African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [188]
Everyone agrees the Tonga are wonderfully artistic. The baskets and stools will find themselves in rooms all over the world, where visitors will say, What a beautiful stool, what a beautiful basket.
The young teachers, in whose house I am staying, have bought a few things to take back to the Mid-West of America, as presents.
They are religious, and work very hard. Other teachers in other houses are not religious and also work hard.
One ex-pat teacher, from near Chicago, is appalled because most of a mathematics class don’t understand what she has been teaching. ‘They sit there, it seems they understand–then you discover they haven’t understood a thing.’ Eight of the class of forty she believes have a chance of passing O-level if properly coached. It is holiday time, but every day she drives herself on terrible roads to the school, and there is met by the eight pupils who have come in from their villages, some walking miles. She sits with them for hours, going over and over the problems. This same girl tells me a story. In Harare she was standing for the three or four hours that it is customary to have to wait for anything of a bureaucratic nature. She was the only white person in a line of hundreds. The young black clerk who was pushing people’s fingers into ink to make prints did not look up at the faces of the people who moved past her. When she saw the white hand, she did look up, then said sharply, ‘Have you washed your hands?’ ‘No.’ The clerk had said this to no one else. ‘Then go and wash them.’
This incident is a mirror of the arbitrary white treatment of blacks in the old days.
It must not be thought that all the ex-pat teachers or Aid workers are useful. I was in a village when a young Englishman who was working in the fields with the villagers came over. He was leaving that day and he was miserable. ‘It was the best thing I ever did, coming here. It’s taught me everything. They are a wonderful people.’
I asked the Extension Worker who had brought me about this youth. Some villagers were there. He said, ‘They send us these young people. They are supposed to be teaching us. They want to help us. But we have to teach them what they are supposed to be teaching us. When they arrive they have no manners, they don’t know how to behave. What do they learn in their schools? This one had a breakdown. Sometimes they drink because they are so lonely. They find it hard to be friends with us.’
The woman in whose hut the young man had been living, with her son, said, ‘But he is not a bad person. He wants to be kind.’
The Extension Worker: ‘These young people get paid to come here and teach us. But we don’t get paid for teaching them everything.’
The hostess woman, who is large, literally shining with health, has suddenly become someone else: she has become the young man. Every bit of her body pleads as she stands in a curve, head poked forward, chin thrust out, eyes moving from one face to the next in a mix of aggression and apology. She is the poor young man who can be seen at this very moment, a forlorn figure, holding out his hand that has a store biscuit in it, to a small child who is shyly taking it. Becoming herself, the woman stands laughing. Everyone laughs with her.
LOVE OR SOMETHING.