by Bessie Head
As Dinorego and Makhaya approached the home of Mma-Millipede, which was not very far from the home of Dinorego, they turned off onto a small footpath that wound and curved its way into the bush. The sudden clearing revealed the identical pattern of mud huts perched on the edge of the land. The yard was crowded with children. There were a lot of goats, and Makhaya got the impression of goats and children rolling in the dust.
“The children belong to the families of Golema Mmidi,” Dinorego said, smiling. “They are supposed to be out in the bush grazing the goats, but here they are all playing at the home of Mma-Millipede. I told her she will one day become bankrupt through having to feed all these children and goats, but she pays no attention.”
An old woman walked slowly across the yard in a forward-bending manner as though her back troubled her. She wore a very long dress and had a scarf tied round her head. The children set up a clamour when they saw Dinorego, and she swerved round in her walk.
“Batho!” she said, addressing Dinorego. “But I say, you are about early today, my friend.”
“I have brought my son about whom we spoke the whole week,” he replied.
“Batho!” she said, again.
She turned and looked at Makhaya, closely. There was something so lovely in the expression of habitual good humour and kindness in her face that it evoked a spontaneous smile in him. Once he got to know her well, he was to find that she often prefaced sentences with the word ‘Batho’, which means, ‘Oh, People’ and may be used to express either sympathy, joy, or surprise.
Whatever conclusions the old woman had come to through her inspection of Makhaya’s face, she determined to keep to herself and discuss them with the old man once Makhaya had left. To indicate this, she glanced meaningfully at Dinorego from under her eyes.
In reply Dinorego said, “My son cannot stay long. He is just on his way to work.”
“Indeed! I am ashamed of you, my friend. What about the tea? There is always time for tea. Besides, I must gather some eggs to send to Gilbert. I was just about to feed the fowls.”
She pointed to a basket in her hand which was full of corn seed. This made Makhaya look towards the chicken house and recall the vivid words of the old man on their first day of meeting: “If you have fifty-two fowls, you must build a coop fifteen feet by twenty-five feet…” And indeed, the chicken house stretched the entire length of the yard. Three of its walls were built of a mixture of smoothed mud and bricks, while the front part was enclosed with chicken wire and had a small gate. Poles were spaced at neat intervals round the walls, over which was suspended a thatched roof. There were troughs for food and water and boxes for broody hens. Fat sleek fowls pecked in the dust.
A child emerged from one of the huts with a tea tray, and once they had seated themselves, Mma-Millipede wanted to know all sorts of little things about Makhaya. Do you eat well, my son? she asked. Do you often get ill? If you get ill, please inform me so that I may accompany you to hospital as you are now far away from your home and relatives. About all these small things she chattered in her kindly motherly way, and they seemed like mountains of affection to the lonely Makhaya. He noted how the old man nodded his head contentedly in this sun of kindness and how the goats kept frisking their short tails and raising their forelegs high in the air, pretending to crack each other’s skulls in mock battles, while the children tumbled in the dust. He was a little repelled at first by the generosity of the strange old woman. It was too extreme. It meant that if you loved people you had to allow a complete invasion by them of your life, and he wasn’t built to face invasions of any kind. And yet, this isolation he so treasured had often been painful, because he too felt this eternal human need to share the best and worst of life with another. Thus he looked at the old woman questioningly. He wanted a few simple answers on how to live well and sanely. He wanted to undo the complexity of hatred and humiliation that had dominated his life for so long. Perhaps, he thought, her life might provide him with a few clues.
Makhaya would have been amused at the chatter of the old people once he had left.
“I say, my friend,” Mma-Millipede burst out excitedly. “The young man is too handsome. Can you imagine all the trouble if he is not of good character? I am even afraid to think of it.”
She was thinking of all the men who were away at the cattle posts and the mines and how Golema Mmidi was just a village of women for the greater part of the year.
