African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [209]
The young teacher in the bush school is reunited with his wife.
The farm assistant, the champion parachutist, is now a preacher in a charismatic Christian sect.
Dorothy’s two younger children are being sent to school by Ayrton R. Under ESAP school fees have been introduced for many children. He buys them clothes and books. They are angry: they do not like school, mostly because their school friends bully them, saying, ‘Why should we be at the same school as the children of domestic workers?’ But: they will be educated and their parents are not. They are angry too because Ayrton R. has a nice house and they do not.
The Herald, the country’s main newspaper is lively and critical, no longer sounds like Pravda. There are good magazines, and new independent newspapers and magazines are planned.
In a crowded government office an official was rude to an old white woman who complained she had been waiting for five hours. A black man said to the official: ‘Don’t speak to the old woman like that, we don’t like it.’ The others agreed with him, ‘Yes, we don’t like your behaviour.’ The official became polite.
An Irishman, Declan Gould, who has spent seven years helping the homeless and the poor, has been deported, made a Prohibited Immigrant, under the same laws Southern Rhodesia used, which have been kept, unchanged.
When something goes wrong it is still being blamed on South African sabotage. Many Zimbabweans have apparently not noticed that there is a new situation in South Africa.
Things are not well at the University of Zimbabwe. When it was set up, under Federation, it was given a liberal constitution of the kind usual in democratic countries. Under a new law, The University Amendment Act, the university will be controlled by the government, that is, by Zanu PF. The Vice Chancellor will be able to get rid of any academic who doesn’t please him–without appeal. Students will have a worse time. Academics who can leave are leaving, or plan to leave. People are hoping this retrogressive law will be done away with.
The writers of Zimbabwe held a meeting this month, January, to protest the harassment of its members by the Central Intelligence Organization, whose stupidity and heavyhandedness is probably due to their having been trained by the secret police of the infamous Ceasescu. People want to know why a democracy needs a secret police.
On a Commercial Farm–white, I was told disgusting racial jokes, inspired by the government’s incompetence. But: there should be 200 people on this farm, the workers and their families. There are seven hundred. The farmer says: ‘I would have 4,000 by now, but I have to send them away. I don’t like doing it. They want to be here because they do better with me than in the Communal Areas. All the white farms carry more people than the same amount of land in the Communal Areas.’ He is irrigating large fields, using precious water he could use to grow the profitable crops the government asks for, so as to feed the seven hundred through the drought. ‘I’ll see my own people fed, at least, since those fools can’t do it. And what about all the others that keep coming up begging for food? I have to send them away or I won’t have enough for my people. How do you imagine I feel doing that?’
A new law provides for the taking of land without appeal from white farmers in certain designated areas. The perennial threats to do this means that a productive part of the agricultural economy is kept in a state of uncertainty, farmers beginning to refuse to invest in their farms, and trying to put money into movables. Meanwhile the government has large areas of land still not allocated. It is being said that this law is designed to distract the attention of the Povos from the government’s mistakes.
Zimbabwe plans to shoot 30,000 elephants this year instead of the usual 3,000 or 3,500. Otherwise the herds