African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [89]
As we got into the car baboons were barking from the ledge where the paintings were. They had been watching us from some safe place, and now had come to inspect the ledge to find out what we had been doing, and if we had left anything. Soon, when the black youths had gone back to their huts, the baboons would come here to pick up the yellow fruits, perfectly ripe today, for these fruits have a moment of ripeness, just a few hours, and before that they are sour and rough on the tongue, and afterwards slimy, repulsive.
A COMMERCIAL FARM
We drove on the Golden Stairs road, past the Mazoe dam. This area is famous for its oranges, for its various agriculture. The farm is near the Umvukwes, that is to say, Mvuri–or the Dyke. How did it happen that Mvuri, a soft rumbling word, was heard with a clacking k? A mystery. That Chinhoyi should be heard as Sinoia, Gweru as Gwelo, Mutare as Umtali–not hard to understand. Soon we were near the Dyke, with its load of billions of years. I have on my mantelpiece a small slice of rock, once clay, and in it a fossil fish that was blithely swimming along when some cataclysm sunk it in choking ooze. The label says this little fish, Dapalis Macrurus, is thirty million years old, a matter for awe, but the clay that surrounds it must be thirty millions old too, but no one slices up and sells ancient clay to sit on people’s mantelpieces with labels that say, This rock is thirty, or three hundred million years old. Clearly, for awe, we need a form, the outline of a fish as delicate as a skeleton leaf; or the Dyke, which we can see dividing the landscape, a visible announcement of extreme age; we need upthrusts of granite which we gaze at and think, Here we touch the archaic, here is real antiquity, as if the soil they are embedded in, a million or so years younger, is worth less of our human respect.
The farm is an old one, that is to say, was ‘opened up’ not long after the Colony began. The farmhouse is old and comfortable, with the deep verandahs of those days, like big shady rooms. But first we sit out under trees. Under layers of leafy branches, we sit and listen to ring doves, cinnamon doves, the emerald spotted dove, and the different kinds of louries. The heat is heavy, and the bird sounds, by long association, seem the voice of the heat. The temperature is well up into the nineties, but it is the dry snapping highveld heat that does not sap and undermine like the wet heat of sea coasts. We drink tea. We drink varieties of fruit juice. We discuss, what else, politics. I am on the alert for the babyish querulous grumbling of the whites only six years ago, but no, all that has gone. This is what I listened to all through my childhood on the verandahs: farmers grumbling about the government which always and in every country is hostile to farmers. The government and the weather, between these two anarchic tyrants farmers are for ever ground down, no matter what powerful lobbies they operate, no matter how well they are doing.
The Commercial Farmers have an energetic organization and meet continually with government, to the point that other groups complain the Commercial Farmers are unfairly represented. The Commercial Farmers are always being told how much they are valued, are proud they produce difficult crops that bring in the needed foreign currency.
My room in Harare is now full of reports, analyses and abstracts and those dealing with the Commercial Farmers–still mostly white–are interesting for the number of times they will repeat that Commercial Farmers have nothing to fear. This is because the masses of the black landless look with impatience at these big farms of rich good soil and complain