“I was thinking that the young man would make a good husband for my daughter,” Dinorego said. “What do you think, my friend?”
Mma-Millipede looked at her friend for some time. She had a lot of reservations about Maria. Even her shrewd eye had not succeeded in penetrating the barrier of aloofness and hostility that were a natural part of the young girl’s personality. But she had long suspected that there was more than met the eye in the friendship between Maria and Gilbert. It had been of such a long duration that almost everyone had come to take it for granted, in particular her good friend. The only thing that prevented Mma-Millipede from voicing her suspicions to her friend was the fact that, to her, Gilbert was a foreign man, and foreign men were a fearful unpredictable quantity in an otherwise predictable world.
“I shall have a talk with the child, my friend,” she said at last. “I shall try to find out for you what is on her mind.”
Back at the mansion, Matenge was reviewing the short interview he had had with Makhaya. He was reviewing it intensely, in a one-track way.
“So the refugee says he’s not leaving,” and he said this over and over, staring sightlessly at the grinning Joas Tsepe. Tsepe, too, was still smarting under the rough snub given him by Makhaya. Joas was not the kind of man who could stop and examine himself. He could not see how unpleasant his too familiar manner was to other people, and he would never know that the inferiority complex, which was the driving force of his life, was also a dangerous little bully.
“I can sum up a man like that from a mile, Chief,” he said. “He’s a traitor to the African cause.”
Eventually, Matenge’s one-track sentence drove him to his car and to the office of Inspector George Appleby-Smith.
“The refugee says he’s not going,” he said, looking down into the expressionless face of the police officer. “I have made an ultimatum. I want him removed because he is a dangerous criminal who is using the farm as his hideaway. No one is safe in my village. I don’t see how the authorities can allow him to remain there.”
“I quite get your point, Chief Matenge,” the officer said. “The only thing is that the matter is no longer in my hands. It is now the responsibility of the chief immigation officer, Major Ross. He has promised me he will make a decision concerning Mr Maseko in one week’s time.”
After Matenge had walked out, George Appleby-Smith remained staring at the wall ahead of him for a long time. He had not so very long ago been on the phone with Major Ross, had ‘stuck his neck out’, as he said he would, and been assured that Makhaya would be granted a resident permit in one week. His assistant-in-command of the station entered and had to click his heels several times before he gained the attention of his superior. George Appleby-Smith looked at him with laughter-filled eyes.
“Sergeant Molefe,” he said. “Tell me why I hate people?”
The sergeant remained stiffly at attention. He was used to the oddities of George Appleby-Smith. “I think you only hate people when you have a headache, sir,” he said.
Once the week was up, Matenge took it upon himself to drive the three hundred miles down to immigration headquarters, perhaps hoping to influence the decision concerning Makhaya’s removal. He knew everything was on his side. Political refugees were never allowed permanent residence in Botswana, and it did not take too many complaints to engineer their removal.
But the major hummed and hawed a bit and made a show of looking through a file, then dropped a bombshell.
“Makhaya Maseko,” he said. “Ah…let me see. Here it is. We found out that he qualified fo
r residence and granted him a residence permit yesterday. It is already on its way to him.”
That inner howling devil once more retreated. Matenge walked out crumpled, and each time he faced a defeat his eyes would get a peculiar hollow look in them and he would quicken his pace in walking. Particularly someone in a superior position to him could make him crumple this way. On this occasion, the shock was accompanied by fear. He felt his position threatened, and he felt that the threat to his position was his association with Joas Tsepe. He felt that the granting of the resident permit to a refugee was to spite him for his association with Joas. He determined to rid himself of the company of Joas Tsepe. Fortunately for Joas Tsepe, his political party just at this time sent him away for six months on an important ‘mission’.
“In the meanwhile, shortly after his failure to banish Makhaya, Matenge was struck down with a severe attack of high blood pressure. He was in hospital for one month, and during this one month a number of rapid changes took place in Golema Mmidi and at the farm.”
