African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe

by Doris Lessing

THE LITERARY WORK

A memoir set in Zimbabwe between 1982 and 1992; published in English in 1992.

SYNOPSIS

Doris Lessing returns to the homeland from which she was exiled some 30 years earlier and contemplates Zimbabwe’s past, present, and future.

Events in History at the Time of the Memoir

The Memoir in Focus

For More Information

Doris Lessing was born in 1919 in Persia to British parents. In 1925, the family moved to the British colony of Southern Rhodesia in Africa, where her parents became unsuccessful farmers. Twenty-four years later, after two unhappy marriages and the philosophical and personal turmoil of being involved in Marxist politics, Lessing left Africa for London, where she quickly established herself as a promising novelist, becoming known among other works for her series Children of Violence, about Martha Quest, a character who grows up in Africa and settles in England. Lessing returned to Southern Rhodesia in 1956 to find herself a “prohibited immigrant” because of her politics; she was at this point officially exiled from the country, a ban that was not lifted until 1982. Finally the Marxist government of Robert Mugabe allowed her to return to a transformed land. She entered the newly founded nation of Zimbabwe, born after a decade of civil war between whites and blacks in the former British colony. African Laughter records Lessing’s joyous, painful reunion with the land and people (white and black) of her youth, now so greatly changed.

Events in History at the Time of the Memoir

Background: Chimurenga

African Laughter examines the social and political aftereffects of the civil war (called the “Bush War” or, more properly, “Zimbabwe’s Liberation War”) that transformed the former British colony of Southern Rhodesia into the rebel state of Rhodesia, the temporary state of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia, and then into the new nation of Zimbabwe. The war, which left an estimated 30,000 people dead, is also known as “the Second Chimurenga”—a word that means “war of liberation.” The First Chimurenga took place a century earlier, when European settlers made a concerted land grab in the territory of the Shona people, who had occupied what is now Zimbabwe for at least 1,500 years, and of the Ndebele (or Matabele) people, who had moved north to the area from present-day South Africa in the early 1800s.

On February 11, 1888, J. S. Moffat, a British official in Bulawayo, made an agreement with the Ndebele king, Lobengula; apparently there is some contention over whether Lobengula actually signed such a document or if he knew what it was he was signing. In any case, the king promised not to enter into land agreements with other foreigners without British sanction. Later

TIMELINE: THE FIRST AND SECOND CHIMURENGAS

The history of race relations in Zimbabwe encompasses little more than a century but is nevertheless complicated. The following dates provide a quick overview of some key events leading up to the Second Chimurenga.

that same year representatives of Cecil Rhodes, a British mining magnate based in Cape Town, South Africa, concluded the Rudd Concession with Lobengula; Rhodes won mineral rights—but no land concessions—within all of Lobengula’s kingdom. Yet Rhodes, who may or may not have understood that Lobengula’s kingdom did not in fact extend the length and breadth of Zimbabwe, immediately set about colonizing the land. On September 12, 1890, a band of British mercenaries and adventurers arrived in Harare (which they called Salisbury), set up the Union Jack, and declared themselves at home. By 1895, 4,863 Europeans had settled in Zimbabwe (Uwechue, p. 1644). They set aside special pockets of land on which the original inhabitants would be permitted to live, gradually earmarking the rest for European use. Unsurprisingly, this situation led to unrest and rebellion on the parts of the Shona and Ndebele. In Mashonaland (home of the Shona) the battle that would become famous as the “First Chimurenga” claimed the lives of one tenth of the white settler population (450 lives) (Uwechue, p. 1645). The battle ended with the help of a negotiated settlement and the British remained, but the war raged on in the imaginations of black and white Rhodesians for the next 100 years.

