African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [39]
The two men in the back seat spoke a little English. The man beside me spoke it well. I at once said I was from England, without going into complicated histories, and he said I was welcome, and he hoped I would stay, because all the whites were leaving the country. I asked if he liked Mugabe, Yes, he liked Robert Mugabe very much, but he didn’t like the Comrades. If Mugabe knew what the Comrades did, he would punish them, but perhaps no one told him. I have heard this in too many countries, or read it, not to find it discouraging, so I asked about the War. And that was what we mostly talked about for the rest of the journey. He had spent the first part of the War in his village, not very far from here (close to where De Waal and Venter decided to buy their farms), in a district where the government troops and the guerillas came all the time, both sides taking people away for questioning, beating up even children, even girls. The women couldn’t get to work in the gardens, they were too afraid, so everyone was always short of food. If there was food in the huts, soldiers of both sides might take it. Cows and goats disappeared, and soldiers of either side might have driven them off. It all got so bad he left his village with his family and went to live with relatives in Mutare. The War was horrible. No one could know, if they hadn’t lived through it.
The man in front, whose name was Gore, referred continually to the men at the back, and they said Yes, Yes, and sighed, and shook their heads and clicked their tongues, and as we passed this gully or that kopje, or apparently friendly piece of bush, one, then all, might point and say, There…they killed three people there…all the huts burned in that village…there was a terrible fight on that hill…the helicopters came down there and shot bullets into the bush, and afterwards there were dead people lying everywhere.
The helicopters had to be Smith’s men, but otherwise there was no way of knowing who ‘they’ had been, in this incident or that.
In England, I said, we had read about the War in the newspapers and sometimes seen it on television, but Gore shook his head and said, No, newspapers do not tell you what a thing like that is like. Newspapers can only say, This happened, That happened, but they do not tell you what is in the hearts of the people. We lived all the day and every night afraid. We were afraid to sleep. If you slept you might wake to find the thatch over your head on fire. And who had done it? It could be someone living in the next hut. If someone disappeared you’d know that person was a spy for the government or for one of the armies. Someone you had known since you were both children could be paid money to kill you. Children disappeared and then you heard they were in the bush with the fighters. You knew they might appear any minute with guns. Because they knew about the village and could guide the others. The War made soldiers out of ten-year-olds. And what will happen to them now? They never went to school.
‘The Comrades had schools for the children,’ said one of the men at the back, being fair.
‘Yes, but what could they learn?’
‘The Comrades taught them to read and write.’
‘Some of them can read and write a little. And they learned a lot of other things. Will they forget those things?’
They sighed, they shook their heads, they smiled, while we drove along this road that for me meant memories of many decades ago, but for them meant war. Ambushes, bombs, mines, armoured vehicles, prowling aircraft, and helicopters who might use it to land on, scattering troops like seeds of death into the bush on either side.
Gore asked about Britain, and his two friends leaned forward to