African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [98]
Ayrton R. appears from his lodging half a mile away, and remarks that if the Aid organizations had any sense of priorities, they would set up teams of engineers to go around schools, Growth Points, clinics, to mend simple things like valves, which no one bothers to mend. They could take with them youngsters who would learn how to put right a valve, a tap, or a broken pipe.
‘The trouble is that all these poor bloody kids, in all the schools of Zimbabwe, have decided that only a literary education is worth having. Where do you find the ultimate bastion of respect for the Humanities? Not in Thatcher’s Britain! No, in the bush, where generations of black kids have decided they are too good to be engineers and electricians, and are taking O-levels in English which they mostly fail.’
‘Quite so. This is where the English aristocratic contempt for people who work with their hands–engineers or technicians–stops. In schools like this. Do you suppose those effete types who said in England, “I can’t ask him to dinner, he’s in trade!” or “I can’t let Angela marry that man, he’s only an engineer” would have believed that, roll on half a century, you’d find black kids stuck in the bush hundreds of miles from Harare unwilling to soil their hands with manual work? Would they recognize their heirs?’
‘I was in an office in Harare. An American Aid worker was arguing that the education being given to the children was inappropriate, what was the point of teaching them the British syllabus, with books suitable for Europe? What was needed was a good basic technical education. A black woman who was waiting her turn turned furiously on her. She said, “I see you whites are still just the same. You don’t want our children to have a real education. Oh no, that’s for your children. We want a good education for our children, just the same as yours.”’
‘There you are, an aristocrat! Do you suppose she would recognize her predecessors?’
Conversation on these lines entertained us through a breakfast of semolina and tea.
Jack went off to class, to be there by seven-thirty. He pointed out that most of his pupils would have got up by half-past four, or five at the latest. The girls would have fetched water, cut wood and cooked porridge, waiting on the boys as well as on their elders. Some of them would then have walked up to four or five miles to school through the bush. Most do not bring food to school. It is common for pupils to faint from lack of food. This is true too of the small children in the primary school, who might go through until four in the afternoon without a bite to eat or even a drink. To get water means walking a mile to the well, and, oddly enough, they lack energy.
When Jack has gone, instructing us to turn up at such and such a time to lecture his pupils, Ayrton R. describes the room he has spent the night in. It belongs to another ex-pat teacher, who has departed to Britain for the holidays. The room is like a time-capsule, for the walls are covered with CND posters, Greenpeace posters, and pictures of heroes like Che Guevara and Castro–the ‘progressive’ stereotype of five years before. Large numbers of young teachers, inspired by the rhetoric of marxist Zimbabwe, have arrived in bush schools to find themselves disillusioned. In order to do their