The War of Liberation erupted in 1966, initiated by blacks in Rhodesia (as the former Southern Rhodesia was now known). Outraged by a century of racial discrimination that left them economically, politically, and socially powerless—but most importantly, deprived of their ancestral land—the rebels began an armed struggle against the white minority government. Under Ian Smith, this government had declared itself independent of Britain in 1965 in order to insure its continuing rule over Rhodesia. The United Nations Security Council judged the break to be illegal. Beginning in 1967 the U.N. imposed economic sanctions, which ultimately isolated Rhodesia from the international community. Other nations were not allowed to export goods to Rhodesia, to import Rhodesian goods, or to have financial dealings with the nation. Even air travel to and from the nation was banned. The British blockaded the Mozambiquan port of Beira, from which Rhodesia had run an oil pipeline, pressing the Rhodesian government to come to the bargaining table. Under these harsh conditions, the War of Liberation escalated in violence and scale. In 1971 the British government stepped up pressure on the illegal Rhodesian government, and succeeded in having Smith agree to review racist legislation, and to prepare for majority African rule around the year 2035. This agreement was put to the Rhodesian people (under a British-sponsored body known as the Pearce Commission) and was rejected. Meanwhile, the war raged on. It is important to understand that the War of Liberation was not just a struggle for political independence. It was also a struggle to escape vicious, sometimes life-threatening discrimination and poverty, and to obtain basic amenities like education and healthcare.

• The Land Tenure Act of 1969 alloted 45 million acres (out of 96.4 total) to black Rhodesians, who made up 96 percent of the population.
• In 1969 only 10 percent of black dwellings had electricity.
• When the War of Liberation broke out, 60 percent of the national income was earned by the 4 percent white minority.
• In 1977 the average income for a white Rhodesian was Z$513/month; the average income for a black was Z$49/month.
• In 1976 only 14.6 percent of black Rhodesians were employed.

  (Tungamirai, pp. 36 and 38; Weiss, p. xxi)

In 1974 the Portuguese were driven from their former colonies in Mozambique and Angola. Mozambique, directly east of Rhodesia, gave the armed black struggle in Rhodesia a huge boost—both in morale and in the more practical form of arms, training, and safe haven from which to launch attacks on the government. Suddenly the rules of the game looked a lot different. In November 1974 Smith released the imprisoned leaders of ZANU and ZAPU, and agreed to begin negotiations. In December the ANC—which, though banned, remained operative outside Rhodesia—agreed with Smith to a cease-fire, the beginning of negotiations, and the Rhodesian government’s release of its political prisoners. The government, however, broke its word—the cease-fire was not observed, prisoners were not released, and the murder of a ZANU leader led straight to the government’s door. The mood of the time is best captured in the inability of both sides to agree even on a place to hold negotiations—Smith insisted on Rhodesia, while the ANC argued for somewhere outside Rhodesia (in part because Smith threatened to arrest certain ANC leaders if they set foot on Rhodesian soil). The parties finally agreed to meet in train cars on a bridge over Victoria Falls (on the Rhodesia-Zambia border), but this meeting did not go well, nor did the next, nor the next.

In 1978 Smith contacted leaders on the fringes of the black liberation movement and reached an agreement with them, one that would still concentrate most power in the hands of whites. Elections in April 1979 saw one of these black leaders, Bishop Abel Muzorewa, a long-time activist and former head of ANC, establish a government. The country’s name became “Zimbabwe-Rhodesia.” All of this was essentially a show on Smith’s part designed to convince the international community that sanctions should be lifted from the economically crippled Rhodesia;

THE WARRIORS

African Laughter, like most works that deal with recent levents in Southern Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, refers to a dizzying array of armies, movements, military and government agencies, and to the men who led them. In the following table are some of the most important of these:

Ian Smith: Known among white Rhodesians as “good old Smithy”; leader of Southern Rhodesia as it evolved into the rebel state of Rhodesia and then to Zimbabwe.

ZAPU: Zimbabwe African People’s Union; operated out of Zambia; supported by the Soviet bloc; most active and influential in the 1960s; its forces were called ZIPRA (Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army).

ZANU (PF): Zimbabwe African National Union (Patriotic Front); operated out of Mozambique; supported by China; its forces were called ZANLA (Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army); formally abandoned Marxism-Leninism in 1991; most influential as of 1972.

Joshua Nkomo: Leader of ZAPU; former leader of the African National Congress in Southern Rhodesia.

Robert Mugabe: Leader of ZANU (PF); prime minister of Zimbabwe.

Bishop Abel Muzorewa: Bishop of the United Methodist Church; former leader of African National Congress in Zimbabwe; later leader of United African National Council, which formed the “Zimbabwe-Rhodesia” government that was Ian Smith’s brainchild.

