African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [186]
We sat in the shade with the Tonga fishermen under great trees like green towers, on the Tonga stools that fetch high prices in the tourist shops. The fishermen tell us their story: two of us speak their language. Settled far from the lake and ordered to become farmers, they did badly, and a few crept back to the shore to catch fish, for their families were starving. At last the authorities stopped arresting them, and they were permitted to make a fishing collective. There are forty of them, and they have four boats. No more fishermen nor boats will be permitted to join the collective. Some children were energetically playing around the huts. Because these children ate fish they were healthy, unlike the apathetic children we had already seen in villages a long way from the shore. But these were not really supposed to be here: the fathers bring them into this man’s village, to feed them up, in the school holidays. The fishermen themselves eat little fish: they sell it to pay for their children’s schooling, for like every parent in the country they are determined their children will get the education that will admit them to the modern world, far from this poverty.
Because families are not allowed into the fishermen’s village, it is men who mend the fishing nets draped everywhere over lines, and which are often torn by the crocodiles. The nets are expensive and a torn net is a tragedy. The fishermen’s lives are a guerilla war with crocodiles and hippos, just as their wives miles away fear elephants. The spectral trees that still stand up everywhere in the water, the remains of the forest that was drowned by the rising waters, are a bonus: the fish like the old trunks, and the fishermen row quietly from one dead tree to another, after the fish. But the crocodiles know fish like the dead trees and they are there too.
The fishermen are humorous. They are philosophical. They laugh as they talk of their poverty and the indifference of officials. Told that one of their visitors is a writer, they suggest that their lives should be described because–they seem to feel–if the authorities really knew, their hearts would be less hard. They laugh when they tell us how they may not now row their boats across the lake to visit their relatives on the Zambian shore. ‘The police there will only talk to us with guns.’ ‘Passports are not for poor people.’ ‘Why should I have to get a passport to row half a mile to villages where my own family lives?’ One fisherman remarks that he enjoys seeing photographs in the newspapers of Presidents Mugabe and Kaunda embracing with fraternal emotion: it makes him feel so much better about not being able to visit his Zambian family.
These men are the second and third generation away from the people who were forced to move. Asked if the Tonga talk about their past, the reply is that old people do, but the children don’t believe their tales.
‘Once we lived on the edge of the water: it was a big river then, it was the Zambesi river. We fished and we hunted and we grew three crops a year in the rich soil. Now we grow one crop a year and we are not allowed to hunt–we are sent to prison if we do. And only a few of us may fish.’
Once we lived in Eden where Nature was so kind we hardly needed clothes and fruit fell from the trees. But then an angel with a flaming sword…
At the beautiful hospital, that has a Spanish feel to it, with tall curving walls and open-work patterns in the red brick, a perfect building for the climate–designed,