by Robyn Scott
“Well, I’m sure he’ll be able to help you,” said Mum, turning round reluctantly. It was the usual problem: almost every Motswana man said there was something wrong with his kidneys. The women complained about their wombs.
“Ee.” The man nodded. But after a few moments’ deliberation, he continued. “And I am only half-charged.” His expression suggested this was a greater problem than his kidneys.
“Half-charged?” said Mum.
“I can only do it once a night.”
Problems with ‘doing it’ were a thrilling change from troubled kidneys, wombs, and dirty blood. Damien and I immediately stopped tracing patterns on the dusty shelves.
Mum coughed. “Oh, dear,” she said in a strained voice, “well, perhaps the doctor can help you with that too.”
“Ee.”
The man in front of us turned around and said something in Setswana to the half-charged man. Laughter and rapid conversation followed, joined by several other men. In any language, the sympathetic nods, occasional laughs, and thigh slapping clearly accompanied an exchange of embarrassing stories and shared problems.
But the details we could not follow until the cashier spoke, returning the conversation to English.
She had abandoned the cash register altogether and leaned forwards across the counter. Huge breasts spread out in front of her like full sacks of mealie meal – breasts stretched by child after child, but kept full thanks to a rich husband who could afford to fatten his wife with generous amounts of beef.
“You men are all wrong,” she announced, in a booming voice that silenced the chatter. “We women like it just once.”
She paused, eyeing her audience, letting her point sink in. A few chuckles came from the line, which consisted mostly of men. One or two began to murmur in Setswana.
“And,” she continued, silencing everyone once more. “We like it long and Aow.” She prolonged the last word, and her breasts shook as she laughed at her own unabashed precision. She turned to Mum and eyed her enquiringly.
All eyes followed.
“We do indeed,” said Mum, grinning back at the cashier.
Laughter erupted in the queue. A few people yelled enthusiastic Mma Ngakas. Heat seeped across my face. I was embarrassed for Mum, mortified for me. Sex was fine – fascinating – in the abstract, between animals, or involving people you didn’t know. Involving parents, it was unbearable.
The cashier winked at Mum, and resumed her till-prodding. A babble of Setswana rilled the air again, and the queue ground on. Long and Aow. Like so much in Botswana.
Before, in New Zealand, Dad was just a doctor, doing a job, just as all my friends’ parents – plumbers, lawyers, farmers – did their jobs.
Here, though, it was different. Much more. An identity that he carried around all the time – one that extended like an umbrella over the whole family. An invitation for strangers to give detailed medical histories; sometimes, a kind of passport to courtesy. With a sticker to prove it: on the windscreen, next to the licence disc and the green Wildlife Society badge, a round circle that said ‘Doctor’s Car: Member of the South African Medical Association’.
A year in Botswana, and the magical effect of the doctor had become as unremarkable as the numerous roadblocks and veterinary posts, where it was most frequently and dramatically displayed.
The roadblocks, often erected on the long, lonely roads between towns, were usually police checks for licences or brake lights. The veterinary posts – booms across the road manned by veterinary officials in little wooden huts on the verge – were barriers to control the spread of foot-and-mouth disease, which broke out occasionally and threatened Botswana’s valuable beef export industry. Stationed wherever the road crossed one of the long veterinary fences that patchworked the country, these checkpoints could result in painful delays: your shoes sterilised – in case you’d stood on cow poo – while officials combed the car for potentially disease-carrying meat and dairy before making you drive through a dip full of disinfectant, in case you’d driven over cow poo.
But even the most surly-looking official, strolling towards us, bearing down, would be disarmed by the sight of the sticker.
“Dumela, Doctor,” he’d say, fixing his attention on the driver’s window after a cursory glance inside.
“Dumela, Rra.”
“Le Uogajang?”
“Re tdoga gentle.”
Then, inevitably, something like:
“Ee, Doctor. I’m not well.” The officer would look pained, lean on the windowsill. “I need some medicine for my kidneys.”
“Hmm.” Dad would nod and contort his face into a sympathetic frown. “You’d better come and see me at my clinic.”