FRELIMO: Front for the Liberation of Mozambique; anti-Portuguese movement based in Mozambique.

RENAMO: Mozambique National Resistance; started by Smith government to destabilize FRELIMO and black Zimbabwe rebels; after Zimbabwean liberation, RENAMO was flown out of Zimbabwe by South African security forces.

it did not work. As the war continued, it became clear that the black liberation forces would win. By the end of 1979 Smith showed his readiness to negotiate for real. Rhodesia’s government was placed in the hands of Britain’s Lord Soames, the Muzorewa government was dissolved, a constitution was written, and elections were scheduled for February 27-29, 1980. Robert Mugabe, head of ZANU, became prime minister on March 14, and Canaan Banana, the new president of Zimbabwe, opened Parliament on May 14 of that year.

Learning a lesson: Mozambique

Lessing’s narrative is peppered by explosions on the Mozambique border, where RENAMO (Resistencia Nacional Mocambicana, or Mozambique National Resistance), a white-financed terrorist organization, is blowing up the pipeline that brings petroleum to Zimbabwe. A landlocked nation, Zimbabwe depends on nearby ports, such as Beira or Maputo in Mozambique. Mozambique had been a Portuguese colony. When the Portuguese settlers were forced to concede power in the early 1970s, they chose to leave rather than take part in a multiracial government. The sudden and complete departure of the nation’s political and technological experts played havoc with Mozambique’s economy and infrastructure. Robert Mugabe, the first prime minister of Zimbabwe, had lived in Mozambique as head of ZANU for many years; the specter of total economic collapse that he witnessed there influenced his own decision to make peace with the white community in Zimbabwe.

“Rhodies”

On the other side of the War of Liberation in Zimbabwe were Rhodesia’s white settlers. In 1969 they were outnumbered by black Rhodesians by a ratio of 21:1. Less than half had been born in Rhodesia; at least half had dual citizenship in some other country; one third had arrived in the country within the last eight years (Godwin and Hancock, pp. 16-17). Many of them resided in the city of Salisbury (renamed Harare after independence) and a smaller but still sizeable number, including Lessing’s brother, lived in rural areas. They ranged widely in class and ethnicity, with Jews, Greeks, and Afrikaners forming their own close communities, bound, it seems, less by cultural similarities than by their collective need as a tiny minority to segregate from the blacks among whom they lived. Most of these white Rhodesians enjoyed a high standard of living, made possible by the exploitation of black labor.

As soon as the war was over and the new Republic of Zimbabwe had been declared, whites left in droves. During the time that Lessing was visiting Zimbabwe, she reports hearing many white people speak of moving elsewhere; statistics show that in 1979 there were 232,000 white citizens of Rhodesia, whereas in 1990 there were only 80,000 (Godwin and Hancock, p. 314). Those who stayed, however, learned that it was still possible to live a good life in Zimbabwe. Inflation soared, government propaganda flooded the airwaves, bureaucratic ensnarlments were legendary, and it became difficult to procure parts for automobiles and tractors—but the basic pattern of their lives was not disrupted. This is not to say that the white Zimbabweans were overjoyed with their new situation—most historians, and certainly Lessing herself, note that the white population spent the first few years of Zimbabwean independence grumbling derisively about the ineptitude and corruption of the new black government.

White farmers, among whom Lessing grew up, were protected from land expropriation for ten years under the British-sponsored transition to black majority rule, and they lived their postwar lives much as they always had. They had the best land and the technology with which to farm it most productively—and were thus vital to the well-being of the entire nation. After independence some white farmers, like Lessing’s friend “the Coffee Farmer,” became advisers to the new government, keeping an eye on black agricultural efforts to make sure that all was going well. Agriculture, always among the nation’s most important industries, remained so after the war.

