. Again they are of thousands of tiny houses, two rooms with a verandah, a kitchen and bathroom. To make such a township, first all the indigenous trees are cut down, the roads are laid out, usually on a grid pattern, and then the houses go up in a dusty or muddy plain. They are crammed as closely as the old houses built under the whites: the new suburbs, like the old, look what they are, desperate attempts at cheap housing. Zimbabwe is hardly short of space, not like Europe where every yard is contested. Why then are these houses massed like so many toy towns? Because this reduces the cost of the services: the pipes, wires, lines, ducts, sewers that make it possible for many people to live together. Is this not perhaps short-sighted? Would it not have been better if Comrade Mugabe had insisted from the start on paying more and laying out towns with enough space between the houses for some kind of privacy? It is hard to see where they find room even for a washing