He might add the dates he visited whichever village happened to be nearest.
Usually, we’d be waved on without being searched for foot-and-mouth-carrying meat or a driver’s licence, or checked for whatever it was.
With only Mum in the car, the effect was not as immediate, but it still eased the brittle tension that so often hangs, palpable, over uniformed officials in Africa. And Mum would deftly steer the conversation towards the doctor.
Occasionally, Lulu, Damien, and I would be addressed too.
“Ah, I know your father.”
Or, “How is Dr. Scott?”
And we would say, proudly, “Very well.”
And then we would shut up and grin the roadblock-and-border-post lip-cracking grin, which we’d learned and perfected. The look that pleaded: I have nothing to hide. You’d be waiting your time if you empty the back. Please let me through as soon ad possible. If I have to, I’m prepared to give you a cool drink, the newspaper lying on the backseat…
Grandpa Ivor needed no identifying sticker on his battered white bakkie to glide past officials. He ‘wasn’t just a madala – a respectful title given to all old men – he was The Madala, known by everyone and exempt from the usual rules.
On the rare occasions that being a ngaka didn’t improve the atmosphere at roadblocks or government departments, Dad would say, “I’m The Madala’s son.” And then, at once, scowls would vanish, booms would be lifted, and forms would be stamped. When Dad’s application for a work permit had been delayed, then mislaid, and finally lost, Grandpa had phoned the Speaker of Parliament. Days later, the forms had been found.
Grandpa had grown old in Botswana as Botswana had grown up, from what was, when he arrived more than two decades earlier, the inconsequential, undeveloped British Protectorate of Bechuanaland, to what had become, by the time we arrived, one of Africa’s most prosperous, democratic nations.
After Bechuanaland became in 1966 independent Botswana, Grandpa became a Botswana citizen, one of the few whites in the country prepared to learn Setswana and give up their other passports. Somehow, Grandpa had got away with learning only a handful of Setswana expressions, which he augmented with a variety of swear words. But he had fully relinquished his South African citizenship.
Grandpa hadn’t cared. He was a Motswana, here to stay – respected for his age, liked despite his temper, and forgiven things that seemed unforgivable: anger out of all proportion to the inconvenience, insults far beyond limits that could see non-citizens Pled from Botswana.
Being Pled – made a Prohibited Immigrant and deported from the country – is the punishment occasionally meted out to foreigners who commit crimes and, more rarely, to those who offend Batswana sensibilities with racist remarks or fierce political criticism. The controversial law, often seen to be at odds with Botswana’s good democratic record, allows the president, at his discretion and without explanation, to expel non-citizens. Grandpa’s wild, sometimes racist, frequently dispensed insults would have made him a prime candidate.
Of course Grandpa couldn’t be Pled. But we weren’t citizens, and could be. And sometimes, in the presence of one of his tirades – at shopkeepers, policemen, customs officials – 1 worried that this time Grandpa had gone too far, that one of us would have to be Pled instead of him.
“Will ya bloody well hurry up!” Wild arm gesticulations would always be used to emphasise his fury. “Do ya think I’ve got all fucking day to waste?…Could do a better bloody job myself…Useless! Lazy! Ineffective bunch! The whole bloody lot of you.”
Then, suddenly, as sympathy for his unlucky victim had been obliterated by concern over one’s own diminishing prospects of remaining in Botswana, Grandpa would exhaust his swear words, run out of new insults, and stop.
And the recipient, who had been listening silent and stony faced, would sigh, smile, and say something like, “Ee, Mr. Scott, I’m so saw-rry. And how is Mrs. Scott?”
“Betty’s doing well, thank you.” Grandpa would beam back at him. And then they’d have a relaxed exchange, before saying a warm ‘Tsamaya sentle, ’ and ‘Sala sentle’ – Go well, and Stay well – and parting like best friends.
