African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [99]
‘Do you realize,’ demands Ayrton R., ‘the lunacy of it? There isn’t a school in Britain that doesn’t have television, a computer, telephone, Fax, copy machines, and some sort of library. There isn’t a child who doesn’t watch television, go to the cinema or on trips to museums and probably to France or Italy. In schools like this one there are classrooms with untrained teachers and too few textbooks, and that’s it.’
Some of the ex-pat teachers go home the moment their contracts expire, or, pleading illness, before. The various organizations, religious and otherwise, break in their young teachers by keeping them in Harare for a couple of months. But nothing in Harare can prepare you, says Jack, for the realities of a school like this one. Jack himself became mysteriously ill four months after arrival and had to stay in bed. It was with an effort he dragged himself up and back to work. He comes from a gentle family in the Home Counties, and has taught in London schools which struck him then as rough.
Jack told us to lock the door: we might think there was nothing worth stealing. We went through the bush towards the schools, passing the disabled water tank, then through the junior school, whose long low buildings were so crammed with small children it seemed they would spill out of the windows. Goats came to inspect us. There were puddles everywhere and a grey sky pressed down. We left the junior school behind and walked through a sparse scrubby bush, pointing out to each other an orchid and a butterfly: these days they do not go unremarked. Then a small stream, and a path up a rise to a new strong fence. Outside the fence fusses an indignant cow. She has been accustomed to taking this path, but now, for no reason she can understand, there is this fence, designed to keep her and her kind out. She waits there sometimes for hours, hoping for someone to leave the gate unfastened. We find Jack in a classroom in one of the long barrack-like buildings. He is instructing a group of young men and women who have just sat O-levels. Some are as old as twenty. They give an impression of bouncing energy and vigour and confidence. Any group of young Zimbabweans is like this: they are large, strong, glossy with health.
Ayrton R. and I sit at one of the desks, watching Jack finish a lesson. The classroom: two of the windowpanes are cracked. The windows are dirty. There is a cracked rafter. The floor is half an inch deep in dust and rubbish. The room would look derelict, if it were not for the lively people in it.
I notice beginning in me that process known unkindly as ‘Africanization’. Well, I think, in this climate they don’t really need to shut the windows. As for the rafter, easy to put a bit of wire around it. The floor? You don’t need a clean floor to learn lessons. Dirty windows? What of it!
Ayrton R. is miserable. ‘There is no headmaster, you see. You can tell a school with a bad headmaster at a glance. I’ve seen enough of them.’
Jack instructs a couple of the pupils to take us next door and show us the library. His pride and joy. He created it. There was no library at all. No money for books because the headmaster stole the money.
The library is a narrow room, like a wide corridor, and it has perhaps three hundred books in it. Obsolete textbooks. Novels donated by well-wishers or by those who have Taken the Gap, most of the kind read by people nostalgic for dear dead England:
‘Edith stood at the window gazing past the buddleia to the road where Geoffrey would come. She had set out her bottle of sherry, but perhaps he would prefer whisky? Where was her whisky bottle? She had had no occasion to offer whisky since last Christmas, when her brother dropped in during his trip home on leave from India. At last she found the whisky bottle pushed to the back of the shelf where she kept her gardening things–insecticides too, she was afraid. She