Six
One might go so far as to say that it is strong, dominating personalities who might play a decisive role when things are changing. Somehow they always manage to speak with the voice of authority, and their innate strength of character drives them to take the lead in almost any situation. Allied to all this is their boundless optimism and faith in their fellow men. One such personality in the village of Golema Mmidi was Dinorego, and it was his support of and belief in Gilbert that swayed the villagers over to a support of the cattle co-operative. Another such personality was Paulina Sebeso, who was to bring the women of the village to the farm and help open up the way for new agricultural developments in Golema Mmidi.
Paulina Sebeso was quite a newcomer to the village, having lived there for not more than a year and a half by the time Makhaya arrived. She came from the northern part of Botswana, which fact immediately ensured her the friendship of Dinorego and Mma-Millipede. Northerners really pride themselves on being inexplicable to the rest of the country. They speak Tswana at a faster, almost unintelligible pace and have added so much variety to the Tswana language as to seem to an outsider to be speaking a completely foreign tongue. Thus, when northerners greet each other they say: Good-day, branch-of-my-tree; while everyone else simply says: Good-day, friend.
The implication in the greeting, branch-of-my-tree, was a rather true one for northerners. At one time they had been the most closely knit of all the tribal groupings, each one claiming at least a distant relationship to even the most insignificant member of the clan. But, once the family structure began breaking down under the migratory labour system, it was they who most readily practised intermarriage with foreigners.
Unfortunately for Paulina Sebeso, she married, at the age of eighteen, a foreign man from Rhodesia whose tribal tradition it was to commit suicide when his honour was at stake. It wasn’t a remarkable marriage and her husband wasn’t a remarkable man, being rather of a mild, passive, stay-at-home temperament. He worked as a bookkeeper for a certain large company, for which he received a wage of thirty pounds a month. By careful saving he managed to build a two-room brick house for his family, and also every year added a heifer or two to their stock of cattle. He had worked for the company for sixteen years when a new manager was appointed. Before long the new manager claimed that two thousand pounds had been embezzled. He also produced evidence that a number of receipt books were missing. The only people who handled both the money and the books were Paulina’s husband and the manager. There was a doubt. On the one hand, the company believed the claim of Paulina’s husband that he was innocent of the crime. He had worked for them for a long time, was known to be of sober habits and the sum stolen was too large an amount to have been stolen by an African man. Petty pilferings had occurred here and there but never vast sums. On the other hand, the receipt books had been removed in such a skilful manner as to suggest that the embezzling had taken place over a number of years.
In the end the company charged both Paulina’s husband the new manager with the theft. On the day he was notified of this, Paulina’s husband awoke in the night and hung himself from a tree in the yard. He left a note, once again claiming innocence. The company, being anxious to regain its money, dropped the court case and immediately seized the property of the dead man, claiming that the suicide was in fact an admission of guilt. Thus, being dispossessed of a home almost overnight, Paulina moved, with a son aged ten and a daughter aged eight, to the village of Golema Mmidi. The son, named Isaac, lived at a cattle post twenty-five miles away, herding his mother’s cattle while Paulina and the small girl remained in the village to grow crops. The eight-year-old girl, named Lorato, was thus able for most of the year to attend the village primary school, while the boy, Isaac, was tied to the cattle post and received no education at all.
Perhaps Paulina was not a very beautiful woman. She was tall, thin and angular, with a thin, angular face. She was also flat-chested and like all flat-chested women, this was a sore point with her. It was hard to find a suitable stuffed-up breast bodice in a country like Botswana, especially if you live in the bush, so she was in the habit of stuffing hers with carefully crumpled bits of paper. But she had lovely big black eyes that stared at everything in a bold way, and her long straight black legs were the most beautiful legs in the village. She had a decisive way of walking as though she always knew where she was going and what she wanted. She was fond of gaudy-hued skirts with strong colours like orange and yellow and red, and the bigger and brighter the splashes of colour, the more she liked them.
