by Norman Rush
There is no modular outfit supplied to men. Men here look like men in any poor village: there is a range of quality in their clothing from new to fairly ragged, with self-evident castoffs predominating. Everything is laundered to a fare-thee-well, though, and clothes are changed frequently. Men were never issued clothes gratis, as an entitlement, in the way women were, but a very serviceable coverall was made available below cost. All clothes went free to the washhouse. Urgings to men to sign up at least occasionally to take a turn in the washhouse came and went and were usually answered by the men asking when they could expect to see women taking turns in the tannery. The reek in the tannery was unbearable.
The political economy seems to go like this: Women are deeded their houses and plots. Ownership entitles you to a voting membership in Sekopololo, The Key: Sekopololo is a voluntary labor credit system. At your own discretion or inclination you exchange your labor or craftwork for scrip, which entitles you to anything in the stores house, where the range of imported and locally produced goods is surprising. The value of the scrip earnable at different tasks is continually under revision, to induce people to opt for the most needful jobs. Dineo seems to be in charge of this. With your house comes a share in the collective cattle herd and your own patch in the mealie fields. Sekopololo is also a mechanism for external trading: commodities exported run from knit goods to karosses to carvings and, I gather, glass oddments. There are some other items Tsau exports, the knowledge of which appears to be proprietary and which I am clearly not eligible to know about as an outsider. Men can only be nonvoting members of Sekopololo. Unclear how this is justified. They seem to work like dogs.
In most rondavels a soupçon of glass brick of the kind you used to see in moderne cocktail lounge façades is incorporated. The bricks are embedded in the walls in random arrangements. If you look at Tsau at night from out in the plain or from the top of the koppie you can imagine the dots and dashes the lit bricks become constituting a message in code. Apropos his vitromania I once asked Denoon to make the thought experiment of asking himself what he would have done with his life if he had been born into a world evolving on its own decently enough that his personal attention was not required: would he have been a glassblower or glass artisan of some kind? I meant this innocently, but it was taken as needling him. This was precisely the question to ask if I wanted to make him more seclusive about his glass projects, about which he was already defensive because it was so evident how lavishly his glass workshop was outfitted. He had a very expensive—in the thousands—solar crucible and a plethora of other devices and supplies, including sacks of rare sand. His glassworks was better equipped than the carpentry shop with its ludicrous pedal-driven saw. I had exclaimed the first time I saw his place. He didn’t like my reaction. It was unfair to call glasscraft a hobby. He was forever going to find someone appropriate to train, although his maiden foray in that direction had gone wrong when the young woman who was his apprentice burned her arm badly. This had traumatized him and led him to keep the workshop as his own sealed bailiwick afterward. When I pointed out to him that it was odd that the glassworks was the only venue in Tsau, apart from the Sekopololo office and the post office, ever locked at night, he stopped locking it—but I think he never forgave me for making him feel he ought to. My last thrust at getting to the roots of his vitromania came when he told me the tale of going as a boy to the part of Oakland below Fourteenth Street where the Japanese flower growers and truck farmers had a settlement, just after the Japanese were taken away and put into camps at Tule Lake. There was absolute destruction. Mobs had come there. Acres of greenhouses had been smashed, houses trashed and vandalized. There were acres of broken glass. He was incredulous. It still depressed him to think of it. I suppose he partook in the cult of the working class his father followed. There was an important but tenuous connection here. Oakland and San Francisco were then, by our standards, citadels of union power, he claimed. How could the destruction have happened in a union town? was his question. I said The people who wrecked the greenhouses were hardly detachments from the Central Labor Council or the CIO, were they? No, I said, undoubtedly they were young boys. But no, he knew the mobs were men. I gather that the question was why the unions had permitted this, if they were what his father had said they were. I wanted to know where this episode lay in relation to his father’s assault on Nelson’s bottle sculpture, a reasonable enough thing to want to know. But with that the portcullis came down with a vengeance.
