Norman Rush - Mating

Nelson was interesting on the Boers, which was our last main topic at Tutwane’s. I was flagging, but this woke me up. In Gaborone, especially within the embassy penumbra, everybody talks about the Boers but nobody does anything about them, as I once said and which went over gratifyingly. The Boers keep coming into Botswana and killing people when they feel like it. They are still doing it. So we were always speculating about when the next raid would be, how far they would turn the screw, when they would close the railway at Ramatlabama, and so on. Anyone who had anything new or acute to say on the Boers was regarded with interest. I in fact jotted down key words from Denoon’s take on the Boer menace as soon as I got back under a streetlight. I might not get invited to the site, but I would take this away with me against a rainy day. Waste not want not is my motto.

The craziness of the Boers comes out of nationalism, he said. The Boers have only had the feeling of being in charge in South Africa since 1948 or 1950, which is recent, when they finally overcame the British. They had just gotten their feet under the table, so to speak, when of all people the kaffirs start telling them it’s all over, dinner will not be served. All they get is starters. The Boers reminded him of America, which only got to run a Pax Americana from the end of the Second World War until the sixties. Tantalized nationalisms are the worst. To which he added that, more than in any comparable case, the Boers are their state, since over half the adult Boer workforce is state employed.

Secondly, apartheid had to be looked at as an instance of a generically male form of madness having to do with sport. He said You’re looking at a particular game of performative excellence, like the shepherds in Crete who base their hierarchies on successful sheep rustling. Oppressing blacks is a national blood sport. We should consider the handicap the Boers accept. A tiny minority is holding down a gigantic black majority getting larger and more furious by the day. If the Boers can do it it’s better than winning every medal in the Olympics, which the Boers can’t play in anyway. The game is called Triumph of the Will. I know a fair number of Boers, he said, and Boers want to go into the SADF and go to the border or ride like lords through the townships. The English speakers don’t and are the ones who are conscientious objecting or slipping away abroad when the draft touches them. The white exiles you meet in Gaborone are English speakers, most of them. You strike up a conversation with a Boer and the first thing he wants to know is if you’ve done your military service, wherever you come from. Been to the army, then? is the first line out of their mouths. If you haven’t, they’ll still talk to you but from an emotional distance. I know them, he said.

There was no bravura about any of this analysis. In fact I could see he was depressing himself as he went on.

How is it going to end, do you think? I asked.

I don’t know, but it is, he said, and there’s something amusing the Boers have done to themselves that they won’t appreciate until it’s all over. Possibly the dumbest thing the Boers ever did was allow kung fu movies into the townships. They thought they were letting in cultural trash to distract the masses. Mark my words, someday somebody will trace the influence of kung fu movies on the liberation struggle and it will be substantial. Because kung fu movies, which are in fact trash, nevertheless teach over and over again an important lesson: you’ve got to get revenge. Christianity says you don’t, the reverse, and for years the educated black leadership went with that. But here comes something else, a set of brilliant how-to illustrations that says to young men Join into groups, use your bare hands against the enemy — the corrupt kung fu clubs that support the gangsters or the evil dynasty — accept discipline and adversity, team up, never give up, avenge your brothers. And by the way, here and there include women as fighters.

I had done as much as I could for myself. It would be smart to leave before I was dismissed.

I got up and said Do you know the Batswana call the stars the same thing the Sumerians did, the shining herd, letlhape phatsimo?

I went to the gate. I had been a touch abrupt in leaving, slightly disconcerting him, which I liked.

Would he at least think about considering using me as a volunteer?

You tempt me, but I have to say no, he said. Of course what would make you irresistible would be if you know something about cooperage. Or taxidermy, say.

Sorry, I said.

That was all. He asked me if I had a torch, and I said no as if he were asking a silly question, the point being to show how acclimated I was to getting around in the dark the way you do in the village at night. It was bravado and in fact I was afraid. But I forged out into the black labyrinth of Old Naledi as though nothing could make me happier and as though I were a person with an actual sense of direction.

I enjoyed this, he said as I left.

All the way home I flattered myself that I had at least gotten into the foyer of his consciousness. Sometimes I believed it. In any case, he would see my face again.

Grace, Again

I was feeling tender and valedictory toward Gaborone, and even toward the mall, now that I was going to be leaving. It was set. I was preparing to get to Denoon’s site. I was determined to do it. The surprise would be his.

I liked and hated the mall, a halfway-paved enclosure three blocks long which is the crux of retail and street life in the capital. The shops lining the mall are pseudomoderne, with go-go displays featuring Mylar and pinlights, with Muzak loops droning, and with typical third world inventories: gluts of what you don’t want, voids where the most commonplace necessities — such as tweezers, my then most pressing need — should be. For the most part the proprietors are Chinese or Indians, with a few Batswana fronting for South Africans. The array of businesses is the usual: hardware and clothing stockists, chemists, takeaways, butcheries, a walk-in surgery or two. The only really big buildings are at the ends of the mall — the banks, the embassies. For amenity you have, on either side of the central and widest part of the mall, between the Capitol Cinema and the President Hotel, cement benches with umbrelloid metal canopies. There are thorn trees intermittently. I liked the mall for its comédie humaine but hated it because it so completely incarnates the Western good idea of what Africa should become and because the South African merchandise the shelves are overflowing with is such shit yet so overpriced. South African shoe manufacture is my personal bête noire. It is risible. A smattering of poor devils, mainly women, selling seasonal items like fried mopane worms or maize on the cob spread their karosses under the trees — but only a smattering. When the mall was put up, the traditional farmers’ market was deconstructed and the shards moved into permanent stalls far away along the railway, where the market languishes but is definitely not an eyesore for makhoa, who prefer to shop in tidiness, on vinyl tile flooring, to the strains of the Melachrino Strings or some other dead orchestra.

I was crossing the mall, just passing the President Hotel, en route to a second attempt to secure a tweezers, which I was willing to be in stock at Botschem. My mode when I want something badly, and which has been known to work, is to proceed up to the absolutely last moment as though there could be no doubt I would get it. In three days of hard work I had succeeded in assembling everything I felt I needed to begin my expedition to Denoon’s site, with two minor exceptions: tweezers and the actual location of Denoon’s project.