Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  A desert is a place without expectation. In Botswana there is always the possibility of rain. The hope of rain. Rain is hope: pula means fulfilment as well as rain. As a political catchword, the cry has a less muffled ring than the many variants of the word ‘freedom’.

  From the days of the late-nineteenth-century conquest of southern Africa by whites until 1966, Botswana was the British Protectorate of Bechuanaland and, except for parties of anthropologists for whom it was a trip back to the Stone Age culture of the Kalahari Bushmen, it meant the ‘line of rail’ connecting the Republic of South Africa with Rhodesia that ran up inside its border along the strip of fertile farmland settled by whites. The Line of Rail is still there, the two or three frontier towns – one street with hotel verandah and shops facing the railway station – but as a way of life it no longer sums up the country, only the colonial past. Botswana’s railway was – and is – owned and operated by a neighbouring country, Rhodesia, and Botswana’s capital was until recently a town just outside its borders, in South Africa. The brand new capital, Gaborone, is only just inside; the pull of economic gravity remains unavoidably towards the south, where are based the international mining companies whose discoveries of copper, nickel and diamonds beneath the sand will mean, ten years from now, the doubling of the per capita income, at present on the poverty line. Gaborone is set down on the Line of Rail but not of it, complete and ready-to-use: an Independence Expo in whose pavilions, after the celebrations, people stayed on. Flagwaving consular residences, a national museum, churches with contemporary bell-towers, the hotel/cinema/national-airline/shopping complex which even includes an American Embassy – one-stop urban civilisation. In the piazza of the shopping mall a few thorn trees have been left to assert the empty savannah outside, but the barbers, beggars and vendors of an African town are too overawed to set up business under them. Emancipated black girls drink beer among the men in a hotel bar, now, at midday. Out of the cheerful exchanges in the Tswana language there comes suddenly, in English, the authentic tone of Gaborone: ‘I give it three years, and I buzz off.’

  More than twenty years ago Seretse Khama, Chief-designate of the Bamangwato and Paramount Chief-designate of all the Botswanaian tribes, married a white girl while studying law in England and was exiled by the British colonial administration from his ancestral home in Serowe. It was one of the biggest political scandals in Africa, with all the private intrigues of an African dynasty, the Khama family, to complicate the issue. Sir Seretse Khama, knighted by the British, elected by democratic vote, is now first President of Botswana; the Bamangwato remain the biggest and most distinguished tribe; Serowe remains the seat of the Khamas as well as the capital of the wealthiest province and probably the last nineteenth-century African – as opposed to colonial – town south of the Equator.

  In their Great Place where the Khamas lie when they die, they are not so much buried as set on final watch over the Bamangwato. You reach the Great Place by a steep walk up behind the swept, stockaded kgotla, the open-air tribal court and meeting place beneath a big tree, and the silos where communal water or grain are stored. On a hill that gives out upon the whole town and beyond is a pink stone terrace of graves – the Grecian urns, marble scrolls and infant angels of ‘funerary art’. The real monument is the one the earth has spouted and tumbled in an outcrop to one side, Thataganyana Rock. Little humpy dassies dart fussily in and out its petrified burst-bubble holes.

  Thataganyana is a superb vantage place for the living as well as the dead; we leaned upon the warm wall of the terrace and looked down over the entire life of this town like no other town, a town ordered garland by garland, not in streets or blocks, loop after loop of green rubber plant hedging circular houses grouped round cattle stockades made of stony grey tree trunks. Far away, the square of a sports field marked in the same green, and then the fuzzy plain overlaid, by the eye, with thickness upon thickness of blond grass and grey bush until it laps a few hills, one flat-topped, that are exactly the single woolly hills drawn on ancient maps of Africa. A God’s-eye view; you can also see into everyone’s clay-walled, decorated back yard. A woman whirrs at her sewing machine. Gossiping men lean against walls. A baby staggers about in a G-string; an old man in a parson’s black suit, with hat and stick, pays a visit. You can hear everyone’s life as well: it is Saturday afternoon and those people who have decided to kill a goat, brew some maize beer and throw a party – a popular way of making money, since an entrance fee is charged – amplify African jazz above the hollow knock of wood being hewn. We stayed on while the moon came up and only the little bronze buck, symbol of the Bamangwato on top of the grave of Khama III, stood out clear. Just before the light went, a tiny girl ran from the houses and squatted to relieve herself in the security of the Great Place’s shadow.

