Out of darkness
Robert Oakeshott
AFRICAN LAUGHTER: FOUR VISITS TO ZIMBABWE by Doris Lessing HarperCollins, f16.99, pp. 442
It's hard to remember all the new names. I sometimes say Salisbury and then somebody says, 'Watch out , or you'll be reported to the Comrades'.
`Soon everyone will forget', said Gore. `Only old people like me will remember Mutare was called Umtali'. And he shook with laughter [emphasis added], the marvellous African laughter born somewhere in the gut, seizing the whole body with good- humoured philosophy ...'
Ys, we are on the road which runs eastwards from Harare, through Mesheke to Umtare; and then on to Zimbabwe's mountainous border with Mozambique. It is 1982. Our driver is, of course, Doris Lessing. This is the first of her four visits to what, when she had last seen it in 1956, had been the colony of Southern Rhodesia.
Behind her was a brief stop at Mesheke. She had pulled up to poke about among the buildings of the Mesheke Hotel, made famous and unforgettable for readers of The Golden Notebook. She had found them `derelict unused', though later they appear to have enjoyed a not very engaging renaissance. Her laughing companion, Gore, is one of three African hitchhikers: . . all three middle-aged, or at least not young. They were shabby but they were ami- able and I knew I had found what I had been wanting, people of the country, black people, I could talk with. Talk, that is, without being overheard by antagonistic whites, by the new breed of ideological blacks ...
What Mrs Lessing mainly discussed with these middle-aged and amiable African hitchhikers as she drove them on eastwards towards Umtare, was their experience of the war: the struggle between Southern Rhodesia's white settlers and the African nationalists which had only finally been resolved by the victory of Robert Mugabe in the elections of 1980. When they talked about the war, Doris Lessing tells us, her three hitchhikers were 'tense and sombre'.
The war was horrible. No one could know if they hadn't lived through it. [But] if we were not talking about the war ... they laughed.
An Aristophanic counterpoint, between the comic and the serious, zigzags like a
golden thread from the start to finish of this marvellous book. It is delightful and profoundly moving by turns, and frequently both at the same time. Moreover, it is not too much to claim that if offers such a vari- ety of subject matter as sometimes to defy classification. 'Third world groupies' — the phrase is Mrs Lessing's not mine — or, anyway, those among them with some knowledge of Africa's rural areas, will already be familiar with the Blair toilet: Zimbabwe's 'intermediate technology' contribution to the problems of village sanitation. Mrs Lessing rightly notes the celebrations in 1988 associated with the completion of the first 100,000 of these admirable inventions. Even so, it comes as something of a surprise that separate con- secutive paragraphs are devoted to what one might call the logic of the apparatus and then to the experience of using it. I can't resist quoting a sentence or two from each:
The Blair toilet is based on the known pref- erences of the flies that carry so many dis- eases. The flies prefer light to dark. The toilet consists of a very small hole in a cement floor, over what is known as 'a long drop'. The hole is perhaps seven inches by about three or four. There is another hole, a large one, full of light, built outside the toilet. The flies go down into the dark after the smell, but then try to get through the well-lit exit, which has a wire screen over it. They die there.
And then: The use of the thing is not so easy . . . The hole being small needs careful aiming. Men, I am told, find it difficult.
So there are passages where Mrs Lessing shows the Orwellian virtues of her eyes and prose. But perhaps most pervasive to African Laughter is an eye of double vision: of the elderly writer coming back, after a quarter of a century's exile, to the land of her early childish years, and adolescence; of her womanhood to the age of 30, and indeed of her two marriages. The resulting double vision is, I think, a part source of the numinous quality which is never far from these pages; and is especially evident
At least we don't have to worry about charges of discrimination.' in those which describe her long visit, in 1982, to her elder brother Harry Tayler; and her later visit to the site of the parental farm, the home of their growing up, in the country's Banket district. Harry's politics were very different from his sister's. He `took the gap', that is moved to South Africa, not long after the first of the four visits described in this book. And died there of a heart attack before having the time, as did many of his fellow old Rhodies, to come back. As a proxy for his political credo Mrs Lessing quotes from a letter he wrote before the Africans took power: If communists like you and McCleod think you can get away with it then I'm afraid I have to tell you that our Affs are sensible people and know which side their bread Is buttered.
Harry was never much of a reader. But brother and sister shared, among other things, a passion for the setting of the virgin bush and the unspoilt wild life in which they had grown up. And there is a splendid passage — too long, alas, to quote — in a letter from South Africa written shortly before he died. It tells of a quite exceptional potato plant, which he discov- ered fruiting away in most inhospitable conditions, under the broken cement floor of a derelict and abandoned house in a wilderness. I have done no sort of justice to the most really serious topics of this book: neither to the curse of the corruption and rapacity of Robert Mugabe's regime, nor to the vari- ous more hopeful developments reported by Mrs Lessing; especially the gradually growing self-confidence of Zimbabwe's rural women which she sees, in my view rightly, as the best single source of opti- mism for the future. Nor have I the space to deal with the author's treatment of those two arch furies which are already threaten- ing, and indeed, to a significant extent, already causing, the most melancholy and serious calamities: I mean the fury of the present drought and the seemingly ever' spreading fury of Aids. In her serious discussion there is for rile just one surprising omission. Mrs Lessing does not seem to be familiar either with the general case for putting special efforts behind the secondary education of girls, or with some remarkable evidence for the benefits of doing so, from the Indian state of Kerala. But the identification of this error of omission, if such it is, would be quite the wrong note to end on. With the special preferences of Spectator readers in mind, perhaps I can best close by welcoming the news that the unpopular- ity of the Mugabe regime has already resulted in a revival in the political influ- ence of the chiefs. Oh, and there's another thing that I overheard in a gentlemen s club a little while back: the current Marquis of Salisbury is, it seems, already called Harare by his close friends. Soon everyone will forget . . .
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