Zambia's compromise with the West

Shiva Naipaul

I became alarmed when, without the slightest hesitation, the New Zealander with whom I had been-travelling (and New Zealand, it ought to be recalled, was, at that time, in official disfavour throughout black Africa because of its recent rugby tour of South Africa) told the immigration official at the Tanzanian-Zambian border post of Tunduma that he was intending to travel in transit through Zambia on his way to South Africa. I was amazed at hi's foolhardy naiveté. After all, Zambia is among the foremost of the 'front-line' states supposedly locked in battle with the whitesupremacist South. Kenneth Kaunda, one imagines (or is led to imagine), is made of sterner stuff than, say, Seretse Khama of Botswana — another 'front-line' President — who, when he recently fell ill, was rushed off for treatment at a 'whites only' hospital in Johannesburg.

And so my surprise was great when, without comment, the passport was stamped and returned with a smile. At the very least, I had expected him to receive some sort of lecture, or reprimand. Even more surprisingly, the officer then went on, in the most obliging way possible, to suggest the alternative routes (through Zambia) he could have taken to `Jo'burg', thus saving himself time and money and trouble.

I soon learned not to be surprised at this permissive attitude. On the contrary: I soon learned to be surprised at any display of its opposite. Rhodesia and South Africa, the traveller soon discovers, arouse more passion in the West than they do among the citizenry of the black 'front-line' states. The shelves of one Lusaka supermarket I went into were laden with South African merchandise — meat, toilet paper, detergent, tinned goods of all kinds. In former days, apparently, the source of origin used to be disguised. Nowadays, no one bothers to take the trouble. As I strolled along the alleyways of that Lusaka supermarket, I reflected ruefully on the crises of conscience occasioned in the past by my consumption of South African oranges.

The Rhodesian question provokes irritation rather than altruistic sentiments. The irritation was rampant in the young clerk who complained to me about the steep rise that had occurred in the cost of living. He was, like all town-based Zambian males — and despite his declared poverty — flamboyantly attired: his shoes were platformed, his trousers flared, his red corduroy jacket exquisitely waisted, his tie exceedingly broad and colourful. He did not attribute his poverty to the fall in the price of copper—which earns for Zambia the bulk

of its foreign exchange — but laid the blame on the support the Government was giving to the 'liberation struggle'. 'The Ministers are all right — they are rich men. The freedom fighters are all right — they get free food. But what about people like us who are not Ministers and not freedom fighters? They should look after us first.' Did he not, then, support the aims of the freedom fighters? He laughed. 'How can a man on seventy-five kwarha a month (one kwacha is roughly equivalent to one dollar) support anything? My stomach comes first!'

I sympathised: Lusaka is one of the most expensive cities in the world. Zambia's finances are so bad that the salaries of civil servants are often in arrears; the University is unable to buy books to stock its libraries; cigarettes are in short supply because the manufacturers have no foreign exchange to purchase the necessary packaging materials. When the copper markets sneeze, Zambia catches pneumonia. Many of the youthful unemployed and underemployed of Lusaka gaze with longing towards Rhodesia. Several of those I spoke to said they would — if they could — go there to seek work. Naturally, the Zambian government cannot allow that. If it did, it would, of course, be behaving no differently from the government of another 'front-line' state — Mozambique. The economy of Mazambique would probably collapse if the government did not allow substantial numbers of its citizens to work in the mines of South Africa.

As is the case all over East and Central Africa, it is not the whites who arouse the greatest animosity, but the Asians. (Whites arouse no animosity at all really. In this part of the world, when Africans and Europeans talk about 'racial harmony' they mean always racial harmony between black and white. History has shown that it is the brown man who invariably pays the price whenever black and white decide to put aside their antagonisms.) My stay coincided with a vigorous anti-Asian campaign in the Zambian press. Day after day, in the Times of Zambia, lengthy articles and impassioned letters to the editor were devoted to this enthralling subject. Asian women were accused of harbouring feelings of superiority because they did not sleep with or marry Zambian men. Photographs were published showing suitcases filled to the brim with bank notes allegedly seized from Asians attempting to smuggle currency out of the country. Asian businessmen, predictably enough, were guilty of monopolising the distributive trades and exploiting innocent Zambians. Could Asians, one letter-writer wanted to know, ever become patriots?

