My Mortal Life
I could never get a coherent relationship going with Martin. I wanted to. I tried different modes with him. I tried just making his life more normal and less protean. He would stay over with me sometimes for as long as three days. But even then the clandestine side of his life would superpose itself and he would have to slip off to meet someone in the dead of night or go somewhere. I was helpful to him in small ways. For instance, right away I discovered he was afraid he was losing his hearing, a tragedy for somebody who expects to be second viola in the All Races National Symphony someday in a reborn South Africa. It occurred to me that he was having an earwax buildup, which is mostly a thing of the past for people who regularly take hot baths and showers. But in Bontleng he was essentially reduced to sponge baths, even though he was methodical about them. I purged his ears with Debrox and he was overcome with the result.
We could have been serious. It was seductive that he enjoyed sex with me so much. He could be lyrical about my breasts. He was not widely experienced. If he ever got to a normal weight he was going to be striking rather than alarming. We were both starved for talk. I admired him for what he was doing. He was enrolled in a war against something that was totally evil, and he was fighting in a disinterested way — because he was doing it all for his black countrymen, a third party. He thought of himself as a realist and was the first to say he expected that even the whites with the best credentials would go into a period of eclipse once there was majority rule. The question of what I was doing with my life kept coming up by implication more and more overtly.
This reminds me that later Denoon would say there were only two completely self-justifying occupations in the contemporary world that he had personally run into: one was fighting the Christian fascists of South Africa and the other was being a fireman, because you can never have the slightest doubt that you’re doing something totally socially valuable by pulling people out of burning buildings. Medicine he excluded because people got rich doing it, and anybody who lived a life of service to the church — say in a ghetto or medical mission — also got excluded because ultimately their work was acquisitive and inwardly intended to increase the temporal power of their particular denomination. He said firemen were the only people he knew with no self-doubt and that they went into their vocation knowing they had a thirty percent likelihood of ending up with a damaged spinal column.
But what was I doing with my mortal life? The question kept rearing up in my mind not because Martin tried to make me feel disadvantaged or trivial but because when you came down to it what I was trying to do with my anthropology was first to get a job in a halfway decent university and then get tenure. This was a marxist analysis of my situation but it was correct. Along the way, of course, I was going to be adding to the world’s knowledge of man, no doubt. But there was already a lot of that, to put it mildly. Possibly there was enough. The government of Botswana, at least, thought there was enough for a while, it looked like. This was late January, because Reagan had been elected. The government announced a bombshell, a moratorium on all foreign-sponsored anthropological research in the country. Studies were piling up faster than anybody in the ministries could figure out what they were supposed to conclude from them. Most of the projects the government approves have something to do, however remotely, with getting the agricultural economy to work better. My colleagues were in a frenzy. They had had visions of coming back and doing follow-ups into infinity. I found it liberating but kept that to myself. My colleagues were fuming over a threatened investment. Who would ever have heard of Isaac Schapera if he had been permitted to do only one monograph of the Bakgatla? was something said endlessly. I was even in the unfamiliar position of feeling one-up, because my stupid exploded project at Tswapong was considered ongoing and I could stay in Botswana relatively indefinitely. I was grandfathered.
I was attracted by the intimations of danger around Martin, thinking initially that I was dealing mostly with atmosphere. It was inconceivable that the Bureau of Special Services had nothing better to do than infiltrate agents to harass this aesthete so thin he looked like a weather vane. I was also attracted by the sense he gave me of being able to see into the world of power hidden behind the public world. This was a little addictive to me, and I felt it. The conviction that the world is secretly corrupt is dangerous to certain temperaments because it rationalizes cutting corners and being selfish, an impulsion I was not in need of. But we would sit on the balcony at the President Hotel and a permsec would come by who was a lion of opposition to South Africa in the press and Martin would tell me that this man had children in school in Pretoria in a fancy place like St. Stithian’s and that he owned chicken farms near Mafikeng, which made him in effect a hostage of the people he was constantly attacking. Martin knew exactly who was related to whom in government and convinced me that nepotism is not a useful construct for anthropologists to bring to the study of African government. He knew who all the undercover Special Branch operatives were and who were the intelligence people from the different embassies. In fact, although I had no way of knowing it at the time, he pointed out in some connection the Brit who would turn out to be my next lover. Martin compared Gabs to Lisbon during World War II. He had a pearl of great price: he knew whom to trust. When black exiles came over for a drink, it was wonderful. He was trusted, even by the Black Consciousness people, who are so edgy usually. He knew who was with the Diamond Police, which is almost a state within a state in Botswana. He especially loved pointing out the undercover South Africans, who all looked like burghers or successful farmers, which fed my taste for irony. I have a weakness for irony, and it was supreme irony that if anyone was, in the long run, going to salvage something for the white South African bourgeoisie, it was going to be people like Martin, whom they were, according to him, surveilling and thinking of killing. The future of a few million guilty whites was going to depend on whatever goodwill a handful of decent white colgrads like Martin could generate in the breast of the victorious black masses.
A Fatal Proposition
Let me not omit certain impurities in the man. Whole genera could get on his hate list if certain members of it did something antithetical to the cause. He was homophobic, or tended to be, because, he claimed, they had been overrepresented in Rhodesian information services during the liberation war. So that was it for homosexuals. I tried to point out that there was a logical error consisting of making the part stand for the whole, which he was committing. I drew back from trying to make headway against his anathematizing tendencies because that indirectly raised a question of why he was associating with me, an American whose CIA had told the South Africans where they could find Nelson Mandela when he was underground.
My being American was a serious issue and came up also at one point when I asked him why he wasn’t proselytizing me more than he was. My feelings were a little hurt, frankly. I hated South Africa, which he didn’t dispute. But there was the fact that I had not done anything politically strong enough to suit him in my life to date. I had never been a member of anything that was specifically against apartheid. I asked him how many women there were available to him in Botswana who had done everything he demanded politically. It was no use. We and the West Germans and Israel were the worst. We had given the Boers the bomb, and so on. There would always be a coda waiving my responsibility for the actions of the American power elite when we had these malentendus, so we could get on with dinner or bed, but the strain was there.
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