Waiting, I sauntered around outside a little, going up the main avenue, Gladys and Ruth Street, as far as the mysterious white object that had frightened me when I first noticed it. The main avenue was named for the wives of the first and second presidents of Botswana. An oddity was that at the gate end the street was Gladys and Ruth, but at the plaza end it was Ruth and Gladys Street. People were touchingly scrupulous about which name order they used, depending on which end of the street they were at. The white object was a gauze shroud covering a flayed carcass hanging from a tree, the meat tree, to age. It was to keep flies off. I had seen meat trees before, but never with this refinement. There was an attendant at the tree, and people were coming up and indicating which sections of the cow they wanted when it was cut up. The attendant, actually the cow’s owner, was taking these orders down in a notebook, and chits or tokens of some kind were being handed to her. I observed all this from a distance, not wanting to overstep.
It was a cool morning, bright, no different than any other morning since Kang, but now I was able to experience the pleasure there was in it. Breathing was a pleasure. I’m sure I’ve never been so pleased with myself. All the innocent industry of the households getting mobilized for the day was a pleasure to see. And I loved Tsau from the compositional standpoint, from the pastel motley feeling of the rondavels to the red rock jumble crowning the koppie. I was already thinking of these rocks as the Citadel, portentously.
Another mystery fell away. Twice I saw children pushing light wooden two-wheeled carts whose sideboards were decorated with simple figures or symbols in enamels in spectrum colors. The wheels were bicycle wheels. In the case of the two carts I got a glimpse of the decor consisted of female imagos with pierced disks of glass screwed into the wood where eyes or a necklace would be. Clearly carts like these, in their shuttlings, were responsible for the vivid blurts of color I had seen recurring at odd points in the landscape. Why these rococo vehicles were always called dung carts when in fact collecting dung from the kraals and pens was the last and least thing they were used for is something I never figured out. The dung carts did well on the packed earth of the pathways and must have been strongly made, because I saw them routinely bumped very hard up and down the short intermittent runs of steps in the paved routes to the plaza without flying apart. Children personally owned these carts and could earn credits for conveying goods or messages in them. You might see a cart being furiously rushed someplace with a folded piece of paper in it and nothing more. This was not totally laughable, because there was always the possibility that something more substantial might be picked up for the return trip. As I was to discover, the explanation was that there was a greatly indulgent attitude toward the small, petted population of children. People sent the children on perpetual errands, many of them invented or marginal, out of love, essentially. The carts made a contribution to the visual agitation or liveliness you felt in Tsau, which was especially noticeable in late afternoon or during the innumerable holidays when the children were out of school.
Feeling unauthorized, I kept my saunterings close to home. The women I watched transacting at the meat tree watched back. I could tell I was being talked about, but it seemed friendly.
I had a moment of fear when all the women began, I thought, pointing at me. But they were only directing my attention to Mma Isang, who had come out into the yard and was summoning me by striking a thing like a glass sashweight with a ball-peen hammer. The notes produced were pleasant and musical, and did carry. What a genteel way to get somebody’s attention, I thought, although it seemed to me you would have to be on the qui vive to pick out this particular line of sound amid the general aural glitter of Tsau — the jinkling of the wind chimes, the cowbells and goatbells and dogbells, the drivel of birds and poultry, and all the other as yet unidentified ingredients in the sinfonia domestica playing from sunrise to sunset in this intricate place.
The Mother Committee
Three women arrived. These are of the mother committee, Mma Isang said.
Breakfast would be al fresco, I had already observed, at a table under the cloud tree.
I wondered if everyone in Tsau was always beautifully dressed. I already knew that no one, children included, went barefoot. People wore sandals or moccasins. If they went out into the bush they were supposed to strap on leather leggings, like shin guards, as protection against snakes, but these were unpopular. There was a definite municipal costume. It was modular. People wore either a long sack dress, sleeveless, belted or unbelted, or a tunic and shorter-skirt combination. There was another type of skirt, much fuller and with complexly arranged buttoning panels that would supposedly permit the skirt to be fastened back into pantaloons, which only a few women wore any longer. It had been an experiment. Everything was made from the same material, a tan muslin. But here uniformity ended. Garments were individualistically decorated, either dyed in different solid or combined colors, or printed with motifs like eyes, crosses, stars, ankhs, letters of the alphabet — some quite majuscule. The printing, some dense and some sparse, was done with dies cut from different local tubers. There was some not overambitious embroidery around neckholes and armholes. Headscarves were universal but entirely individual as to color and tie-style. Headscarf art at Tsau would make a coffeetable book. Plain modes were the norm, but there were always triumphs of excess turning up: anything went, and stuffings were sometimes used to create truly startling ridged and tiara effects. When jewelry was worn it was usually glass, what else? or the Basarwa ostrich-eggshell-chip bracelets and chokers that are staple trade goods all over the Kalahari. I felt quite drab and masculine as we went to the table.
Mma Isang muttered a Setswana phrase to me that translates as We are walking on our toenails. This equates to our Walking on eggs.
There were two women in Mma Isang’s age range and one, Dineo, in her forties. Introductions were in Setswana. It was formal. I sat down with the delegation. There were only four chairs, regular European straight chairs, so Mma Isang went to get a chair for herself, placing it at a little distance from the setting around the table. We served ourselves tea. In English Mma Isang again said I should be patient because these sisters were bringing our breakfast behind them, which was meaningless to me until a young boy appeared propelling a vermilion cart into the yard. He was in the standard schoolboy kit of khaki shorts and short-sleeved shirt and appeared to be in a hurry to finish with us and get somewhere else. He was cutely officious, expertly prying the fitted lid off a sheet metal chest, inside which was straw, beneath which was another box, containing our breakfast of scones, socalled, and hardboiled eggs. It was done like lightning. The boy was given a token. He shot away. Everything was hot. We ate off cloth serviettes.
You must eat so many eggs as you please, Mma Isang said, again in English, for which she drew a reproving gesture from Dineo. I gathered that it would be Dineo who would determine when English would be spoken at this interview.
Dineo was clearly primus inter pares here. She was sinewy. Men would find her sexually interesting, I thought. She was tall for a Tswana, true black, Nilotic, with what the Batswana call long eyes. She had a hard, narrow face. Her dress, slit to the knee on one side, was printed with bands of tiny black crosses, black on tan, which gave a faintly sacerdotal air to her presence. She had presence. She was wearing an amber headscarf draped like the one the Sphinx wears. There was a trick, possibly starch, to the way the delta panels of the scarf stayed spread at the sides of her neck. This was her signature headdress. I only saw it varied a few times. She had force. I liked it that white though I am, she was looking me straight in the eye, unlike her companions, who were doing the more typical side-glancing and down-glancing as they absorbed themselves in studious tea drinking or egg peeling. Something in her expression reminded me how stern Batswana women can be about malingering, and I readjusted my plan to look more done in than I actually felt. I felt myself involuntarily wanting to appease her.