One of the most trying aspects of transition for all concerned was the resettlement of black Zimbabweans on land appropriate for farming. The three-year Transitional National Plan (1982-85) stated that 162,000 black Zimbabwean families were to be resettled on some 9 million hectares of land. However, the Plan did not work out well; by 1989 less than a quarter of these people had been resettled on only 2 million hectares. Many others simply squatted on land owned by whites. Of course, this caused significant tension, even among people of different races who were trying to get along. The Land Acquisition Act of 1992 exacerbated tensions, allowing the government to purchase whatever land it desired, at a fair price, with no appeal possible from the white owners. Lessing notes the effect that this policy was having on the white farmers of Zimbabwe:

“GIVING UP”

Lessing recounts the many rationales of people who have flooded out of Zimbabwe, for one reason or another. In a characteristic effort to provide a balanced view, she notes these snippets of conversation:

“I moved house. I put up a dura wall around the garden.” (A type of cement fencing.) “All day in the department I hear, ‘So you’ve put up a dura wall, just like a white.... All I hear is the whites this, the whites that. I’ve had enough of this racism. It’s getting worse. I’m off.”

A scientist left because, having many times applied unsuccessfully for some laboratory equipment, refused on the grounds of shortage of foreign exchange, he stood at the airport watching “Dozens of these damned [black leaders] off to one of their conferences somewhere. There’s always enough money for that.”

The last straw for another was a new history book for use in schools, designed to correct the errors of the white version of African history....

But: the man who left because of the fence is black….

(Lessing, African Laughter, pp. 418-19)

A new law provides for the taking of land without appeal from white farmers in certain designated areas. The perennial threats to do this means [sic] that a productive part of the agricultural economy is kept in a state of uncertainty, farmers beginning to refuse to invest in their farms, and trying to put money into movables. Meanwhile the government has large areas of land still not allocated. It is being said that this law is designed to distract the attention of the Povos [the poor] from the government’s mistakes.

(African Laughter, p. 434)

Ngangas

Sprinkled throughout African Laughter are references to the ngangas (now spelled n’angas), the traditional healer-diviners whose role in Shona society is to communicate with the spirit world. Sometimes they act as mediums for ancestral spirits or for spirits that, for example, make rain. They diagnose and cure illnesses that are physical and individual, as well as communal ills that are metaphysical, political, and social. At the end of 1989 it was estimated that there was one n’anga for every 257 Shona. By contrast, in 1984, there was one “Western” doctor for every 6,700 Shona (Reynolds, pp. xxvi-xxvii). As respected counselors in the Shona communities the n’angas served as advisers to the black fighters in the War of Liberation; n’anga approval of the African soldiers went a long way toward legitimizing their actions and confirming the validity of their struggle to reclaim their ancestral land. Not all n’angas approved of the war, of course, but they did what they could to provide healing and reconciliation to the community. When the war ended the n’angas filled perhaps their most important ritual function, cleansing people of evil, internally and externally,

FROM A CHIMURENGA SONG

The air is still
But they who watch
Know that their children
Fight for their land.

Spirits of the ancestors
Lead us, protect us,
We die for you
For our land.

(Weiss, p. 13)

with the help of plants, animals, and dream interpretation.

Education

When the War of Liberation erupted in the early 1970s, the black guerillas closed many rural schools, in part to encourage children to join the freedom fighters. And, in fact, the children did join up in massive numbers, usually because of forced recruitment or abduction. By the end of the decade more than a thousand schools had been closed. Lessing reports throughout African Laughter on the efforts of the Zimbabwean government to reinstall education as the primary pursuit of the nation’s youth; new schools were going up, albeit on a shoestring budget, and teachers, both Zimbabwean and foreign, were struggling to improve the quality of education in the new nation. In 1980 the Mugabe government made primary education free and compulsory. The number of schools skyrocketed, as did enrollments, and the government made education a priority in its budget. But there was a dearth of teachers, materials, buildings, and, perhaps more important, a lack of prospects for those students who did manage to graduate:

In 1982 I met teachers radiant with exhaustion and idealism, who said they worked in schools converted from barns, shacks, shops—anything, and there might be two or three shifts of pupils in a day.... Parents helped to build schools, giving time, skills, and money, often going without necessities. Secondary education was the key to their children’s future, and there was no sacrifice too great.

Eight years since Liberation.... Zimbabwe is now covered with secondary schools. But there are not enough teachers, textbooks, let alone—often—electricity, or even clean water.... The teaching staff in these schools never stay long, they are always on their way to somewhere better The children at these schools believe they are being given a future....

This situation is dangerous, a classic for revolution: numbers of young people who have been promised everything, have made sacrifices and are in the end disappointed.

