He said something apropos my obviously overlong meditation on all this.
I explained why I was puzzled.
He was vague. He had had very little to do with the choice. It had come out of the mother committee. It was a useful thing to do because it gave everyone a chance to see what things were breeding in the hinges of shadows, the place where shadows bend, meaning what doctrinal involutions were establishing themselves in the hothouselike recesses of the different Bible groups. Also a tranche of the older boys and girls would be leaving to go to secondary school at Kang, where they would be targets for the Scripture Union. This is like a rinsing, a rinsing off that needs to be done periodically. He said Try to look forward to it.
Thick Calm
Different things made me not want to go to this particular parlamente. One was Nelson’s insouciance and generalness about what the event would structurally be: I couldn’t get answers to the questions of whether teams were involved, who would speak when, whether he would be lecturing first or at all. There was too much spontaneous order being assumed. I always want to know the rules, because there always are rules. People who tell you there aren’t tend to be hiding their knowledge of the rules for their own advantage. Then also he was clearly trying to flog up major attendance at this parlamente, or so I concluded from the hyperactivity of the summarist with her incessant announcements. You were almost afraid she would jump out from behind a tree to remind you one more time to be sure to come. But Denoon was telling me that the size of the crowd was a matter of indifference to him. Denoon was in a state I was beginning to think of privately as thick calm. He was seeing everything sub specie aeternitatis, all of a sudden.
I was careful to point out to him that at the same moment he was arranging what would amount to a shot across the bows of undue religiosity, he was, behind the arras, pushing a sort of milky cult of the foremothers, centered on the cemetery. I was sympathetic with what he was trying to get at. I admired him for trying. He was trying to do something about the bottom layer of the Tswana mind, which consisted of the conviction that our ancestors hate us, watch us, and are touchy. Via little picnics and observances in the cemetery, he was clearly trying to propagate the cartoon that the five charter mothers buried there were mothers of us all and were powerful and were loving toward us, the living. Thus he would be crowding out very slowly the main source of an underlying kind of paranoia in Tswana culture, presumably. If you believe that the dead hate you and that all your afflictions come from offending them, this is what we’d call paranoia, a structural paranoia: he was right. I said to him Your foremothers cult is mariolatry of a sort, like the way the Catholics use Mary to soften a cosmos run by a punitive god and his pal Satan. It’s religion, I said. He said No, it’s ideology. He was made extremely uncomfortable. I wanted to say that blaming your ancestors for all the bad luck and illness bound to befall you in a dire terrain like Botswana was probably pro survival, group survival, in that it directed rage and suspicion backward and mostly away from contemporaries, except, naturally, for the occasional unlucky witch.
I understood what he was trying to do, but also Of all things in existence some things are in our power and some not is a truth. You can be only so promethean before the consensus is you’re a nut. What was to be done?
When Whitemen Come Amongst the People It Is Always for Lying
The morning of the day of the parlamente I got a disabling headache. It was a classic. I get headaches, but out of wanting to resist being a stereotype I rarely mention them, so that when I do complain I’m credible. Nelson was attentive and clearly unhappy at leaving me in my duress. But he went. I insisted. I lay there feeling totally razed until, at around three in the afternoon, when the meeting would have been in progress for two or so hours, I was seized with the conviction that if I didn’t go I was going to miss something critical to resolving my feelings about the prospect of staying in Tsau. I took four Compral and went, trying, futilely, to time my steps not to coincide with the thudding in my head.
The parlamente was al fresco. There were about a hundred people packed in a crescent around the porch of Sekopololo. Burlap canopies had been stretched above this area. Everyone was sitting on mats. Denoon was on a strip of mat back against the porch, sharing it with Dineo and a sharp-tongued aunt, Mma Keridile, who was in charge of the municipal herd. Bolsters had come from somewhere. There was food being handed around, bean salads and scones, and hot tea, which was welcome. It was a little chilly. People were bundled up. I found a place to sit where I could lean against the trunk of a thorn tree, at the edge of the crowd, out toward the view of the desert. There was no particular pattern to the distribution of the crowd, except for the cluster of men around Hector Raboupi directly in front of Denoon. I liked the mixed lolling and disputation idea, and the vaguely Near Eastern feeling coming from being on rugs and under tenting. The tan light was soothing. So was holding my mug of tea against my forehead.
The way it worked, as I gathered, was that beforehand people had submitted statements or assertions on the general subject of god and religion. These were on cards which got shuffled by Denoon or Dineo or Mma Keridile before one was selected to be read out. The writer would acknowledge. Then people would respond, sometimes substantively and sometimes with deprecative shouts. The point in having three interlocutors was to rotate the function of selecting people from the floor to reply. And you were supposed to signal your desire to comment by holding up a twig. Maybe half the audience adhered to this protocol, half the time. Also the chairs were authorized to summarize or supplement contributions and to determine how long a particular point was to be pursued. Clearly also the panel was balanced in terms of viewpoint in that Mma Keridile was a believer of some kind, probably a Zed CC, Dineo was neutral, Denoon was the village atheist. You could tell which chair was in charge of the current phase of the proceedings by his or her tenure of a glass bar like Mma Isang’s and a little metal hammer to strike it with in order to punctuate the flow. Most of the older children were there, looking excited. There was coming and going in the crowd, but not much.
I arrived as Denoon was reminding us that parlamente was not intended to raise one idea or belief up to oppress others but for all views to show in the light. Now for a time we would proceed in English. I was relieved at this. The idea of exerting the concentration necessary to follow closely in Setswana, with my head hurting the way it was, was painful.