Miami Herald Nov. 8, 1992
AFRICAN LAUGHTER
By Doris Lessing
HarperCollins. 440 pp.
One-third of the way through this multi-faceted account of four revisits to her
former homeland, Zimbabwe (until 1979, Southern Rhodesia), Doris Lessing issues a
warning she never heeds. "To be in love with a country," she advises, "is a tricky
business. You get your heart broken even more surely than by being in love with a
person."
The Persian-born multiple-Nobel Prize nominee, lived from ages five to 30 in
Rhodesia, raised in poverty on her father's unsuccessful farm, before becoming persona
non grata for opposing minority white rule. She has lived since 1949 in England
"because it is quiet and unstimulating and leaves you in peace," a serene setting to
compile her massive oeuvre.
Yet between the lines of African Laughter Lessing leaves little doubt that it is
Zimbabwe, this struggling land of her youth, for which she feels what some Latins call
querencia, that sense of place which inspires identification and love.
With a rich weave of styles, from anecdotal to journalistic to philosophical, she
blankets her four Zimbabwe visits--1982, 1988, 1989, 1992--with a patchwork of
emotions: pain and joy, despair and hope, irritation and devotion.
It becomes easy to understand Lessing's metronomic swings of response.
Landlocked as it is amid a southern Africa deep in potential disaster: devalued currencies,
failing crops, soaring costs of food and medicine, hetro-sexually transmitted AIDS
threatening to wipe out an entire generation and the pernicious political menace of South
Africa, Zimbabwe struggles yet survives. It even keeps some weaker neighbors, such as
Mozambique, alive.
In the dozen years since Robert Mugabe and Joseph Nkomo's Patriotic Front
wrested power from Ian Smith's white regime, Zimbabwe has faced severe challenges.
How would the races get along after power switched from white to black hands?
At first, uneasily. Says one white Zimbabwean to Lessing in 1982: "Your precious
Africans...they can't get anything right....They're inferior to us, and that's all there is to it."
Even many black Zimbabweans agreed. Says one: "The whites are cleverer than us. We
need them to stay here and give us jobs." Yet by acknowledging the solid infrastructure
the British had erected, Zimbabwe avoided the overhasty shambles some neighbors had
made and enjoyed stability while newly empowered blacks garnered technical expertise.
Meanwhile, throughout the 1980s, despite "South Africa's determination that all
of the southern part of the continent should remain dominated by the whites," a cultural
lessing, african laughter 2
transformation evolved. Young urban blacks, for better or worse, adopted some of the
behavior patterns they'd observed in whites, and a new generation of whites, more open
and democratic than their parents, reached adulthood. Ironically, the worst racism
Lessing sees comes from newly arrived Britons who believe previously latent bigotry can
bloom in African soil, a phenomenon not unheard of among Northerners who've moved
to the American South.
Yet, even as Zimbabwe's society grew more egalitarian, its government grew
more corrupt. By 1988, Lessing found both blacks and whites disillusioned. An everswelling
bureaucracy of young single-party Marxists exhorted socialist ideals even as
Eastern Europe demonstrated their failure. Worse, greed threatened to turn Zimbabwe's
government into a "kleptocracy" like many of its neighbors. Says one "betrayed lover" of
Zimbabwe: "I expected a period of incompetence.... 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."
A major strength of this book is how Lessing allows dozens of people, like this
betrayed lover, to relate their country's story in their own words spun seamlessly into the
overall narrative. Their accounts are often inconsistent, but so too is Lessing's, as when
she says native Africans had no sense that land could belong to one person rather than
another and two pages later tells how the Zulu-offshoot Matabele snatched land from the
peaceful Mashona. If her sources often speak in sweeping generalizations, so too does
Lessing.
Yet a vividly painted landscape of Zimbabwe emerges in these pages. We see the
bush disappearing where once the eland and leopard roamed free. We see African
women forming supportive sisterhoods on this most paternalistic of continents where, to
Zimbabwe's north, pharonic circumcision of girls is still widely practiced. We see
headmasters extort their schools' funds, yet children increasingly seek education. We see
much more, all told with love and hope by one of the foremost writers of the past halfcentury.
