Twenty Chickens for a Saddle

by Robyn Scott

  The dominee’s suddenly enquiring tone interrupted my thoughts. “Now,” he said, narrowing his eyes at Lulu, Damien, and me, “it would be very interesting for everyone here ifyou could tell us about your religious lives in Botswana.”

  The whole class turned to look at us.

  “You live on a farm in Botswana. In the Tuli Block. Is that right?”

  We all nodded.

  “I am told it’s quite far away. Where do you go to church?”

  None of us spoke, and the faces grew more curious in the uncomfortable silence. I felt weak. The problem with Jannie paled by comparison to such a question in this hostile environment. In a town where everyone went to kerk, we couldn’t admit to the domninee, of all people, that we did not. But lying to a dominee – about God – was not an appealing option either.

  Lulu and Damien looked hopefully at me. If I didn’t speak, they would, which would be disastrous. Lulu would at once tell the simple, unqualified truth. Damien could go either way; possibly the blunt truth, but, in his present please-everyone behaviour, possibly a blatantly far-fetched whopper.

  “Yes, the Tuli Block is very far away,” I blurted out. “Two hundred kilometres from the nearestpropertown. Which is Selebi-Phikwe. That’s where we used to live. So it’s now a long trip to go to church. But there are several churches in Selebi-Phikwe…”

  Without a pause I began describing the Catholic church to which Lyn Nevill occasionally dragged Melaney and me. Including as much boring detail as possible, and omitting the details of with whom I’d been to church, I prattled away and had just started to recount part of a previous sermon when the dominee interrupted me.

  “Thank you very much,” he said. “Very interesting. Let’s end with a prayer.”

  I sighed with relief. Lulu and Damien looked impressed.

  Afterwards, I replied to Jannie’s letter, on the same piece of paper so I could also correct his English.

  Dear Jannie,

  I don’t particularly want to get to know you more. Anyway, I’m leaving tomorrow and never coming back.

  Robyn

  P.S. See correction.

  Perhaps it was misleading the dominee, but thereafter everything went downhill.

  At dinner, Damien was quiet and sat a little away from the other boys. He had a big red mark beside his eye. Afterwards, he hung around in the dining hall.

  “What happened, Didge?”

  “Got beaten up,” he said, wincing. “Really donnered.”

  I suddenly regretted my note. “Was it Jannie?”

  “No, three other boys.”

  “Who?”

  “Doesn’t matter, Rob.”

  “Why?”

  “Just cause.” He shrugged. “Think I talked too much.”

  “I’m going to speak to them,” I said indignantly. “And report them.”

  “No, Rob, don’t,” said Damien. “Please don’t. I’ll just get beaten up again.”

  Back in the bedroom, Deanne and Annalise hardly spoke to me. This time it was about Jannie: word had spread that I’d shunned him. That night there was no farting to laugh about.

  By breakfast, Damien’s eye had turned purple. Only Lulu, chatting happily to Louisa, still seemed cheerful. I spent the morning in the library, feeling too annoyed to work effectively. But after lunch, cheered by the prospect of Mum’s imminent arrival, I followed everyone else out to the field to watch the athletics competition.

  Lulu was running. Neither Damien nor I had wanted to take part: he too sore, I too angry. Waiting for her race, Lulu chatted to the other runners, all of whom were barefoot. After a few minutes, she removed her shoes too.

  Amongst the runners, by Lulu’s side, was Louisa, the two-hundred-metres champion, and as the girls lined up, the audience whistled and called her name.

  The pistol fired, and the runners set off. Louisa got more cheers, which became louder as Lulu raced beside her at the front of the pack.

  Quickly pulling away from the others, the two girls raced neck and neck. Fifty metres from the finish, cheered only by me and Damien, Lulu accelerated, winning by several metres. There was silence in the stands, grim hostile faces all around us. Even the headmaster looked upset as he presented Lulu with her prize.

  For a while, Lulu sat beside the other runners. But when it became clear that no one was going to speak to her, she joined me and Damien, looking miserable.