Peasants, seething with righteous indignation, fired the crops on Asian-owned farms in the eastern part of the country. The climax came with the front page headline which read: 'Asian doctors kill their patients'. It was an open secret, an Assembly woman said, that Indians could buy their medical degrees on the streets of Bombay. They then came all the way to countries like Zambia to practise their deadly art on unsuspecting black men.

I travelled by road from Dar-es-Salaam to Lusaka with a party of Australians, New Zealanders and Americans, most of whom were on their way 'South'. They were all young — none past their middle twenties —

and curiously apathetic: they slept through some of the most spectacular Tanzanian scenery. I remarked on this to one of them — a blond, curly-headed American boy, the darling of the girls in the party. 'I'm not really interested in Africa or Africans as such,' he replied with disarming frankness. Why, then, had he come to Africa? To sort out, he said, some 'emotional problems'. Apparently, there was a girl back home in California, concerning whom he 'could not make up his mind'. He showed me her photograph. 'She's no Greta Garbo,' he admitted, staring critically at the photograph. 'Still, she's got some really admirable qualities.' But, I pressed, why come all the way to Africa to sort out his emotional problems? Why not Mexico? 'I came to see the wild life,' he said, assuming a most earnest expression. 'I care a great deal about the wild life.' As he talked about his 'concern' for the elephant, I remembered the Swede I had met in Dar-es-Salaam.

European influence, he declared to me one day, had wreaked terrible damage in Africa. This in itself, was a not particularly arresting proposition. All the same, I asked what aspect of European influence had, in his opinion, done the most harm. 'The introduction of Western medicine,' he answered without hesitation. Modern medicine had, by increasing the number of Africans, ruined the ecological balance. 'The result is that you have a lot more Africans competing with the game. It's not the animal § we should be putting in reservations. It's the blacks.'

Late one night we camped near an embankment of the Chinese railway. After we had eaten, the men of the party sat around the fire. Keith, another of the Americans, asked Ian, our New Zealand driver and acknowledged African expert, what Rhodesia was like.

'Fantastic,' Ian said. 'Bloody fantastic.

It's the cleanest country I've ever been in. Maybe Switzerland is just as clean. I can't say. But Rhodesia . .

'Switzerland is pretty clean,' Keith said.

Ian began telling of a public toilet he had once patronised in Bulawayo. So clean was it, he could see his face in the brass fittings. 'They employ two or three coons on a fulltime basis to keep it that way. I tell you, man, I've never seen a toilet like that anywhere else, not even in South Africa. It's so clean you fed it's a crime to use it.'

Keith stirred and poked the fire with a stick. 'You think the coons will ever take over there?'

'I figure they might,' Ian said. 'But it will be the biggest bloody tragedy that's ever happened. What's more, the coons won't like it either.'

'What's South Africa like?' It was the boy with emotional problems who spoke. 'Is it as bad as some people make it out to be?' 'A weird and wonderful place,' Ian said. 'I think I prefer Rhodesia, though. The kaffirs might be as thick as glue. But some of those Afrikaners take the cake.'

'They say it's a beautiful country,' Keith said.

'The most beautiful place you'll see this side of heaven,' Ian said. 'What a mindbending place. I once saw a guy walk up to another guy and stab him in the eye — just like that.'

'Wow!' The boy with emotional problems shivered and hugged his knees.

'That must have been quite something,' Keith said. He looked pale and haggard in the firelight. He was still recovering from an attack of malaria; an attack he had quite deliberately courted by refusing (Now,' I had heard him say, 'I can tell the folks back home that I had malaria in Africa') to take any of the usual prophylactics. 'And was one guy white and the other black?' he I asked.

'No, no,' Ian said. 'Both were kaffirs. The fuzz didn't give a damn. A weird and wonderful place is Jo'burg.'

'Sounds a bit like America,' the boy with emotional problems said. `Do you know that Washington DC is almost eighty per cent black? Jeez! The capital of the United States! Can you imagine that? Coons everywhere you look.'

A train, its headlamps sweeping the dark like searchlights, rattled along the embankment. We had been three full days on the road; and Lusaka was still some three hundred miles away.

