African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [63]
Now, looking back, things I took for granted come forward: for instance, what the women wore. For decades every black woman in Southern Rhodesia and Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland wore blue and white, indigo and white, patterned cotton stuff. Whose idea was it? At some point somebody must have said–who?–‘We are going to manufacture this type of blue and white cloth for the women of Southern Africa.’ The patterns look Indonesian. The cloth was manufactured in Manchester along with kenti cloth for North Africa and the kangas of Kenya. The great bales from England arrived in ships, were put on to trains, and the rolls of cloth, smelling of dye, found themselves on the shelves of hundreds of ‘kaffir truck’ shops. It was beautiful material, strong, good quality. The women looked beautiful. This cloth could not be worn by poor women now, for it is associated with the shameful past. Meanwhile, it is made up into luxury items for boutiques in the big cities of The Republic, and bought by fashionable white women and fashionable black women who may have never known its history. In Zimbabwe I saw it covering sofas and chairs in a farmhouse, and as curtains in Harare. Unwritten social history: in this case probably in the records of the great cotton manufacturers of the Midlands.
The farm workers who stood in the dusk waiting to be paid, the sunset fading behind them, were not the same from one year to the next. They moved from farm to farm, if there might be a shilling or even a sixpence more in their pay envelopes at the end of the month, or a kinder farmer, or a better water supply–a good well, a nearby river. Only the bossboy and his assistant, and a man skilled at driving the teams of oxen, and the carpenter and a man who knew about machinery, stayed on from year to year.
Now, in 1982, I again sit on a verandah on a pay night, watching. It is an enclosed verandah, not a large one. On one side is the kitchen, on the other a bathroom, and doors lead off to the main part of the house. The dogs sleep here on three car tyres covered with old sacks. They sit beside us now, one, two, three, watching, interested.
There is a small table with money on it and the farm manager, who is no longer called a bossboy, sits beside the mother of the little girls, as an equal. She has spent the whole day working out the money due to everyone, because the Coffee Farmer is in too much pain. A dog has leaped up and jarred his broken shoulder. ‘A little setback, I am afraid,’ he says, and will not laugh when we tease him for being so heroic.
Outside the verandah is a crowd of labourers, men and women. It is five in the afternoon, and the sun is slipping behind the tall dark mountain.
The workers are of two kinds, the regulars who are paid the legal minimum wage, thirty pounds a month, or more, and the casual labourers who come for the harvest. They are paid very little, but work is short. Every day men and women arrive to ask the farmers for work, and say they will work for less than the minimum wage, ask how are they going to feed their families? ‘I can’t pay you less,’ say the farmers virtuously. ‘It would be against the law. Well, don’t blame me, take it up with the government–it’s your government now, isn’t it?’
This is, in short, one of those well-known ‘grey’ areas that spoil the maps of theoreticians. Casual labour does not, or should not exist…hardly exists at all…soon will