  Mum arrived to find the three of us sitting together on the stands at the end of the field. “Why haven’t you got hats on? Oh, my goodness, Damien, what happened?”

  Our good-byes were quick and unfriendly. The headmaster was considerably less warm to Mum. Mum barely spoke at all.

  “It was my fault,” Damien insisted.

  “Nonsense. Nothing justifies that.”

  “I did tell someone to voetdek.”

  “Idiot,” I said.

  Damien said, “Thought we were supposed to be protected.”

  Driving back to the border, we took turns recounting the dramas of the last two days, relishing the unpleasantness, shouting with laughter now that we were free.

  Building up slowly to Jannie and the interrogation by the dominee, I mentioned Damien’s gun pictures.

  Mum said, “Why were you drawing guns?”

  Damien explained that on the first morning he’d drawn a gun, and the boys had been so impressed that he’d spent the rest of his two days in classes churning them out. “Got donnered anyway,” he mumbled.

  “They were so good, Mum,” said Lulu. “Three types.”

  “Five, actually,” said Damien. “Perfect replicas. Even drew the pistol to scale.”

  “When did you see a pistol?” asked Mum.

  “Not sure,” muttered Damien. “Sometime.”

  “Didgy?” said Mum. “Come on.”

  “At Rassie’s place,” mumbled Damien.

  “And then, Mum,” I interrupted, “I got a note…”

  “Hang on, Robbie,” said Mum. “Damien, tell me about these guns.”

  ♦

  A few weeks earlier, Damien had been at Jean’s when he’d met Rassie Potgieter, a young farmer who’d paddled downstream from his farm on the South African side of the Limpopo. The conversation soon got around to guns.

  ♦

  “Got a hell of lot of guns,” said Rassie.

  “How many?” Damien asked.

  “Jirre. Not sure any more. A hell of a lot.”

  After a few drinks, Rassie agreed to show him, and Damien helped him paddle back up the Limpopo.

  “There was a whole shed,” said Damien. “Full of guns. Ten or twelve at least. Ammo for everything too.”

  Rassie had pointed out his personal favourites amongst his collection. “Lekker, hey? You want to shoot some?”

  “Ja.”

  For half an hour, Damien and Rassie had tested out guns.

  “On what?”

  “Trees,” said Damien. “And birds. But I didn’t shoot any of the birds,” he added quickly. “And Rassie was drunk, so he kept missing.”

  “Drunk?” said Mum, her knuckles going white on the steering wheel.

  “Well not actually that drunk,” said Damien hastily. “But definitely drunk enough to miss the birds. I think,” he continued after a thoughtful pause, “that he actually only got very drunk after he left me in the shed.”

  “He left you there?” said Mum. “By yourself?”

  “He offered me a brandy,” said Damien, “but I told him I wasn’t allowed to drink.”

  “He left an eleven-year-old in a shed lull of guns and ammunition?”

  “Ja,” said Damien. “For ages, that’s how come I can remember everything. But then I took a pistol and the R4 fully automatic assault rifle out onto the firing range to practise.”

  “Cripes,” said Mum. “Maybeyou’d be safer getting beaten up in Pikfontein.”

  “How can you say that, Mum?” I spluttered.

  But Damien interrupted me. “No it’s cool, Rob. Anyway I wouldn
’t get beaten up again. Next time, I’d definitely donner them.”

  Back at the house, Dad pronounced Damien’s bruise ‘not serious’.

  Damien looked disappointed. “No scar?”

  “Nope.”

  “I’ll be emotionally scarred,” I said.

  “Nonsense,” said Dad. “The only ones who might be are Jan-nie and Louisa. Spurned and beaten by two English meisies. Now come on, Robbie, it’s all water under the dam.”

  Damien was banned from seeing Rassie. But otherwise life returned to normal. Before long Pikfontein came up in conversation only when Dad had run out of more creative ways to tease me.

  “I’ll send you off to Pikfontein. Marry you off to Jannie.”

