African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [84]
The Africans in the car today tell me that he is now famous for quite different qualities. He is bad to his servants. He has too many girlfriends. He drinks. He likes going abroad too much, wangles himself on to the commissions and committees so he can have trips to America and Europe. And it is well known he is one of the Ministers involved in the current car scandals.
After half an hour or so of discussion the driver calls everyone to order. ‘Now, wait a minute, just–wait–one–little minute! What is this I hear? I think we have proved it is better to be poor, not rich? This poor Chef here, his character destroyed, ruined by success–a pity he wasn’t left just where he was. Better to live like a dog, kicked by Life. Can it be this is what we have decided?’
‘If that is what we have decided,’ says his wife, ‘then we must undecide it. Better to be a good dog than a bad Chef? No. Not me.’
‘It’s all right,’ says her husband, driving on. ‘You’re safe. My salary won’t allow you to be corrupt.’
‘A pity, my dear.’
COMMERCIAL FARMERS
Are the Commercial Farmers good when they are black? The reply is that many have gone bankrupt. ‘They seem to think’ (the speaker is a white farmer who certainly works hard) ‘that all you have to do is buy a farm and then it runs itself. They buy a store, a hotel, a transport business and a farm, and try to run them all. The farms are the first to suffer, but they don’t always realize that: it’s easy to put a few mombies on a farm and call it farming.’ (Mombies, the word for cattle, sounds like the lowing of cattle, when soft, contented, conversational. It is a word pleasant to use and to hear.)
‘And so they aren’t good farmers?’
‘They are good farmers when they are good farmers. But the really good black farmers are the small farmers. They do it properly.’
THE SMALL FARMERS
They do it properly on old-fashioned technology. Sometimes a small tractor is labouring across a small field, but the level of technology used by most blacks is the same as that used when my father was farming, by the whites. Oxen, not tractors, pulled ploughs, harrows, cultivators of the sort now to be found in farm museums, in Britain. Oxen dragged the wagon piled with sacks of grain or loads of manure.
The need for working oxen is what keeps the perennial debate between whites and blacks, conservationists and the farmers, alive and often acrimonious.
‘Your trouble is that you have too many mombies on your land. It is overstocked.’
‘My trouble is that I haven’t enough land. I need more mombies to do the work.’
All the Communal Areas I have visited are in wildly beautiful country. The people living here are poor. Their lives when the rains fail are hungry. But surely it is better to be poor here, in this sunlight, this beauty, than, let’s say, Bradford or Leeds. There ought to be different words for poverty that grimes and chills and darkens, and this poverty where people live in spleendour, lifted up on to the Altitude into ringing windy sun-scoured skies.
THE ALTITUDE
I had forgotten about the Altitude. Today, afflicted by a disinclination to do more than sit on the patio and watch the birds, I heard: ‘But you are still getting used to the Altitude.’ Where I was brought up the Altitude was held responsible for most ills. Being run down, another not easily defined condition, meant you should get off the Altitude, and getting on to it again needed a period of readjustment. The Altitude has a lot in common with contemporary dangers like radioactivity and ultra-violet rays which cannot be seen or felt, but strike you down nevertheless.
THE GREAT DYKE
The map of Zimbabwe shows that all of it stands high, except where certain rivers go, but along a ridge running slantwise on the eastern side, the Altitude is 5,000