(African Laughter, pp. 192-93)

The Memoir in Focus

Contents summary

African Laughter is made up of a rich and wide-ranging series of vignettes, dealing with everything from the public health ramifications of the Blair toilet, to the state of Zimbabwean hospitals, to farming techniques and government corruption, to black novelists and the disappearance of the Zimbabwean wilderness. Throughout its pages are discussed various gaps—between races, nationalities, genders, generations. And, in “The Monologue,” the rote series of complaints voiced by white farmers against the black government—to Lessing’s mind, ad nauseam—emerges the most important of gap of all: the geographic “Gap” through which white Zimbabweans threaten to pass forever into South Africa. Lessing pastes these vignettes into a sort of scrapbook about her travels in Zimbabwe during the troubled period when the new nation was struggling to define itself.

The memoir is divided into four sections: “Then” (1982), “Next Time” (1988), “And Again” (1989), and “And Again, In Passing” (1992). The last is the shortest section, comprising a sort of coda to the themes worked out in the previous three. These three share certain continuities that shape the work. For example, subsections entitled “Air Zimbabwe” appear at or near the beginning of all three, and foreshadow the condition of the nation that Lessing is about to visit. In 1982 the black air hostesses are defensive and reserved, the passengers are almost all white, and the atmosphere is tense and uncomfortable. Lessing finds her seatmate, a white racehorse owner, to be peevish and prejudiced, aghast at what he sees as the clumsiness of Zimbabwe’s new black government. At Immigration she is greeted by a shy, inexperienced black officer. In 1988, by contrast, the hostesses are confident and firm; the plane is filled with black businessmen, government representatives, and celebrities; and the customs officials are as confident as the cabin crew. In 1989 Lessing sits next to a chef—one of the new class of black Zimbabwean government officials who have somehow managed to reconcile their official Marxist philosophy with personal economic rapaciousness. The immigration official is sarcastic and hostile, and gives her problems because she is a writer and journalist—“thus proving how thoroughly Zimbabwe has entered the modern world” (African Laughter, p. 324). These three “Air Zimbabwe” pieces trace the memoir’s progression through Zimbabwe’s early hopeful promise, ebullient confidence, and eventual decline into cynicism and despair.

In 1982 Lessing is filled with a sense of dis-combobulation—she is back in “the streets of the town that was once my big city” and nothing is as it once was—the physical and psychological effects of the war are still visible in the land and in the faces of people, white and black, she meets (African Laughter, p. 15). Immediately, she is plunged into nostalgic reverie, and recounts episodes from her childhood days with her family (mother, father, brother) camping in the vast bush that spread across so much of Rhodesia. Her return surprises her in this regard: “When I returned to Zimbabwe. I expected all kinds of changes, but there was one change I had not thought to expect. The game had mostly gone, the bush was nearly silent. Once, the dawn chorus hurt the ears” (African Laughter, p. 23).

THE DISAPPEARING BUSH

During her 1988 visit Lessing speaks to a young African schoolteacher who likes to walk in the “bush” by himself. She realizes with shock that, although their experiences are separated by only some 50 years, the change in the bush has been immense—what he considers bush she considers a denuded landscape.

“When (I was a girl in Banket the bush was full of koodoo, sable, eland, and all the smaller buck, particularly duiker. There were stem buck and bush buck, anteaters and porcupines and wild cats and monkeys, and baboons and wild pig. There was every kind of bird. There were still leopards in the hills….”

“Did you live in a game park?” he asked.

“No. That was how the bush was then. Everywhere. In every part of the country….”

“You say that wasn’t a safari park?”

(African Laughter, p. 344)

Lessing is also confronted by the years that have passed when she meets, for the first time in nearly two decades, her younger brother, Harry. Harry has never shared his sister’s “funny ideas” about race relations and communism. He is outraged by the still-fresh transition to power of the black Marxists, by the fact that President Canaan Banana lets chickens run in the gardens of Government House and by Prime Minister Mugabe’s habit of traveling in an armed motorcade. He concludes his tirade with “they’re inferior to us, and that’s all there is to it” (African Laughter, p. 43). This is Lessing’s first exposure to “The Monologue,” the antigovernment rant that springs to the lips of many white Zimbabweans. But the rapid social transformation is disorienting not only to white Zimbabweans: a young black hitchhiker fired from his new job in Harare weeps in Lessing’s car; blacks who were promised land at the war’s end, only to discover that this land was to be communal, not private, become stubborn squatters on white-owned farmland; the French wife of an unemployed black writer finds herself waiting on her husband and his friends according to “African custom” (African Laughter, p. 112).

