African Laughter (13 page)

POLITICS

If, as soon as you arrived in Zimbabwe, first London…then Britain…then Europe…then the rest of Africa, receded, dwindled, instead rose up, threatening and powerful and unscrupulous, South Africa, the southern neighbour, the exemplar, the ‘last bastion of White Supremacy in Southern Africa’. In 1982 few conversations did not come around to South Africa, either as a threat or a promise. Not only civilians left every day to this bastion: the soldiers of the disbanded white armies, their occupation gone, talked of Taking the Gap and then forming guerilla groups who would return to fight against the black government. In fact Renamo had been born in white Rhodesia as just such a group. The South Africans employed ‘Rhodies’ not only to train Renamo, but in all kinds of ways subversive to Zimbabwe. They incited ‘incidents’ that reached the British newspapers as the work of isolated adventurers, but in Zimbabwe they were believed to be the long arm of South Africa. (Nothing is more useful as a diagnosis of Britain than going to a country remote from European sets of mind and finding out what has not been reported in Britain, or reported inadequately.) Everyone, black and white, believed that the anti-Mugabe Terrorists, mostly supporters of Joshua Nkomo, whether he welcomed their support or not, were inspired by South Africa. ‘Near Bulawayo there are whole areas of bush the government troops can’t go into at all.’ Everyone knew South Africa sent agents to the international conferences where investment and development were discussed, to spread rumours of the precariousness of Zimbabwe, every achievement minimized, every setback exaggerated. And, in 1982, newspaper correspondents met bombastic blacks, or whites who confidently talked Treason. I listened to feverish whites, in Harare, in Mutare, mostly ex-army, plotting the downfall of Mugabe. Crazed, they were, but could not see it. Smith was their hero. Smith, Smithie, Good-old-Smithie, in every conversation. Easy to hear, instead, ‘Daddy’, ‘Nanny’, even ‘Mummy’, and the terror of children left alone in the dark, children who had been brought up to know they were due everything, and could not lose what they had, for safety had been promised them by ‘Smithie’. But they had lost everything; they had lost their White Supremacy, and still could not believe it. And their plots and intrigues could not have the consequences of Treason because how could it be treason to take back what is rightfully your own? While listening to these infants I used to think of the black man in London (on Liberation he returned home and took his place in the new Zimbabwe) who at the height of the War, when emotions were at their most violent, remarked calmly: ‘We can’t expect that type of white to change. They never will. They are like children and will have to be treated like children. Or like sick people.’

A week into my stay in a new Zimbabwe I finally understood that these were indeed sick people. As I moved from one verandah to another–morning tea, lunch, afternoon tea, drinks, dinner–on the flanks of those incomparable mountains, I listened to The Monologue, and reminded myself that these were normally cool, self-reliant, resourceful and humorous people. The Monologue up here was bitter, self-pitying, peevish, began with the day at six or so and went on till bedtime. Now it was not only President Banana and the chickens, Mugabe and his motorcade, but the new bureaucracy, inefficient, arbitrary, weighted against the whites. The Swedes and their Aid operations were hated with a cold rage that now I find hard to believe. Did I really sit listening for hours of malicious anecdotes about the Swedes? Indeed I did: I have my notes. The Swedes were the first, or the most generous, or the most visible of the new armies of international benefactors, and particularly attracted resentment, but so did anyone who had supported the ‘terrs’ or who had assisted the birth of Zimbabwe. Cold Comfort Farm, that exemplary settlement where, for years under the whites, black and white lived and worked together, had always attracted criticism, but now what it stood for had triumphed, every kind of gossip circulated among the whites, some so stupid and so petty I had to keep telling myself: a political enemy is not described as someone who disagrees with you, almost certainly from motives as idealistic as your own, but as vicious, twisted, immoral, and incompetent.

Above all, there were the Squatters…one could encapsulate the whole grievance of the blacks thus: They came and stole our land.

