African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [49]
At supper–fifteen people, family friends, visitors, a scene of peace and plenty–all the talk had been of war. Again I heard the note of bitter longing and regret, when they remembered how at nights they lay in the bush under the stars, and tried to stave off sleep because of the splendour of the skies, and listened to the silence of the bush–full of danger, and that was at least half the point. ‘The best time of their lives’–what else? And with a thousand times more reason than when my father talked of the best time of his life, meaning the companionship of soldiers. ‘I’ve never known that again…’ But that was the trenches. Longing, regret, nostalgia–for what? More and more I think that these, our most powerful emotions, longing or regretting, are about something else, some other good or lack. There’s a Companionship few of us have known, which we dream of, and in war it comes close, for a time. With Death as its price. Then the War is over, and suddenly everything tells these men they are no longer young. It is not a long slow attrition, which is how most people experience the onset of middle age. During the War years they have been valued and have valued themselves for the attributes of young men: physical strength, toughness, endurance, bravery. And for years they have been in an earlier stage of culture, where men hunted other men, to kill them. No wonder memories of war are such a strong drug. And all over Zimbabwe black men who had fought for six, seven, eight years, in the forests and kopjes and vleis, sometimes from the age of ten, or eleven, had endured that cruel war, so much worse than we were ever told in the newspapers, had fought inadequately equipped, and often untrained–these men were remembering a time of hope. For years they had lived in and off the bush, their fathers’ heritage, if not their own; they had been with equals and friends, the white man and his cold cutting ways held in focus as an enemy, and a long way off. They were permanently drunk on the most satisfying rhetorics, so much better than alcohol, and on danger. Now they were back in civilian life, most in poorly paid jobs, or jobless and clinging on to the often semi-criminal fringes of town life, or jobless in villages. Or they were crippled and being ‘rehabilitated’, sometimes being taught to read and write. Probably the people who could understand each other best of all in Zimbabwe, in 1982, were the white and black veterans of that war. But they had to hate and condemn each other.
ANIMALS
The ‘gun-boy’, a man of fifty or so, is out every night after baboons and wild pigs. Driving along the side of a mountain through the bush, in these parts more like rain forest, suddenly there is a troop of baboons and their young crossing the dangerous exposed road.
‘Ahhhhh,’ sighs the visitor from Europe.
‘Vermin,’ snaps the farmer.
A group of wild pigs, the little ones running after mother…‘Oh, look, look at the little pigs.’
‘Vermin, rubbish,’ says the farmer.
Baboons raid the coffee fields, can lay waste a whole field in a night, and have learned they can get high on coffee beans. They do get high on coffee beans. Pigs root up the vegetable gardens and chase the house dogs and kill them when they can.
The man with the gun is essential to the mountain valley and its farmers. Baboons and pigs and people cannot live together, too bad.
In the forests of Mozambique there is no game left, because of the War. Nothing, all killed.
But every morning, when I got up, about five-thirty, to be in time to see