  And I would seethe indignantly while Dad muttered that the whole thing had been worth it just for this. But Dad was relentless enough to tire even me. After a few weeks, I was too bored to protest.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” mused Dad. “Never thought you’d laugh about this. Told you it’d be character building. A glimmer of hope for your sense of humour yet. After what, only twelve years.”

  “Thirteen,” I corrected him.

  It was early 1994. In a few months South Africa ‘would have its first democratic election. And in a small state to the southwest of us, trouble was brewing on Botswana’s borders.

  Bophuthatswana wasn’t even a real state. Situated within South Africa’s borders, and created, like all the other Bantustans of the apartheid regime, as a way to further segregate races, this ‘black state’ or homeland had been given nominal independence by the South African government. By the rest of the world, however, it and other Bantustans were seen as puppets of the apartheid regime and not recognised as independent states. And now, in the run-up to the elections, the Bantustans were about to be officially reincorporated back into the new South Africa.

  Fearful of being marginalised, Lucas Mangope, Bophuthatswa-na’s longtime head of state, widely considered a stooge of the apartheid government, was resisting strongly. The Bophuthatswana Defence Force opened fire on protesting civil servants and, in a bid to restrict negative media coverage of his clampdown, Mangope closed several television and radio stations. Meanwhile, in a farcical twist, the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging, the staunchly right-wing white racist group, stepped in to support Mangope. At the opposite end of the political spectrum, but equally fearful of marginalisation, the AWB saw the clashes as an opportunity to preserve the old ways. It rallied its supporters, and armed AWB members got in their bakkies and set oil to fight for the old South Africa.

  In the Tuli Block, we watched South African news footage of AWB members caught on camera in Bophuthatswana. The AWB opened fire at people on the roadside. The police and, ironically, several lower-ranked soldiers of the Bophuthatswana Defence Force – now in some chaos – returned the fire, and three AWB members were shot and killed.

  “Who do they think they are?” Dad fumed as we listened to interviews with the khaki-clad white men holding guns. “Arrogant sods. Why can’t they just bloody accept what’s happening in South Africa?”

  “They must really live in another world,” said Mum.

  “Probably our part of the world,” said Dad.

  I said, “They look like the members of the Tuli Block Farmers’ Association.”

  Everyone laughed. Then Mum put a hand over her mouth.

  “No, that’s unfair,” she said. “Listen to us. We must stop talking like this. We’re becoming as bigoted as they are. Keith, look what we’re doing to our children. This is pure prejudice speaking.”

  Shocked by the killings of its members, the AWB quickly retreated from its humiliating mission, the news coverage died down, and the process of reincorporation continued successfully.

  Several weeks later we heard word on the Tuli Block grapevine that Rassie and his friends had got back safely to their Limpopo farms.

  “From?”

  “Bophuthatswana.”

  “What? No! That’s terrible.”

  “Ja. Those okes were hell of a lucky. Jirre. They could have been shot!”

  Later, the clash was to be hailed as the end of military resistance to the new democratic South Africa.

  ∨ Twenty Chickens for a Saddle ∧

  Twenty-Two

  School

  Passive resistance, however, remained and in some areas flourished. Months after the elections, in many of the small towns in the old Northern Transvaal – the new ‘Limpopo Province’ – there was still no sign of the Rainbow Nation’s rainbow.

  In the Spar where we did our fortnightly grocery shopping, the black bag packers still looked just as scared of the white Afrikaans tanniej at the tills, who still told them off like disobedient children. Some towns even continued to defiantly fly the old flag – as did Pikfontein Skool. And by 1995, the year I went to school proper, the Pikfontein Skool had remained steadfastly all white.

  At the Bulawayo Dominican Convent, my new school, only about a third of the students were white. Which, as Mum liked to stress, was one of the reasons she was so pleased that I’d chosen the Convent. “It’s all worked out so well,” she’d been telling anyone curious about my sudden entry into the formal education system. “Just as I’d always planned.”

  “Really?’” Less tactful friends expressed surprise to learn that Mum had had, all along, a plan for her children to go to school.

  “Well, I planned that they would be the ones to choose when they wanted to go to school. And now Robbie has. Exactly when she was ready.”

