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By Root 1368 0

hear what I said. I talked, knowing the images my words made had little to do with Britain. Gore had always lived in his village with his wife and children till they moved to Mutare, and now they were in a single-roomed hut in a township outside Mutare. He worked in a garage. One of the men at the back was a watch-mender and had never been far from Mutare. He had not even visited Harare. The third was a watchman in a hotel in Mutare’s main street. The big hotel, he said, with pride, but laughing, mocking the hotel’s pretensions and his pride in it. There people came who had been in every country in the world! As for him, he had visited relatives in Portuguese East, before the War. Mozambique, Gore corrected him. He said, laughing and shaking his head, ‘It’s hard to remember all the new names. I sometimes say Salisbury, and then somebody says, Watch out, or you’ll be reported to the Comrades.’

‘Soon everyone will forget,’ said Gore. ‘Only old people like me will remember Mutare was called Umtali.’ And he shook with laughter, the marvellous African laughter born somewhere in the gut, seizing the whole body with good-humoured philosophy. It is the laughter of poor people. If we were not talking about the War, when they were tense and sombre, they laughed.

They wanted to know what changes I had seen since I had left so long ago for England.

I wanted to talk about the emptying and thinning of the bush, how the animals had gone, and the birds and the insects, how this meant everything had changed; how myriads of small balances, hundreds in every small patch of bush, necessary for water, soil, foliage, climate, had been disturbed. I had already begun to suspect that these changes were more important than, even, the War, and the overthrow of the whites, the coming of the black government. Now, years later, I am sure of it. But I could not talk like this to these people then, at that time. It would have sounded an irrelevance: at best, like one of the eccentricities the whites go in for.

It is, I think, almost a law that what one is afraid to say because it will be rejected by the atmosphere of a time, will turn out to be a few years later the most important thing of all.

So I did not say anything about that; instead, that when I had left in 1949 there had been a quarter of a million whites, and one and a half million blacks. Now, so the experts claim, it is eight million. Eight million of mostly very young people. In a generation there will be twenty-five million.

‘Eight million,’ said Gore, laughing and shaking his head. Because of the word million, as much a block to his imagination as it is to mine. Mutare, his ‘big city’ had never had more than thousands in it.

‘We are poor people,’ he said, gravely, when he had stopped laughing.

This was a comment, not only on the eight million, who would have to find food to eat and clothes to wear, but on what I had been saying about Britain.

I knew what he found particularly interesting in what I told them, when he translated it for his friends. He at once translated when I talked about unemployment benefit, which for them was like news from another galaxy; about the Underground system in London; when he heard that every child went to school until the age of sixteen; that there the shops were full, and there were no shortages of anything, ever. He did not translate when I was ready to talk about our system of government, political parties, elections, town councils.

For the two hours it took to reach Mutare I was with men who knew about what other people had from the talk of travellers, from newspapers, from television–but they seldom saw television or films; they saw aeroplanes in the sky and sometimes got lifts in cars, but they would never travel in an aeroplane or own a car. They were excluded from the marvels of modern living but had come close when for ten years they had been in the front line of a war fought with modern weapons, for about these they talked with knowledge and expertise. In short, they were like most of the people in the world.

Their way of telling me what