African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [203]
‘Can’t you see what is happening in Zimbabwe? We have been having electricity cuts for weeks. The railway system is not working. The telephones work or not.* They can’t even get coal from the coalfields to the hospitals–this week no operations in Harare’s main hospital. No coal for the tobacco barns and tobacco is the main foreign exchange earner. They borrow six locomotives from South Africa, and in the first week two are a write-off–two more are disabled and need repair. At a time when Zimbabwe is grinding to a halt Mugabe hands over fifty-five per cent of the railway capacity to ferry Zambia’s freight to the ports. The roads–there is no way this country can maintain its road system, not without handouts. I go to X province, the roads are being done up, I hear. The Swedes are paying for it. Next day on a new road: the French are paying for it. Are we going to go on like this, living on handouts? Gimme, gimme, gimme, give us libraries, give us new locomotives, give us the bloody lot.’
SO WHAT SHOULD BE DONE?
Marxist student: The Bourgeois Revolution has failed. Now we must have a Revolution of the Proletariat.
Black farmer: Transport, it’s all transport. If only Comrade Mugabe would organize our transport…
White man, (born in the country, plans to stay in it, on innumerable boards, committees, charitable governing bodies): First you take the brakes off investment. But that won’t change anything until something else happens. Money has been poured into this country–millions. Most of it wasted. The Aid agencies, they don’t understand the priorities, they don’t understand the level they should have started at. The railways will work when these chaps have been trained to understand the mechanics. Industry will work when there’s a trained personnel. Look at Zimbabwe airlines–they fly, don’t they? They don’t just fall out of the sky? No, they decided to have an airline–all these countries have to have one, they’re prestige. But they put money into training the chaps to teach. Because they had to. If I had my hands on this Aid money I’d set up colleges to train the teachers. There’s a gap–that’s the gap. And make it prestige. Mugabe should be right in there making speeches and dishing out prizes. Do you know what has happened? These young black chaps, they want to study literature, God help us, they’ve inherited all that snobbery from England where engineers are dirt. When I was in the States last year I kept meeting engineers in the aeronautics industry, English, Scottish, they are working in the States and in Europe where engineers are valued. But here it is a matter of life and death for engineers to be trained and then valued. Until we’ve got this layer of properly trained black chaps it’s pouring money down the drain.
‘Did you know that every year the Japanese train 400 times more engineers and technicians than we do?’ (‘We’: The British.)
‘Training, training, training, TRAINING, TRAINING–it’s training that we need. TRAINING.’
POLITICS
A Commercial Farmer (white) in the high-tech district, where not so long ago Selous bartered with Lo Magondi, applied to become a member of Zanu PF. He was interviewed by two important members of the Party.
‘First of all,’ says he belligerently, ‘I have to tell you three things. One, I have a big mouth and I’m not going to change.’ (He had been famous for attacks on government policy.)
‘And what else, comrade?’
‘I’ve been farming thirty years in this country, and I’m going to go on farming the way I know best.’
‘And what else?’
‘I’m never going to leave this country. If you burned my house down around my ears and told me to live in a mud hut I’d stay.’
‘Welcome to Zanu PF, comrade.’
GIVING UP
People leave Zimbabwe for apparently minor reasons: straws that break…