I was clearly not alone in having missed the signaling that was supposed to precede Denoon’s being allowed to declaim for so long. There was a shouted protest from Leta, the worst batlodi.
She continued with This is lies! She herself was violating the rules by plunging straight into English without getting assent, which drew comment.
Why are you speaking so long with saying we must not have beliefs whilst you are thrusting beliefs upon these people from long before when we first came here? she asked.
People said Shame! but she went on. Always you are giving forth beliefs, yet you are a lakhoa and we say why is he not giving forth beliefs to makhoa rather than Batswana?
I was amazed. She was very junior to be putting herself forward so aggressively, and her status in Tsau was interim and dubious to say the least. And there was ingratitude. By accepting the batlodi Nelson had saved them from jail time.
All this came out in the partial chorus that rose against her: She is impudent, She is a new person who is soon gone, Where is her mother to see this?
She said You see because when whitemen come amongst the people it is always for lying, as we know from when they came with New Testament put down in Xhosa and Pedi that was saying it must be one man one wife as you can see written. And then in time they could no longer keep hidden Old Testament with proof of many kings with many wives at that time. And you must make that woman stop with writing, as I am not on for examinations, I am speaking my heart.
She was pointing at me. It was like a blow. I had taken my notebook out and was getting a few things down. I had done this publicly often enough, without anyone objecting, although I suppose that usually people assumed I was under the rubric of recording something about birds. Before anybody had to defend me I stopped, ostentatiously.
Leta stopped then. Denoon was silent, feeling chastened, no doubt. He looked worried.
I sensed a larger attack gathering. Dorcas Raboupi seemed to be creeping between several groups. When I perceived the attack forming, my headache vanished completely, occultly.
The rest is sketchier than it should be, because I was stopped from noting things down in situ and it was a fair while before I could get back to reconstructing the event. And then the event itself took such a swerve toward furor.
First there was an ineffectual flurry of dinging. In a way I experienced that as a tolling for something lost. I had never seen anything in Tsau as uncivil as what Leta had done. I was full of clear energy. I wanted to fight, not that I had any special right to and not that doing it would have been anything but counterproductive, granted my status, meaning my link with Nelson and my race too, I suppose. But still I wanted to fight. I was tremendously galvanized. And my head was perfect.
What had been in preparation was a potpourri of falsely spontaneous grievances ostensibly brought into being by Leta’s salvo. Nothing had anything to do with the subject of the parlamente. The attempt was to inflate the churchbuilding issue into an umbrella unrelated issues could shelter under. Say how he has interfered amongst our underclothing, was a facetious reference to Denoon and the brassiere imbroglio I overheard. I think this was humorous and probably not meant to be part of the developing potpourri, but one of the batlodi also overheard it and brazenly shouted it out, even though that issue long predated her arrival in Tsau and everyone knew it. There were four or five foci of objections spread throughout the crowd, the most active one being among the people around Hector and Dorcas. Everything critiqued Nelson in one way or another, but the protest was always directed to Dineo, with Nelson referred to in the third person, which was an insulting strategy in itself.
He has made us to eat from a wheel, someone said. This had been mentioned to me. At an early point Nelson had tried to introduce the lazy susan into household mealtime protocol as a delicate way of promoting a more equalized access to food, protein in particular. Nelson was well aware of the statistics on household males, senior males, getting the first pick and the lion’s share, then the women, then the male children, then the female children. He was perfectly right, because the statistics about men hogging the food in the third world, and I don’t mean only in Africa, are horrifying. I could understand Nelson’s feeling that here they were, engaged in wringing food and drink from bare rock, in a sense, and he was seeing it reticulated directly into a stratified consumption pattern which anyone seeing it from the outside would want to do something about. I don’t know how sensitively he’d promoted these lazy susans, but they had fallen out of general use, although we did encounter them on occasion when we went out for corso, where they might be in use for serving sweets. It was an elderly gentleman who had raised this complaint, so presumably he had personally undergone the wheel and it had clearly left a mark on his soul. I was pleased that there was at least a little negative trilling by the loyalist women after he spoke.
There was another complaint, a feeble one, and sidelong, that Nelson was frightening the children with pictures of monsters in the water we must drink. This referred to a feature in some of his popular-science lectures, where slides of water were magnified and projected on a wall so that all the animalcules there are in unboiled water could be appreciated. I suppose it was an oblique way of protesting all the emphasis on handwashing and the rather comic civil surveillance he tried to keep inflated to monitor it. Denoon even privately jokingly referred to the monitoring as his campaign of terror against unwashed hands.
Someone then said He at one time forced us to run amongst ourselves like phuti, meaning deer. Nelson later explained to me what this was about. He had tried to promote a few village-green-style sports, mainly kickball and some limited footracing. Kickball was still played in a desultory way down by the kraals and was a game particularly popular with a group of the aunts. What I said when he told me about the games was that surely organized exercise in Tsau was slightly nugatory, Tsau where people are on their feet morning to night doing work that’s primarily physical, not to mention the perpetual up-and-down-the-koppie process. I said Life here is thoroughly aerobic. He agreed but said that everything was an experiment and that he had never understood why field sports had to be limited to the young. They could take place in a slower way, but he saw no reason why the impulses behind people wanting to do games should go away. If I was wrong I was wrong, he said. And in fact the very mild form of kickball, where the ball is rolled to you and you run to base and back to home, if you can, after the kick, had survived on its own.