African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [92]
As we drove back to Harare there was a road block, to check for licences and the conditions of tyres. The death-traps, the rattle-traps, of six years ago are being cleared off the roads.
In 1982 the road blocks were feared. They were often operated by soldiers, and the raw mood of that time made it a nervous business, stopping so that the inside of a car, the boot, even the engine, could be checked for weapons. Now a smiling young man asked some routine questions and glanced at the tyres.
‘Have you work for me?’ he asked Ayrton R.
‘What sort of work?’
‘Any sort of work. Gardener, housework–I can learn to cook.’
‘I am sorry, but I don’t have any work.’
‘I am sorry you don’t have work for me.’
‘Goodbye. Go well.’
‘Go well. Goodbye.’
We drive on. It seems that whenever you are stopped by the police on a country road, they ask for work. ‘They want to be in town. That is the great basic fact about this country. Everyone, but everyone, wants to be in the towns. Any town. Why should Zimbabwe be any different from the rest of the world? Other countries haven’t solved the problem, why should we be expected to? Is Mugabe going to pass a law forbidding people to come into the towns? If he did, there’d be another revolution and he knows it.’
A TEA PARTY
The room is full of elderly people, white, middle class. They are retired civil servants, widows of public servants. The atmosphere is pale, relaxed, and I see I have been meeting only passionate partisans of Zimbabwe, whether for idealism or self-interest. It is often said of these people that they might never have left Tunbridge Wells or Cheltenham. This is only partly true. For one thing their side was badly defeated in a war and that means they have had to accommodate failure.
The new Zimbabwe, chaotic, ebullient, violent, full of energy, full of optimism, is not a match for their natural temper, which tends toward the ironic, the philosophical. They cannot leave here, because pensions are not paid outside Zimbabwe. But would they if they could? Probably not. People who precipitously left for South Africa have come back. ‘Once we lived in a wonderful country called Southern Rhodesia. Now we live in a wonderful country called Zimbabwe.’ Outside a gate in one of the suburbs the house’s name is announced as ‘The Gap Took Us’–from a family who Took the Gap and returned. Where in the world would these ageing people be able to live as they do here, soaked in sunlight and able to afford a servant? But many do not have servants, pride themselves on their self-sufficiency. The worst is that they cannot now make trips to Britain. The money allotted for travelling is very little. If you do not have well-heeled relatives able to pay for you, then you stay here. ‘There are worse places to be stuck in,’ I observe and am told: ‘It’s all very well for you, you fly in, you fly out, but you have no idea of the cultural isolation. The newspapers only carry local news or if it’s foreign news it’s communist propaganda. Thank God for the BBC. We can’t afford to subscribe to overseas newspapers on our pension.’
These people do not talk about politics, or say, ‘Why doesn’t Mugabe…’ They cultivate their gardens, and go in for charitable works, just as they would at Home.
But they are not the only refugees from the past. Today, being driven through the most prestigious suburb of them all, I was told it is full of well-heeled whites who are born-again Christians. ‘Yes, that’s how losing the War took them! They can’t face life just as themselves, without holding on to God’s hand. No, this whole suburb is jumping with God, comrade, jumping with God.’
GARFIELD TODD
Garfield Todd, ex-Prime Minister, now a hero of the Revolution, magnificent, white haired, eighty years old and alive with energy and optimism, sits on the verandah of his daughter’s house. But it is not really a verandah. Hearing she meant to build herself a house, he said, ‘You aren’t going to have another of these houses, a string of rooms with a verandah along them? No, I shall design you a house.’ So it is more