African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [96]
‘But it is running without those principles,’ I say. ‘What about all those young people we were talking to?’
‘No, it is not running, it is not running at all. The whole place is neglected, demoralized and dirty.’ And Jack is in despair.
We then embark on that discussion that I have already been part of several times, but not in a tiny brick room full of insects buzzing around the lamp, the frogs going hard at it outside. These ideas sound different in a house in Harare, not exactly abstract, since Corruption–the scale and the shamelessness of it–is frightening everyone, but certainly not as urgent.
What is extraordinary about all these embezzlements and thievings is that the perpetrators do not seem able to believe they will be caught. You will see in a newspaper–usually the Chronicle in Bulawayo, not the Herald, which is a conformist paper–a headline like, ‘Minister So and So–99 Counts of Fraud’. This headmaster here was stealing money and sleeping with schoolgirls for months, with everyone watching.
‘It is as if they have some area in their minds that blanks out the normal expectations of results of wrong-doing,’ says Jack. ‘If you don’t want to say, They’re barmy–which they obviously aren’t.’
Is this another Grey Area, where old customs, or ways of thinking, blur in contact with new ideas, new laws? Except that in the old society theft was theft, and severely punished. How is it that sane and intelligent people go in for large-scale theft apparently believing they are invisible, or that The Law has no eyes? ‘Or,’ says Jack, ‘that everybody isn’t talking about them.’
As for the schoolgirls, that is easy to understand. A girl of fourteen or fifteen is considered nubile, and, indeed, marriageable. The young teachers often sleep with the older girls, and then marry them.
‘But surely a headmaster should set a good example?’ demands Jack. And repeats that the headmaster is a man without character. This formula is allowed to sum up the conversation.
By now it is half-past seven, nearly time for bed. Jack says he is so tired by the end of the day he is asleep by eight.
Time to make a last trip to the toilet.
Zimbabwe has just held celebrations for the 100,000th Blair toilet. This toilet was evolved as part of the War against fly-borne diseases, and, too, against bilharzia, hookworm, dysentery.
The life-cycle of bilharzia goes like this. It doesn’t matter at what point you enter it. Let us take the moment when the snail that harbours the bilharzia fluke ejects it in the water of the river. This entity then enters the skin of some human bathing or washing clothes in the river. It makes its way to the liver, or bladder, or kidney, or some other suitable organ. There it does great damage. This disease afflicts millions of people in Africa, and in other countries too. But Africa is the worst. People die of it, and suffer all kinds of symptoms, one being lethargy, which is one of the reasons for the accusation that ‘Africans are born lazy’. (This is a white formula from the past.) A friend of my parents, a farmer, an energetic wiry man of the type described as ‘living on his nerves’ dropped dead one day, while apparently in the best of health. He was discovered to be ‘full of bilharzia’. When the fluke leaves the afflicted organ, it is excreted. The excreta is deposited in the bush–or was until recently. The rains wash the excreta into the river, and the bilharzia fluke enters the snail.
It is possible to fill rivers with poison to kill the bilharzia, but the poison kills a lot else as well. Besides, the next rains will dilute the poison and make it ineffective. It costs money to poison a river. It costs much less to treat a person for bilharzia. Once there were long, and painful, and complicated treatments for bilharzia, but now it is easier. Much