adminNot long ago Prime Minister David Cameron rebuked people of colour on the island, for going on the rampage through the streets of many towns. They were protesting against the policeman who had shot one of them dead in an incident whose motive they blamed on racism. The same David Cameron had maintained deafening silence when the British people were abusing people of colour – up to this time when they said enough was enough.
During the struggle, freedom fighters shot down from Zambia a planeload of holidaymakers over Hurungwe that had taken off from Victoria Falls on its way to Harare. Combine Operations Headquarter said freedom fighters had crossed the Zambezi River and butchered all survivors with bayonets as they scrambled for help through the rugged terrain.
Foreign missionaries composed a song which was called “Defeating Silence” in protest against the Patriotic Front for failing to rebuke freedom fighters. Combine Operations HQ had said among the people who were butchered with bayonets when they had survived the crush was Baby Natasha, who was five years old.
Not long ago a farmer from Chiredzi area found his worker who had tired out from working hard on the sugarcane plantations asleep. The farmer thought to himself that the most civilised manner in which he could wake this African up was to urinate into his mouth.
The same foreign missionaries, together with the human rights organisations, maintained deafening silence when The Herald exposed the farmer.
Doris Lessing describes in the “Grass is Singing” how settlers used the mythical “native problem” to treat people who were working for them with contempt.
The location is a farming community in Ngezi and the characters are typical Rhodesian farmers wearing shorts and farmer shoes without socks.
Most of the characters come through vividly in imagination because Mary and Dick Turner occupy the whole book, like what Jesus Christ does in the synoptic gospels. “When they say: ‘One has to understand the country,’ what they mean is: ‘You have to get used to our ideas about the native,”‘ writes Doris Lessing. “They are saying, in effect: ‘Learn our ideas, or otherwise get out – we don’t want you.’ Most young men were brought up with vague ideas about equality.
“They were shocked by the way natives were treated. They were revolted a hundred times a day by the casual way they were spoken of, as if they were many cattle, or by the blow or a look. They had been prepared to treat all people as human beings. But they could not stand out against the society they were joining. It did not take them long to change. It was hard to become as bad oneself. But it was not very long that they thought of it as ‘bad’. One’s ideas amounted to nothing.
“Abstract ideas about decency and goodwill, that was all – merely abstract ideas. When it came to the point, one never had contact with natives, except in the master-servant relationship. One never knew them in their lives as human beings. A few months, and these sensitive, decent young men had coarsened to suit the hard, arid, sun-drenched country they had come to.
“They had grown a new manner to match their thickened sunburnt limbs and toughened bodies.”
Doris Lessing describes how settlers respond when Mary Turner is found lying in a pool of blood in the veranda of their house on the farm in Ngezi. The whole settler community blames the gardener, Moses, for the murder, though Tony Marston, who has just come from England, comes forward with evidence that can unmask the murderer. Sergeant Denham tells Tony to mind his own business if he wants to be on good terms with others because he has not yet understood the African and his ways.
The “native problem” paints the worker as addicted to drink, lazy, and a thief who can rape the white woman at the drop of the hat. Doris Lessing reveals why settlers didn’t go back to their countries when they had amassed the fortune they found in Zimbabwe through the sweat of the labour they were vilifying.
“My children,” says father, “if I had remained in England you would be wallowing in gutters.”
The settlers stifled their inferiority complex by seeing the people whose wealth they were grabbing as though they were less than human beings.
The housewives of Zimbabwe would do well not to emulate the bad habits of settlers. They bring relatives from rural areas to work for them as maids for 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They pay them at irregular intervals when money becomes available; the wage is likely sent direct to the parents under extortionate arrangements. The maid is reduced to the level of a squatter that is tolerated because of the cheap labour that she provides when she is still needed. The time that the maid is made to work is not proportionate to the hours that the daughter on holiday from boarding school is allowed to sleep. In African culture all children are treated equal.
Paul Chidyausiku knows how to define the situations where justice has been turned on its head. “It is simple arithmetic,” the eminent statesman wrote in 1964. “Two plus two is equal to four.”
He was commenting as editor of Moto on the paltry performance of the City Council of Gweru in providing housing for African people. The local authority had bragged when it opened a new township that it was doing a fantastic job in providing African people with a roof over their heads. Paul Chidyausiku meant to say that failing to provide a house for one person in Zimbabwe is an injustice done to all people of Zimbabwe.
Moto was the vehicle through which students in rural areas kept track of events taking place in towns. The weekly produced icons like Justin Nyoka, the journalist who turned his back on the lucrative contract he had with BBC and joined the struggle. The army escorted Father Michael Traber to Harare International Airport on a one-way ticket because the Rhodesian regime feared his intellect.
The fact that people of Zimbabwe don’t talk openly about issues of colour doesn’t mean that they are not aware of them. The danger is whether a person who urinates into the mouth of another can be rehabilitated, when he has grown up reading a book like Animal Farm. Mary was ill-treating Moses because she suspected him of stealing her sugar from the basin. That refrain sounds too familiar to be of comfort.
It would be preposterous to think that Ian Smith went away with the “native problem” that Doris Lessing is at pains to highlight. If that problem was no longer there, labour would be a stable factor on farms, making them produce to capacity.
The woman who remains at home while the husband goes out to work on the farm can go for days without meeting people her class. This might make the woman irrational in the way she treats workers to the detriment of what she and her husband would have set out to achieve.
Mary Turner says: “I’ve found out that living with people that one can’t associate with can lead to outbursts that can’t be condoned.
“A farmer should know when and how to raise voice without being accused of segregating against the worker, who is indispensable.
“The workers feeling that their employers don’t respect them can organise others to boycotts farmers like that during critical moments.
“Though workers might appear simple, they are sensitive about how their employers talk to them and treat them when they perform their tasks.”
Doris Lessing is assessing the society in which she lived and writes objectively about what she sees without pulling back her punches.
She described to a meeting of writers in Harare after Independence what happened to the novel she had written using the name which was not her own.
Though she was already a famous writer, the young man who looked through her manuscript, at house which published her books, said it was not suitable for publication.
His senior said the hand of the person who wrote that manuscript seemed to be that of Doris Lessing and told him to check with her.
Doris didn’t mention the title of that book, which she said went on to become a best seller. Authors told Doris that publishers in Zimbabwe were telling them to write books that would become textbooks.
The publishers want to have manuscripts which have a ready market in schools because mature people have lost their reading culture.
There is no author in Zimbabwe who can come up with a book like Nana in which Emile Zola chronicles the life of the famous prostitute of Paris, when women like her are found in the Avenues in Harare.
“The publishers should not tell writers what they should write about,” said Doris Lessing. “There is nobody who can sit down and say that the book that he or she is writing will be made into a textbook.
“When I write my books,” she went on, “I don’t know whether schools will use them or not. I just write because I’ve something to say.”
On issues of aesthetics, Homer, Modercai Hamutyinei, Dostoyevsky, Patrick Chakaipa, Sigola and Doris Lessing have one thing in common. Each time you read them you read them afresh.
Young people would do well to spend sleepless nights translating them into any language if they want to become writers whose works stand up for eternity.
To the reader of modern literature Doris Lessing can be tedious. Her writing could have been effective if she used more quotes in dialogue.
The reader wanting to get the best out of lonely situations on farms should not miss re-reading the Grass is Singing. The crispness with which Doris Lessing writes is bewitching and enchanting.
The secret that aspiring writers can learn from Doris Lessing is that a full-stop brings sanity to sentence. Shakespeare was not insane when he aired his views on how people should write.
“Brevity,” he said, “is the soul of wit.”
Online Reporter