In 1988 Lessing returns to a nation that has teetered for six years on the brink of another civil war, this time between rival black factions. A year earlier Prime Minister Mugabe became convinced that Zimbabwean stability was being threatened by South African-supported ZAPU forces under Joshua Nkomo, and Mugabe took action. He entered into the Unity Agreement of 1987, which drew Nkomo’s troops out of the bush—who turned out to be less numerous than feared—and brought Nkomo into the Mugabe government. Meanwhile, in the six years since Lessing first visited Zimbabwe, corruption has run rampant in government, now at least partly in the hands of the chefs, the new black elite:

A United Nations official remarked.... “it is not exactly unknown for the victorious side in a civil war to line their pockets, but Zimbabwe is unique in creating a boss class in less than ten years and to the accompaniment of marxist [sic] rhetoric.”

(African Laughter, p. 146)

Nevertheless, what Lessing herself has learned through “reading newspapers from Zimbabwe, letters from Zimbabwe, [and] listening to travellers’ tales…. [is] vitality, exuberance, optimism, enjoyment” (African Laughter, pp. 146-47). This visit is marked by paradox, contradiction, and irony. Lessing notes the passion with which people discuss politics, build schools, teach, struggle to improve healthcare and women’s rights, form collective farms and help former “terrorists” reintegrate into society; she notes also people’s disillusionment with the government, like this tirade by a Zimbabwean:

I expected a period of incompetence. I expected every kind of mess and muddle. I knew nothing would work for a time. How could it when they didn’t have the trained people? But what I didn’t expect was that these bastards would get into power and then not care about anything but feathering their own nests.... Do you imagine they care about those poor bastards out in the Reserves—yes, they are still the reserves, you can give them a new name if you like, but. …

(African Laughter, pp. 154-55)

In 1989 Lessing returns to a grumbling, crumbling Zimbabwe. It is not yet the bitter Zimbabwe she will see in 1992, but it is grappling with an AIDS epidemic, an out-of-control black elite, a corrupt commercial class, the further disappearance of the bush, entrenched suspicions between the races, and the political disillusionment of young men and women who fought a war seemingly only to change the white elite for its black twin. To encapsulate this feeling, Lessing reproduces a poem by S. J. Nondo, written in protest of the black elite:

The Vengeance of the Poor Man

In your sumptuous house
I toil and sweat for you,
Yet in the heart of Harare
You see a stranger in me.
When I am dead and buried,
Your deeds will tear your heart.

In hotels that glitter,
On fatty steaks you dine,
Honey your tongue with oozy puddings
and sink your frame on cozy beds.
When I am dead and buried,
Your deeds will tear your heart.…

(African Laughter, p. 375)

The final section, which takes place in 1992, is brief, erratic, and bitter; it records the demise of hope in Zimbabwe. Lessing reports tiny fragments of information, sometimes only a sentence or two, on the order of: “In Zimbabwe they are not saying, ‘Why doesn’t Mugabe … ?’ ‘Mugabe should …’ The people have given up hopeful expectation” (African Laughter, p. 431). Or: “A letter: when I think of our dreams at independence I want to cry for Zimbabwe” (African Laughter, p. 436). The memoir concludes with a brief overview of the history of Zimbabwean agriculture and the place of Zimbabwe in southern Africa.

