African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [88]
The experts argue about the meaning of some of these scenes, these figures. The trouble is, we are looking at them through our eyes, and there is no way of knowing, I say, how those people then saw the world. I am with an expert who probably knows as much about Bushmen paintings as anyone in the world. He disagrees with me: we can find out how they thought and understand their cosmology from these pictures.
Sometimes, when you are with an expert you casually say something and then know you have touched an area where people have been arguing, speculating, for years.
He said, ‘Perhaps you enjoy the idea that we don’t understand them, and can’t understand them?’
It is true: there is something restful in the thought that thriving and successful peoples have lived and we have no idea at all how they experienced what we call reality.
If you turn your back on the overhang of pictures you stand high, looking out over a landscape that goes miles, to hills, to mountains, the rim of hot blue sky. Below are patterns of fields: those lines that separate fields, are they contour ridges or fences? If fences, or hedges, then that is not an African concept, but then contour ridges weren’t either. The people who made these pictures, little people, short stubby made-for-hardship people, stood here long before the Africans of these times were here, looked out over this landscape and saw–what? How do we know they saw what we see? Perhaps when they looked at hills, valleys, trees, they owned what they saw in ways we don’t understand, as the Aborigines in Australia can be part of a landscape through song. Perhaps, looking out, their backs to the pictures they had made, they were the landscape, were what they saw. Sometimes people now have flashes or moments when it is as if they are ‘part of everything’, merge into ‘everything’ they flow into trees, plants, soil, rocks and become one with them. How do we know that this condition, temporary and only occasionally achieved, and with rare people, was not their permanent state?
Arguing enjoyably about these possibilities we climbed back down through the rocks to the car, to have lunch. Two black youths have come from the huts to gather yellow fruit lying all over the ground, fallen from the mahobahoba trees that grow here in a grove. That is what they are pretending to do, for politeness’ sake, but really they want to watch us. We set out china plates, knives and forks, glasses. We spread out cold chicken and salad and orange juice. Should we ask them to join us? But they are keeping just far enough away to make that awkward. Besides, there is not enough for four. We eat, while they hang about, watching, watching, leaning to pick up one of the yellow fruits, putting it in their mouths, leaning down again, standing up to stretch, and yawn and turn away, pretending indifference–and then again they pick up fruit and stare at us.
We forget that it is still rare for poor people far from a town to observe the lives of rich whites or, these days, the rich blacks.
‘They are looking at something unattainable,’ says my companion, indicating the big American car, built for a life on rough roads, and the basket, the plates, the glasses, the cutlery. ‘They are already twenty-five years old, and they aren’t young enough to have taken part in Mugabe’s educational revolution that says every child, girl or boy, must get a secondary education. They have probably done four or five years in school. They are unemployed. They dream of the good life in town. They will never have a car and a bungalow made of brick, with glass windows and curtains and a three-piece suite.’
When we had finished eating, we packed everything into the basket,