by Bessie Head
Makhaya completed the form and handed it to the police officer, who looked at him in an odd quizzical way.
“Step outside with me for a moment, Mr Maseko,” he said.
They walked for a moment in silence towards the gate, then George stopped abruptly.
“Chief Matenge, who administers this village, wants you removed from it on the grounds that you’re a refugee,” he said. “What he wants has never really mattered to me. We don’t see eye to eye. But this time he has a point. The government doesn’t encourage refugees. It would like you all to push off somewhere.”
Makhaya kept silent, not knowing what to say.
“In fact,” George Appleby-Smith continued. “Things are so bad that if anyone sticks his neck out for a refugee, he’s not likely to get promoted for five years.”
“You mean you’ll stick your neck out for me?” Makhaya asked, amused.
“That’s what I’m saying, but only on the guarantee that you don’t let me down and mess around in the politics of southern Africa.”
“You don’t have to bother,” Makhaya said, sharply annoyed. “I’m not begging anyone in this country to shove me around.”
The green eyes blazed with anger. “Don’t give me that bullshit,” George shot out. “And if you’ve got any bullshitting chip on your shoulder, keep it to yourself.”
They stared at each other in this brief flare of anger. Makhaya was the first to regain his humour.
“Tie a man’s hands behind his back and then ask him if he’s going to chop down a tree,” he said, smiling. “I wish the whole of southern Africa would go to hell. Only I don’t know what to do about getting it there.”
“Smart guy,” George drawled, also smiling, “it’s not your philosophy of life I’m after, but a straight, practical ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Are you going to leave politics alone?”
Makhaya looked at him with a pained expression. “No, I won’t,” he said, “I may have run myself into a dead end. I may be sick of everything, but the day I fix myself up, I’ll do whatever I think is the right thing to do.”
George Appleby-Smith looked at him for some time. “I’ll still stick my neck out for you,” he said, quietly.
He half-turned to go, then remembered something. “Report your presence in this village to Chief Matenge tomorrow morning at eight. He’s responsible for the comings and goings of people and has to know, for the record, whether you intend staying here.”
He walked to his Land-Rover, climbed in, and drove off. Makhaya remained where he was some minutes longer. If there was anything he liked on earth, it was human generosity. It made life seem whole and sane to him. It kept the world from shattering into tiny fragments. Only a few, quietly spoken words: “I’ll stick my neck out for you.”
As he entered the office, Gilbert looked up and smiled. “What did that funny cop have to say?” he asked.
“Nothing much,” Makhaya said. “Except that I should report my presence in the village to Chief Matenge tomorrow morning.”
Five
Chief Matenge really believed he was ‘royalty’. So deeply ingrained was this belief in him that he had acquired a number of personal possessions to bolster the image. One was a high-backed kingly chair and the other was a deep purple, tasselled and expensive dressing gown. In this royal purple gown, he paced up and down the porch of his mansion every morning, lost in a Napoleon-like reverie. Of late, this pacing had been often done to the accompaniment of loud chatter from Joas Tsepe. Loud is perhaps an understatement of Joas’s speech. He was a platform speaker who never got down from the platform. He was hoarse-voiced. He was always in a sweat. He gesticulated. He had attended so many conferences that his ordinary speech was forever an underlined address: “Mr Chairman, and fellow delegates…”
Usually, Matenge paid little attention. Joas came from a certain tribe of the Kalahari Desert who were still regarded as slaves. The chief also despised the literature of Joas’s political party. In this respect he reflected the attitude of his country. The tide of African nationalism had swept down the continent and then faltered at the northern borders of Botswana. During the pre-election campaign, the politicians had had to chase after the people who kept on moving back and forth to their cattle posts and lands, seemingly unaware that destiny was about to catch up with them. But they couldn’t get away from the blaring microphones, and after a time they paused awhile, to listen. One crowd of politicians shouted that the people should take up arms, and embark upon the ‘Unbroken Line’ with ‘freedom’ as their grand aim. You have nothing to lose but your chains, they were told. People listened with mounting anxiety. They could well enough see that they were important to these men.