AFRICAN LAUGHTER
By Doris Lessing
HarperCollins. 440 pp.
One-third of the way through this multi-faceted account of four revisits to her
former homeland, Zimbabwe (until 1979, Southern Rhodesia), Doris Lessing issues a
warning she never heeds. "To be in love with a country," she advises, "is a tricky
business. You get your heart broken even more surely than by being in love with a
person."
The Persian-born multiple-Nobel Prize nominee, lived from ages five to 30 in
Rhodesia, raised in poverty on her father's unsuccessful farm, before becoming persona
non grata for opposing minority white rule. She has lived since 1949 in England
"because it is quiet and unstimulating and leaves you in peace," a serene setting to
compile her massive oeuvre.
Yet between the lines of African Laughter Lessing leaves little doubt that it is
Zimbabwe, this struggling land of her youth, for which she feels what some Latins call
querencia, that sense of place which inspires identification and love.
With a rich weave of styles, from anecdotal to journalistic to philosophical, she
blankets her four Zimbabwe visits--1982, 1988, 1989, 1992--with a patchwork of
emotions: pain and joy, despair and hope, irritation and devotion.
It becomes easy to understand Lessing's metronomic swings of response.
Landlocked as it is amid a southern Africa deep in potential disaster: devalued currencies,
failing crops, soaring costs of food and medicine, hetro-sexually transmitted AIDS
threatening to wipe out an entire generation and the pernicious political menace of South
Africa, Zimbabwe struggles yet survives. It even keeps some weaker neighbors, such as
Mozambique, alive.
In the dozen years since Robert Mugabe and Joseph Nkomo's Patriotic Front
wrested power from Ian Smith's white regime, Zimbabwe has faced severe challenges.
How would the races get along after power switched from white to black hands?
At first, uneasily. Says one white Zimbabwean to Lessing in 1982: "Your precious
Africans...they can't get anything right....They're inferior to us, and that's all there is to it."
Even many black Zimbabweans agreed. Says one: "The whites are cleverer than us. We
need them to stay here and give us jobs." Yet by acknowledging the solid infrastructure
the British had erected, Zimbabwe avoided the overhasty shambles some neighbors had
made and enjoyed stability while newly empowered blacks garnered technical expertise.
Meanwhile, throughout the 1980s, despite "South Africa's determination that all
of the southern part of the continent should remain dominated by the whites," a cultural
lessing, african laughter 2
transformation evolved. Young urban blacks, for better or worse, adopted some of the
behavior patterns they'd observed in whites, and a new generation of whites, more open
and democratic than their parents, reached adulthood. Ironically, the worst racism
Lessing sees comes from newly arrived Britons who believe previously latent bigotry can
bloom in African soil, a phenomenon not unheard of among Northerners who've moved
to the American South.
Yet, even as Zimbabwe's society grew more egalitarian, its government grew
more corrupt. By 1988, Lessing found both blacks and whites disillusioned. An everswelling
bureaucracy of young single-party Marxists exhorted socialist ideals even as
Eastern Europe demonstrated their failure. Worse, greed threatened to turn Zimbabwe's
government into a "kleptocracy" like many of its neighbors. Says one "betrayed lover" of
Zimbabwe: "I expected a period of incompetence.... 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."
A major strength of this book is how Lessing allows dozens of people, like this
betrayed lover, to relate their country's story in their own words spun seamlessly into the
overall narrative. Their accounts are often inconsistent, but so too is Lessing's, as when
she says native Africans had no sense that land could belong to one person rather than
another and two pages later tells how the Zulu-offshoot Matabele snatched land from the
peaceful Mashona. If her sources often speak in sweeping generalizations, so too does
Lessing.
Yet a vividly painted landscape of Zimbabwe emerges in these pages. We see the
bush disappearing where once the eland and leopard roamed free. We see African
women forming supportive sisterhoods on this most paternalistic of continents where, to
Zimbabwe's north, pharonic circumcision of girls is still widely practiced. We see
headmasters extort their schools' funds, yet children increasingly seek education. We see
much more, all told with love and hope by one of the foremost writers of the past halfcentury.
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