African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [190]
All over Zimbabwe teams of former Freedom Fighters are being sent to areas where they fought, to try and remember where fighters were killed and carelessly buried, or not buried at all. The corpses or bones are buried with appropriate rites. It is believed by many that the country is full of dissatisfied and vengeful ghosts, and it is they who are responsible for Zimbabwe’s many problems.
TWO WHITE FARMERS AND
THE BOOK TEAM
We are back with the farmer who last year sang us his hymns to the soil, and we are watching gangs of seasonal workers plant tobacco. This is far from the chancy operation of the old days, which depended on the coming of the rains. Pierced pipes and long hoses now make planting possible weeks earlier. ‘Water, we have so much water now,’ cries the farmer, meaning the new dam, full because of the good rain, and already irrigating the farms around here. This soil is producing three crops a year. ‘Soilmining,’ says the farmer, irritable because of his conflict, loving real earth, but working with this, which is like brick dust and soaked with chemicals. This earth is no pleasure to look at or to touch. Not in this field are we likely to see the farmer bend to lift a handful of earth and marvel at it–an act of worship. But he is pointing at another farm just across a river. ‘Now there’s a farmer! He never wastes time lying awake at night wondering what Nature’s going to wham us with. His farm is really high-tec, they’ve got everything, you should see it. I tell you, Israel’s got nothing on us in this district…yes of course he’s white. The Affs don’t have any feel for this kind of farming, and good for them. I’d like to believe they never will.’
He goes on, irritable and discouraged in a way I remember from then because of ‘trouble’ with his workers.
It was all his own fault, said he: he brought it on himself. Last season he suddenly couldn’t stand seeing the female casual workers sitting on the floor of the work-shed hour after hour tying up tobacco, with their babies on their backs. Eight hours a day. It was insane. He offered them a crèche and two trained nurses to run the crèche so the women would not be burdened. The women refused, saying they wouldn’t trust their babies to strange women, because of the danger of witchcraft. ‘Witchcraft! It’s unreasonable! It doesn’t make sense! It’s irrational! I tried again this year but they wouldn’t hear of it, and there’s bad feeling but they won’t tell me why. All I know is, I’m some kind of a villain.’
I asked the Book Team about this. There we sat, five of us, under a tree, talking about the affairs of the world. Both Sylvia and Talent took it for granted that the farmer, being white, wanted a crèche because the women would be more efficient. I said it was not so: he was upset because of the over-burdened women. They wouldn’t have that. ‘Do you realize you at once assume the worst just because he is a white farmer? You won’t credit the whites with any human feelings at all?’ It was no good. When I persisted, they said, as if this was proof of the man’s illwill and not his incomprehension, ‘And anyway, he is starting at too high a level. He should have made enquiries in the farm village and found women who are already trusted by all the other women. It wouldn’t be easy, because of course they don’t trust each other. They are from different tribes.’ ‘But,’ I ask, ‘handled differently, do you think he could get them to accept a crèche?’ A long discussion: on the whole, probably not. Cathie was unhappy because of the witchcraft and wanted the others to agree it is being exaggerated. But Talent and Sylvia and Chris insisted that witchcraft is a serious problem, and won’t go away just by being ignored.
I took the original incident and the comments of the Book Team to the Coffee Farmer.
‘I wonder how often good intentions on the part of us whites go wrong out of sheer bloody ignorance. I’d never have thought of going to find a woman in the village and talk to her