African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [87]
This man says that when he is away from Zimbabwe he feels exiled from granite. It is the oldest rock in the world, says he: it came bubbling up from the world’s secret interior, slowly rising through layers of other rock to surface here. He can’t live without granite…I once knew a poet, a Yorkshireman, who spoke about rock in this way, but it did not have to be particular. The feel and the weight of rock, stone–any stone–in one’s hands, that was the thing. It gave substance to his life.
Should I ring up some appropriate office and enquire, my voice made stern with the ring of one in search of scientific exactitudes: ‘Just exactly how much is granite radioactive?’ Of course not: this country is a myth-breeder, it always was. Revolution, that maker of myths, has only made it easier for a voice to slip into that tone, careless, dreamy, proud, where one says, ‘Look at that granite mountain over there–I don’t know why they make such a fuss over Ayers Rock–imagine some great lizard crawling over it, the size of a railway train. A winged lizard…just the place for a dinosaur to lie out and soak in some sun…’
A PICNIC
Today I was taken to see the Bushmen paintings some miles from Harare. Again the drive through rich suburbs, then the rich red lands, then a Communal Area. This one is comparatively well-off. Most families have at least one member working in Harare, and the money comes back here. Or cash crops are grown on these small well-worked fields and taken in for sale. There are all types and kinds of dwellings, from the old pattern of groups of huts, to new brick bungalows standing by themselves in little gardens, with cars outside them.
To get to the paintings we had to turn on to a dirt road, where granite tumbled everywhere about us, in the shape of cliffs, hills and heaps of piled boulders. Heat sizzled out of the granite and down from a sky where there was not one cloud. The road goes through villages, where, if there is a car, then it is likely to be visitors for the paintings. Now there are plans to take small, carefully selected groups of tourists who can afford to pay well. As usual here is a collision between the need to look after these easily damaged paintings and the imperative to earn foreign exchange.
The road became wheel-marks through rough grass. We passed some people sitting out under trees, who greeted us. We greeted them, feeling awkward at being there. Half a mile further the road ended, we parked, and climbed cracked slopes, littered with rock, through granite boulders that always seem about to topple, but never do, to a baby cliff where you pull yourself up and then go crabwise to a ledge where once the Bushmen stood to make their pictures on a low overhang. And here you see why there are so few left of these rock records of the past. Once you could see rock paintings almost anywhere you searched among hills or boulders. There were some on our farm, sprightly half-effaced figures on the underside of a boulder. They were vandalized, deliberately destroyed. I remember watching white schoolboys throwing stones at a rockface covered with paintings, on and on, until they were chipped, cracked. Why? Because they were there? What is this need to destroy?
There is graffiti here, clumsy scrawls, a stick figure like a small child’s first efforts: this time, it