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By Root 1525 0

happened in the 1960s, in London. For some reason, I forget why, a group of people got into the habit of meeting most evenings, to sit around my big kitchen table, to talk and drink wine. We were old, and young, and from various parts of the world. We played this game: every person who sat down was given a drawing block, and different coloured pencils. We doodled. I don’t know how this game began. I found a heap of these drawings recently, and at once knew who had drawn what. We each had a characteristic style, and themes that repeated night after night, week after week. Some of us got desperate, trying to escape this cage of necessity, that made us produce the same patterns, no matter how hard we tried to change. One man, brought up a Roman Catholic, who then became an atheist, drew tight, small patterns, and in every one, somewhere, was a cross. There was no way he could avoid that cross. When he refused to let his pencil make a cross, we pointed out that the pattern of the drawing was a cross. A young girl, in one of those psychological labyrinths it seems impossible one will ever get out of, drew convoluted knot-like patterns like intricately braided tresses. She could not draw in any other way. When she put her pencil to the paper, it seemed, of its own accord, to make these black, swirling knots. A woman then at the height of her life, full of content and optimism, drew patterns of leaves and flowers. She tried to draw different things, but an animal, or a person, or a cup became half vegetable, growing leaves and fruit. A woman in a state of indecision–should she leave her husband or not–put her pencil to the paper, made a line or a shape, scratched it out, started again, scratched it out: at the end of an evening her sketch pad would be full of jagged erasures. And so it was with all of us: we were set in modes, by organizers and governors unknown to our conscious selves.

BOOKS

President Mugabe has said there will be a good library in every village. I have been visiting more schools, some as bad as the one run by ‘the man without character’, some good. But in very good schools there are empty shelves in rooms that call themselves libraries where books ought to be. Books written by African writers are all read to shreds. There are rejects from better libraries, and among them might be books the children would enjoy, but no attempt is made to differentiate between them. Perhaps the idea is, better any books than none at all. But there is such a hunger for books, for advice about books, in this country where the electronic revolution is yet to happen. Radios may or may not pick up the BBC or South Africa. There is little video, and a few programmes from The Open University, but only a minority benefits from these, since most schools do not have television. Books remain as influential as they ever were, in countries like Zimbabwe. It is not possible to exaggerate the influence of books, even one book. Dambudzo Marechera, the author of House of Hunger, described how, when he was a hungry child scrabbling for bits of food and clothing on the rubbish heaps attached to white houses, he found a thrown-out Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedia. It changed his life. Yet even the big libraries in Harare and Bulawayo are short of funds. If you send them books, you may get a letter: I am sorry, please don’t send any more, we cannot afford the Customs duties. Even the University of Zimbabwe library is not funded to keep itself up to date with books.

MUSIC

A Sunday morning mbira party. The mbira is a base of wood with metal strips of varying lengths and widths set on it, in tiers. It can be held between two hands and played while walking. When I was growing up the gentle sprightly tinkling of the mbira could be heard as you walked through the bush, and then the player came into sight, usually a young man with a hoe slung over a shoulder, his fingers conversing with the hand piano (which is what we called it) while his eyes searched the bush for game.

When played seated, the instrument is held inside a calabash, for resonance,