∨ Twenty Chickens for a Saddle ∧
Five
Schools of Thought
Halfway along Kagiso Street, in the heart of Phikwe’s greenest, quietest suburb, stood Granny Joan and Grandpa Terry’s large, lawn-surrounded house. Like all the mine manager houses, theirs nestled behind thick hedges and tall trees, and from the road all that was visible was the garage and the maid’s small room. Beside the latch on the gate hung a metal sign with the picture of a snarling sabre-fanged dog, which was similar to the pictures on almost every other gate of every other house in the suburb, and accompanied by the same Setswana words: Xihaba Ntdwa!
“Beware Dog!”
Inside, the house smelled of flowers and floor polish, and the polished wooden furniture reflected your face back at you as you walked past. Tall white wall units gleamed with delicate crystal animals arranged on mirrors, large framed photos of Karen, Linda, and Alison – the three daughters, in order of age – grinning in their graduation gowns, and rows of mounted beautifully coloured rocks from Granny and Grandpas days on the Zambian Copperbelt.
There was not a trace of dust or dirt anywhere, not even on the ankle-deep fluffy white carpets in the lounge or on Granny’s poodle. Muff, who bore an uncanny resemblance to the fluffy white carpets, and none whatsoever to the picture on the gate.
What lay behind that gate was for us, coming from the old, dirt-surrounded Selebi houses, an entirely different-world to that which we were now accustomed. And however much we visited, as I walked through the lush secluded garden to the polished front door of the large, pristine house, I never failed to feel like a foreigner. And often, as Mum pressed the singsong doorbell and Lulu, Damien, and I carefully wiped our feet on the doormat, I thought of Dad, and of how foreign and nervous he must have felt all those years before, as he stood there for the first time, wiping his feet and wondering what awaited him.
It had been Dad’s university holidays, and he was staying with Grandpa Ivor in Selebi. Visiting only once a year, Dad knew few people in Phikwe, and a week before the New Year’s Eve dance, he was still without a date. When he learned that Terry McCourt had a pretty single daughter about his age who was also at Cape Town University, he headed at once to Kagiso Street.
The lanky young man who answered the doorbell was about the same age as Dad, which was a surprise for Dad, having been told that Terry McCourt had only daughters.
“I’m Keith Scott’,” he said. “I was hoping Karen might be in.”
“She is,” replied the man, extending his hand. “I’m Hennie, her fiancé. Come in.”
Too taken aback to decline, Dad followed him inside. He was, of course, too late for Karen. But that evening he met Linda – six years younger than he; then only eighteen – and asked her to the dance instead.
It was 1975, and Mum was spending her second Christmas holiday in Phikwe. She liked Dad immediately, most of all for his total dislike of convention – which was the thing about Dad that Granny Joan and Grandpa Terry immediately disapproved of most. From the start, they’d been vaguely alarmed by the blood relationship to the famously eccentric Ivor Scott, and Dad did little to allay their fears that he would only entrench their middle daughter’s already firm inclination towards unorthodoxy.
At Mum and Dad’s wedding three years later, a Catholic priest, who was one of the guests, remarked that theirs was the first wedding he’d ever attended where God hadn’t got a mention. Granny Joan and Grandpa Terry were still blushing when Dad himself articulated all their worst fears about what their daughter might be letting herself in for.
“Getting married’,” said Dad solemnly, as he began his wedding speech, “is a bit like having your passport stamped when entering a foreign country. It neither guarantees that you will have a good time, nor that you will stay out of trouble.”
At least twice a week, when Granny Joan looked after us lor the afternoon, I’d consider what life might have been like if Mum had been more like Granny Joan, and if she had chosen, instead of Dad, a husband from amongst the many conventional, sensible bachelors that Grandpa Terry had wanted for her.
It was not an altogether unattractive prospect.
The first few hours of our afternoon visits were spent playing in the big, bright blue, perfectly clean swimming pool. When we tired of this, Granny would check that we were properly dry and had clean feet before calling us inside for slices of cake or freshly baked chocolate eclairs. Sometimes, she’d measure us for new clothes to replace ours, which had mostly come from the Salvation Army shops in New Zealand, which Mum loved and Granny hated. Or she’d lay out half-finished pinned-together dresses and shirts, reels of different coloured ribbons, and tubs of buttons, and ask us to choose which we preferred.