But what did it all mean? What was this ‘Unbroken Line’ and where were the chains? The politicians could not perceive that the conference table terms meant little to a people who never read a newspaper and who were completely out of touch with the latest trends, but they pushed ahead all the same, glibly spouting the meaningless phrases. They invaded people’s homes on hut-to-hut campaigns, blindly gesticulating and shouting that they were “in the grip of the force and direction of the law of change,” as they were wont to call this new phenomenon, African nationalism.
The other political party – the sons and relatives of chiefs – was more cunning. It kept its distance. It played catchy little folk songs everyone knew. It talked about cattle and crops and all the familiar Botswana problems. People were soothed, perhaps even a little disappointed. The latter crowd was too well known; all their faults and failings and private evils were openly discussed in the villages.
Then the pamphlets started circulating, each party stating its views. The sons of chiefs collected the data from the experts and issued neat little manifestos outlining the problems of the country – water, agriculture, cattle development. The sons of slaves attacked the ‘imperialists and neo-colonialists’ who were still skilfully manipulating the affairs of an oppressed people. But they put over their ideas very badly, with many spelling errors:
“You will get a pseudo-independence if you do not vote for us,” the pamphlets stated. “Do not stamble. We are people in the clear who know the line. We will eliminate ignorant disease.”
It was one of the most pathetic of elections. The sons of chiefs, who had had all the advantages of education, pounced on the spelling errors of the sons of slaves, who had little or no education.
“Can such men run a country?” they asked, gleefully.
Thus, driven with their backs to the wall, the sons of slaves resorted to low-down mud-slinging. The chiefs all had syphilis, they said. For such defamatory statements, many served jail sentences. Others, like Joas, were imprisoned for getting voters to sign papers on the pretext that his party and the party of chiefs were one and the same thing. For all this, the sons of slaves found themselves more despised than they had ever been before.
Matenge, being educated, soon cast aside the literature of Pan-Africanism. But Joas as a person made sense to him. His own crooked mind and Joas’s crooked mind tallied. Besides, Joas had a remarkable amount of inside information on Matenge’s arch enemy, Gilbert.
“I’ll tell you what the Imperialists are up to now, Chief,” he said one day. “First they sent the missionaries. Now they send volunteers like Gilbert. What is a volunteer? Volunteer, my eye. I have top-secret information about these training camps in England. Gilbert has been sent here to pave the way for the second scramble for Africa.”
This particular morning, Joas was hopping mad. He stood in one corner of the porch, gesticulating, fuming, his eyes almost darting out of his head in self-righteous indignation. On the previous day he had approached a registrar of co-operatives in an attempt to get his cattle co-operatively registered.
“And do you know what Smedley said to me, Chief? He said, ‘I’m afraid I can’t register your co-operative, Mr Tsepe.’ I said, ‘And why not?’ And he said, ‘I’m not going to allow cooperatives to be used for political propaganda.’ So I said
, ‘But everyone is a politician these days, Mr Smedley. Why discriminate against me? A certain other person I know got his co-operative registered in one day. Aren’t you practising racialism, Mr Smedley? This matter won’t rest between you and me. I am going to report…’”
Matenge held up his hand with a sudden, imperious gesture. In his pacing he had noticed the approach of Makhaya, accompanied by the old man, Dinorego. Matenge stared intently at Makhaya and made several errors in his summing up. The flinching, averted face and slightly hunched-forward shoulders, he interpreted as the sign of a weak and cowardly character. And the very marked air of calmness in the long strides, he associated with the type of man who would never put up a battle.
Matenge slowly descended the steps. The descent was regal, kingly, spectacular. Makhaya jerked up his head in surprise. The sham of it all appealed to his sense of humour, but one look at the face of Matenge instantly aroused his sympathy. It was the face of a tortured man, slowly being devoured by the intensity of his inner life, and the tormented hell of that inner life had scarred deep ridges across his brow and down his cheeks, and the icy peaks of loneliness on which the man lived had only experienced the storms and winters of life, never the warm dissolving sun of love. Being himself a lonely man, Makhaya instinctively sensed this. But they differed. Makhaya’s was a self-protective loneliness, and he had the sun inside him all the time.
