African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [79]
NOVELS
Someone who had the idea of researching the over one hundred novels written by blacks which will never be translated into English, found something unexpected. Whites figure in these novels hardly at all, or when they do, often as helpful and Olympian figures, taking a child to hospital, or giving a lift. But you can read a couple of dozen such books one after another and not meet one white character. ‘They are not interested in us,’ said the man who told me this, amused, ironic. ‘We assume they are fascinated by us, the way we are by them. But we are simply noises off, that is, down there in the villages.’
‘Down there…’–the phrase is sometimes used ironically, meaning the rapidly enlarging gap between the poverty of the countryside and the riches of the towns, not because the countryside gets poorer but because the towns get richer.
Ayrton R. and I, both brought up in the country, he in Matabeleland, I in Mashonaland, and both remembering how the whites sat around discussing the ways of the blacks, talked about these hundred or so novels as a revelation.
‘Then that means that if the whites left this country entirely most of the blacks wouldn’t even notice? Perhaps it would become like those countries up north which are rapidly going back to old Africa, as if the whites had never been there, everything is collapsing, nothing working, transport, telephones, roads, railways, the civil service, hotels–nothing works.’
‘Oh, no,’ says Ayrton R. at once. ‘The infrastructure here is too sound.’ He speaks protectively, and with pride.
Infrastructure is not a word that usually spends much time in my mouth, but I seem to be hearing it and using it, several times a day.
PASSIONATE PROTAGONISTS
A white person said…a black person said…I was taken to task by one of the people who loves the new Zimbabwe, and cannot endure the slightest blemish. Because blemishes undoubtedly exist, she insists even more on political definitions: a not unusual reaction. ‘We are all Zimbabweans now,’ she cries. ‘We aren’t black or white, we are people.’ I say her attitude is sentimental, unreal. She says mine is unhelpful, and anyway, what does it mean, black, or white?
I say nothing could be easier. White means all the shades from the ivory of skins that have never seen the sun to the café-au-lait of the mixed-race people–usually called Coloured, but it is a risky word, because the political ‘line’ changes so often. Black means the gradations from this same coffee to the velvety black of tropical Africa.
True that certain politicoes, particularly in the United States, have decided that ‘black’ is reactionary, but the people these sentimentalists claim to defend, namely, the blacks, use it all the time.
JESUIT ACRES
It was Cecil John Rhodes himself who gave the Roman Catholics so many fat acres. They have always run schools, convents, training centres, missions. Some of the best schools in the country are Jesuit, Dominican. It seems no one grudges them these acres.
If one were to say their record does not deserve unmixed praise, then what does?
For instance, a friend of mine, whose grandmother was the storyteller for her clan, a famous lady, replied when I asked him, Do you remember your granny’s tales, for if you do then you should record them before they vanish–‘I knew them when I was small, because that was how we Africans were taught about life then, through stories, but when I was put in Dombashawa School all that was beaten out of me. They said our culture was backward, and now I couldn’t remember even one