Women’s rights in Zimbabwe

Throughout African Laughter, Lessing notices women—poor, badly fed, pregnant—who go unnoticed by the men around her. She obtains firsthand access to their world. In 1988 Lessing has “that stroke of luck travellers dream of, which we cannot plan, expect, order, or foresee: I was invited to go with a team of people making instructional books for use in the villages” (African Laughter, p. 236). She travels through rural Zimbabwe in the company of a “Book Team” of three Zimbabwean women and a Zimbabwean man on a cultural mission. This team and others like it spread out in groups of four or five across the nation, and speak with large gatherings of women and men, trying to discern and address the sociological and political concerns of average (i.e., rural) Zimbabweans. They are to publish their findings in a book, hence the name of the team. Several such books have in fact been produced, including one on basic economics (how to open a bank account, etc.). The project that Lessing is invited to join is devoted to women’s issues. The Zimbabwean government had promised women—who had fought in the bush alongside men—equality in law and in the workplace. A series of laws suggested that it would deliver on this promise:

• In 1980 the Minimum Wages Act mandates that there be a minimum acceptable wage paid even for unskilled workers, a group that overwhelmingly includes women.
• Also in 1980, Equal Pay Regulations stipulate that men and women be awarded equal wages for equal work.
• In 1984 the Labour Relations Act gives women three months of maternity leave and forbids employment discrimination on the basis of gender.
• In 1985 female Public Service workers are given the same pension benefits as their male counterparts.

As one women’s publication has observed, however, “the implementation of these laws to the benefit of women is a different story” (Getecha and Chipika, p. 111). Traditional beliefs, which dictate that women are inferior, have been entrenched in both black and white Zimbabwean society. Lessing reports, for example, the plight of a white Zimbabwean women in the mid-1980s who had to obtain the permission of her ex-husband before a doctor would perform a sterilization procedure upon her.

The book team project of which Lessing writes is not the only women’s rights publication to be issued in post-liberation Zimbabwe. The journal Tauri or “Speak Out,” for example, is a bilingual (English and Shona) magazine put out by the Women’s Action Group in Harare. It deals with such issues as sexual discrimination, domestic violence, what to do if arrested, and how to avoid contracting AIDS. In 1995 the Zimbabwean Women’s Resource Center and Network published Zimbabwe Women’s Voices, a collection of information on equal rights legislation, poetry, interviews, and essays on such subjects as “Violence against Women,” “Women, Land, and the Environment,” and “Women and Education.” Aiding in the effort are such organizations as the Zimbabwe Women’s Bureau, Women and Law in Southern Africa, Association of Women’s Club, and the Global Fund for Women. Their participation—in fact, their very existence—demonstrates that at least in some circles women’s rights in Zimbabwe have been the focus of considerable activism.

Sources and literary context

“Every writer has a myth country,” asserts Lessing at the beginning of African Laughter. “This does not have to be childhood” (African Laughter, p. 35). In her case, however, it is. Lessing returns to Zimbabwe, despite everything. Not only did the government brand her with “Prohibited Immigrant” status, but she has also been alienated from her family there—she left behind two ex-husbands and two children. Her return nevertheless has an air of the inevitable about it. In Part 1 of her autobiography, Under My Skin, composed about the same time that she was finishing African Laughter, Lessing writes: “A few weeks ago—1992—I was in the bush not far from where I was brought up I might not ever have left it, this is where I belonged” (Lessing, Under My Skin, pp. 111-12). Her brother, Harry, traumatized by World War II and by the recent War of Liberation, cannot remember large portions of their shared childhood, so from the dialogue in African Laughter we learn only scraps here and there. In her autobiography, however, Lessing writes more fully of her childhood adventures in the wilderness that surrounded her parents’ farm:

AIDS

Like many African nations, Zimbabwe suffers from a severe AIDS epidemic, In 1992 Lessing writes that “the government says [AIDS] will kill at least a million people by the year 2000, in a population of nine million. …In an urban clinic recently one out of four babies was HIV positive. Most men refuse to wear condoms” (African Laughter, p. 435). The grief that Lessing feels in recounting these statistics is the keener for her having noticed on two previous trips the government’s offhand way of dealing with the crisis. In 1988 she writes:

In every conversation these days, sooner or later, AIDS appears. Not in government offices: officially Zimbabwe is not supposed to have a problem with AIDS. The Minister of Health has Just announced publicly that talk of AIDS is put about by ill-wishing whites to destroy the infant tourist industry.

(African Laughter, p. 234)

There is a memory, a most particular and special memory….[F]or years, knowing how little my brother and I agreed on, or shared, I would think: I wonder if he remembers that day, but as it turned out, he did not....