Dinorego politely bowed his head and greeted Matenge. His greeting was dismissed with a slight gesture of the head, which contained in it an inheritance of centuries of contempt for the ordinary man. Matenge never once took his eyes off Makhaya, as though by this concentrated stare he intended to pulverize Makhaya into nonexistence.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“Makhaya Maseko.”
Matenge bent his head slightly and a mocking smile played around his mouth. “I hear you have begun to work with Gilbert at the farm,” he said.
“It worries me,” he said. “Gilbert just makes arrangements with people but the authorities do not approve of his actions, nor the people he chooses to associate with. Having a refugee at the farm is going to give it a bad name, including the whole area in which it is placed.”
“What’s wrong with a refugee?” Makhaya asked.
“Oh, we hear things about them,” he said. “They get up at night and batter people to death.”
He glanced briefly at Dinorego, then continued. “I’ll tell you something about Gilbert. He knows nothing about Botswana agriculture. He ought to be in England where he received his training in agriculture. The only man who knows how to do things here is a Batswana man. Most of the trouble here is caused by people from outside and we don’t want you. We want you to get out. When are you going?”
Makhaya looked at the man in amazement and disbelief, almost overwhelmed by the viciousness in his voice.
“But I’m not going away,” Makhaya said, as calmly as he could, though a sudden rush of anger made his voice quiver.
“If you don’t go away I’ll make things difficult for you here,” he said.
“What else can I say, except go ahead?” Makhaya said.
Matenge smiled. “You know what a South African swine is?” he said. “He is a man like you. He always needs to run after his master, the white man.”
Matenge turned and ascended the steps, unaware that a murderously angry man stood staring up at him. There was a wild element in Makhaya. He had seen and faced death too often to be afraid of it, and taking another man’s life meant little to him. Several times Dinorego said, “Let’s go, my son.” But Makhaya just looked at the old man with a pained, dazed expression and his eyes glistened with tears. Dinorego misinterpreted this, and tears also rushed into his eyes.
Joas Tsepe ran lightly down the steps. “I’d like a word with you, Maseko,” he said.
Makhaya laughed harshly, sarcastically. “I don’t know who you are,” he said. “But Maseko is my father’s name and I haven’t given you permission to use it.”
He turned abruptly and walked away. Dinorego shuffled anxiously beside him. He kept glancing at Makhaya’s face but could not understand his mood. It was tight and withdrawn.
“I am struck with pity for what has happened, my son,” he said. “But you must keep calm. Some people say the chief has high blood pressure and will surely die of this ailment one day.”
Makhaya looked at the old man with a queer expression. “The chief is not going to die of high blood pressure,” he said. “I am going to kill him.”
And he said this with all the calm assurance of a fortune-teller making a prediction. Dinorego went ashen with shock.
“No,” he said sharply. “You must never, never do that, my son.”
“But he is concentrating on killing someone,” Makhaya said. “And he is doing this, not with guns or blows, but through the cruelty and cunning of his mind.”
Dinorego absorbed this rapidly. It had a strange ring of truth. The series of crises and upheavals in Golema Mmidi fully justified Makhaya’s theory.
“Can’t you concentrate too, son,” the old man said quickly. “Can’t you concentrate and be as clever as the next man?”
This quaint reply and the anxiety of the old man completely dashed away Makhaya’s anger. He laughed but he also felt a twinge of remorse. Makhaya felt that anger had made him utter unduly harsh words to that other grinning, uncomfortable fellow who had run down the steps. Perhaps he was just another of those two-penny-ha’penny politicians who sprang up everywhere like mushrooms in Africa these days.
“Who is the other man?” he asked.
“His name is Joas Tsepe,” Dinorego said. “He and the chief are acting like spies against the new government.”
