African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [81]
There exists a solar stove, a natty little device, but it is not popular, has no emotional appeal. You can’t sit around a solar stove the way you can around a fire, gossiping. If everyone used the solar stove, then the forests of Zimbabwe would be saved. Similarly, there is a useful contraption called a digester, easy to make and cheap to install. A pit is dug near the living hut, and fed with a slurry of animal dung or plants. Another pit takes the spent slurry, to be spread on fields. From a small vent near the main pit a pipe leads methane gas into the hut, to the cooking area. In the middle of the hut we were shown was a large smoking log with a pot standing beside it, and the gas pipe was not working. That log has been burning in the middle of a cave, a hut, a hall for–how long? Thousands of years? Millions? The centre of communal life, family life, in every part of the world.
A COMMUNAL AREA
We were taken around by an instructor in agricultural and communal expertise, a middle-aged man called Peter Simbisai, an energetic character who was proud of what he and his kind are accomplishing. First to a family place of a traditional sort, a group of huts inside a fence. ‘Here,’ said he, ‘lives an old man with his sons and their families, all here, with him.’ Not looking at me, but past me, because of the criticism: ‘We aren’t like you people. You don’t mind if your children leave home at eighteen, perhaps going as far away as South America. We like to keep our families together.’ He spoke with reproach.
This kind of hut is not impressive from outside. Inside they are tall, airy, cool. A bench goes part of the way around the inside. About a quarter of the wall space is filled with cooking pots. Shelves hold clothes and crockery.
There is talk of a new tourist venture. Groups of people will be led on walking tours through the bush, spending their nights in villages–that is, in huts like this group of huts. Villages asked if they want to be on this tourist route have said yes.
We were driving through still fresh and uncut bush, the light and airy trees of Mashonaland, which are infinitely various, for unlike the forests of Europe, they have never been subjected to an Ice Age. That is why the trees and plants of Europe are so limited in kind: the Ice Age destroyed the old forests and the trees we know are what have taken hold since the ice retreated.
Peter wanted us to see something he said was important. Soon he was driving us through a Communal Area, an old one, which meant it had been a Reserve. I had known the Native Reserves in the old days. As the Colony of Southern Rhodesia was settled the blacks were moved off good land and put in the Reserves which were poor bleak places, often without roads, schools, clinics, even enough water. When Mugabe came to power he decided that the first necessity was to direct money to improve the rural areas. Someone who did not know what the Reserves used to be like might not be impressed now, taken to a Communal Area. They are still poor. What you at once see is that the bush is impoverished, full of stumps, and most trees have lost a limb, or two limbs, to the need for firewood. They have been carefully pruned by people who know very well that these trees of theirs are precious. The grass is thin. There are gullies of erosion, or the slope of a field shows a scattering of grit and pebbles where the rains have washed away the soil. Groups of huts may be at distances of as much as half a mile. The general effect is of emptiness, but in fact the soil is carrying as many people and animals as it can–more than it should in some areas. But what this imagined observer will not know,