Land, the soil, the earth, this is what had been taken from the blacks. Throughout the War of Liberation, the Bush War, Mugabe was making a promise, that when the whites were defeated, every black person would have land. What Comrade Mugabe meant was that they would be part of communal schemes and settlements, but every black wants to own land as the whites do, to have and to hold and to pass on to heirs. Comrade Mugabe was fighting a hard war and his was only one of the armies. He did not know he was going to win. Perhaps even in the midst of such uncertainties it would be wiser for guerilla leaders not to make impetuous promises. It is not possible for every black person to own land or even live on the land. There will never be enough land, particularly with the population doubling, doubling, doubling, at such short intervals. But when the War ended, every black person who had supported Mugabe because of his promises, and many who had not, waited for land, and for Paradise to begin.

This Paradise was in fact more like an anarchist’s utopia. No one would need a licence to drive a car. Cars would not need licences. No one would have to pass school exams, yet everyone would have qualifications and certificates, and any job at all would be at once available. No need for tickets on buses or on trains. Electricity and water would flow as free as air through pipes. Of course not every black believed in every article of this creed, but every black believed something on these lines, or, at least, this fantasy was believed in by the more childish part of the blacks. And who knows how much despondency and betrayal is felt by that sensible and adult part of a person whose childish fantasies have to die?

By the time Zimbabwe was born there were three countries to learn from. Mozambique’s economy was in ruins, partly because the whites had been thrown out, with all their expertise. In Tanzania Nyerere, inspired by the examples of the Soviet Union and China, where collectivization had led to the deaths of tens of millions of people, introduced forced collectivization and the peasants practised passive resistance, so that in the shops of that fertile country was little food or none: peasants always win in the long run. In Zambia, due to mismanagement, agriculture was such a disaster most of the food was being grown by the few remaining whites. (This remains true in 1992.)

Comrade Mugabe learned from all this, and only two years after Liberation there was a careful, cautious, thoughtful policy of buying up white farms as they became available, settling selected people on them, but only when elementary services had been guaranteed. The rhetoric that accompanied this policy was as senseless and torrential as in any communist country, but luckily there was (and is) little connection between what was happening and the words used to describe it.

Inflamed and justified by the years of rhetoric, black people rushed on to the new farms, not waiting to be properly settled, but were removed again, if unsuitable. Who was suitable and who not? Well, that’s it, the promises of the Bush War did not mention suitability.

‘The whites stole our land, and now we want it back.’

‘Yes but slowly does it. Do you want Zimbabwe to be a mess, like Mozambique, like Zambia, like Tanzania?’

‘We don’t care about all these big thoughts, long-term perspectives. Just give us the land you promised us.’

‘But there isn’t enough land to go around.’

‘Then throw the whites off their farms and give us their land.’

‘There still wouldn’t be enough land.’

‘That isn’t what you were saying when you were the Boys in the Bush.’

‘Yes, but the exigencies of that period of time prohibited in-depth analysis, and now we have examined the situation from all angles and taken into consideration the parameters of the parastatial infrastructure and relevant co-ordinates, it is evident that…’

‘
Give us our land
.’

The new farms are an extension of the already existing settlement areas and Native Purchase Areas set up under the whites, just as the Master Farmer Certificates given to good farmers are a continuation of policies begun under the whites. It was not possible to give credit to the whites for anything in 1982, so the new policies were presented as if born out of the head of the new regime.

On the white verandahs, the most important article of The Monologue was the Squatters. When I was not sitting on verandahs, I sat in cars, being driven through areas crowded with every kind of shack, hut, shanty, each surrounded by straggling mealies and a few pumpkins. The earth was eroding into gullies, the trees were being cut for fuel. Who drove me? Explosive, splenetic whites.

‘Just look at that, look at it, there won’t be any soil left…’

‘For God’s sake, calm down!’

‘It’s not as if they are even living there…the men have jobs in town, they bring their wives and kids to the land they’ve squatted, they can’t live on what they grow, they can’t even grow more than a few meals of sadza.’

‘You are going to have a stroke if you aren’t careful.’