Since she was not by temperament given to brooding on the past, she soon recovered from the tragedy in her life and set out to build up a new life in Golema Mmidi. Part of her plans also included a man, as she was a passionate and impetuous woman with a warm heart. It never really mattered what kind of man he was or the magnitude of his faults and failings. It was just enough that her feelings be aroused and everything would be swallowed up in a blinding sun of devotion and loyalty. Of course, if she were to find a man who accidentally managed to gain the respect of the whole world at the same time, then this loved one could magically become ten thousand blazing suns.
She had her land and home not far from the farm gates. There, directly in the path of the setting sun, Makhaya was in the habit of coming to watch the sunset. Just as at dawn, the sun crept along the ground in gold shafts; so at sundown it retreated quietly as though it were folding into itself the long brilliant fingers of light. As he watched it all in fascination, the pitch black shadows of night seemed to sweep across the land like an engulfing wave. One minute the sun was there, and the next minute it had dropped down behind the flat horizon, plunging everything into darkness. On intensely cold nights, it threw up a translucent yellow afterglow, full of sparkling crystals, but otherwise it puffed itself out into a thin strip of red light on the horizon. As his eyes became more and more accustomed to the peculiar beauty of Botswana sunsets, he also noticed that the dull green thornbush and the dull brown earth were transformed into autumn shades of warm brown, red, and yellow hues by the setting sun.
One evening Makhaya walked right into a great drama. The thornbush was seeding and it did this in a vigorous way. One spray of seed struck him on the cheek, and on a closer inspection, he noticed that all the branches were profusely covered with beanlike pods. These pods twined tightly inward until they were coiled springs. Once the pod burst, the spring ejected the seeds high into the air. He stretched out his hand, broke off a pod and pressed it open. A few minute kidney-bean-shaped seeds slithered on to his palm. He stared at them in amazement. Could this rough, tough little thornbush be a relative of the garden bean? He decided to take the seeds back to the farm and question Gilbert.
Paulina, meanwhile, had watched these comings and goings at sundown with avid curiosity and at last, being unable to contain it, had sent the little girl to Makhaya with a message. This particular evening Makhaya stood just a stone’s throw away from her yard, and bein
g absorbed as he was in the popping, spraying drama around him, he did not at first notice the child standing near him. And even when he did, he looked down rather absent-mindedly into a pair of small beady black eyes.
“Sir,” the child said. “My mother says she sends you her greetings.”
“Who is your mother?” he asked.
The child pointed in the direction of the huts. Makhaya glanced up briefly, was struck in the eye by a vivid sunset skirt of bright orange and yellow flowers and momentarily captivated by a pair of large bold black eyes. He looked down at the child and sent back a cruel message.
“Go and tell your mother I don’t know her,” he said.
He turned and, without looking either left or right, walked back to the farm. Paulina, on receiving his message, flamed with confusion and humiliation. So distressed was she that she rushed over to her friend Mma-Millipede.
“Mama,” she said. “I’ve made a terrible blunder.”
And, half-hiding her face in her hands, she explained her blunder.
“You’ve done nothing wrong, my child,” Mma-Millipede said, calmly. “It’s just that Makhaya is a foreignman and not accustomed to our ways. The women of his country might have an entirely different approach when they wish to arouse the interest of a man.”
Paulina sat in thoughtful silence for a while. As far as she was concerned, there was only one woman equal to her in the whole village.
“Perhaps he is attracted to Maria,” she said, and it nearly killed her to utter these words.
Mma-Millipede hesitated. The old man, Dinorego, had remarked that very day that Maria no longer attended her English lessons. These used to take place at just about sunset and last for an hour each evening. But now, for the last three days, Maria had sat at home by the fire instead of going to the farm as she usually did. Mma-Millipede was hesitant to impart this information to Paulina, as already she looked the picture of despair.
