by Bessie Head
He found the villagers seated quietly and patiently in the yard as he drove the big truck with the coffin through the gate. A few men moved to the truck to lift down the coffin and carry it into the house. Chief Sekoto got out and stood for a moment leaning against the truth, trying to take stock of the situation. There was that desperately earnest young man, Gilbert, also leaning against his Land-Rover and looking up at the sky where the vultures circled and circled. Chief Sekoto could picture so clearly the day Gilbert had walked into his office and Chief Sekoto had thought him mad with all his talk about the poor. The poor were just the poor, and the commoner was just the commoner, and they were not very interesting people to Chief Sekoto. They lived such stupid lazy lives. They were so filthy in their habits that a mud hut was all they deserved.
How was Chief Sekoto to know that there was a quiet and desperate revolution going on throughout the whole wide world? People were being drawn closer and closer to each other as brothers, and once you looked on the other man as your brother, you could not bear that he should want for anything or live in darkness. Maybe he knew nothing about this because this revolution belonged to young people like Gilbert and Makhaya.
These young people only puzzled a man like Chief Sekoto. If he had had the good looks of the handsome refugee what a colourful drama his life would have been! One dramatic love affair after another. And here was the young man, wasting his life away in the bush. Someone told him they did this because they were communists – all this permission requested to build dams and register co-operatives. He had queried his friend George about this communist business, and his only reply had been: Bullshit. George had all the top-secret information too, and Chief Sekoto never doubted his word. Besides there were mad people and mad people. He had never lost a night’s sleep over the presence of the two young men in his tribal reserve, but he had lost plenty of sleep over his brother.
He straightened his short body and waddled briskly up the stairs. There was a crowd of people in the big dining room and the coffin was on the floor. He averted his gaze from the body of his brother, which was stretched out on a couch, and walked over to George, who stood by himself at the far end of the room.
“What happened?” he asked in a whisper.
George shrugged. “People say they wanted to have a peaceful discussion with the chief,” he said, keeping his face expressionless.
“What was this peaceful discussion about?” Chief Sekoto asked.
“Their cattle are dying,” George said, then just kept silent.
Chief Sekoto looked at him, puzzled, “I don’t understand,” he said. “Did my brother kill himself because people’s cattle are dying?”
George gave his friend a long look before replying, then he shrugged again. “Just a week ago,” he said softly, “…just a week ago we found a dead child of this village at the cattle post. He died a most horrible death from malnutrition. We held no one to blame for it because you can’t prosecute droughts and famine. But today your brother wanted to prosecute the mother of this child for some unknown offence. The people of this village came to attend the trial. That’s all they did.”
Chief Sekoto looked at the ground. He did not know what to think because if he did he might have felt too, and that would stifle and choke him. It was all a bad tragedy, his brother, the poor. But George Appleby-Smith stared at everything with peaceful eyes, even the way the village men gently lifted the body of Matenge into the coffin. He would never be able to close his eyes to all these people in rags and tatters and no shoes. They were all he really lived with in his daily work. They were so poor, yet it never occurred to them to steal. Because of this the prisons were nearly always empty. A murder case turned up once in a blue moon. Instead, you found yourself inspector of a police station where a lot of absent-minded people walked in to report that they had forgotten their blankets on the train. Could you please find their blankets? You got other curious things happening to you, too. Once, for a year, almost at the exact same hour each afternoon, a big white goat would step into his office and walk around sniffing the untidy jumble of papers. Then walk out again. He never found out to whom that goat belonged because he never directly involved himself with anyone, but both goats and people love George Appleby-Smith. And he appreciated this deeply.
The men lifted the coffin and carried it out to the truck. A lot of the villagers, including Mma-Millipede and Dinorego, had decided to accompany Paramount Chief Sekoto and would stay over in his village for the funeral. The rest of the dazed and stunned villagers slowly began to make their way homeward, still unable to utter a word. You have to be loved a bit by the time you die. People can only say good things about the dead, and if you’ve left no treasures on this earth, what’s there to hold on to except a terrible pity? Perhaps the people of Golema Mmidi were afraid, too, that they had really killed Matenge, in a strange gathering-together of all their wills. It was as if they did not want any evil to impose itself on them, and they had all quickly and silently decided to suppress it. They found it difficult now to break the cohesion and singleness of purpose that had drawn them together that day. Until late that night they kept on grouping and regrouping in each other’s yards, drinking bowls of sour milk porridge, discussing the weather and how hot it had been that day. But not once did they mention the name of Matenge, though he was in all their thoughts, hovering like a great, unseen shadow over the whole village.
This strange mental disassociation from the events of the day also took place in Gilbert, Makhaya, and Pelotona, the permit man, when they arrived back at the farm for a late lunch together. They held some half-hearted, distracted conversation about rationing water until the emergency borehole had been sunk. But they lapsed into unexpected intervals of silence. You couldn’t ever forget Matenge, not once you had met him face to face and he had spat his venom out at you. Matenge made you doubt the basic goodness of mankind. He made you think of all the people who are only half like him, and this completely shattered the innocence and trust with which you might approach fairly harmless people who do a bit of evil now and then to entertain themselves.