“Is the new government popular?”
“Oh yes,” said Dinorego. “It is very popular. People can vote for it for twenty years. Men like Joas do not speak the language of the people. Who can understand cheating and murder when such things are not the custom here? Some say the new government cannot improve people’s lives because the leaders come from the chiefs. But we can wait and see, and if they are no good, one day we will chuck them out.”
They turned out of the circular clearing in the central part of the village and took the road that led back to the farm.
“What is the time, son?” Dinorego asked. “I want to introduce you to my friend Mma-Millipede. She is anxious to meet you and cannot wait any longer.”
Makhaya looked at his watch. It was eight fifteen. And there was a twenty-minute walk back to the farm. The old man shook his head.
“I cannot trust my friend Mma-Millipede,” he said. “She will delay us.”
But Makhaya waved this aside. On the way to Chief Matenge, the old man had told him a very moving story about Mma-Millipede and the great tragedy in her life.
Mma-Millipede, he had said, had grown up side by side with him in a village in the northern part of Botswana. The mother of Mma-Millipede and his mother were such great friends that they privately arranged a marriage for their two children at some future date.
It so happened that while growing up Mma-Millipede became very interested in the Christian religion. On the surface this was not unusual. Women lived idly in the villages during the dry season while the men were busy the year round with the cattle. To fill in the dull round of the day, many women drifted to the church, where they were also able to obtain a bit of mission education. But in spite of the advantage they had over men educationally, few of the women developed a new personality. They remained their same old tribal selves, docile and inferior. Perhaps Mma-Millipede was one of those rare individuals with a distinct personality at birth. In any event, she was able to grasp the religion of the missionaries and use its message to adorn and enrich her own originality of thought and expand the natural kindness of her heart.
The family of Mma-Millipede was one of the poorest in the village. But the recognition Mma-Millipede had gained for her religious views soon brought her to the attention of the ch
iefs, in particular one named Ramogodi, a drunkard and dissipated boaster and the son of the reigning chief. It was Ramogodi’s pride that he was sexually attractive to women. This was true. There were few women in the village who had not been his bedmate at some time or other. But whenever he waylaid Mma-Millipede, she just stared at him, seriously. Thus, Mma-Millipede unconsciously challenged the pride of a vain man, and he became determined to have her as his wife.
His haughty mother approached Mma-Millipede’s family. They refused to offer their daughter in marriage to a chief’s son, fearing that she would be treated as a slave in the household. The haughty woman interpreted this refusal as an insult to the royal house and proceeded with plans to force the marriage.
She found out about the proposed marriage of Mma-Millipede to Dinorego and forced Dinorego’s parents to arrange another bride for him with all speed. Thus, terrorized into submission, the family of Mma-Millipede had no choice but to allow their daughter to marry Ramogodi. There was only one child from the marriage, because Mma-Millipede and her religious ways soon bored Ramogodi. He was often away from home, making hay with his former sweethearts. Still, Mma-Millipede continued to live in his house as his wife and bring up their son.
After many years came trouble. The youngest brother of Ramogodi acquired a very beautiful wife, and Ramogodi took it into his head that he also desired the same woman. Things came to such a pass that Ramogodi’s brother committed suicide by hanging himself. He left a note saying: “I cannot stand the way my brother is carrying on with my wife.”
This made Ramogodi the most hated man in the village, but in spite of that, he divorced Mma-Millipede and within three months married his brother’s wife. The son of Mma-Millipede had to be exiled to a far-off village because he could not be restrained from the urge to kill his father. The shock of it all almost deranged the mind of Mma-Millipede, and in an effort to help her forget the past, Dinorego and his wife persuaded her to come and live with them in Golema Mmidi, where they had settled. A few years later Dinorego’s wife died of heart trouble, but the long and close friendship between Dinorego and Mma-Millipede continued. Mma-Millipede had become a trader of all kinds, and she also purchased the skins of wild animals, which Dinorego made into mats and blankets.
