African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [47]
Which sometimes took surprising forms. A certain liberal white farmer (but the word liberal is a malediction) on Liberation called his workforce to him and said, ‘And now we shall all work together as equals. No more migrant labour on this farm. I shall give every one of you two acres of land to build a permanent home. The land will be yours. What you grow on it will be yours.’
‘And what do you suppose happened?’ demanded the white woman who was telling this tale, her face lit with hatred. ‘Well, what do you think? All the relatives moved in at once, there were hundreds of them. That idiot went to his permanently employed men and said, “Can’t you see that there won’t be any soil left here in five years’ time? It’ll be desert. Your friends are cutting all the trees down. You must send them away.” But of course they wouldn’t go. They could recognize a good thing when they saw it.’
‘And what happened?’
‘He went to Australia and he’s farming near Perth. And all his Squatters got their comeuppance anyway because his farm was purchased by the government.’
Verandah talk was not only of Squatters. When Mugabe was fighting his desperate war in the bush, he said other things that were less than intelligent. One was that compulsory dipping of cattle* was a sinister plot by whites to destroy the cattle–the mombies–which are warp, woof and weft in traditional African life. Compulsory dipping was in any case hard to keep up while the War was going on, but at Liberation the blacks at once stopped dipping, and as a result there were all kinds of diseases. Hard for the government to begin enforced dipping again. ‘But we thought you told us…’
The Comrades in the bush announced that making contour ridges to stop erosion was another ploy to undo the blacks. The bad results from this were in 1982 already visible. On African farms they were ploughing right across the contour ridges. Gullies formed, which became ravines, water rushed down them carrying precious soil. ‘You wait a few years,’ said ill-wishing or conservationist whites, ‘they won’t have any land left–but they’ll blame us for it, as usual.’
This concern for the land impressed me. When I was growing up the whites were land pirates in more ways than by grabbing it. When the government made contour ridging compulsory, and sent out surveyors to map the land, they grumbled. All that has been forgotten. If The Monologue in its various forms was boring, and you wished only to be somewhere else as it started up again–again, again–when these people talked about farming techniques, it was a very different thing. These reformed pirates and land grabbers know about inventions and discoveries from every part of the world. They experiment, they innovate, they wonder if tree planting in Scotland or the thousands-of-years-old tricks used to wring water from deserts being used by Israel could be applied to Zimbabwe. They discuss wind power, solar power, water-screws from the Middle East and Egypt, new ways of building dams, the introduction of drought-resistant plants from semi-deserts, the control of pests by other pests or helpful plants, the farming of eland instead of cattle.
I was taken to visit a farm which was ‘a bit of a show place, you won’t find many farms like this one’.
The couple had farmed in Northern Rhodesia, were among the hundreds of white farmers who left when it became Zambia. They went to the Transvaal and farmed successfully, but ‘They don’t know how to get on with the Affs down there. The Affs there aren’t friendly and nice like our Affs. They are sullen. I never saw a smiling face all the time I was there. So we decided to try Southern Rhodesia.’
Again history caught up with them, and inflicted on them a black government.
He was a remarkable farmer. The farm was more like a medieval manor, or perhaps a white farm in the old days, than farms now; full of workshops and mills, dairies, a blacksmith’s, a leather-worker’s shed. The farmer resembled a stereotype Texan, for he was tall, tough, rangy,