by Bessie Head
This was the sum total of Makhaya’s revolt, and if he regretted having aroused all the tortures which were slowly falling away from him in Golema Mmidi, it was because they disrupted his feeling of friendship and respect towards Gilbert and all the new mental outlooks he was assuming. It was only through Gilbert that he discovered in himself a compassion for the whole great drama of human history. Only Gilbert admitted the mutual interdependence of all men. The raw materials of all the underdogs had gone into the making of those aeroplanes and motor cars, and Gilbert had been surprised to find the underdogs living in such abysmal conditions while his own country had prospered to an almost unbelievable state of wealth. There was no way for him to grasp such poverty, except to live under the same conditions as the poor. Makhaya formed his own conclusions from this. He saw Gilbert’s culture as one that had catalogued every single detail on earth with curiosity, and it revealed to him great gaping holes in his own culture and how impossible it would be for Africans to stand alone. His own culture lacked, almost entirely, this love and care for the earth and had all its interest directed towards people. He had grown up in an atmosphere where the most important thing in the world was the stranger whose shadow darkened the doorstep. People were the central part of the universe of Africa, and the world stood still because of this. Makhaya deviated slightly from this pattern as he was born with a natural inclination for his own company. Thus, Gilbert’s scientific outlook was a welcome alternative to him.
He felt, too, that all the tensions, jealousies, frustrations, and endless petty bickering which make up the sum total of all human relationships were in reality unnecessary. This belief was necessary to his own survival, as the desire to retaliate in a violent way against all human selfishness and greed was a powerful urge in him. He found himself, over this period, beginning to combine the two – the good in Gilbert with the good in his own society. Perhaps he did so because he needed to save himself. Some part of him was even fearful that he was being mocked by the gods, and that one day he would find himself pitched back into the nightmare over which he had had no control, just as he had had no control over the living processes which had created him, Makhaya, a man with a black skin, which in turn made men with differently coloured skins jar the quiet and peace of his being and allow him no peace, night or day, to live with a natural part of his body. He suspected that Botswana society had its own merry-go-round, as he had seen from the behaviour and attitudes of Matenge and Joas Tsepe, but he did not have a stake in Botswana society. He did not want a stake in any man’s society, and that’s why Gilbert and his ideas appealed to him so deeply.
What else could a man do, except seek a manageable life? What else could he, Makhaya, do, except wait here a bit until he lost his hate? It was he, Makhaya, the individual, who was seeking his own living life because he was fearful of the living death a man could be born into. In the meanwhile it seemed to him, for his own private needs, that he should free himself of hatred and concentrate his mind on the details of life in Golema Mmidi.
This life was indeed a full one and, for a beginning, a very pleasant and manageable one. Two weeks after the first tobacco curing and drying shed had been built, one hundred and fifty women joined the tobacco growing project. This meant that a number of sheds could be built, simultaneously, on one day, as the women were now organized by Paulina Sebeso into small working groups. They were able to copy the pattern of the first shed with ease, and if Makhaya’s blue overalled person was all about the village, it was to help with the construction of the drying racks, which were a complicated affair worked on a collapsible pulley system. The old man Dinorego joined Makhaya in his work. After a few days, Makhaya left this job completely to the old man and started work on small dams which were to be a source of extra water supply. It was too risky to depend on rainfall alone to give the tobacco project a good start, Gilbert reasoned. Who knew when the drought would break, and already the one farm borehole was heavily strained with having to supply the whole village with good drinking water, plus sustaining the cattle in the ranch.
The dams were to be built on each homestead and they were for the purpose of trapping whatever storm water might rush along the ground during the brief rainy season. They were to be pits, blasted out with dynamite, to a depth of seven feet and a width of fifteen feet by fifteen feet. Their capacity would be eight thousand gallons of storm water. The bottom of these pits had to be lined with three layers of mud and polythene and the sides to be supported with sandy, concrete-filled plastic bags. In each case a deep furrow was to be dug to catch the runoff storm water and lead it into the dam. Again, the materials were simple and the costs kept low. The polythene was to be on the farm account until expenses could be deducted from the co-operative sale of the tobacco. Dynamite was commonly used to blast out pit toilets, as water-flush cisterns were almost unknown in this waterless country.
So, almost the day long, Golema Mmidi rocked to the blast of dynamite charges, and huge quantities of earth and rock were hurled high in the air. Makhaya, who buried and set off the charges, was often near enough to be splattered by rock and earth. He liked the drama and the irony, for not so very long ago he had come out of jail for wanting to use this very dynamite against the enemies of human dignity. It was like a self-mockery, this splattering rock and earth, to realize that he was indeed powerless to change an evil and that there were millions and millions of men built differently from him who enjoyed inflicting misery and degradation on a helpless and enslaved people. By contrast, Golema Mmidi seemed a dream he had evoked out of his own consciousness to help him live, to help make life tolerable. But if it was a dream, it was a merciful one, where women walked around all day with their bare feet and there were no notices up saying black men could not listen to the twitter and chatter of birds. The small brown speckled-breasted birds who lived in such huge colonies in Botswana were fat, gorged things. Dinorego solved the mystery, for him, of their eating habits. He took Makhaya a little way into the bush and broke open the surface of the earth. It crawled, just under the surface, with the soft juicy bodies of white ants, and thousands of birds lived on these juicy morsels the day long.