  Down in Serowe in a gaunt cool house with the drinks and the guns ready on the verandah lives Sekgoma Khama, graduate of Dublin University and cousin of the President. He is a princely young man, almond-eyed and handsome, with a strangely fateful laugh – when a gun went off among us while we were jolting in a truck over the veld after eland, the bullet searing the ear of his close friend, he broke the shock with that laugh, not in callous amusement but as a kind of baring-of-teeth at the hazards of life. The hunt itself was in the nature of a quest: as Tribal Authority (the democratic title for Chief; he is acting in that capacity in place of an elder brother studying the problems of developing countries, abroad) he has the right to bag himself a single head of the rare species a season. He set off early with us among a house-party of friends – a Jamaican, an African geologist (rarer even than the eland), a pretty Swedish girl who was helping to found a cottage textile industry in the town, and a whole entourage of gun-bearers. Half an hour out of Serowe the red hartebeest with their tarnished copper coats stood, not recognising death when one among them fell, but a small herd of eland were as elusive as any unicorn. Their broad light flanks always seeming to be presenting themselves one-dimensionally, just the way they look in ancient bushman paintings; they led us a dance from the grassland into the scrub forest, where they threaded away between screens of trees while even Sekgoma’s crack shots fell short.

  When his brother returns, Sekgoma Khama will take up again his full-time occupation of managing the Khama family’s lands and cattle, and serving on the Land Boards that, as much as the switch to a money economy, will change the structure of Botswana society. He sees change not as abandonment but transposition of traditional institutions: cattle as wealth not capital – which was the basis of the economy – becomes ‘a ranching operation’; the tribal monopoly of land loosens as allocation becomes a matter of applying to a government board instead of the local chiefs. He felt at home in Joyce’s Dublin; lucky man, it has not made him feel any the less at home when he sits under the tree at the kgotla, settling some dispute among the 36,000 people of Serowe. He shows disquiet over only one thing: ‘The mineral discoveries so far are all in our Central Province … it could be a delicate situation, politically …’

  The Bamangwato, it seems, cannot escape being a favoured people; for them, the cry Pula does not go unanswered.

  Like the ownership of cattle, hunting has always been the way of life of the people here, whereas in other parts of Africa in colonial times it quickly became only the privilege of whites. In a country without billboards (or even road signs) a pair of horns on a tree marks a turn-off or the way to a cattle post, and in every place of habitation bones and the skins of game pegged out to dry are homely as a front garden in the context of other lives.

  In spite of this, Botswana is one of the few countries in Africa that still has great herds of game left, not only in reserves but living alongside men. The Kalahari, hostile to agriculture, is what has saved the animals, and they have learned to subsist sleek-coated through the dry months upon the heavy desert dew condensed on tough vegetation. There is conflict now between, on the one hand, the Government’s reflection of the Western world’s concern to preserve wild
life in the Third World and, on the other, the curious unconscious alliance of interest between the Africans who’ve always shot for the pot and whites who have shot for trophies and fur coats. The fashionable vocabulary of environmental studies is invoked these days by people in the skin-and-bone trade. In Francistown on the Line of Rail, while walking through a ‘game industry’ past mounds of lopped-off elephant feet and vats of impala and zebra skins soaking, we were given an erudite lecture on the ecological viability of the whole highly profiable business – indigenous people continuing to live off indigenous animals, rather than the development of agricultural and industrial employment for the people and protection for the animals. The very balance of nature was being preserved, our cultured white informant said, by buying from Africans the skins of only plentiful species, and utilising every scrap of the product – and by this time we had left the sickish smell of the curing sheds and were in a workshop where beautiful and noble creatures like those we had pursued on the plain outside Serowe were emerging finally: as elephant-foot umbrella stands, ostrich-foot lamps and zebra-skin bar stools. In the taxidermy department, some white safari hunter’s lion was being tailored into his skin, with little strips of cosmetic tape to hold it in place over the stuffing. A ghastly ecological situation given dubious scientific licence to continue colonial hubris in the beauty of wild animals owned as kitsch.