There is the credit system operating through Sekopololo, there is private barter outside that system, and there is a regular pula currency system operating, with regular banking through the post office. I keep looking for someone who is existing totally outside Sekopololo, something theoretically possible, but no one is, including the very hostile health post nurse assigned here by the government. She considers this exile, but people here are seducing her into liking the place by being unfailingly nice to her. Everyone says she was much worse formerly, which is hard to believe. They wish she would go if she is unhappy. The woman being trained to replace her is already more proficient at giving shots. The health post nurse is too young for this place. The government also wanted someone on government pay to run the post office, but Denoon succeeded in getting a Tsau woman deputized for that, if that’s the word. But what the systems conjoin to produce is an amazing equality of condition. Equality is relaxing, Denoon liked to say. Certain powers only arise under conditions of equality, meaning absolute equality, and even then not at first, until people believe it is going to be permanent. Don’t you feel it yourself? he would ask, and sometimes I did.
Decoration rampant. No object too minor. Framing, lintels, all carved and stained. Crank handles on composters carved spirally. The dung carts. Sandal straps have designs burned in. Walkways in compounds edged with painted stones or mouth-down bottle butts. There is a tool here for sawing up scrap glass, bottles especially. Intaglio in the planking around the toilet holes identifies each one as to function, and at face level in the wall opposite as you sit is a wooden plaque bearing an eye-shaped piece of glass over gilt paint intended to glint at you and remind of correct procedure. When I first saw these I thought what wonderful mementos of Tsau they would make, which I read as meaning that I already saw myself as leaving Tsau—as fascinating as I found it and despite the fact that I had just arrived. Do you belong anywhere? I asked myself. Denoon loved a book by James Joyce’s brother in which their father is described as someone it was impossible to imagine as a happy, productive member of any society the mind of man had yet to come up with. I immediately thought of myself, of course. Crockery heavily glazed in spectrum colors, but odd because the black-glaze floral motifs applied are clearly thumbprints. After the rondavels are painted a mastic is applied to the lower third of the exteriors to defeat termites: various herringbone and serpentine designs are created in the wet mastic, using the fingertips, including one design that looks very much like dollar signs.
How serious is this place, au fond? I once said to Nelson that he should call Tsau Occam’s Torment instead, because he was always multiplying entities unnecessarily. This was during the long period when he could be teased pretty freely. If it looks like rain you pull a string and a gutter made of overlapping flappets of wood flops down that extends beyond the edge of the roof thatch so that a drop of rain is never wasted. The gutter feeds a buried cistern equipped with an iron hand pump out of the nineteenth century. There is a box on a post next to the stoop: this is for messages, either in chalk on slate or in soft pencil on oblongs of frosted glass sealed to a wooden tablet: you rub out the message on the glass with a damp cloth or the heel of your hand. Reuse is king. Paper is precious here, so writing on both sides of a sheet is universal. You shower in the afternoon, having earlier raised a black polyvinyl sack of water up onto a shelf at the top of a stall, where the sun heats the water. The sack plug turns into a showerhead when you twist it. You raise the shower sack via pulley. The number of things that can be ra
ised and lowered or operated at a distance via pulley systems is greater than I would ever have dreamed.All tables are dropleaf, with very solidly made fly rails. All candle stands and oil lamps have mirror reflector attachments.
I understand some things and not others. I can understand why the proportion of older women with some visible defect or deformity is high. I understand this in a general way because we know that illness in the culture is interpreted as being the result of some transgression of what the ancestors wanted you to do. So that permanent defects must mean serious transgressions. But why is Dineo here? How did she get cast into destitution? She could be a model! Many of the younger women have been shunned over prostitution coming to light, other patriarch-enraging actions or disobediences, or witchcraft accusations. Dineo is atypical in some way. Her Setswana is pure, without dialect traces. When I ask what tribe she is, people say Bamangwato, but on questioning it turns out that this is an assumption, no doubt based on her self-confidence, and two people have said Bamalete. She slightly obsesses me, which I have to control because asking personal questions, especially about other people, is très gauche in Tswana culture.
