African Laughter Read Free Page B

dry?
    Now I see that refusal, that inability to ‘take in’ my exclusion, as a symptom of innate babyishness: mine, and, too, the inhabitants of privileged countries, safe countries, for there are more and more people in the world who have had to leave, been driven from, a country, the valley, the city they call home, because of war, plague, earthquake, famine. At last they return, but these places may not be there, they have been destroyed or eroded; for if at first glance, like a child’s recognition of its mother’s face when she has been absent too long, everything is as it was, then slowly it has to be seen that things are not the same, there are gaps and holes or a thinning of the substance, as if a light that suffused the loved street or valley has drained away. Quite soon the people who have known one valley or town all their lives will be the rare ones, and there are even those who speculate how humanity will have to leave the planet with plans to return after an interval to allow it to regenerate itself, like a sick or poisoned organism, but when they return after long generations they find…
    AIR ZIMBABWE
    In 1982 I booked the seat on Air Zimbabwe, made arrangements, with more than usually mixed feelings.
    As I seated myself inappropriate emotions began, all much too strong. For a start, the stewardesses were black, once impossible. Since nearly all the passengers were white, and these black girls had no reason to expect courtesy from them, they were defensive and would not look at anyone. The atmosphere was unpleasant. I had hoped to sit next to a black person, so as to hear what was being thought, but was beside a white race-horse owner, a man of forty or so, who grumbled obsessively for the ten hours of the flight about the new black government. I had heard this note of peevish spite before: at the Independence celebrations in Zambia the white officials of an administration which had done nothing to train blacks for responsibility, recited examples of inefficiency while their faces shone with triumphant malice. Here it was again. This man insisted in one sentence that this was still God’s Own Country, and he could raise and train race-horses more cheaply and better here than anywhere in the world; he and his family enjoyed a wonderful life and he wouldn’t leave for anything–but the black government…I listened with half an ear, thinking that soon, when I had paid my dues to the white world, I could leave it and find out about the new Zimbabwe. Meanwhile I disliked this man with an impatience identical to that I had felt all those years ago, growing up here. Childish, spoiled, self-indulgent, spiteful…yes, he was all this, they were all like this, or most of them, but what of it, and why should I remain so involved?
    While he grumbled about the deprivations they suffered in the way of food, breakfast was served, slabs of bacon, scrambled eggs, sausages, fried bread, a meal to fuel farm labourers or gravediggers.
    The little airport was unchanged: I hardly saw it. The smells, the colours of the earth had undone me, and my emotional balance was gone. Immigration was a shy young man, hesitant, inexperienced, who asked if I planned to come and live here now: too many of ‘our friends’ had left because of the old government. He enquired about my passport: for I had been born in Persia, and I explained that one could–loosely–equate Persia and Iran with Southern Rhodesia and Zimbabwe. When I changed my money at the airport bank the official asked if I was the author and welcomed me in the name of Zimbabwe. I went out into the dry scented air and wept. And there was the young man who had brought the hired car to the airport. So occupied was I in admonishing my tear-ducts that I hardly saw the streets. I left the young man at the car-hire firm and parked. I was on my own in the streets of the town that was once my big city.
    THE BIG CITY
    Of course the old one-horse one-storey town had gone…though