  There is only one road to the west and it leads three hundred miles from Francistown to Maung, the last place on the map that signifies more than a store, a well and a mud village. Early on the way the earth gives out, the Kalahari begins, then the road skirts the rime of the Makgadikgadi salt pans and the heads of ilala palm stand up like broken windmills. As if all their sundered parts had flown together again, we encountered along the road impala, gemsbok crowned with antennae-straight horns, kudu bulls with elaborately turned ones, ostriches with legs like male performers in ballet drag.

  Maung reached has the unreality of any oasis; no relation between the deep blue and green of the Thamalakane River shining between towering wild fig trees and the monotonous village of grey huts on endless grey sand not a hundred yards away. Riley’s Hotel (the old London Missionary Society mission station converted by an Irish pioneer adventurer, now dead and legendary) and Riley’s Garage are the fount: the big pub behind mosquito screening where white-collar Africans have taken up darts among hefty white habitués, the grease pits where trucks and Land-Rovers are relieved of the sand that clogs their innards. Lumbering four-wheel-drive vehicles are to Maung what ships are to a port – their image of power and freedom not only demarcates road from sand by the impress of their tracks, it also dominates the imagination of the black children: their toys are model trucks home-made of bent wire on condensed milk-tin wheels.

  Walking through the village we read a ‘Wanted Man’ notice of a new kind. Reward was offered for Diphetho Monokrwa, ‘last seen following a herd of buffalo’. We came upon, at nine in the morning, a party of women in Victorian dress embellished with jewellery and eastern turbans, sitting like telephone-cover dolls in the sand, making a leisurely meal of tea and porridge. Before the 1914–18 war Herero people fled from German genocide in South West Africa (Namibia); here they live still, their extraordinary women peacocking it among the Tswana hens. These are the women who played the Lysistrata act without ever having heard of her – they refused to bear children while the men submitted to German oppression. Only that sort of female spirit could sustain a vanity colossal as this, trailing wide skirts through the sand, boned up to the throat in the heat, ironing flounces with a flat-iron filled with burning coals, creating in poverty a splendour constantly remade out of bits of what has worn out. After the meal they passed round a cup of salt and a pocket mirror; each cleaned her teeth with a beringed finger, and took a critical look at today’s face.

  Maung is the last place you can buy a loaf of bread for many hundreds of miles. It is also the plenitude of the Okavango delta and you can skip the desolation and fly there in a few hours to canoe and fish and bird- and game-watch. The Okavango, misnamed a swamp, is really a vast system of clear bayous created by the Okavango River and seasonal flood-waters that come down from the highlands of Angola each May. At least one of the safari camps that are setting up business has its own airstrip. Just outside the Moremi Game Reserve, in a self-styled ‘game kraal’ built of reed and thatch to house a wealthy species of tourist, each suite has its pastel-coloured portable thunder-box and each guest his personal servant. For the hard-living Francis Macombers are being replaced by wildlife worshippers, and the white hunters, pushed as far south as Botswana, have gone about as far as they can go, and many are themselves turning for survival to leading photographic safaris and mugging up ornithology to please bird-watching clients. Derek ‘Kudu’ Kelsey is one of the adaptable ones, as ready now to aim the amateur photographer’s camera so that he may bring back the trophy picture as once the white hunter was to put his client into the position where his gun couldn’t miss. But while Mr Kelsey is a perfectionist, filing the wicked cat’s-nail thorn off every knob of the magnificent mukoba trees of his ‘kraal’ lest a guest might suffer so much as a scratch at Africa’s hands, he retains a dash of endearingly uncalculated zaniness from wilder, colonial times. In the morning he took us by canoe expertly along the water-paths made by hippos through papyrus that lead on for many days’ journey up the Okavango; in the evening he appeared in dinner jacket and trousers worn above bare ankles and veldskoen shoes, and had arranged for ‘dinner music’ to be provided by the grandfathers, wives and babies of a nearby village, who sat round the fire clapping and singing their narrative chants. Later, there were dancing girls, in the form of the six- or seven-year-old daughters of the waiters, abandoning a sweet bashfulness to shake their little bodies frenziedly in grass skirts.