There is amenity here. If you’re white and you stay any length of time in an African village, you can find yourself unconsciously counting the moments until you get back to the properly upholstered white West. Anybody can adapt for a while to perching on stools or sitting crosslegged on mats when the time has come to stop standing up, but the feeling is wholly interim. In Tsau you could be comfortable in the Western sense. Mattresses were foam rubber slabs of the best density, although you were welcome to sleep on one of Denoon’s experimental palliasses made from shredded maize husks if you were a total loyalist. He was also certain there must be a way to make passable toilet tissue out of maize husks, but he never was able to connect postally with the right expert. His drive toward import substitution almost amounted to a tragic flaw. In Tsau there was an adjustable chair, like an Adirondack chair, with a sling back made of hide, in which you could attain what you never can in a normal African village—the semireclining position. Mopane wood furniture: larger tables with marquetry: chairs have thong or strap mesh seats: chairs and tables seem to be built slightly lower than the American norm, are comfortable, suggesting that furniture in the West is built to a comfort median set by the taller sex. Indoor temperatures fine. Rondavels have thick walls, especially lower down, and are so thermally efficient you canheat one up in fifteen minutes with a container of warm ashes, almost. In the morning, in cold weather, you open your north-facing double-paned windows and the sun heats the place decently all day and you retain the heat for the night by closing the shutters and rolling down a thick feltlike shade. There is a turtleshell-shaped smallish mud stove, vented to the outside, which is mostly used for boiling water. There are larger mud stoves outside, which people seem to use equally with the solar ovens they complain continually about over having to keep adjusting the tracking mirrors. Children can be gotten to do this if they arent in school, but you have to pay because it’s boring. The children are darling fiends. There is nothing wrong with this place so far.
Tsau is permanently on edge over certain matters. Omnipresent mindfulness about water, not wasting it, conserving it. There is no such thing as having a leisurely stroll off the beaten path anywhere on the koppie: the entire upper surface is engineered for water harvesting: cement barriers, damlets, sluices: these empty into two deep underground cisterns, one Z and one W. There is a supplementary system under construction on the south slope below a broad face of bare rock—this system is not exactly an afterthought, because the cistern was dug before the construction people left, but the catchment structures are cruder, rock and cement rather than the pure cement of the main system. A distinction is made between the cistern water, called saved water, and the fresh water from the artesian springs at the SE edge of the koppie, around which the fields and kraals are laid out. Solar pumps and the three windmills move both kinds of water into the huge storage tank sunk back in among the citadel rocks. Public buildings and house plots are reticulated, house plots have standpipes, but water is released into the system only twice a day, morning and evening currently, and then not for long. Each house plot has a cistern for thatch runoff and a smaller tank for graywater. Finally, in the mongongo grove deep south on the sand river is a primitive boom and bucket apparatus to get water from shafts dug next to the bank. These yield a little rather turbid water which is trucked around on carts for various animal needs. The supply of water is just above average for this time of year, but people are hoping for a freak rainstorm or two, as has happened five times in the last eight years on dates everyone can tell you. In addition to being attuned to water, the community has to be alive to several other recurrent threats, depending on the season. As I picture it, the entire settlement convulses itself to get all its solar equipment and the netting on the nethouses under burlap shrouding if it looks like hail or a serious sandstorm.The solar ovens in the yards have a wooden housing that is easily shoved over everything delicate, but shrouding all the solar panels that run pumps or do batch heating at the central kitchen is a major undertaking. There are teams for this. There is the equivalent of a fire drill, bells are rung, children rush out of school. Then there is the question of the very high level of maintenance going on: cleaning of the gutters in the water catchment, chlorinating cisterns, checking water levels, polishing mirrors on the various solar devices and oiling their joints and gears. People are also on the qui vive about public health. Flyswatting is done religiously, sometimes frenziedly. There are very few flies, in actual fact, especially in winter. But the feeling seems to be that there should be none. There is a kind of casual social monitoring, not only of children, over being sure that hands are dipped in the disinfectant solution outside the privies as you exit. It is perfectly to be expected that you will be shouted at from the next yard or the street if someone notices you being remiss. When you come to Tsau you take a virtual oath to do this faithfully. Is all this a tonic thing or not? Would you tend to wear down over time? Compare this to living at a less comfortable level but in a condition where you are free of the obligation to become part of a collective self-defense organism every time a bell rings. Or does that generate feelings of connection you can only get in some such way? Housefires not a source of anxiety because mud block is not flammable and thatch is impregnated with a fireproofing substance. Newly treated thatch smells like cinnamon, but this fades as the thatch ages.
