African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [72]
A United Nations official remarked, not in an official report, but during one of those unofficial conversations that are probably more influential: ‘It is not exactly unknown for the victorious side in a civil war to line their pockets, but Zimbabwe is unique in creating a boss class in less than ten years and to the accompaniment of marxist rhetoric.’
But reading newspapers from Zimbabwe, letters from Zimbabwe, listening to travellers’ tales, what came across was not the flat dreary hopelessness of Zambia, the misery of Mozambique, but vitality, exuberance, optimism, enjoyment.
AIR ZIMBABWE
That night on Air Zimbabwe, November 1988, announcements were made like this: ‘Comrade Minister, ladies and gentlemen, please fasten your seat belts…’ ‘Comrade Minister, ladies and gentlemen, the non-smoking sign has been switched off and…’ The Comrade Minister was said as if the minister were a box of sweets to be shared out among us passengers. On board were many large and solidly-suited black men on their way home from international conferences, making us whites seem a casual and unserious lot. There was one person who united us all in respectability, compared to his magnificent otherness: a pop star, a young black man glittering and swaggering, like a bullfighter or a Pearly King. Six years earlier the air hostesses had been as nervous as foster-parents on trial, but now they were maternal and firm, and when the lights were turned down and the troubadour sang gently to his guitar, they would have none of it, and ordered him to sleep, preferring their lullaby, ‘Comrade Minister, ladies and gentlemen, the captain and the cabin staff wish you good night.’
Immigration was a confident young man, Customs another, and there at last were the skies of Harare, a deep and sunny blue, and the foliage was rich green, the rains having come last week. I was driven through a suburb that this time I was actually seeing, inappropriate emotions having taken themselves off. What I saw was streets that kept going out of focus and blurring with remembered street patterns and vanished buildings. We are all of us used to towns that collapse here and there in geysers of dust, quickly transforming themselves into towers, gardens, new streets, but I had not gone through this day-by-day process with Salisbury, which is like living with a person: you hardly notice the slow erosion of a face, or how features re-create themselves. When I left in 1949, when I visited in 1956, the town was still a cross-hatching of avenues and streets sketchily laid over the veld, ratified by trees and gardens as a town. Now you drive through the central part, business and administrative, to get to Harare’s expanding suburbs, glossy, rich, with gardens that in Britain you would have to pay an entrance fee to see. I said, ‘Do you realize what a paradise you people live in?’–and remembered I had said that before, though it was not what I thought when I lived there.
This house is deep under trees that hold the heat off, and there we were in a room with gardens on two sides, and soon we stood in the garden itself, two acres of it, containing, as a quick census established, several hundred different kinds of plants. Birds swooped about, notably the purple-crested lourie, with its creaking fateful cry.
In the old days, visiting a farm, you were ‘taken around the place’. It is the settlers’ instinct, showing to fellow civilizers of the wilderness what has been achieved, and on behalf of all of them. ‘See what I’ve carved out of the trees, out of the grasslands, see my house, my animals, my plants, my good strong roof which may very well have to shelter you too sometime…’ so a dog eases itself into a new sleeping corner, fitting his back into a curve, stretching out his legs. He drops his muzzle gently on his paws…‘Yes, that’s the size of it, that’s what it is like, this place of mine.’
When Ayrton