So many of the barefoot women, too, competed to do him a little favour. He never had to worry about where a cup of tea, which smelled like wood smoke, would come from, or what he would eat for the next meal. It was always there, brought by a rush of eager hands. Paulina Sebeso had to stand back and watch this jealously, but no other woman felt jealous as he shared out his attention among them all equally and then stood up at the end of the day and went his own way. Dinorego was very impressed by Makhaya’s relationship with the women. It seemed to him that Makhaya was well versed in ancient African customs where the man maintaned his dignity and self-control in front of women, except that in former times this man had maintained it over a harem of concubines, while Makhaya had none.
Mma-Millipede, of course, shared every secret with her friend Dinorego, and since Paulina Sebeso was like their own flesh and blood, being also a northerner, they were both anxious that she obtain for herself this young man whom they both loved. Nor could Dinorego fail to notice how Paulina trailed silently behind them each evening on their homeward journey and that every recognition of her existence by Makhaya filled her big black eyes with the shining look of rain falling on wet leaves. Not that Makhaya failed to notice it either, after some time. His first reaction was one of helpless surprise, because, in spite of his good looks, he was quite unaccustomed to being adored by a woman in a single-minded way. That is, adoration was patient and waiting while love or, if you liked, plain sexual passion banged everything about. It either shouted or thought it knew too much, and it had always left him cold and had not involved his heart. Therefore, if he wanted to get involved now it would be on his own terms and at his own pace. He ignored Paulina Sebeso as carefully as he ignored all the women, but he also sat in her yard and drank wood smoke tea until the stars came out. Then he would stand up and say, abruptly, “Well, I’ll be
going now.”
But Paulina Sebeso had a very pretty little girl who walked like a wind-blown leaf, and Makhaya was in a mood just then to like a little girl like that. He turned up one Saturday afternoon with a box in which he had thin strips of rubber, packing straw, glue, and green paint, and together he and the child set out to make grass for her miniature village. They worked the whole afternoon on this in absorbed silence, like two children of the same age who took life very seriously. Paulina worked nearby in silence too. Like all the other women who were now working daily on the sheds and dams, she had to stamp large quantities of sorghum for a week’s supply of porridge. Now, all over the village the sound could be heard of wooden pestles being pounded into wooden stamping blocks. Every three minutes or so Paulina paused and poured a minute quantity of water into the stamping block to soften the hard orange and pink corn seeds. This in turn made the crushed, powdery corn quite damp, and once she had winnowed away the husks, she had to spread out the corn meal on sacks to dry. She was so preoccupied that it was some time before she noticed Makhaya standing nearby, observing her. It upset the accuracy with which she hurled the pestle into the stamping block, and she looked up at him in exasperation, wanting him to go away.
“I want some tea,” he said by way of explanation. “But I’ll light the fire and make it.”
“Goodness!” she said in alarm, holding onto the thick wooden stick. “Don’t touch the fire. It’s a woman’s work.”
Makhaya narrowed his eyes, that amused magical smile on his face. “Goodness!” he said, imitating her speech. “It’s time you learned that men live on this earth too. If I want to make tea, I’ll make it, and if I want to sweep the floor, I’ll sweep it.”
Paulina shook her head and continued stamping. Makhaya turned the world upside down every day. He issued orders no one could counter, and he issued them with a smile that begged for an excuse for being the sole controller of everyone’s life and the stars and the moon too.
“Quiet men are dangerous,” she said to herself with a smile.
But they filled the world with peace, these quiet men. Everything ran on smooth wheels with a mathematical order and precision. The child sat near her village, carefully painting the grass green while the man, with equal care, scraped out the old ash with a flat stick and set a fresh, crumpled paper on the outdoor fireplace. Paulina watched the fire-making with a critical eye, and it occurred to her for the first time why the ancestors had set certain jobs aside for women and certain jobs for men. Men and women were unalike mentally. Look at how this man built a fire! He treated each stick as a separate living entity, and because of his respect for each stick, he moved his hands slowly, with many pauses, placing the firewood down at carefully calculated angles. This fire was set for a limited purpose. It was meant to boil water for tea and burn beautifully, without smoke, in a straight blue flame. A woman worked differently. She grasped a bunch of sticks in her hand, but it wasn’t the fire only but a thousand other purposes that fire would serve. At one moment it had to burn brightly but the next the flames had to be pulled apart and simmer the pot of meat. A fire was only a rag bag to a woman, and because of this she threw the firewood on the flames in haphazard confusion. In protest, the fire smoked like mad and food and tea and wood smoke all got mixed up together. But would people ever eat and stay alive if housework was so precise and calculated like this bright, smokeless, quick-burning fire?
