African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [50]
HOTELS
On the road up to the Vumba are two hotels, old style, full of space and character, with verandahs, lawns and–birds. You sit out on a sunny lawn, overlooking mountains and forests, and drink tea, beer, and watch the birds flashing about in the trees. The game warden for this area is also linked with the hotel industry. He is full of woe because the kidnapping of the six tourists will put people off coming to visit. We sit about drinking this and that and play the game, ‘If I were…’ In this case, Minister for Tourism. We would advertise package tours for bird-watchers, promising old-fashioned hotels, full of charm.
THE NEW CLASS
In one of these hotels I sat with a friend in a corner of the bar. At the bar four very young, very smart black people. The two girls wore evening dresses, all bare backs and shoulder straps. The men were in dinner-jackets. They flirted and chattered and behaved stylishly. Film behaviour. My friend, an old-time white, and I were experiencing quite different emotions. Those girls, there–thirty-five years ago–that was me. I knew they felt as I did, aged nineteen, twenty, in my ever-so sophisticated dance dresses. They were desperate and unsure. My companion said, ‘They are civil servants from Mutare, up here on a night out. Well, good luck to them.’ Meaning, If that’s what they want, then that proves they are stupid.
ANTHROPOLOGY
Certainly not on the verandah, for it is too cold, but around the great fire, a dozen people, some visitors from Harare, talk about the news: if three of the six tourist hostages taken on the Victoria Falls road have been released, their captors say they will kill the others by a certain time. Several say it is a bluff, no one has been killed or will be killed. Then a man from Bulawayo says, ‘If the Matabele say they will do a thing, they do it. It is their culture.’ He told us he had lived with the Matabele during the War for months, had eaten and slept with them. When he came out of the bush it was hard to remember English, for a day or two. On cold nights, with one thin blanket each, he slept in a sandwich between two Matabele. He has nothing but admiration for the Matabele. When later it was confirmed the hostages had been killed, he said, ‘I told you so.’ Quite a few of the company love the Matabele, it turns out, and even more the Zulus, from whom the Matabele descended. There is present an historian and anthropologist, and he teases a South African girl. ‘Why do you love the Zulus? It’s because they are military people by nature. Soldiers. The Prussians of Africa. I can tell what a person’s like according to whether they like the Matabele or the Mashona. The Mashona are easy-going, creative, artistic, and witty, just like the Italians. That’s why the Italians who settled here after the Second World War got on so well with them. Both have a great gift for living. But white South Africans adore the Zulus, and certain types of white Zimbabweans adore the Matabele. Like to like.’
They talk, they talk, they talk obsessively about the new black leaders. They cannot stop talking about them. But already the harsh and angry judgements of my first few days are changing. Mugabe has this or that good quality. Nkomo isn’t too bad–a pity he’s in the dog-house. This is far from the hysterical turnabout that the Kenyan whites showed a surprised world: one week Jomo Kenyatta was a devil and a thug, the next a Grand Old Man.
One leader has no redeeming features at all: Edgar Tekere who when drunk went into a white farmhouse and murdered the farmer. Tekere is a fanatic, he is beyond redemption, and Mugabe should get rid of him. Edgar