  “Ah.”

  “And now we’ve been lucky enough to get her into the Convent. Which is a wonderful school. And has a much better racial balance than Girls’ College.”

  This was Mum at her optimistic, backwards-reasoning best.

  A lack of options was, in fact, the main reason I was going to the Convent and not to Girls’ College – the other private girls’ school in Bulawayo, where several Phikwe friends were studying, and the obvious choice. And the reason I had no options was mainly because the sudden desire to go to school had possessed me at exactly the worst possible time – midway through the second year of high school, well into the syllabus, and long after the places had been filled.

  Girls’ College, discovering I hadn’t been to school, did not even bother to interview me. “Sorry, we’re completely full. Perhaps if you’d come a year and a half ago…maybe try again next year…”

  The Convent, initially, was no different. I was eventually given an interview only because a friend in the Bulawayo horsey community, who’d given me several riding lessons, put in a good word for me with his mother, who was one of the teachers.

  I knew no one at the Convent. All my friends, including Mel-aney, were at Girls’ College, which, unlike the convent, was a proper boarding school. By then, however, I didn’t care.

  I was ecstatic. Once I had decided to go to school, I couldn’t bear to ‘wait another day. I’d suddenly had enough of homeschooling. I was desperate for structure, desperate for tests and exams, and desperate for classmates. I longed for homework.

  “Just be yourself,” Mum consoled as I fretted in the days before the interview. “Remember that there will be some differences between the syllabuses, and it’s not what you know and don’t know that matters so much as your whole approach to learning.”

  Unconvinced by this argument – even without Dad’s doubtful smile – 1 began frantically revising the last year of my correspondence assignments. Until an even worse thought occurred to me, after which I spent the remaining time trying desperately to speed-read the Bible. “I’m never going to do it,” I moaned, as Mum assured me all ‘would be well. “The nuns will hate me.”

  So it was with some relief that I discovered my interviewer, the deputy headmistress, was not a nun. As the interview went on, I continued to relax, for despite the cross and biblical pictures on her office walls, Mrs. Joliffe seemed to be staying clear of the subject of God. Instead she talked a lot about the school, expla
ining with a soft voice and serious expression how they, at the Convent, prided themselves on being one of the top-performing schools in the country.

  “You’d have to work very hard ifyou were accepted, Robyn.”

  I said I would. “I can’t wait to have exams and homework.”

  Mrs. Joliffe gave me a quizzical gaze. “Really?”

  “Really,” I said. And when she still looked unconvinced, I added, “My friends at Girls’ College think I’m strange.”

  “Indeed,” said Mrs. Joliffe. “Well, you’d probably get even more homework here.”

  Then she asked me ‘what achievements I was proudest of.

  I said running a very profitable business selling free-range eggs, laid by rescued battery chickens, to buy a saddle.

  Mrs. Joliffe’s mouth twitched, and she looked down at the papers on her desk. Then she said she thought she’d asked me enough questions. Explaining that I must now do an exam, she handed me a pen and printed sheets of the rough ugly Zimbabwean paper, which was used for everything from immigration forms to shop receipts.

  She wished me good luck, then left me in her office, with instructions to begin with the maths paper.

  Some of the topics I could do easily. With some, I didn’t know where to begin.

  As the problems I couldn’t do stacked up, my stomach began to ache with panic. Suddenly I wished I’d had the chance to show off my limited biblical knowledge after all. I stared miserably at the cross – which provided no inspiration – and then at the Veritas school shield, which I would now never call my own.

  “It’s terrible,” I mumbled, when Mrs. Joliffe returned to collect the paper. “Sorry.”

  “Well, let’s not jump to conclusions,” she said brightly. “And you’ve still got your English exam. Good luck, again.”

  “Thanks.” I managed a weak smile as she left the office. I studied the cross again, gathering my thoughts. My only hope now, I decided, lay in a display of great moral fortitude.

  It was on this basis that I carefully chose from the list of essay questions.

  “Money is the root of all evil.” Discuss.