From habit, she dropped the wooden pestle and rushed towards one of the huts. She would catch the last of the flames and mess them up with a clutter of wood and set the porridge pot over this smoke haze for the evening meal. Jarred by this sudden, frantic activity, the mathematical fire-maker and tea-maker retreated with a profound look of annoyance on his face. He could not even bear to look at the way Paulina sloshed the tea into the teacups. He walked towards the thornbush hedge and stood with his hands in his pockets, looking towards the horizon.
But the look of annoyance was soon banished because the sun was about to drop behind the flat horizon. It was just a big yellow ball and the air danced with sparkling crystals. The faint blue mists shivered like homeless dogs and slyly crept into the hedged yard for a bit of warmth.
“Here’s your tea, my friend,” the woman said, approaching him.
“Thank you,” Makhaya said, politely, ever careful to keep himself the homeless foreign alien.
“You must not say ‘thank you’ once you are used to a person,” the woman said.
“It depends on whether the person is used to me,” he said. “Are you?”
She looked at him, half-laughing, half-puzzled. He always confused her with the speed with which he replied to careless, thoughtless remarks and the way he had of taking conversations up and down hills and valleys and mountains.
“I should be afraid to say I am used to a person like you,” she said.
The answer pleased him and he turned again to the sunset. He wanted no one to be as rash as to say they understood his soul, especially when he had put up so many ‘no trespass’ signs. He wanted everyone as the background to his thoughts, not through arrogance, but that this emotional detachment was essential to real love and respect. The distances also revealed to him his true relationship to both friend and foe, and in the end both friends and foes might be acceptable if they always lived on the other side of the hill. But within all this, as Mma-Millipede had discovered, he employed a number of undercover tricks to bring him close enough to those whose warmth and love he craved. Ah, but happiness, anyway, was dirt cheap in Botswana. It was standing still, almost in the middle of nowhere, and having your face coloured up gold by the setting sun. He heard the small girl approach behind him and sit down next to her mother to sip tea. He had found out from her that she also had a brother, a few years older than she was.
Without turning around he asked, “Where’s the boy?”
“He’s at the cattle post, looking after the cattle,” Paulina said.
“You ought to employ someone older who does not need an education,” he said.
She kept quiet. Wages were a problem. An employed person had to be paid a monthly salary, and she barely earned thirty pounds a year from the sale of her cattle. Cattle were all that stood between her children and herself and outright starvation, and she had to keep the costs down. Makhaya turned round and looked at her. He was only thinking about the small boy. If an old man like Dinorego had found the cattle business such a harsh life, how much more terrible must it be for a young boy. Paulina looked down.
“I know the child must attend school,” she said. “But I cannot afford to employ somebody.”
“How many cattle do you have,” he asked.
“Eighty,” she said.
He was silent for a moment, making a swift mental calculation. “You must sell the damn beasts,” he said.
She looked up, shocked. A Motswana without any cattle at all might as well be dead. “I cannot do that,” she said.
“But you will have nine hundred pounds in the bank,” he said, “it’s enough money to live on for four or five years, and the boy will be free to attend school.”
The idea of selling all the cattle was totally unacceptable to her. She could not see beyond cattle to anything else which would offer her a haven of security. If her husband had been alive, the boy would most certainly be at school. She compressed her lips and looked at Makhaya with hard, realistic eyes.
“Why do you care?” she said roughly. “You are no relative of mine.”
He laughed because he was unsure if her remark meant he was someone out to swindle her.
“We’ll talk about relatives some other day,” he said, “I’m now talking about those damn beasts who are more of a burden than a help to you. I’ve said, after you’ve sold the burden, you will know what you are eating for four or five years. That’s time enough to look around and find another way of earning a living. I’ll help you because I’m interested in the same thing.”
She was unconvinced. “Why do yo
u want to help me?” she asked. “Why don’t you go and get rich by yourself. Each man helps himself in this world.”
He looked at her exasperated, “I’m not really necessary to anyone, least of all to Gilbert,” he said, “I can feel myself leaving this country, perhaps even tomorrow. But if you think you need my help, I’ll stay and help you.”
“Perhaps you had better go away,” she said in a shaken voice.
She could not follow the strange twists and turns of his mind, and this filled her with a bitter, furious despair. No one could accept anything they could not understand. Besides, when had anyone helped another, free of charge? It wasn’t a custom. She looked up at him apprehensively. If he really believed her and went away, she would die. He returned her look with a look of speculative calculation. There were other ways of saying what he had to say, but he was forcing friendship and understanding on her because he needed this in a woman more than he needed anything else. He walked across the short space that separated them and sat near her on the jutting mud foundation of the hut.
