African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [91]
‘They break my heart,’ says the farmer’s wife. ‘What’s going to happen to them?’
She says that the young people come up to this house to ask if they can borrow her books. She gives them detective stories, crime stories. She can’t keep up with the demand for her books. Ayrton R. protests that they are ready for much better. For instance, a young boy he knows of, from a rural school, reads Thomas Hardy. He has suggested Hardy to teachers in the remotest rural schools: with success. The farmer’s wife sounds unconvinced, but says she will offer more difficult books. The conversation slides into a familiar track with, ‘One of these Aid agencies could set up mobile libraries. They should offer everything from Enid Blyton to Garcia Marquez.’ ‘I simply don’t understand these Aid people. I wish I had the handling of some of that money.’ We amuse ourselves mentally setting up projects that would cost a fraction of the vast sums often wasted by the Aid agencies.
Then, the talk returns to the government: I am listening to what I now know is this time’s Monologue–or one of them.
Mugabe’s economic policy is ruining Zimbabwe because it is creating stagnation. Zimbabwe is desperate for investment, but why should people invest when they are allowed to take out of the country only five per cent: of course they invest in the Pacific Rim, where everything is booming. Socialist dogma is a killer, as they have found in every country in the world. You aren’t allowed to sack an incompetent worker: that means that you don’t employ them, for you have to carry them. This is only one of the policies you’d think were designed to prevent economic growth. Another is not being allowed to import farm machinery or even spare parts. You can only buy new machines through complicated deals that go like this. Someone outside the country sends a letter, backed by a bank, to the effect that he, she, is prepared to pay for–whatever it is, a tractor, a lorry. These documents are sent by a Zimbabwe bank to the foreign firm who will then supply the machine. But what of those people who don’t have relatives or friends outside Zimbabwe prepared to pay for the machines? As for spare parts…the government will not allot the currency, so machines stand idle, or you have to make trips down south to The Republic to get them, or you smuggle them in, or, using the famous ingenuity Southern Rhodesia was, and Zimbabwe is, so proud of, you invent spare parts or run machines on “faith, bits of string, rubber bands. But you can’t do that for ever”. The only people getting anything out of all this are the crooks in government who set up all kinds of rackets importing spare parts: that is one reason we don’t expect the policy to change. Too many people do well out of it. Or when Mugabe does permit a factory to make some machine, he says there can only be one factory, so, no competition and the prices are several times what they should be: all the disadvantages of monopoly capitalism, but in the name of Socialism.’
That is one Monologue.
Another overlaps the first. ‘Eight years this lot have been in power! Heroes of the Revolution! Look at them! What a bunch of crooks! One of them came visiting our school last month…’ (A school teacher is speaking, an idealistic young black man) ‘Where do they get all that fat from, the Chefs? If you pricked him great spurts of pure white pig’s fat would come out. He didn’t care about our pupils. He didn’t know about our problems. All he cared was to get through his inspection–but he didn’t know how to inspect, he didn’t even go into a classroom. He wanted to get back to Harare and feed his fat buttocks and his fat