African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [195]
What we had been listening to all evening was the monologue of the old soldier about a time so vivid, every minute so strong in memory nothing can ever be as real again. How could I not have recognized it at once? After all, I had been brought up with it, with my father talking, talking, about his war. It suddenly occurred to me–and why had it not before?–that all the men and women in the machinery of government, Big Chefs and Little Chefs, have come out of camps, out of the War in the bush, and they spend at least all their working lives together. War bound them, and memories of war bind them now. They sit talking, Do you remember?–but there is no need to ask, for they know they all remember and cannot forget. A great deal of their talk is about that war even when it is apparently about something else: this is always true of people who have been scarred by violent emotions. Nothing will ever happen to these people as powerful as what they lived through, before many of them were even twenty years old.
That evening a curtain had been briefly lifted for us on the loneliness of the old soldier, whose war is in the past, and now the world is full of new people and they don’t want to listen.
But what is most interesting, is the future. The official histories, the Authorized Versions, are given out as fact, are part of official ceremonies, taught in schools. A whole generation of young people have been brought up on them, as the sacred Foundation of Zimbabwe. But the people who fought in that war and know what it was like are in their twenties and thirties. Soon at least some will be writing their memories, autobiographies, reminiscences. Then the truth about the War will be exposed, and there will be two versions, the official histories and the truth. It must be obvious to everyone that this is going to happen. Yet the Authorized Version continues to be insisted on, to the point where a novelist writing about the War mildly enough, suggesting that the Comrades were not always perfect, was attacked by all the critics. In fact there is already a verbal history and an official one and, inevitably, the Chefs will be made to look silly.
If there was ever a case of, How do these politicians’ minds work?–then it is this one.
EDUCATION
I am interviewed by a clever young woman, product of the University of Zimbabwe. She was one of the best students of her year. I am so impressed I mention her to various people, and what they say adds up to this: She wouldn’t do so well now. First, she is white. Second, she is not political. Third, she is a woman. Any one of these, by themselves, all right: put them together and she wouldn’t make it. I mustn’t think this is what Zimbabwe is like everywhere. On the whole it is good-natured, friendly, easy-going. No, the bigotry is where the Stalinists are entrenched. And by the way, have I thought how extraordinary it is, the white politico who identifies with black racism? They hate and persecute their own kind, while, of course, complaining about racism.
Nor are some ideas from the past going to be shifted easily. Already a generation of young people studying literature or history have been imbued with Stalinist, or socialist-realist, ideas. An historian, the father of Rhodesian–Zimbabwean history, told a class in the university that he had made a mistake in certain interpretations. The students would have none of it. ‘But that’s not what we were taught.’ ‘But I’m telling you, what you were taught is wrong. I wrote that history and now I know parts of it are wrong.’ But it was no use: what they knew was history. As marxism, communism, is rejected everywhere, the people who were marxists and communists will remain, but calling themselves something different, and even thinking of themselves as