African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [45]
A week into my stay in a new Zimbabwe I finally understood that these were indeed sick people. As I moved from one verandah to another–morning tea, lunch, afternoon tea, drinks, dinner–on the flanks of those incomparable mountains, I listened to The Monologue, and reminded myself that these were normally cool, self-reliant, resourceful and humorous people. The Monologue up here was bitter, self-pitying, peevish, began with the day at six or so and went on till bedtime. Now it was not only President Banana and the chickens, Mugabe and his motorcade, but the new bureaucracy, inefficient, arbitrary, weighted against the whites. The Swedes and their Aid operations were hated with a cold rage that now I find hard to believe. Did I really sit listening for hours of malicious anecdotes about the Swedes? Indeed I did: I have my notes. The Swedes were the first, or the most generous, or the most visible of the new armies of international benefactors, and particularly attracted resentment, but so did anyone who had supported the ‘terrs’ or who had assisted the birth of Zimbabwe. Cold Comfort Farm, that exemplary settlement where, for years under the whites, black and white lived and worked together, had always attracted criticism, but now what it stood for had triumphed, every kind of gossip circulated among the whites, some so stupid and so petty I had to keep telling myself: a political enemy is not described as someone who disagrees with you, almost certainly from motives as idealistic as your own, but as vicious, twisted, immoral, and incompetent.
Above all, there were the Squatters…one could encapsulate the whole grievance of the blacks thus: They came and stole our land.
Land, the soil, the earth, this is what had been taken from the blacks. Throughout the War of Liberation, the Bush War, Mugabe was making a promise, that when the whites were defeated, every black person would have land. What Comrade Mugabe meant was that they would be part of communal schemes and settlements, but every black wants to own land as the whites do, to have and to hold and to pass on to heirs. Comrade Mugabe was fighting a hard war and his was only one of the armies. He did not know he was going to win. Perhaps even in the midst of such uncertainties it would be wiser for guerilla leaders not to make impetuous promises. It is not possible for every black person to own land or even live on the land. There will never be enough land, particularly with the population doubling, doubling, doubling, at such short intervals. But when the War ended, every black person who had supported Mugabe because of his promises, and many who had not, waited for land, and for Paradise to begin.
This Paradise was in fact more like an anarchist’s utopia. No one would need a licence to drive a car. Cars would not need licences. No one would have to pass school exams, yet everyone would have qualifications and certificates, and any job at all would be at once available. No need for tickets on buses or on trains. Electricity and water would flow as free as air through pipes. Of course not every black believed in every article of this creed, but every black believed something on these lines, or, at least, this fantasy was believed in by the more childish part of the blacks. And who knows how much despondency and betrayal is felt by that sensible and adult part of a person whose childish fantasies have to die?
By the time Zimbabwe was born there were three countries to learn from. Mozambique’s economy was in ruins, partly because the whites had been thrown out, with all their expertise. In Tanzania Nyerere, inspired by the examples of the Soviet Union and China, where collectivization had led to the deaths of tens of millions of people, introduced forced collectivization and the