African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [51]
They talk, they talk, they talk…about the regiment that is stationed just a couple of miles away. No, they are not the Koreans, nothing like the Fifth Brigade, but they are far from the nice tidy soldiers of modern Europe, kept tucked out of sight when not in use. They behave very badly, not above stealing what they find unguarded. They terrorize women they find alone, join beer drinks when they should not and get very drunk. There is no redress.
Why are they here?
When the boundary between Portuguese East Africa and Southern Rhodesia was drawn, two officials met for drinks and settled the matter, by throwing dice…true or false? When an anecdote is told and retold, and it is, and has been, about frontiers all over Southern Africa, then you have to wonder. It is told with relish, by the whites–tamed characters admiring their buccaneering predecessors. (‘Drake was really a terrible ruffian, you know.’) I have also heard it told, with relish, by blacks, in the spirit of, Well, what can you expect!
Lord Salisbury said: ‘We distributed mountains, rivers and lakes among us without knowing where they were.’
Presumably he would not have approved of the two raffish young officials, one Southern Rhodesian and one Portuguese, sharing sundowners and dicing for the frontier that runs four miles away.
The trouble is, it cuts a certain African tribe in two. One part is now in Mozambique, the other in Zimbabwe. Because Mozambique is having such a bad time, and there is famine, and because the Africans on that side see no reason to love or respect the frontier, they come over to Zimbabwe to get food from their relatives, who are well off. This is against the law of the new Zimbabwe, which has to be enforced by Comrade Mugabe’s soldiers, referred to by the locals as the Comrades. This battalion is the real ruler of the area. The whites hate them because wherever they are, there is anarchy. The blacks hate them because they are always raiding homes to see if they are harbouring ‘brothers’ from across the frontier.
The whites: ‘They behave as if they own the place.’
‘Do you think the fact they have just won this war has anything to do with it?’
‘I’m not having it, that’s all! The women have been up complaining again. I’ve sent a message to the chap in command. But what can he do? There’s no discipline.’
But the battalion had its uses, too.
‘Something is under way,’ goes the talk on the verandahs. ‘We’ll tell you when it’s over.’
We stand on hillside looking down at the little huts of the Squatters, poor, makeshift, and, instead of being grouped like a traditional village, they are isolated, dotted here and there, in clearings in the forest where the trees have gone and the soil is slipping away down the mountainside.
This is what was under way…the battalion had been ordered by the government to clear some Squatters off a farm. In charge of The Operation was a young Scotsman, who hated what he had to do: he had not slept for two nights, he said. After The Operation he came in for a drink. The army had gone in with lorries, cleared everything out of the huts, set fire to them. The women had stood watching the huts burn. There were over seventy women. It was considered significant that two sewing-machines were found, twenty sacks of mealies, and a suite of store furniture. It was taken for granted that these goods were for the anti-Frelimo Terrorists, or Renamo, who–the people around here believe–are sure to win. I ask, ‘But surely these people wouldn’t support South Africa? That’s what it amounts to?’ ‘Look, these are peasants, behaving like peasants–like all the people in villages, poor bastards, while the War was on. They kept their heads down and survived. They know how to survive. Those poor bastards want to eat. People need to eat you know. They don’t eat under Samora Machel. They think they will eat better under the other crowd. That’s all there is to it.’
The lorries took the Squatters down to Mutare, to be resettled,