African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [35]
‘Why did you come here to Zimbabwe? Are you going to live here? Have you got a job for me? Any job. I want it.’
‘No, I’ve just come to visit.’ Here I could have said I was brought up here, then left–and so forth, but all that happened before he was born, possibly before his parents were born. Far away in the mists of history this white woman lived here…
‘Why don’t you stay here?’ he cried, seeing this job, too, disappear. ‘Or perhaps one day I will come to England. There everybody has a lot of money and a house.’
On we drove, up towards the crest of a long ridge, and then down into a valley; up the next rise and then down, while sometimes he cried silently and trembled, and then dried his face, and trembled and burst out crying again, while I was, with part of my mind, in cars going to Macheke for the weekend thirty-five years ago. Communists, we called ourselves. The label we used to describe ourselves was that, and it is a shorthand as useful as most. But in fact we spent little of our time on the current communist prescriptions for a better world, partly because the ‘line’ laid down by the Communist Party of South Africa, and, therefore, by Moscow, was that the black proletariat would take power and create justice all over this land. There were, then, few Africans who fitted into this definition. We thought in fact about what went on everywhere else: Britain, Occupied Europe, Japan, the Far East, America. The War was an education in thinking about the world as a whole. It was a watershed, precisely in this way. The First World War began the process. My father said that when he was growing up on the outskirts of Colchester (a Roman town) it never occurred to anyone to brood about events in America, or China or–much–even in London. No, the news was that Bill’s (his school friend) father’s mare White Star had won the 3.30, and that there would be a church picnic. But the War put an end to that. Even on the farm he read newspapers from London, and listened to the crackling broadcasts from the BBC. He felt a famine in China or India as his personal responsibility. The admonition that we should eat up whatever it was on our plates we wanted to leave was delivered with an incredulous, passionate, accusing anguish.
Macheke is so vivid in my memory because of the War. Now I believe we were all mad, all over the world, whether actually in the fighting or not. Perhaps the world cannot murder on such a scale without going mad? Is this a consoling thought? Is it true? Is mutual murder the natural state of humankind? For us, then, this so terrible war was of course the War that would end all war, for everyone at last would see how terrible war was. (Just like my parents and the First World War.) All of us believed, as an article of faith, in a peaceful future world…I was in my mid-twenties, part of a group. Then such groups had to be political. By definition we were in the right about everything, destined to change the world and everyone in it, and our opponents were either misguided, or mostly wicked. We were all in love or not in love but wished we were, or wished that he or she was in love with us; or we had been disastrously in love, leading to regretted marriages (but luckily divorce was nothing these days), and because many of the group were pilots in training they were always being whisked off to dangerous parts where they could get killed, and many were. Partings were frequent and painful, but borne because of the state of elation we all lived in, and because