African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [95]
We drive through this denuded bush on a large road, then a smaller one, and turn off, and off again, each time on to rougher tracks, past notices that say, ‘The Happiness Secondary School Welcomes You!’ ‘The New Dawn School Welcomes You!’ Now we are on a rutted track in a Communal Area. There are few trees left. On we go, several miles, past a store, over a little bridge where women are washing clothes in a pool full of detergent suds, and there, ahead, is the school. Two schools in fact, the primary school, the secondary school. All the schools in the country are the same, built to a pattern, long, low, shed-like buildings, sometimes with narrow verandahs. This assembly of buildings occupies a large area, several acres. There are trees, most whole, and not mutilated, there are shrubs and even attempts at gardens. What you might think you were seeing, if you had not already learned these patterns of building say ‘school’, could be something on the lines of an army camp or depot or an internment camp, places that have to be quickly and cheaply erected.
We have been invited by a friend, a young man from England, who contracted to teach for a year, but volunteered for another year, with the possibility of a third. There is Jack, waving from outside a minute shed, or so it looks. The big Volvo makes the house look even smaller. The house has two small rooms. In one is a bed, a corner with hooks to hang a jacket or a shirt, a shelf for books. In the other is a table, gas stove, and a higgledy-piggledy of pots, pans, jugs, cans of water, kerosene for the hurricane lamp, vegetables, bags of mealie meal, tomatoes, a couple of onions. We have arrived in the middle of a school day. Jack goes off to his pupils, putting on a tie, rolling down his sleeves, according to regulation: teachers must set an example. Ayrton R. and I sit crammed among the paraphernalia while people drop in on pretexts, to look at us, for it is known that Jack is expecting ‘important visitors from Harare, from the University.’ They want to borrow a match, get a glass of water, or simply to say they are friends of Jack’s. They are a succession of lively, very young people, mostly boys. Some are teachers, but it is not easy to tell teachers from pupils.
Then Jack reappears and engages them in conversation in Shona. Ayrton R. who was born and brought up in the country does not know as much Shona as this young man does after a few months.
The Shona patterns of greeting at once melt you in admiration, and in apology for our gracelessness. Nothing like, How are you? or, Hello!
‘Good afternoon.’
‘Good afternoon.’
‘Have you spent the day well?’
‘I have spent the day well if you have spent the day well.’
‘I have spent the day well.’
‘Then I have spent the day well.’
Jack can now converse in Shona, not, he deprecates, about philosophy or politics, but on the, How is your sister? How is your health? Have you done your homework? level.
At sundown we walk off to the store about a mile away, over the little bridge where women are still washing clothes, through trees. We sit on a stone under a tree drinking Coca-Cola, watching the comings and goings at the store, and above is the sunset, backlighting heavy black clouds with scarlet and gold rays. The bird calls, the voices of the passing groups of people acquire the softened, distant note appropriate to nightfall, and we walk carefully in the dark over the rough track to the tiny house. On the way we are offered green mealies, sold much harder and older than we would choose to eat them. But Jack says, buying some for our supper, ‘If you are short of food you aren’t going to eat mealies before they have acquired their maximum size.’ We light the paraffin lamp, and in the dim light we eat the hard mealies and talk about the school. This headmaster, like the headmasters of three other schools in the area is ‘suspended’ for embezzling funds. He has also been having sex with the pupils. ‘He is a man without a character,’ says Jack. This diagnosis interests us and we discuss at length whether