The Zambian landscape is one note endlessly repeated. At the Tunduma frontier the character of the land suddenly changes. The rolling hills of south-central Tanzania fade away and the table-flat upland of the Zambian plateau begins. Open grassy country gives way to derelict woodland; a featureless wilderness of. spindly trees, twenty to thirty feet in height. Mile after mile, hour after hour, it remains the same. Occasionally, a low range of hills is glimpsed in the far distance, but their

promise of release from the hypnotic monotony is deceptive. Their summits reveal nothing — nothing but the Woolly canopy of the wilderness stretching away on all sides as far as the eye can see. Heat waves dance on the mirror-like asphalt. Now and then, in a clearing in the bush, there is the fleeting apparition of a village of mud huts. Women, squatting in the shade, look up expressionlessly from their labours; squads of naked.children, shouting, arms flailing, come rushing over the beaten brown earth to wave at the lorry. The wilderness closes in again. You doze, you wake up, you doze once more. Ahead, unwinding to a destination that seems increasingly unreal, the black ribbon of unswerving asphalt disappears over the crest of a rise in the middle distance; only to reappear on the summit of another, more remote acclivity. Nothing indicates that you have made any progress. You wait for some sort of resolution — the physical catharsis of a towering mountain, a rushing river, a blossoming of the unrelenting woodland into human cultivation. But there is no resolution, no release from the delirious sameness.

In some places the land was on fire, tongues of orange flame licking through the dry undergrowth. Banks of billowing smoke shrouded the blackened skeletons of burnt-out trees.. Ash covered the ground like snow. Hordes of white butterflies, whirling dizzily about the lorry, impaled themselves on the radiator and windscreen; Or were crushed under the wheels. At sunset, the land was a sullen, smoking desolation, the tepid air soured with the acrid odours of smouldering vegetation. Sometimes the road followed the Chinese railway. It was a strange sight. With its neat stone and iron bridge, its tidily gravelled embankments, it looked as dainty and as

functionless as a child's toy. Occasionally, there were 'stations', brand new, pinkwashed block houses with their names printed in large letters. But these stations, opening on to untenanted bush, were no more than their names; seeds of unspecified hope scattered in the Zambian wastes. Zambia, with an area of nearly 300,000 square miles, contains fewer than five million people. The country is one of the most sparsely populated in the world. Lusaka is, in a sense, merely a scaled-up version of those toy stations planted in the bush. There is, so far as it is possible to tell, no specially compelling reason for its being where it is. Suddenly, it looms up on the horizon, its skyscrapers silhouetted against the blank Central African sky.

In Kenya the official state philosophy goes under the name of 'Harambee'. (It is, strictly speaking, more of a slogan than a 'philosophy') It is a 8wahili word meaning 'pull together' and is used to denote the national ideal of 'self-help' — or 'help yourself' as one cynic remarked to me. In Tanzania the official state philosophy is, of course, 'African socialism' as expressed by the ujamaa communes. Zambia, not to be outdone, has its own unique philosophy, elaborated by its President, Kenneth Kaunda. He calls it 'Humanism'.

'It means,' a Lusaka police inspector told me, 'that here in Zambia we put Man at the centre of things.' I asked him to be a little more precise. 'Well,' he said, after thinking hard for a while, 'the colour of your skin is not the same as the colour of my skin. Do you agree?' I agreed. 'That's it, you seer I looked at him perplexedly. My obtuseness obviously saddened him. 'Well,' he said, 'you agreed that the colour of my skin is different from the colour of your skin.

Would you also agree that we are friends?' I said I would like to think that we were — even though we had met less than an hour before. 'That's-it, you see! That's exactly it! Although my colour is different from yours, it doesn't stop me being your friend. And that is because I am a humanist. Do you understand now?' I said! understood a little better —but not fully. How, for instance, did Zambian Humanism differ from Tanzanian socialism which also claimed that it put Man at the centre of things? 'Here in Zambia,' he replied, 'we are not so militant as they are in Tanzania. I would say we are about two-thirds socialistic. Here we have something like ujamaa but we call it by a different name. We call it village regrouping.'

Zambia's humanism is, if anything, even harder to pin down than Tanzania's rival — or perhaps complementary — state ideology. The Lusaka intelligentsia are hardly any more enlightening than my friend, the police inspector. 'Zambian humanism,' one of them declared, as if reading from a prepared statement, 'aims at eradicating all evil tendencies in Man.' Its ultimate goal, he went on, is nothing less than 'the attainment of Human Perfection' which will be achieved by ridding society of 'negative human inclinations such as selfishness, greed, hypocrisy, individualism, laziness, racism, tribalism, provincialism, nationalism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, fascism, poverty, disease, ignorance and exploitation of man by man.' He gazed at me breathlessly. When that comprehensive programme of social renovation has been completed — and, under the wise and inspired leadership of President Kaunda, it was already well under way in Zambia — the people would live by the dictates of Love. Such things as prisons and police forces would become utterly irrelevant. I mentioned these hopes to the police inspector. 'It looks,' I said, 'as if you'll soon be out of a job.' He laughed. 'I think it will be some time before that happens,' he said, and happily poured himself — and me — yet another beer.

