African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [204]
‘If you like. I moved house. I put up a dura wall around the garden.’ (A type of cement fencing.) ‘All day in the department I hear, “So you’ve put up a dura wall, just like a white, you all put up fences.” But everyone knows the first thing a Chef does when he buys a house, before he even moves in, is to put up his dura wall. All I hear is the whites this, the whites that. I’ve had enough of this racism. It’s getting worse. I’m off.’
A scientist left because, having many times applied unsuccessfully for some laboratory equipment, refused on the grounds of shortage of foreign exchange, he stood at the airport watching ‘Dozens of these damned Chefs off to one of their conferences somewhere. There’s always enough money for that.’
The last straw for another was a new history book for use in schools, designed to correct the errors of the white version of African history. First. There is one short chapter on the hundred years of white domination, which transformed black culture. ‘It’s called Positive Discrimination.’ Then, hunter-gatherers are described as inhabiting the Middle East until one thousand years before Christ. ‘You can’t have black kids knowing there were scintillating civilizations around the Mediterranean long before they were ever heard of.’ And then, that polyglot band of desperate, penniless, hard-drinking adventurers who arrived to take their chances in the Kimberly diamond mines are described as ‘capitalists’. And then, in a book meant for both girls and boys, the pupils were invited to imagine themselves king in medieval Africa, loaded with finery, and waited on by his wives. ‘Not a word about all the important roles the women had, they were not just wives to the king, that’s just rubbish. No, I’m a historian. That means facts. If these people want to go in for all this political rubbish then–I’m off.’
But: the man who left because of the fence is back. ‘I’d like to take the bloody place by the shoulders and shake some ordinary bloody commonsense into it. But I don’t want to live anywhere else.’
Nor is it unknown for black Zimbabweans, and even a Chef or two, to be found far from home. After an evening spent playing that game known as choosing one’s words, you may hear, ‘Yes, that’s how it goes…funny how things turn out, sometimes.’
THE VERANDAH IN THE MOUNTAINS
Again I look down on hills, lakes, rivers and forests and above them is a baby aeroplane, owned by a local farmer, and in it with him is the Coffee Farmer. They are circling the mountains, and the valleys, and the Communal Areas looking for signs of soil erosion, which will then be reported to the Soil Conservation Committee.
Through the days and the evenings I sit listening to the ideas bubble.
Everywhere in the Communal Areas you see these fat goats. How is it the blacks don’t make goat cheese? They like strong tastes. Surely they’d like it. Why don’t…?
A woman has just come back from Argentina, with, ‘They grow the same crops as here. Maize, pumpkins, tomatoes, legumes, potatoes. But the poor people make dozens of different dishes with them. Why can’t Argentinian know-how be introduced here?’
It has occurred to an old-timer that the shifts and contrivances, the improvisation, of the white homesteads of the early days, where there was no electricity, refrigerators, running water, could be used now in the poorer Communal Areas. For instance, the coolers that were supplanted by refrigerators. Shelves are enclosed by walls of chicken wire, but doubled, an inch or so apart, the space filled with charcoal. Around the top of this safe is a metal groove that has very small holes in it. It is filled with water that slowly trickles down through the charcoal, so the walls of the safe are always wet, and the evaporation cools the inside of the safe, where butter and milk and meat wrapped in pawpaw leaves to tenderize it are kept at temperatures degrees lower than outside.
Canvas water coolers were hung from rafters or tree branches, and had in them lemonade and cold tea as well.
I said, ‘Outside our