African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [64]
This pay night, just as it was then, is a colourful scene. All the women wear bright store dresses, headcloths, flashing bangles and beads, and it is they who contribute the gaiety, for the regular workers are dressed no better nor worse than the farmers, which is to say casually, if not scruffily. The seasonal male workers cannot begin to compete with their women. Everyone has shoes, these days. Nearly everyone wears a good cardigan or jersey.
It is a noisy scene, too. I sit there with my black eye, my bruised forehead, and the women are joking about the eye. No need to know the local language: women all over the world would be joking in just this way.
The paying out of the money goes like this. A name is called, and into the verandah comes a man or a woman. The little girls’ mother says a greeting in Shona: she has a good friendly way with her, and a brief conversation ensues, with jokes and laughter. The manager opens the relevant envelope and the money is spread out on the table, to be checked–the pitiful few notes and coins, but no one complains.
Throughout this scene the two little white girls stand watching. One is twelve, one ten. They wear very brief shorts and heavy sweaters. Their sweaters cover the shorts, and they look as if they are naked under them. They are innocent, and unaware of how they must strike the Africans, who are eyeing them, shocked. Since they were born they have lived among Africans and it has always been their right to wear anything they fancied, go about almost naked if they liked. I remembered how, in the 1930s, the girl from the next farm to ours, who had just reached fourteen and the age for self-assertion, appeared on the rocky crown of our hill, getting out of the car in tiny shorts, a halter top and high heels. My mother was shocked. My father was agonized. ‘What must they be thinking? Their women never show themselves like that.’ ‘What about their breasts?’ demanded my mother. ‘They sometimes go about with bare breasts.’ ‘Yes, but that’s their custom. You’d never see a black woman with a brassière and shorts that wouldn’t cover a mango.’ ‘Well, that’s our custom,’ said my mother, defending what she hated. ‘But we should be setting a good example,’ he said, and again, as he did so often, ‘What can they be thinking of us?’
The decades roll past and behold there is the new university on the hill near Harare, and a letter in the newspaper. ‘After a dance at the University you see the black students lying entwined on the grass in the dark, two by two, kissing and much more than that. When they were asked why they behaved like this, since it is not any part of their traditional behaviour, they replied, with straight faces, “But we learned it all from you.”
Similarly, a delegation of black women went from Zimbabwe to Israel to visit kibbutzim. They behaved arrogantly, using high peremptory voices, ordering people about. When asked why they were so rude to their hosts, they answered: ‘But that is how our white madams behave, so we thought it was the way we should behave.’
Next afternoon I was walking with Annie along the road on the mountainside above the house when an old man in ragged clothes, with a thick staff like a Biblical patriarch, came towards me. He stopped when he saw Annie, held out his staff horizontally against her, gripped in fists that trembled, and angrily said, ‘Call the dog.’ Annie was not threatening him but she blocked his way and knew that she did: she was full of wicked enjoyment. ‘To heel,’ I said, uncertain whether she would obey me. I was remembering this dog was a bull terrier, and part of the house’s defences, like the security fence whose gates these days stood open. The old man’s fear said everything about her function. She did not come to heel. The man could have killed me and the dog: all the terrors and the hatreds of the Bush War were in his eyes. ‘Sit,’ I tried. Slowly Annie lowered her scarred haunches, but did not take her eyes off the old man’s face. He