  We bought that last bread in Maung.

  Carrying our water and petrol as well as food we struck out west again, into the Kalahari. There are roads marked on the map, but a loose hank of tracks ravels the sand out of Maung and it doesn’t much matter which spoor you choose, provided it fits the wheel-gauge of your vehicle, and you stick to it.

  We arrived at Lake Ngami at night, put down sleeping bags on anonymous sand in an anonymous dark. Our headlights showed weirdly that the cabs of trucks had worn topiary tunnels in thick thorn trees. We didn’t know which side the lake was, only that the few lights in the bush were the village of Sehithwa. One cannot always be sure if the lake will be there at all: when Livingstone saw it in 1849 it was seventy miles long, but there are years when it disappears altogether; it is one of the farthest points where the delta is quaffed by the desert.

  This year it is there, about eight miles of it, in the morning. Like a long gleam seen between the slit of eyelids, at first. No trees on the banks; there are no banks. Sometimes for minutes, when nothing is flying, it looks empty of life. But again, from a certain angle, the skimming birds and the crenellations of the water are the same, so that the whole surface is made of grey wings. What appear to be verges of water and ooze are thousands of gliding duck, quiet and close; a white sandbank in the distance is really solid flamingo. The bush stands withdrawn, half a mile from the water. Suddenly I see silent explosions of dust puff from it, and as I watch, herd after herd of cattle, black, russet, white and dappled, stippled and shaded variations of these colours, burst out of the bush and advance in slow motion, because of the heavy wet sucking at their hooves; across horizontals of grass, sky and water. Herdsmen on horseback with skinny dogs pushing rodent noses into every scent ride by now and then; among all these cattle, one of the men comes up and asks me for milk. Horses, knee-deep, shake their manes like vain girls bathing. Pelicans on the water turn the lake into a child’s bathtub filled with plastic toys. The flamingoes will not stir until late afternoon, when the colour under their wings as they rise seems to leak into the water like blood from a cut finger. As the day moves on heat hazes interpose – between land and water, between one layer of birds or
beasts and another – new glassy surfaces of a water that isn’t really there. The peace, born of the passive uncertainties of this beautiful place, one year a lake, another a dried bed of reeds! Over the trembling horizon you can just make out two nubile hills – The Breasts of The Goat. In shallow years, they say, you can drive across through the lake and pass straight between those hills. It is the way to Ghanzi, where the great cattle drives going south pass; and on, deep in the desert, to the non-places where the Bushmen withdraw from the threat of other men.

  No one had been able to agree where petrol or potable water would be available on the two hundred miles to the Tsodilo Hills. But then no one had told us, either, of the existence of Marcos’s bar, suddenly come upon in the ash-pale desert of Sehithwa village, where we sat disbelievingly drinking iced whisky and arguing over the mathematical problem in a correspondence study course the young village barman was following.

  Villages were more austere even than uninhabited stretches, scoured down to shadeless mud houses, a single store, in an emptiness cleared of thorn by the appetites of goats and the need for fuel. Austere but not desolate: the store was always full of people buying scoops of sugar and maize meal before wire-netted shelves offering blood tonics and gilt earrings, and racks where dusty dresses were chained together. There was no green thing to buy; only the chestnut-shiny fruit of the ilala palm, arranged in frugal pyramids on the sand. When I ate an orange from our supplies, I found myself tasting each suck and morsel down to the pith; the bright skin cast away was an extravagance of fragrance and colour.