Gilbert had been roughed up inside more than all of them. He had had to do a complete somersault of thought and feeling after his arrival in Golema Mmidi. No one had told him there was such a thing as an African oppressor, nor had he expected to find a Matenge exploiting his own people through the cattle speculating business. Hundreds of white men did it and were continuing to do it with efficient ease in Botswana. But an African robbing Africans? And he had tortured himself through many sleepless nights at the ease with which he had destroyed Matenge’s cattle speculating business. There were other things too – the pathetic way in which Matenge always backed down when confronted by a superior.
But if a man like Gilbert had really kept his mind on the Matenges who were an inverted whirlpool of seething intrigues, on the crazy semi-literate politicians like Joas Tsepe, he might have overlooked the kind of people almost everyone overlooked – the Dinoregos and Mma-Millipedes. At the most bitter times of Gilbert’s stay in Golema Mmidi, Dinorego had always said: “I think the Good God don’t like it.” But he said it as though the ‘Good God’ was quite nearby, listening, observing, and Dinorego, his screwed-up face listening to the ‘Good God’, was what had made Gilbert stay and stay. And he mixed it all up with a thousand and one things: the way he smelled the summer rain on the far, flat horizon, four or five months before the first, fat globs of raindrops fell two by two, three by three on the parched earth. Enormous thunderstorms brewed and boiled on these far-off horizons, but it never rained and people never ploughed, until one unsuspecting day it rained in sheets and so hard that the roar of the rain drowned out the volcanic thunderclaps.
What was he looking for? What was he doing? Agriculture? The need for a poor country to catch up with the Joneses in the rich countries? Should super-highways and skyscrapers replace the dusty footpaths and thorn scrub? It might be what he said he had in mind; at least, he said this to excuse
himself for the need to live in a hurricane of activity. But the real life he had lived for three years had been dominated by the expression on Dinorego’s face, and God and agriculture were all mixed up together after these three years. Yet it was a real God this who stalked his footsteps along the dusty pathways, who listened with quiet interest to the discussions on agriculture. Gilbert had no clear explanation of how he had become certain of this, but there was a feeling of great goodness in this country.
But Mma-Millipede had the beginnings of an answer as to why everything was so mixed up. She had traced the course of man’s whole destiny through her studies of the wandering tribes of Israel. Sometimes a man’s God was like Solomon and he decked himself up in gold and he built a house that was a hundred cubits in length and fifty cubits in breadth and thirty cubits in height. Gold candlesticks, cherubims, and pomegranates adorned his house, which had forty bathrooms. And there were bowls and snuffers and spoons and censers and door hinges of pure gold. And all that the followers of Solomon could do was to gape and marvel and chronicle these wonders in minute detail. Even Solomon’s wisdom took secondary place to his material possessions and dazzling raiments. Then came a God who was greater than Solomon, but he walked around with no shoes, in rough cloth, wandering up and down the dusty footpaths in the hot sun, with no bed on which to rest his head. And all that the followers of this God could do was to chronicle, in minute detail, the wonder and marvel of his wisdom.
There were two such destinies which faced Africa – that of the followers of Solomon and that of a man with no shoes. But the man with no shoes had been bypassed, scorned, and ridiculed while the Solomons stalked the land in their golden Chevrolets. Who would eat then if all the gold and pomegranates went into the house of Solomon? Who would bathe if all the water went into his forty bathrooms? Who would have time to plough if everyone had to join the parade to watch Solomon pass by in his Chevrolet of molten gold, his top hat and silk shirt, glittering in the African sun? For that’s all that Solomon wants – a lot of gapers and marvellers. And things were mixed up because there were too many Solomons and too many men with no shoes, and no one could be certain who would win out in the end – except that the man with no shoes was often too hungry to stand in the parade these days.
And that was what it boiled down to in the end – a silent and fascinating battle between the Solomons and aspiring Solomons like Joas Tsepe, and the God with no shoes. The Solomons made the most noise in the world, hopping from one international conference to another, bowing and scraping to the left and right. But the God with no shoes continued to live where he always had – in the small brown birds of the bush, in the dusty footpaths, and in the expressions of thin old men in tattered coats. He was just wondering what all the fuss and clamour was about, you know, these international brotherhoods, the sounding brass and tinkling cymbals, because he really owned the world and the fish in the ocean. It amused him to see all these fellows strutting about, with no humility, forever scheming and plotting to gain what would never be theirs.
