African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [194]
I say this to an ex-combatant from Smith’s armies, and he says, ‘The ngangas were advising us too. Probably that’s why we lost.’
An evening party. The guest of honour is a female Chef. Although many women fought with the Boys in the Bush, few became Chefs. Some have turned out well, some badly–just like the men. The people in this room all know each other well, and this Chef was a friend long before she became a Chef or even before she was a fighter.
‘They’ say she didn’t want to be a Chef, but Comrade Mugabe said, ‘It’s an order.’ He likes her because she speaks her mind and he is surrounded by sycophants.
She talks through dinner and then afterwards, while we sit about drinking coffee and Zimbabwe wine. I had been told, ‘She has to choose her words these days…’ but she talks as people do who normally watch their words, but now need not, because they are with friends.
She was talking about the camps in the bush, where she had been first as a girl, then as the War went on and on, as a young woman. Her formative years had been with the guerillas. Her job was to teach girls and boys deprived by the War of schooling, and, too, young men and women who had escaped from the miseries of village war-time living, and who would have to face competitive life after the War–without training. How very far ordinary life must have seemed, then, in those classes held under the trees, always alert for an enemy.
Her talk sounded for minutes at a time like an official history of the War, full of licensed phrases like, War against Imperialism, Forces of the People, but then other phrases and words came in, and soon the Authorized Version had given way to her own thoughts and words. She was remembering…
Certain official figures, now presented as perfect, with the finality of statues…Such and such a famous soldier, now a Father of the Revolution, the best soldier of them all, knew nothing about politics–he despised politics. One was always drunk…Another’s behaviour to women soldiers was so bad they had to be hidden until he went away. Once a woman Commander said to this man, who had sent to her demanding a girl for the night, ‘I am responsible for these girls. They are here to fight for freedom, not to be whores for you.’ Then she talked about ‘the trials’ in the camps, modelled on the ‘treason trials’ of the great communist exemplars. These trials went on in the bush, in the wilderness, people hanged and shot because they were convicted of–well, what? Treason, of course, but it was a power struggle, that was the point. ‘It was really about power,’ she said and said again–had to say, and say again, distressed, unable to stop talking. All those Comrades, good Comrades, had been killed and it was for their suspected ambition.
The room in that quiet Harare suburb seemed full of the ghosts of young men–very young men, boys really, murdered by their comrades to the accompaniment of judicial phrases, the judgements of the People. How many? No one knows how many now. These killings went on in the camps, dozens of soldiers, perhaps hundreds. That was a time when ‘now I think we all went mad’.
These murdered people were one of the bricks or stones that had built this ‘communist’ state, just as long ago the corpse of a sacrificed person, later an animal, was put into the foundations of a temple or sacred building, a cornerstone.
Listening to her, who, presumably, had been at least ‘on the side of’ the killers, we all had to reflect how we have become accustomed to barbarity. She had been sucked into some madness, as millions of people all over the world have been, like being dragged over a waterfall, and now there was left only, ‘now I think we all went mad’.
Next day the evening was discussed–a strange occasion, it had been. Why, now, so many years after the events, did she have to talk and talk, the way an animal slowly licks and licks a sore place.
Then slowly details