Food en bref. Beef and rabbit irregularly, chicken and guinea hen more regularly, snake and game meats erratically, goat reliably, blood pudding all too often, lamb and pork forget. Fresh cow’s milk usually only for children and pregnant or nursing women: powdered milk everywhere and stirred into everything, as is brewers yeast and package gelatin. Yogurt, maas, and other clabbered milk products made from both fresh and powdered. Eggs off and on, powdered eggs available but not liked. Dried fish and biltong erratically. Cheese never, butter never unless canned. Scallions, cabbage, baby marrows, leeks, early and late carrots, various lettuces, parsley, spinach, kale, chard, sprouts of all kinds. Biltong scarce because only Basarwa can legally hunt game in the reserve: some fitful trade in this and fresh ostrich eggs from them is developing. Marmite and soy powder despised, but beloved by Denoon. Pinto beans, cowpeas, chickpeas. Stringbeans here should be treated as a source for string, period. Tomatoes very sweet, fluted sides. Much drying of vegetables. Fruit leathers.Sunflower oil and seeds, cashews, ground nuts, mongongo nuts. Melons, pawpaw, sour oranges, lemons, limes, granadilla. In every plot tub horticulture concentrated on dwarf varieties, always including peaches and tomatoes. Food is one of the things that put a subtle limit on how long you plan to stay in the rougher purlieus of the third world, unless you happen to be a saint of some kind. The variety of food in Tsau amazed me. Denoon had attended a lecture and heard a soil geneticist say offhand that he thought that Kalahari soils, mixed with sawdust and compost, would probably grow virtually any
thing. Denoon was out to prove this with a vengeance. The long growing season was in his favor. Sun was both friend and enemy, and the trick was to use plastic netting to shade the more delicate crops. Handwatering was the norm. Where any irrigating was done it was via the drip system. The fulcrum of our diet was maize or sorghum porridge done in monstrous vatlike pressure cookers at the main kitchen every day. You could take it away in insulated containers or have it delivered to you by dung cart if you chose not to hike up to the plaza. So that whatever else you added to the meal was recreational, in the nature of embellishment. People seemed delighted with this. Bread was baked every other day, socalled scones irregularly. Leftover bread was never thrown away but ended up as rusks to be eaten with hot milk for breakfast, or as breadcrumbs, another universal additive in Tsau. On the shelves of the Sekopololo stores house was everything you might want that the South Africans had ever bothered to can, from pilchards to lichee nuts. Of course, credit values on these items were kept astronomical both to reflect what it cost to get them to Tsau and to encourage consumption of local and cheaper foods. Rice, groats, barley, pasta. Powdered coffee only, with chicory. Joko tea, rooibos tea. I had been expecting a vastly more restricted food spectrum. There was also bush food, like wild medlars and various peculiar tubers, that kept inserting itself into our diet. In Tsau you could eat interestingly. The diet was light on fats, but there was nothing else wrong with it. Factors beyond my control were not, obviously, going to play their usual role in determining how long I stayed in a particular place, all of which raised my least favorite question, to wit, what exactly I was doing with my life. In Tsau I had been anticipating a palette that possibly a dedicated vegetarian could cope with for a while. This was otherwise. I’m not even against vegetarianism. At some level I think vegetarianism is right. It’s certainly sound, so long as you watch your lysine and B12. But I’m not a vegetarian. Something makes me resist. Why am I certain that males constitute a distinct minority of the total of vegetarians? I think I’m not prepared to concede animal protein to the striding-around master sex while I nibble leafage. I’ve certainly seen who gets the meat in African families.