The way this God with no shoes carried on might easily delude you into thinking he was a charming halfwit like Paramount Chief Sekoto or hesitant about truth like Mma-Millipede or tortured and tormented like Makhaya. He changed about from day to day contradicting and confusing himself by all he had to learn, never certain of anything the way the fortune-tellers were. He had upset Makhaya this day by stacking the cards one way and then toppling them another. He had packed all these cards up in a precarious pyramid and stood by while Matenge picked off the topmost card. It would have been different had Matenge really victimized Paulina for whatever he wanted to victimize her for. Maybe her association with Makhaya. But then a man like Makhaya would not have stood by with tied hands. He would have had blood on his hands by now and been in some cell, with George Appleby-Smith lecturing him on how he had let him down. But the God with no shoes, with his queer, inverted reasoning, had brought Makhaya, a real and potential murderer, face to face with the body of Matenge just hanging there and hanging there.
“Don’t you see?” he said softly. “Murder is small-minded business.”
Did you really trust a God like that? He made you take a long and perilous journey along a road where everyone threw things at you. Then he said you were small-minded if you wanted to throw things back. Why didn’t he do something about the throwers then? Because one Matenge died and another replaced him, and no matter which way you turned there was always a Matenge there to throw something at you. And Makhaya knew that that day was always ahead of him. He would come face to face with one of these grinning, ghoulish oppressors and have nowhere to run any more. And he would just lift up his arm and knock him dead with a mighty blow, right between his grinning eyes. And he might turn round to this invisible God who tormented his life with question after question and knock him down too. Someone had to go into oblivion – either a Makhaya or the oppressor. And Makhaya did not mind if it was he. Because a man could not go on taking it, all the filth and lies and hypocrisy. He might like to step right out of it into a black, silent death, never to live again.
“What are you thinking about, Mack?” Gilbert asked, at last, in a tired, depressed voice.
Makhaya raised his hands with a helpless gesture. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know if I’m thinking at all.”
It was this quiet, hollow feeling inside all of them that made them feel so low. It was as though they had strained so hard against a heavy, unyielding door, only to find it wasn’t there any more. They could not, all at once, total up the good things in this struggle, how it had made them true comrades, how they would not ever have clarified their ideas had they not lived under the shadow of blind oppression. These things would come with tomorrow, when all the hard work had to be done and even Makhaya would find, in spite of himself, that he had to live and give up his morbid speculations on oppressors and oppressed. Even this Good God whom Dinorego said was ‘everywhere about’ stood watching them that evening with an amused look in his eye. Why didn’t Gilbert talk about how exciting irrigation farming would be in Golema Mmidi? Everyone would want to do it now. Just look at the way everyone was shocked out of their minds! Did this fellow Gilbert think progress was as easy as learning to drive a tractor? People had to be given shock after shock to wake them up good and thoroughly, and preparations for progress took place long before progress even started. As for the oppressors! Did you mean Joas Tsepe would win the election as councillor for Golema Mmidi? Maybe anywhere else but not in Golema Mmidi. They would much prefer Mma-Millipede, who mixed up spiritual counselling with practical advice and whom the Good God had long prepared for this position. In fact, there was not anything he would not do for a village like Golema Mmidi, which was a place he had especially set aside to bring all his favourite people together. He wanted them to show everyone else just how quickly things could really change, how ordinary people could get up and do things for themselves and produce enough for their needs and have some left over for sale. But why were they all so boring this evening? Ah, but he was a little bored too. His favourite mouthpiece, Dinorego, was away at the funeral.
Therefore the Good God cast one last look at Makhaya, whom he intended revenging almightily for his silent threat to knock him down. He would so much entangle this stupid young man with marriage and babies and children that he would always have to think, not twice but several hundred times, before he came to knocking anyone down.
He wandered along the footpath, in the direction of the sunset, and stopped for a while in the yard of Paulina Sebeso. She was busy at her smoke hazy fire, preparing supper, but she paused and looked up expectantly as she heard familiar footsteps. It was Makhaya coming home. His long dismal train of thought made him overlook the still, glorious ball of hot, red light which hung in the sky. He was about to start saying those impractical things to Paulina, you know, like this world is not a fit place to live in, but she came rushing towards him with her hands outstretched because she had been deeply f
rightened at the way he had walked up the steps of Matenge’s house, as if he would just be swallowed up by a monster and would not mind. He was like the wind or a fluid substance you could not hold on to. She grasped hold of his hands with that half-laughing, half-puzzled expression, perhaps even shocked to feel that his hands were large, solid bone, slightly warm and damp. He was solid all over, strong and muscular, but the inside of him, the expression of his face was so strange and unreal. What did you say to such a man?
She asked, “Will you have some food?”
He smiled. She was the best of all women he had known – no sulks, no dead eyes, no dead anything about her.
“So much has happened so quickly,” he said. “I forgot to ask you if you’d like to marry me. Will you, Paulie?”
After all, he had said he wanted to marry someone. Didn’t he? But even though Paulina said yes a bit too quickly, she hardly believed it. As though everything was uncertain, new and strange and beginning from scratch.
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