• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1454 0

’ for good marks, just as, so recently, a young man of twenty-two from Devon, a friend of mine, found himself in old Northern Rhodesia governing a district the size of Yorkshire and sitting in judgement in the courts; he was not seen as a young man of twenty-two, but rather as a representative of the British Empire. And then, too, there had been all that rhetoric during the years of fighting, always confident, loud, and full of boasts and promises. But whatever the reason, Zimbabwe was being judged as if there had not been a war. This often happens. The reality of war, the suffering and the brutality and the terror–all that is suppressed almost at once, because it is intolerable and no one can stand it, and instead the pain (and the horror at the way everyone behaved) becomes frozen in war memorials, patriotic speeches, war rhetoric–sentimentality.

‘How old are you?’

‘I am twenty-two years old, madam.’

‘Please don’t call me madam.’

If he was twenty-two then he was twelve or thirteen when the War began.

‘Where were you during the War?’

‘At school, madam. My father wanted me to get my Certificates.’ And he wept even harder. ‘I’ll never get a job now the whites are going. Mugabe doesn’t know anything. The whites are cleverer than us. We need them to stay here and give us jobs.’

Weeks later, just before I left the country, when I described this encounter to a black intellectual, he said in a troubled voice, ‘Who said those things? Are you sure?’ I said, ‘But why are you surprised? I don’t understand any of you. Why do you expect so much of yourselves? Why does everyone go on as if Zimbabwe has been in existence for fifty years? The War ended two years ago. There were all kinds of different opinions during the War and a lot of blacks fought for the government. Why should all that come to an end overnight?’ But what I said was so much against the atmosphere of that time I might as well not have said it. People were numbed. People were turned off…had turned themselves off. They needed a formula: united black marxist Zimbabwe.

We drove on, south-east, getting closer to Macheke (or Mashopi) through that landscape, all miles of wintersere grass, where the wind made rivers of light, where clumps of musasa stood in their airy green, edged by blue mountains–that scene which somewhere in it held his village, to which he was condemned for ever. As he must think, being twenty-two, when what happens to you is for ever.

‘Look,’ I said reasonably. ‘The white people are not cleverer than you. You are only believing what the whites have been telling you. Did you know that for centuries the people of Europe–that means white people–were considered backward and primitive by the Arab world? When the Romans invaded Britain, the way you were invaded by the whites, they called us stupid and backward and savage. And we were.’

While I said all this I felt increasingly ridiculous.

‘Someone wanted my job,’ he said. ‘That’s what happened to me.’

I could have said, the sociological approach, ‘Oh well, you see, there are too many people in the world for the number of jobs available. And this situation is likely to get worse, not better.’

Instead, I asked, ‘Was the War bad for you?’

He burst out angrily, ‘It was horrible, you don’t know, no one knows…’ He wiped the sleeve of his precious jacket across his wet face. ‘In the village, first the Security Forces came, then the Comrades came…we had to be nice to them, you see. We had to pretend…we couldn’t be safe, it didn’t matter what we did.’

I gave him some tissues and he mopped up his face. ‘We only read about it in the newspapers and saw it on the television,’ I said, wanting him to ask, Where are you from?–and he said, ‘Were you in Harare in the War?’

‘I was in England. I’ve just come from London.’

He gave a what-do-you-expect sobbing laugh, and a shrug. ‘Yes, that’s it, of course, from England. You are a white person from England. Now I understand.’

‘We have unemployment in England.’ As I said this I remembered he would not be getting unemployment benefit, but living off his family.

A black