African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [22]
Harry was angry because of problems with his business, which made pictures from feathers and articles like buttons and key-rings from ox horn. It had been successful before Independence, but now, with so many of the customers gone–they had Taken the Gap–it was struggling. Black girls came from a nearby farm village to work. It seemed there was a troublemaker among the girls, she set all the others off, yet the girls had been given everything they asked for. They brought their babies and small children with them to work, they came and went as they felt inclined…no, it was all impossible, he was glad he was Taking the Gap.
Where did the phrase originate? White people who left Southern Rhodesia, and then Zimbabwe, for The Republic,* ‘Took the Gap’.
My brother was prepared to leave this pleasant house, built by himself and a black builder whom he said was a good chap–working with him was a pleasure–leave this great garden, laid out by his dead wife, leave this district, where he had lived most of his life, for a lower standard of living in The Republic not only because he had a daughter in The Republic, but because it stuck in his craw to live under a black government.
‘And now I’ve got to put up with their bloody Labour Officer telling me what to do. I have to abide by whatever decision he sees fit to come up with. I have to do what he says.’
After breakfast the Labour Officer arrived. He was on a bicycle. My brother invited him, with cold formality, to sit down. This of course could not have happened in the old days. We three sat on the verandah and Joseph brought out tea. He and the Labour Officer exchanged greetings in the Shona style.
‘Good morning.’
‘Good morning.’
‘Have you slept well?’
‘I have slept well if you have slept well.’
‘I have slept well.’
‘Then I have slept well.’
The Labour Officer was a man of about thirty-five, a strong, healthy, sane, individual with a humorous look imposed on him by this job, which was mostly having to manage difficult, unreasonable, unfair and sometimes abusive whites.
My brother grumbled on and on about the girls who understood nothing about the obligation to give a day’s work in return for a day’s pay, and about the troublemaker who had all the others dancing to her tune.
The officer sat listening. When my brother had to go in to answer the telephone, I asked him about his work. He had been trained in agriculture under the whites, together with hundreds of others: there had been a policy to train black experts to work in the Native Purchase Areas and the Reserves–no, that is what they were called then, they had different names now–luckily for this government, because he was worked off his feet, all the cultural advisers and Extension workers were worked off their feet, there was not enough of them. It would take two to three years, he said, to train the experts Zimbabwe needed. ‘Surely,’ I said, ‘no one’s going to blame you if it takes longer?’ Suddenly a direct look, acknowledging me as a friend, and not an enemy. He grimaced, shook his head, and laughed. ‘They blame us in any case,’ he said, which was his real answer to my question, ‘Do you find this work difficult?’ To which he formally replied, ‘I try to do my best, madam.’
He bicycled off to the village to talk to the girls. Meanwhile my brother grumbled that this Labour Officer ‘or whatever he calls himself’ of course would be on the side of the girls. After a couple of hours the man came back. The tea tray appeared again. He thought he had sorted everything out, but first of all he would like to see the pay books. Tight-lipped, Harry brought out the pay books. For about half an hour the man worked through them, then snapped them shut, and delivered his verdict. ‘The girls told me you hadn’t paid them, but I see you have, sir. My recommendation