Leasing, once a "Prohibited Immigrant" barred from her childhood
homeland of Rhodesia by its white minority government, returns to
what is now Zimbabwe - and in inimitably forthright style records
her impressions. The author last visited her homeland in the late
50's, when the country was a British colony, not as rigidly
segregated as South Africa but nonetheless dominated by a white
ruling class that enjoyed a way of life impossible elsewhere. When
she returned in 1982, Zimbabwe was just two years old, and blacks
and whites were still bitterly divided as well as devastated by the
ten-year bush war that had pitted blacks against whites as well as
blacks against blacks. The countryside seemed equally devastated
("...the game mostly gone. The bush was silent"), and squatters
were overfarming already fragile lands. Most whites whom Lessing
met, including her brother, delivered what she called "The
Monologue," as much a racist critique as a display of the
after-effects of a tremendous shock. On her three subsequent
visits, the last made earlier this year, race relations proved
healthier, but Prime Minister Mugabe's government seemed
increasingly autocratic and corrupt; the economy was poorly
organized along socialist lines; a terrible drought had ravaged the
region; and unemployment continued to rise, especially among the
young. On these visits, Lessing talked to a range of contacts,
black and white; stayed on farms where white owners were trying out
new crops to boost the local economy; accompanied the multiracial
Book Team, which helps rural women create "how-to" textbooks; and
traveled fearfully to her childhood home, where the beloved bush
had disappeared and "everything spoke of failure." Always the
fair-minded realist, Leasing isn't overly optimistic about the
future, but her sympathetic account of Zimbabwe's struggle to forge
a common destiny is most worthwhile. (Kirkus Reviews)
In the 1980s and early 1990s, Doris Lessing made several visits to her homeland, Zimbabwe, a country from which she had been banned for twenty-five years for her opposition to the government of what was then white Southern Rhodesia. Mingling memory and reportage in vivid detail, Doris Lessing pays passionate and profound testament to an extraordinary country, its landscape, people and unquenchable spirit. 'African Laughter' is both a shrewd and perceptive portrait of a modern African state emerging from its bloody and terrible colonial history, and a candid and moving insight into the mind of one of this century's finest writers.
"An eloquent statement, one of the strengths of this account of a nation's tragedy is that Doris Lessing evokes not sadness but laughter. She describes this as 'the marvellous African laughter born somewhere in the gut, seizing the whole body with good-humoured philosophy. It is the laughter of poor people'."
TLS
"Innumerable conversations – of Africans, among them poets and teachers and cooks; of whites, some of whom have 'taken the gap' to South Africa then returned, disillusioned – contribute to Doris Lessing's picture of the new Zimbabwe. Enthralling, significant and provocative."
INDEPENDENT
"'African Laughter' conveys a country and its people more completely than any other book I have read. It is filled with stories, anecdotes, newspaper cuttings, poems, obituaries, songs, even Doris Lessing's synopsis for a film – the cumulative effect is extraordinary. As well as a remarkable immediacy, the narrative has an irrepressible physical vigour which reflects perfectly the vitality of the Zimbabwean people."
DAILY TELEGRAPH
An Aristophanic counterpoint, between the comic and the serious, zigzags like a golden thread from the start to finish of this marvellous book. Delightful and profoundly moving."
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