African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [183]
And call me a filthy wretch.
When I am dead and buried,
Your deeds will tear your heart.
Your farms, wild and bushy,
I’ve tamed, fenced and ploughed;
The yield I gather you sell
To spend the cash alone.
When I am dead and buried,
Your deeds will tear your heart.
Your cows I dip and milk,
Your horses shoe and brush,
Your sheep I feed and tend,
Yet I live on crumbs.
When I am dead and buried,
Your deeds will tear your heart.
In your sumptuous house
I toil and sweat for you,
Yet in the heart of Harare
You see a stranger in me.
When I am dead and buried,
Your deeds will tear your heart.
In hotels that glitter,
On fatty steaks you dine,
Honey your tongue with oozy puddings,
And sink your frame on cosy beds.
When I am dead and buried,
Your deeds will tear your heart.
My Kufa is bony ridged,
Your Gutsa is round and plump,
Dull and feeble is Kufa,
Bouncing with energy is Gutsa.
When I am dead and buried,
Your deeds will tear your heart.
S. J. Nondo (From Tso Tso)
Gutsa: as it sounds. Kufa: associations of death, deprivation. Ayrton R. says, ‘I suppose one ought to be pleased that it’s not just the whites who are the villains. But I don’t think I am.’
ON THE VERANDAHS
Someone says that Smith, asked in the States what he thought about the black government, replied that the whites had underestimated the intelligence of the Africans. Everyone is delighted with this little morality tale.
Street children in Harare–gangs of petty criminals, as well as ordinary kids, are playing games based on their traditional stories of hare, tortoise and the other animals. They keep the structure of the tales, the plot, but the characters are called J. R., Bobby, Sue Ellen, and so on.
A man who has been at a celebration for the successful building of more Blair toilets, reports that they are taking off, even in the more remote places, because they are status symbols. ‘It is salutary to meditate on the theme of how much of human progress has been dependent on “I have a Blair toilet, but you don’t have a Blair toilet.”’
The Minister of Justice was in prison for ten years under Smith, tortured, beaten. He is planning to abolish the death penalty, and ‘they’ say he is a good man and concerned about the prisoners. ‘I know what it’s like,’ he is supposed to have said. The dissidents who were in prison at the amnesty at the time of the Unity Accord, and not let out because they had committed crimes of violence are, it is said, shortly to be released. There are no political prisoners in the Zimbabwe jails. Everyone I ask says, ‘No, conditions are good. We are doing all right. We don’t have to be ashamed like South Africa, or Zambia.’ ‘How is the food?’ ‘I’ve never seen an overfed prisoner,’ was one reply.
THE WINDS OF HISTORY
‘What is the most dangerous job in Zimbabwe? “Minister for Internal Affairs: your conscience will kill you.”’
We were talking about the man who ran the prison outside Salisbury during the War of Liberation, when so many people were hanged, beaten, tortured. ‘No, you can’t blame the prison governor, he was only doing his job, it’s the Minister who is responsible.’
But it is probably a mistake to imagine responsible officials with consciences made swollen and tender by remorse.
In London during the 1950s were numbers of men who headed the Liberation movements of British Africa’s colonies. All were poor and many were unable to return home, where they could expect to be put at once into prison, if they had not already escaped from prison. Some kept themselves fed on post office jobs, ever a life-line for people educated above their job possibilities. Others subsisted on hand-outs from well-wishers. There were households where these men could get a meal and meet revolutionaries from other parts of Africa.
My visitors included a school teacher Orton Chirwa who would shortly return to liberated Malawi but there he would spend many years imprisoned by that cruel man President Banda. He is still in prison; a