African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [52]
‘Did they get their sewing-machines back?’
‘Impounded.’
‘And the maize?’
No one was comfortable. The Operation was a victory for the whites, giving them reassurance that the black government would at least sometimes enforce the law.
There was anger later when these Squatters were taken before a magistrate and ordered never to return. Not fined. Not remanded. Not put on bail. Told: Don’t do it again.
‘Of course they’ll do it again. They’re walking back up the mountain through the bush at this moment. The Minister of Agriculture keeps promising us, Yes, Yes, of course you can’t have Squatters on your farms, but the next thing he has one of those rabble-rousing meetings of theirs and he says the white farms are up for grabs, and promises them land. He knows there isn’t enough land. He never tells them that. He gets them all worked up roaring and shouting, and next day he comes to us, Oh don’t worry about a thing, just go on growing your crops, Zimbabwe couldn’t do without you.’
A few days after driving towards the Indian Ocean, Harare to Mutare, I drove back, not stopping, Mutare to Harare. Negotiations had gone on with the petrol station, where no one without a permit was served unless you were part of the local mechanisms of barter–services or favours or farm produce in return for a tank of petrol. The pipeline had just been cut again by Renamo, and the road was empty for miles at a time. Sometimes I find myself thinking, What luck to be living now, and it is often when driving alone in wild country, alone, or, as today, companioned. Not only is it permitted, this driving about where one wills, it is actually approved–though probably not for long. Make the most of it while it lasts, I guiltily admonished myself, dawdling or racing in the poisonous machine. On that day in Eastern Zimbabwe, through that landscape, under the tall cool sky, it was no good reminding myself that this was, in the minds of all the citizens, still a war country, with every tree or hill or turn of the road a reminder of killing.
Is there a more beautiful country in the world than this one?–combining magnificence, variety, freshness of colour with a way of speaking to you intimately about our story as a species (we originated hereabouts, so they say) as if you, this item of a moment in history were truly the heir of everything humankind has done and achieved. Survival is what this dangerous grandeur reminds you of: if we have all survived so much, then surely we can confidently hope…but we were nearing Harare and the road was no longer empty, and my companion was pointing out this car, or that lorry or bus, expostulating about the standards of driving. Liberation had released on to the roads thousands of vehicles that were not licenced and could never be licenced because of their decrepitude, but, ‘This government doesn’t care about a little thing like that, it’s shit-scared of its own people. It never prosecutes one of its own. If one of us offends, then that’s it, the police have time enough for that.’ But if many of the black drivers were bad, then the black men who drove the coaches and buses of the regular services were all good chaps: ‘I’d trust my life to them anywhere, any day.’ Certainly now my attention was withdrawn from the bush, the mountains, the sky, and all the associated scaly and furry thoughts banished, I had never seen a more interesting collection of jalopies, tin cans tied up with string, rusting mementoes of the days when ‘everyone’ had cars. They were, in short, just like the cars driven by the poorer white farmers of the old days. Each vehicle pumped out black smoke. Long before you glimpsed one of them toiling up a slope ahead, the greasy black clouds were drifting across the trees, and soiling the cool blue of the winter sky.
THE SHOW
The Harare Show was on. The Salisbury Show in the old days was part agricultural show,