African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [54]
‘Ah. Well. It’s nice to see everyone again.’
A customer arrives, a black woman with three large daughters. She wants buttons for cardigans she knits for sale through mail order. I wander off to African Agriculture. Here there are real crowds, but while they are animated, and having a good time, they are cautious too, for they are as afraid of an eruption of drunk freedom fighters as the whites are. They are absorbed in the plants and vegetables. Very few of these people are cut off from their villages, the country, the bush. I thought of Finland where they said there is not one person who does not have a toehold in the countryside: parents, a brother, a sister married to a farmer. These people crowding to examine the produce knew what they were looking at. All kinds of maize, millet, rapoka, munga–these grains I knew, but there were many others. Roots and leaves from the bush that are used to make relishes for the porridge: I knew the leaves only as plants I saw when walking through the bush. Legumes–dozens of different kinds. Potatoes and sweet potatoes, and pumpkins like yellow boulders, and all the varieties of gourds and squashes. These plants were what the Africans knew and grew, and have always grown, but Zimbabwe, the paradise country, can grow anything at all, from the soft fruit, plums and peaches and apples of the Eastern Districts, to the tropical fruits of the Burma Valley, to the oranges and lemons and grapefruit of the Mazoe Valley, to avocado pears, and mangoes and lichees and kumquats, to…is there anything this sun-blessed, star-blessed country cannot grow?
Crowds drifted from admiring their food, displayed in pots and baskets and laid out on cloth, to the stands beside the place where tribal dancing was going on. The drums livened our feet, and made us move together, and some of the women were dancing, in groups, while men stood by clapping. The tiers were so full you would think not one body could possibly find room to squeeze in, but all the time people, who stood looking wondering where they might fit, found that a space had opened somewhere, and the impossible was happening. Groups of whites stood watching. One group was the new race of Aid workers, or perhaps people from an embassy, friendly, casual, as at home here as they would be, next year, in Ethiopia, Jakarta, Peshawar. Another group was South African soldiers. There was something about them, just as there used to be about the Vietnam veterans. The year before I had come to know a South African who had done two years in Namibia. His face was ravaged, destroyed. The South African soldiers from Angola and Namibia have had to forgive themselves too much. Their faces, many of them, were like wounds. These young white South Africans, here as tourists, looking at Zimbabwe, saw something that they, in The Republic, had fought to prevent. No one looked at them, except covertly, as I was doing. The Africans going past unconsciously (or perhaps knowingly) gave them plenty of space, and lowered their voices.
Generally, the black crowds here ignored the whites. They did not want to have to see us, or, perhaps, genuinely did not see us.
The South African soldiers went on standing where they were, looking at the dancing which here was not a show put on for tourists. The soldiers were all high on something, and it was not alcohol.
I went off and was stopped by a young woman dressed in a wonderful combination of smart red suit, black heels half a yard high, and a head cloth in many colours. ‘Will you give me an interview for my newspaper?’ she wanted to know. We sat opposite each other in the Press Pavilion, and chatted about this and that. Then she asked, ‘What do you think about Zimbabwe?’ We were getting on pretty well, so I risked, ‘At the moment it is breaking my heart.’
She at once sobered out of her smiling professionalism, and says, ‘Yes, I agree. But perhaps a positive message?’
‘Viva Zimbabwe,’ I say. For no reason at all, there are tears in my eyes, and, I see, in hers too. We realize we might easily