Another Lesson On Lessing

Last Fall, I wrote that the Nobel Prize was awarded to writer Doris Lessing, now an anti-communist critical of feminists, for her earlier Marxism and feminism. Predictably, a reader from academe disagreed.

“Have you read any Doris Lessing?” Trent Eades, a community college professor asks. “She’s been critical of communism for nearly half a century.”

“Her The Golden Notebook, published in 1962, clearly shows her disenchantment with communism.” Actually, one of the reasons that I am so tardy in responding to this November 7, 2007 letter is that I wanted to rereadAfrican Laughter, Lessing’s 1992 account of her visits to Zimbabwe during Marxist Robert Mugabe’s first decade in power there.

Also, we had a pretty full publication and posting schedule that, thankfully, has yet to let up. Incidentally, African Laughter features a fairly nuanced portrait of a dictator the civilized world has come to view as a monster.

On the one hand, she excoriates the North Koreans who took up residence in the country she grew up in. “Comrade Mugabe accepted an offer by the North Koreans to supply soldiers to train a regiment especially to guard him and act as exemplars of military efficiency to the rest of the citizens,” she wrote. “They were thugs, bullies and, more than once, murderers, for it was they who were blamed for the recent murder of two tourists not very far from this farm.”

“Everybody feared them.” On the other hand, she gave Mugabe the benefit of the doubt for many years.

“It’s going to take time,” she told a Zimbabwean journalist in the 80s, “but Zimbabwe is on the right path.”

“I said, as it seemed I was already doing several times a day, that I simply could not understand why people expected things to change so quickly,” she recounts a little later in the section of the journal on Zimbabwe in the 1980s. “Corruption has overtaken every newly independent country in Africa, and Zimbabwe too, though Comrade Mugabe exhorted, pleaded, threatened and passed well-intentioned laws,” Lessing also wrote.

Eventually, she too came to see Zimbabwe’s autocrat as part of the problem but her change in view clearly was, as Eades and company might put it, evolutionary not revolutionary.
In fact, in the book she offers “my most grateful thanks to the members of the Book Team of the Community Publishing Programme.”

“The programme was initiated by the Ministry of Community and Co-operative Development”—a Zimbabwe government agency.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.