African Laughter by Doris Lessing

sparkling from under his tightly pressed lids. He shook his head: it was too terrible to talk about. We drove smartly on, while I tried to recall sights and signs that belonged to the road to Macheke, but we were going too fast: there is not only a different road for those who walk, or go by bicycle, but for those who drive at thirty, and sixty. The cars we used to go to Macheke were all on their last legs. During the War we drove what we could get.
    He began a dreary and hopeless sobbing. It was clear he had been doing a lot of crying.
    ‘Please tell me, what is the matter? Perhaps I can help?’
    ‘No one can help. I lost my job this week. They said I am not good enough. I got my Certificate but they said I’m no good.’
    ‘Who said?’
    ‘My Department. Mr So and So…’ The name of a black man. ‘Mr Smith liked me and said I was good at my job and Mr So and So…’ He wept.
    To get a job in the big city is the goal of every young person in Zimbabwe, like everywhere in the world. The usual pieties go on about the delights and virtues of village life but people cannot wait to leave the villages. Here sat a young man condemned to return to his village. His big city had not even been that metropolis Harare, but Marondera. He had been a citizen of urbanity, and now he would take his Certificate and his brave thin suit to his village where they would be wrapped in plastic bags and put on a high shelf out of the reach of dogs and chickens, or better still, hung from a nail so ants and insects could not reach them. He would be one of the unemployed, the workless, taking up a hoe sometimes when the women nagged at him enough. The high moments of a life spent dreaming about the delights of that centre Marondera would be when he walked to the main road and got a lift–if he was lucky–so he could spend an afternoon in the little town, looking up former colleagues for whom he was now a country cousin. They had been able to clutch tight to the ladder of success. Perhaps they would allow him to go with them to the beer house or the cinema.
    ‘It is because all the white people are going. They are taking all the jobs with them.’
    ‘But this is only temporary. It’s only two years since Independence. There will be all kinds of new jobs.’
    ‘Where are the new jobs? I don’t see any new jobs.’
    This struck me as unreasonable. As I had been saying to my brother, ‘What can you expect in two years?’ This, though I did not know it then, so close to the start of the trip, was to be my strongest impression of it, and it remains with me now as a consistently surprising fact. Two years before, in 1980, had ended a very brutal war, involving the whole country. Comrade Mugabe had come to power as the strongest group that had fought in the bush against Smith and Co., which meant there must be large numbers of people disappointed he had won and who were looking for reasons to disapprove of him. The people he had put into government had proved they were good at guerilla warfare, but now they had to govern a modern country in the modern world. Without any tradition of training in administration. Without enough educated people. Without any of the background of experience every child, no matter how poor or deprived, takes for granted in developed countries–which means everyone knows about telephones, letters from government departments, electricity, post boxes, buses, trains, aeroplanes, magistrates’ courts, social security, clinics. Without this background of culture of a practical kind, these people had at a moment’s notice to take on the task of running a country the size of Spain. In a country devastated and shocked by war. You would think they would be given a few years to get used to it. Not at all. Every newspaper, television programme, or international expert talked about Zimbabwe as if it were an established country to be judged by the highest standards. If some authority had pronounced, This is a young