it didn’t matter what we did.’
I gave him some tissues and he mopped up his face. ‘We only read about it in the newspapers and saw it on the television,’ I said, wanting him to ask, Where are you from?–and he said, ‘Were you in Harare in the War?’
‘I was in England. I’ve just come from London.’
He gave a what-do-you-expect sobbing laugh, and a shrug. ‘Yes, that’s it, of course, from England. You are a white person from England. Now I understand.’
‘We have unemployment in England.’ As I said this I remembered he would not be getting unemployment benefit, but living off his family.
A black Zimbabwean said to me, ‘The extended family is a very good welfare system. We don’t need old people’s homes and mental hospitals and unemployment benefit. I have a piece of land twenty miles from Harare, about fifty acres. Twenty to thirty people are always living off it. Grandparents, aunts, nephews, cripples, crazy people, the unemployed. You despise that. Subsistence living, you say, as if it’s nothing. But subsistence means that people are feeding themselves. They aren’t in institutions being kept by taxpayers. You only admire big farms that sell surplus produce.’
‘Why did you come here to Zimbabwe? Are you going to live here? Have you got a job for me? Any job. I want it.’
‘No, I’ve just come to visit.’ Here I could have said I was brought up here, then left–and so forth, but all that happened before he was born, possibly before his parents were born. Far away in the mists of history this white woman lived here…
‘Why don’t you stay here?’ he cried, seeing this job, too, disappear. ‘Or perhaps one day I will come to England. There everybody has a lot of money and a house.’
On we drove, up towards the crest of a long ridge, and then down into a valley; up the next rise and then down, while sometimes he cried silently and trembled, and then dried his face, and trembled and burst out crying again, while I was, with part of my mind, in cars going to Macheke for the weekend thirty-five years ago. Communists, we called ourselves. The label we used to describe ourselves was that, and it is a shorthand as useful as most. But in fact we spent little of our time on the current communist prescriptions for a better world, partly because the ‘line’ laid down by the Communist Party of South Africa, and, therefore, by Moscow, was that the black proletariat would take power and create justice all over this land. There were, then, few Africans who fitted into this definition. We thought in fact about what went on everywhere else: Britain, Occupied Europe, Japan, the Far East, America. The War was an education in thinking about the world as a whole. It was a watershed, precisely in this way. The First World War began the process. My father said that when he was growing up on the outskirts of Colchester (a Roman town) it never occurred to anyone to brood about events in America, or China or–much–even in London. No, the news was that Bill’s (his school friend) father’s mare White Star had won the 3.30, and that there would be a church picnic. But the War put an end to that. Even on the farm he read newspapers from London, and listened to the crackling broadcasts from the BBC. He felt a famine in China or India as his personal responsibility. The admonition that we should eat up whatever it was on our plates we wanted to leave was delivered with an incredulous, passionate, accusing anguish.
Macheke is so vivid in my memory because of the War. Now I believe we were all mad, all over the world, whether actually in the fighting or not. Perhaps the world cannot murder on such a scale without going mad? Is this a consoling thought? Is it true? Is mutual murder the natural state of humankind? For us, then, this so terrible war was of course the War that would end all war, for everyone at last would see how terrible war was. (Just like my parents and the First World War.) All of
I gave him some tissues and he mopped up his face. ‘We only read about it in the newspapers and saw it on the television,’ I said, wanting him to ask, Where are you from?–and he said, ‘Were you in Harare in the War?’
‘I was in England. I’ve just come from London.’
He gave a what-do-you-expect sobbing laugh, and a shrug. ‘Yes, that’s it, of course, from England. You are a white person from England. Now I understand.’
‘We have unemployment in England.’ As I said this I remembered he would not be getting unemployment benefit, but living off his family.
A black Zimbabwean said to me, ‘The extended family is a very good welfare system. We don’t need old people’s homes and mental hospitals and unemployment benefit. I have a piece of land twenty miles from Harare, about fifty acres. Twenty to thirty people are always living off it. Grandparents, aunts, nephews, cripples, crazy people, the unemployed. You despise that. Subsistence living, you say, as if it’s nothing. But subsistence means that people are feeding themselves. They aren’t in institutions being kept by taxpayers. You only admire big farms that sell surplus produce.’
‘Why did you come here to Zimbabwe? Are you going to live here? Have you got a job for me? Any job. I want it.’
‘No, I’ve just come to visit.’ Here I could have said I was brought up here, then left–and so forth, but all that happened before he was born, possibly before his parents were born. Far away in the mists of history this white woman lived here…
‘Why don’t you stay here?’ he cried, seeing this job, too, disappear. ‘Or perhaps one day I will come to England. There everybody has a lot of money and a house.’
On we drove, up towards the crest of a long ridge, and then down into a valley; up the next rise and then down, while sometimes he cried silently and trembled, and then dried his face, and trembled and burst out crying again, while I was, with part of my mind, in cars going to Macheke for the weekend thirty-five years ago. Communists, we called ourselves. The label we used to describe ourselves was that, and it is a shorthand as useful as most. But in fact we spent little of our time on the current communist prescriptions for a better world, partly because the ‘line’ laid down by the Communist Party of South Africa, and, therefore, by Moscow, was that the black proletariat would take power and create justice all over this land. There were, then, few Africans who fitted into this definition. We thought in fact about what went on everywhere else: Britain, Occupied Europe, Japan, the Far East, America. The War was an education in thinking about the world as a whole. It was a watershed, precisely in this way. The First World War began the process. My father said that when he was growing up on the outskirts of Colchester (a Roman town) it never occurred to anyone to brood about events in America, or China or–much–even in London. No, the news was that Bill’s (his school friend) father’s mare White Star had won the 3.30, and that there would be a church picnic. But the War put an end to that. Even on the farm he read newspapers from London, and listened to the crackling broadcasts from the BBC. He felt a famine in China or India as his personal responsibility. The admonition that we should eat up whatever it was on our plates we wanted to leave was delivered with an incredulous, passionate, accusing anguish.
Macheke is so vivid in my memory because of the War. Now I believe we were all mad, all over the world, whether actually in the fighting or not. Perhaps the world cannot murder on such a scale without going mad? Is this a consoling thought? Is it true? Is mutual murder the natural state of humankind? For us, then, this so terrible war was of course the War that would end all war, for everyone at last would see how terrible war was. (Just like my parents and the First World War.) All of
Similar Books
