African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [181]
As in the old days, the hour of travel into the big town for work, the hour back, are on roads crowded, jammed, with bicycles, buses, and (but still only a few) cars. The people who live in these townships mostly cannot afford cars. There is talk that railways will be built to link the black townships with the big town–which is not white now, but multi-racial. The cheap suburbs are black, and poor.
If you drive past such a township, or fly over it, and see the ordered, not to say regimented, arrangement of identical houses, an image is created of many units, each for a family. But each house, meant for a family, contains perhaps twenty or so people. Anybody doomed to rural living with a relative in town will claim the old rights of kinship and try to fit themselves into a house which is already exploding with people, a house appropriate for the nuclear family, for mother, father, and two or three children. But this house could not be more unsuitable for clan or communal living, which was better accommodated in the old days with clusters of huts: it is easy to build a new hut if relatives come to visit, or find themselves homeless. Rather, once it was easy, but now there are not enough trees, or enough grass for thatch.
No, clan living, the extended family, is being done in by the modern towns, and the necessity for them.
The new townships are not cheap. In fact it was cheaper to rent a house in the old days, when they were subsidized.
Two little rooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, limit numbers, even if people do sleep ten or more to a room. ‘You know my heart is large,’ a certain woman wrote in reply to a request from a country cousin for a corner somewhere, ‘but my house is small. There is nowhere left for you to sleep, except under the kitchen table.’
The Book Team worry that they spend their time in rural areas, not these overcrowded, poor, complex conglomerations where people must be needing just as much help.
‘But not the same problems. They don’t need to be told about starting co-operatives and bank accounts. How to handle bureaucracy is more like it.’
‘But we all need to know that!’
THE GARDEN IN HARARE
There is no end to the variety. I ask Ayrton R. to walk around it with me and give me names. Clerodendrum: glory bower. It is dark red. Clerodendron: bleeding heart. The yellow marmalade bush. Mackaya: a mass of pale pink, veined with carmine. Aspidistra as ground cover. Various hydrangeas. The fiddlewood tree. Magnolias. Ajuga as ground cover. Tree ferns. Cape chestnut. Miniature bamboos. The potato tree, twenty feet or more tall, covered with purple flowers. Elephant’s ear. Busy lizzies. Indigenous arums. The spur flower: purple spikes. Plectranthus bushes. Flowering prunus. Blue agapanthus. Hen-and-chickens, otherwise the spider plant. Bougainvillaeas in maroon, orange, white and pink. The ginger bush: yellow with red. Different kinds of canna lilies. Mallow: pink. Ornamental cassava. The tape worm plant: segmented narrow leaves. Albizia: an indigenous tree. Geraniums. Succulents. Small heliotropes. The Kenyan croton tree. A tree with oak-like leaves, and panicles of rust colour. Hymenosporum. The red handkerchief bush. From Australia: the brush cherry tree, with bright pink fruits. Thunbergia: a blue creeper. The Pride of India: crepe myrtle. A cactus from Arizona, with a flower like waterlilies, grown with an indigenous canary creeper up it. Cacti with flowers like red fountains. The Beaumontia vine, with enormous white flowers. Strelitzia from Natal, the national flower of California. Red robin: a large bush. The Chinese hat plant: rust colour, purple, yellow. Berberis. Ficus benjamina. The pineapple-guava plant: like Christmas decorations. The pigeon berry tree–yellow. Mulberries. Peach trees. White agapanthus. A daisy