We knew that buck liked to spend the hot daytime hours in the shade of antheaps where there is thick cover…. We found a high place on a rock, shielded by branches…. We waited. It was about six in the morning, and the sun had just got up. Not easy for a nine-year-old, or ten-year-old…. to sit absolutely still…. We heard small sounds, and then there he was, a male koodoo, slowly picking its way up through the drapes of Christmas fern, the boulders…. We could see liquid dark eyes, dark lashes… we sat scarcely breathing, stiff with the effort not to make a sound … We had never been so close to a living koodoo … We were seeing how the beast experienced its life…. always on the watch for enemies, always wary, listening, turning its head this way and that.

(Lessing, Under My Skin, p. 114)

From scenes such as this are fabricated a “concentration of truth” that makes up Lessing’s myth-country, Zimbabwe (African Laughter, p. 35). It is against these childhood perceptions that Lessing’s adult experiences of Zimbabwe are measured.

Reviews

African Laughter has been well received in the United States and internationally. Describing the book as “a saddening tale of the forfeit of possibility,” Vincent Crapanzano praises Lessing for offering “a jagged but brilliant report of her visits to the new country of Zimbabwe” (Crapanzano, p. 18). Robert Oakshott of the Spectator stresses the laughter as well as the sadness of this “marvelous” work, calling it “delightful and profoundly moving by turns, and frequently both at the same time”; Lessing’s “subject matter” is so various “as sometimes to defy classification” (Oakshott in Chapman and Jorgensen, p. 272). Some critics—for example, as does Richard Stengel in the Los Angeles Times Book Review—have preferred to read African Laughter as an autobiographical portrait of the artist: “In this elegant and elegiac memoir, Lessing not only returns to her native land but to her earliest themes as a writer.... While the book recounts her travels during four trips to Zimbabwe, it is really a Proustian journey to the past, a search for the fountainhead of her own artistic sensibility” (Stengel in Chapman and Jorgensen, p. 272). Others however, have focused more heavily on the historical and political merits of Lessing’s book: “Lessing gives us one of the most penetrating and evenhanded critiques of Zimbabwe as a new nation,” writes P. Mathabane; her depiction “is without stereotype or sentimentality” (Mathabane in Chapman and Jorgensen, p. 272). While positive about Lessing’s depiction of the area’s white settlers “and what has become of them,” K. Anthony Appiah expresses a reservation, related to the limitations of her perspective as a white outsider: “Lessing shows us only the exterior of the black Zimbabweans.... The best of this book is the white man’s story” (Appiah in Chapman and Jorgensen, p. 272).

—Lorraine Valestuk

For More Information

Barber, James. Zimbabwe’s Regional Role: Prospects for a Land-Loched Power. London: Research Institute for the Study of Conflict and Terrorism, 1991.

Bhebe, Ngwabi, and Terence Ranger, eds. Society in Zimbabwe’s Liberation War. Portsmouth, N.H: Heinemann, 1996.

Chapman, Jeff, and John D. Jorgensen, eds. Contemporary Authors New Revision Series. Vol. 54. Detroit: Gale, 1992.

Crapanzano, Vincent. “This Home Can Never Be Home.” The New York Times, 18 October 1992 p. 13.

Getecha, Ciru, and Jesimen Chipika, eds. Zimbabwe Women’s Voices. Harare: Zimbabwe Women’s Resource Centre and Network, 1995.

Godwin, Peter, and Ian Hancock. “Rhodesians Never Die”: The Impact of War and Political Change on White Rhodesia, c. 1970-1980. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Kriger, Norma J. Zimbabwe’s Guerilla War: Peasant Voices. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Lessing, Doris. African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe. New York: HarperCollins, 1992.

_____. Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949. New York: Harper Collins, 1994.

Reynolds, Pamela. Traditional Healers and Childhood in Zimbabwe. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1996.

Tungamirai, Josiah. “Recruitment to ZANLA: Building up a War Machine.” In Soldiers in Zimbabwe’s Liberation War. Ed. Ngwabi Bhebe and Terence Ranger. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1995.

Uwechue, Raph, ed. Africa Today. 3rd ed. London: Africa Books, 1996.

Weiss, Ruth. Zimbabwe and the New Elite. London: British Academic Press, 1994.