‘And the Minister won’t do anything…when he addresses meetings of the Faithful he just promises them land…he’s scared not to. When he speaks to us, the white farmers, he says, “Yes, yes, yes, you’re right, no of course we don’t want soil erosion.” But he doesn’t do anything.’

The soil was washing away. The gullies deepened. Bad enough on mealie-growing land, but on the steep hillsides of the Vumba perched and huddled the shanties with a few thin maize stalks about them, and some chickens. But this shallow forest soil could never grow maize, and whole hillsides were sliding into gullies. ‘
Just look at that!
’ shouted the white farmers, who these days are all conservationists to a man, woman and child.

Half an hour’s drive from this high valley in the mountains that grows coffee, kiwi fruit, soft fruit, passion fruit, you have dropped a couple of thousand feet and there you are in the tropics: pineapples, bananas, mangoes, any tropical fruit, but what united these different landscapes was the Squatters. On to every farm crept the people from the towns hoping to be farmers, real farmers, with title deeds. And every farm repelled them: it was a new and energetic guerilla war.

Which sometimes took surprising forms. A certain liberal white farmer (but the word liberal is a malediction) on Liberation called his workforce to him and said, ‘And now we shall all work together as equals. No more migrant labour on this farm. I shall give every one of you two acres of land to build a permanent home. The land will be yours. What you grow on it will be yours.’

‘And what do you suppose happened?’ demanded the white woman who was telling this tale, her face lit with hatred. ‘Well, what do you think? All the relatives moved in at once, there were hundreds of them. That idiot went to his permanently employed men and said, “Can’t you see that there won’t be any soil left here in five years’ time? It’ll be desert. Your friends are cutting all the trees down. You must send them away.” But of course they wouldn’t go. They could recognize a good thing when they saw it.’

‘And what happened?’

‘He went to Australia and he’s farming near Perth. And all his Squatters got their comeuppance anyway because his farm was purchased by the government.’

Verandah talk was not only of Squatters. When Mugabe was fighting his desperate war in the bush, he said other things that were less than intelligent. One was that compulsory dipping of cattle
*
was a sinister plot by whites to destroy the cattle–the mombies–which are warp, woof and weft in traditional African life. Compulsory dipping was in any case hard to keep up while the War was going on, but at Liberation the blacks at once stopped dipping, and as a result there were all kinds of diseases. Hard for the government to begin enforced dipping again. ‘But we thought you told us…’

The Comrades in the bush announced that making contour ridges to stop erosion was another ploy to undo the blacks. The bad results from this were in 1982 already visible. On African farms they were ploughing right across the contour ridges. Gullies formed, which became ravines, water rushed down them carrying precious soil. ‘You wait a few years,’ said ill-wishing or conservationist whites, ‘they won’t have any land left–but they’ll blame us for it, as usual.’

This concern for the land impressed me. When I was growing up the whites were land pirates in more ways than by grabbing it. When the government made contour ridging compulsory, and sent out surveyors to map the land, they grumbled. All that has been forgotten. If The Monologue in its various forms was boring, and you wished only to be somewhere else as it started up again–again, again–when these people talked about farming techniques, it was a very different thing. These reformed pirates and land grabbers know about inventions and discoveries from every part of the world. They experiment, they innovate, they wonder if tree planting in Scotland or the thousands-of-years-old tricks used to wring water from deserts being used by Israel could be applied to Zimbabwe. They discuss wind power, solar power, water-screws from the Middle East and Egypt, new ways of building dams, the introduction of drought-resistant plants from semi-deserts, the control of pests by other pests or helpful plants, the farming of eland instead of cattle.

I was taken to visit a farm which was ‘a bit of a show place, you won’t find many farms like this one’.

The couple had farmed in Northern Rhodesia, were among the hundreds of white farmers who left when it became Zambia. They went to the Transvaal and farmed successfully, but ‘They don’t know how to get on with the Affs down there. The Affs there aren’t friendly and nice like our Affs. They are sullen. I never saw a smiling face all the time I was there. So we decided to try Southern Rhodesia.’

Again history caught up with them, and inflicted on them a black government.