African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [199]
There were a lot of people, perhaps forty, on the verandah enclosed on three sides by rooms. A swimming bath was watched in case toddlers went too close.
Pupils of a school some way out of Harare sat in tidy rows, wearing their dancing costumes, consuming soft drinks and peanuts. They are well known and entertain visiting Chefs, at parties and banquets. Now they are playing for fun. The meal was sadza, with relishes of peanut sauce and green leaves; rice and curry; stewed chicken, bread, and Mutare’s famous mangoes. Ice-cream. Oceans of Coca-Cola.
The mbira orchestra consisted of three black players, one described as Zimbabwe’s best player, and some white amateurs who joined in the accompaniment. The children danced to the mbira. This kind of dancing is deceptive. It begins with simple padding movements, the feet flat, the body quiet, then grows, but slowly, into a frenzy of movement where you cannot follow the variety and speed of the rhythms, for at the dance’s height it seems the dancer’s feet are always in the air flying after energetic arms and shoulders, every part of the body answering a different beat. There was one little girl, perhaps eight or so, watching the older girls’ movements and carefully following them. She was all concentration as she adapted her arms, her feet, her body, to the dance. Once I watched flamenco dancers in Granada (this was before every flamenco group was tuned to the tourist industry). Four or five women danced together, of different ages, the oldest being perhaps sixty. They were initiating a new dancer, a girl of twelve or thirteen. The older women watched her, making almost imperceptible gestures of correction and encouragement. The audience all knew this was an occasion for the new dancer, joined in the clapping, and called out to her. One day she too would be a famous flamenco dancer, like her grandmother, her mother, her aunt, her elder sister…And she danced for hours, absorbed in her rituals. So, too, the little girl that Sunday morning on the verandah.
People called out for this mbira piece, or another: soft, delicate music, subtle music, the rhythms outside one’s capacity, just as the energetic patterns of the dancers were too fast to catch.
‘This music is to us what your New Testament is to you,’ said the famous mbira player. ‘It is sacred to us.’
Later, in London, I switched on the radio and heard the most seductive of the pieces I had heard that morning being played with a Western orchestral backing, as part of a concert. They say the Zimbabwe mbira players are honoured outside Zimbabwe, but hardly known there: there is a centre for mbira music in New York. Similarly, young people will often have no time for their own songs and music until they hear them played by visiting bands, who have fallen in love with them and adapted them.
When I was a girl there was a man called Hugh Tracey (‘That man Hugh Tracey!’) who went around the villages recording and collecting music. The whites regarded him as some kind of a freak, even a traitor. Some of that music would not have survived without him.
AN OUTLINE FOR A PLAY. A FILM?
A Woman of Our Time
The young man who will one day command a national movement/a guerilla army/his country, represent his people while in exile or in prison, shows none of the qualities of a popular leader. He is shy, scholarly, an observer. The man best known to the Party and the People has all these qualities. When he speaks crowds go wild. He stands in front of them arms held open as if in an embrace, while they shout Viva, or Shame. It is expected he will lead the country, but the capacities that make him so popular also undo him: he likes to be liked, secretly values his reputation with the whites as ‘reasonable’ hates unpopularity. He agrees to a deal with the whites that make him a ‘sell-out’ and even a traitor. At any rate it is the shy and scholarly man who takes his place and proves himself as a skilled and tenacious negotiator/leader of an Army/President of the Party/a powerful presence,