Beer is a major — some saythe major — obsession of the Zambian people. Zambia, so the rumour runs, is second only to Australia in per capita consumption of the beverage. Another rumoured statistic, with which the first may not be unconnected, is that Zambia boasts the highest per capita road-accident rate in the world — though, I happen to think that the mesmerising monotony of the landscape must also be an important contributing factor. However, it is the remarkable consumption of beer, not the mangled vehicles abandoned on the roadsides, which first impresses itself on the visitor. Zambians, young and old, male and female, rich and poor, drink with a dedication I have rarely seen surpassed. When my friend, the police inspector, ordered what he called a 'round', it consisted of six bottles; and his round was followed by my round. With certain individuals dedication

becomes naked worship. I have watched a woman, her eyes closed in ecstatic surrender, he head thrown back, sucking at the mouth of a bottle with all the worldoblivious contentment of a baby at its mother's breast. I did not witness that tableau on the street but in the bar of the not unrespectable hotel where I was staying.

Late one evening I stopped for the night at a township in central Zambia. The manager dthe single shabby 'hotel' greeted me with the sad news that there was no beer. My companion at dinner was a disgruntled captain of the Zambian Air Force. 'They're fighting in the town over beer,' he said. 'The people are sad and miserable. This is not fair. The Minister should be told. It shouldn't be like this at all.' He levelled his fork at me. 'They said they were going to pay special attention to the rural areas. I know for a fact that in Lusaka they have over a hundred bars. Here we have five. Five! I don't call that paying attention to rural areas.' Some weeks earlier a Zambian delegation had been to West Germany on a 'goodwill' tour. As was only to be expected, they paid particular attention to the German brewing industry. An account of the visit was published in the Times of Zambia. 'In Bavaria,' the writer, Stephen Mpofu, tells his readers, 'traditional beer — their version of our own Kachasu — is popular with drinkers . . . it is made by monks from roots collected for them by villagers from the bush . .

The state-run television service clamours for abstinence in between its canned American and British 'shows'. How can Rhodesia be liberated if we Zambians

spend so much of our time and money drinking beer? How can the humanist society take shape? Beer, selling for between seven and ten shillings a bottle, is not cheap by Zambian or any other standards. Nevertheless, despite the price, despite the complaints about the cost of living, Zambians still seem to find the money to buy it — just as they seem able to find the money to indulge their other great obsession: clothes.

The expatriate lecturer in English (expatriates staff the mines, the medical services, the factories, the schools, the technical col leges — without them, the country would fall apart) waved apologetically at the handful of books, perhaps half-a-dozen, on the library shelf. 'There,' he said, 'that's it. That's all the Zambian literature there is.'

For him, the paucity is a source of genuine

embarrassment. 'I would dearly love to teach something Zambian to my students.

But what can I do if there's nothing?' (The dearth, though, does not necessarily breed humility; the same lecturer was attacked by one of his students for teaching Shakespeare on the grounds that he was a 'white writer'.) The man who writes a book in Zambia is immediately whisked away into the higher reaches of the administration. One of the writers represented on the shelf had become a member of the Central Committee of the Party; another had become head of a large state-owned organi sation. But, with the fruits of high office dangling so alluringly before them, Zambia is by no means short of would-be writers. I met one of these. He was, at the time, working for a company producing mainly educational books.

'The book I am writing,' he said, 'is highly symbolic. It's a story about maize, white ants and black ants.'

I asked what the maize was supposed to symbolise.

'The maize symbolises the people. I believe the white ants and the black ants speak for themselves.'

'What's the story line?'

`To begin with I show how the white ants come and eat up the maize. Then I show how the black ants decide to form an army. They come along eventually and eat up the white ants.'

'And what happens after that?'

He seemed surprised by the question. 'Nothing happens after that.'

'That's the end of the story?'

'Of course.'

'After eating up the white ants, aren't the black ants tempted to eat up the maize?'

'No, no, no.' He laughed. 'How can the black ants eat up the maize? They've come

to save the maize. No, no, no.' He became

serious again. 'After I finish that book I intend to write another one.'

Will that be symbolic too?'

'Of course.'

'What will the symbols be?'

'Mainly spiders.'

'Spinning symbolic webs and so on?'

'Of course.'