Finally, when Granny had disappeared back into the sewing room, we’d collapse in full-bellied exhaustion on the fluffy white lounge carpets. Then began the best part of our visits: several blissful hours glued to the videos that Granny recorded for us because we didn’t have a TV, which Mum thought ruined one’s imagination.
Occasionally in Selebi we played rental videos on the tiny portable video machine that Dad had bought for his clinic to show educational videos, and then brought home when none of his patients bothered watching. But this had a screen that was barely bigger than our Concise Oxford Dictionary, and trying to follow the tiny figures was exhausting. Sometimes we also saw programmes across the road at Grandpa Ivor’s, but his ancient flickering television picked up only two grainy channels.
Watching TV on Granny Joan’s large, clear screen was an incomparable experience. By the time Mum returned from her all-afternoon queue at the bank and Grandpa got back from work, we often had not moved, and would usually be engrossed by an ancient copy of The Sound of Miuk, which we watched again and again whenever we ran out of new videos.
At five thirty, Granny’s lips now bright with the lipstick she reapplied at a quarter past four before Grandpa got back from work, it was time for sundowners. On Grandpa’s summons everyone would stop, immediately, whatever they were doing and drift towards the sitting room. Grandpa would then disappear behind the big wooden bar while the rest of us placed our orders from the flowery sofas, which you could sit on, legs flat against, instead of stretched uncomfortably forwards in case of scorpions hiding underneath.
Grandpa was the personnel manager on the mine. This meant he knew about and was responsible for the jobs of many of Phik-we’s working residents, as the mine, employing 5,000 in a town of 40,000, was by far the largest employer.
Grandpa Terry hardly ever raised his voice and rarely swore except for after a few whiskies, when he’d sometimes say ‘Jesus Christ’ with a sudden Irish lilt even though he’d grown up in England, and had never actually lived in Ireland. Then Granny Joan would say, “Really, Terry! That’s not for young ears,” and Grandpa would reply, “You’re absolutely right, dear.” And then he’d clear his throat, turn to us, and say, “You didn’t hear me say that.”
“We already know all the swear words,” I once pointed out. But Granny just gave an indulgent, disbelieving smile and said anyway it was no excuse lor Grandpa Terry to sw
ear. And before I could provide any examples from Grandpa Ivor’s large repertoire, Mum interrupted with one of her lines for steering the conversation back to safe territory.
“Dad, how was work today?”
“Mum, how was your game of bridge yesterday?”
And, as a last resort, “You’ll never guess who I bumped into at the bank…” Which Granny and Grandpa would usually guess after a few attempts, because the list of friends and acquaintances you might bump into in Phikwe wasn’t that long.
Unsafe conversations were anything to do with Lulu, Damien, and me, which could lead to questions about what we were or weren’t learning. Mum was adept at dodging the initial questions, but by the time Grandpa was sipping his third Famous Grouse whisky and Granny her second brandy and ginger ale, they would have generally exhausted her avoidance tactics.
“So, Lin, how did the kids’ lessons go this week?”
“Very well.” Mum would smile brightly. She might add a vague comment about ‘interesting lessons’ with ‘a lot of variety’, or mention that something had been ‘particularly thought-provoking’.
White lie number one. We didn’t have lessons – at least not the sit-down-at-a-desk-and-work-in-a-book lessons that Granny and Grandpa meant. Mum said lessons could be anything that involved learning, but that there was no need to discuss semantics with Granny and Grandpa.
“What did you teach them in maths?”
“How to calculate areas.”
Exaggeration number one. “Areas,” Mum later explained, referred to when we’d helped her work out how many tiles she needed to buy to cover the shower. ‘Geometry’ was the occasion when Dad, who was studying for his pilot’s licence, showed us how to calculate angles with a protractor. ‘Multiplication and division’, the most tenuous of all, could simply mean our last baking attempt, when Mum had insisted that we halve the sugar in the cake.
