African Laughter Read Online Free PDF

the black man must sleep inside the lager, safe, with us.
    This involved all kinds of illogicalities and inconsistencies, but I was used to them, and took them for granted until I was much older. Reuben (or Isaiah, or Jacob, or Simon, or Abraham, or Sixpence, or Tickie–for they never stayed long) made up his own smaller fire outside the boma, and cooked his maize porridge on it, eating, too, the foods we were eating, bacon, eggs, steak, cake, bread, jam. While we sat at night around the big fire, gazing at it, watching the sparks whirl up into the trees and the stars, he sat with his back to a tree, turned away from us, looking at his own smaller fire. Later, when we were in our pyjamas inside the blankets, he was called in, and he wrapped himself in his blankets, and lay down, his face turned away from us to the leafy wall. In the early morning when we woke he was already gone, and his fire was lit, he was sitting by it, a blanket around his shoulders, and he was wearing everything he owned–tattered shirt, shorts, a cast-off jersey of my father’s. These mornings could be cold, and sometimes frost crusted the edges of leaves in cold hollows. In our part of the country, so much hotter, there was seldom frost.
    Later I had to wonder what that man was thinking, taken on this amazing trip in a car (and few of his fellows then had been in a car) to a part of the country too far away for him normally to think of visiting, days and days of walking, with the white family who were choosing–briefly–to live just as his people did, exclaiming all the time how wonderful it was, but preserving their customs as if they were still inside their house. They put on special clothes to sleep in. They washed continually in a white enamel basin set on a soap box under a tree. And they never stopped eating, just like all the white people. ‘They eat all the time,’ he certainly reported, returning to his own. ‘As soon as one meal is finished, they start cooking the next.’
    Now I wonder most of all, with the helpless grieving so many of us feel these days, when we remember the destruction of animals and plants, about the reckless cutting down of those boughs, and of young trees. When we left a site the rubbish was well buried, but the wreckage of the encircling boughs remained, and we would see it all there a few months later, on our way to making a new enclosure with fresh boughs. Above where our fires had roared, the scorched leaves hung grey and brittle. In those days the bush, the game, the birds, seemed limitless. Not long before I left Southern Rhodesia to come to London I was a typist for a Parliamentary Committee on sleeping sickness, reporting on the eradication of tsetse fly, recording how, over large areas, the hunters moved, killing out hundreds of thousands of head of game, kudu, sable, bush buck, duiker, particularly duiker, those light-stepping, graceful, dark-liquid eyed creatures which once filled the bush, so that you could not walk more than a few yards without seeing one.
    When I returned to Zimbabwe after that long absence, 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. Lying in our blankets under the trees on the sandveld of Marandellas, or in the house on the farm in Banket, the shrilling, clamouring, exulting of the birds as the sun appeared was so loud the ears seemed to curl up and complain before–there was nothing else for it–we leaped up into the early morning, to become part of all that tumult and activity. But by the 1980s the dawn chorus had become a feeble thing. Once, everywhere, moving through the bush, you saw duiker, bush buck, wild pig, wild cats, porcupines, anteaters; koodoo stood on the antheaps turning their proud horns to examine you before bounding off; eland went about in groups, like cattle. Being in the bush was to be with animals, one of them.
    Lying inside