The longitudinal thoroughfares that converge on the plaza are called streets and are named for eminent African women, with one exception: there is a Blessed Mary Slessor Street. She was a Scots clergywoman who hunted through the bush in Ashantiland rescuing children, female infants, left out to die. There was a struggle over honoring her, which ended when it was decided that it was enough that she was a woman and that she had performed her good deeds in Africa. The names committee is apparently a hotbed of contention. Latitudinal thoroughfares are called ways. You live streetside or wayside. Ways are named after different social virtues, like Ipelegeng, or pulling together. There is a network of unnamed paths running everywhere, to the top of the koppie and throughout its wild slopes. Where trees are sparse along the streets and ways, efforts are being made to install lattices and to entice vines to grow out, creating stretches of loggia. The deep summer here is blinding and brutal, everybody says, and more shade is wanted. People use parasols in the summer and wear straw sun hats imported from Lesotho. There is a plan to set up toriis like the one next to the gatehouse at the mouth of each of the six main streets. But this is stalled because the gum tree plantation started eight years ago is just now producing trees of adequate height, and there are competing ideas of what to do with them. The gum tree plantation is deep SE, near the airstrip. Rra Puleng is the one who would most like the toriis set up, I sense. There is no map of this place. Everyone knows where everything is. The backlog of unnamed landmarks and venues is growing and causing grumbling.
There is no modular outfit supplied to men. Men here look like men in any poor village: there is a range of quality in their clothing from new to fairly ragged, with self-evident castoffs predominating. Everything is laundered to a fare-thee-well, though, and clothes are changed frequently. Men were never issued clothes gratis, as an entitlement, in the way women were, but a very serviceable coverall was made available below cost. All clothes went free to the washhouse. Urgings to men to sign up at least occasionally to take a turn in the washhouse came and went and were usually answered by the men asking when they could expect to see women taking turns in the tannery. The reek in the tannery was unbearable.
The political economy seems to go like this: Women are deeded their houses and plots. Ownership entitles you to a voting membership in Sekopololo, The Key: Sekopololo is a voluntary labor credit system. At your own discretion or inclination you exchange your labor or craftwork for scrip, which entitles you to anything in the stores house, where the range of imported and locally produced goods is surprising. The value of the scrip earnable at different tasks is continually under revision, to induce people to opt for the most needful jobs. Dineo seems to be in charge of this. With your house comes a share in the collective cattle herd and your own patch in the mealie fields. Sekopololo is also a mechanism for external trading: commodities exported run from knit goods to karosses to carvings and, I gather, glass oddments. There are some other items Tsau exports, the knowledge of which appears to be proprietary and which I am clearly not eligible to know about as an outsider. Men can only be nonvoting members of Sekopololo. Unclear how this is justified. They seem to work like dogs.
In most rondavels a soupçon of glass brick of the kind you used to see in moderne cocktail lounge façades is incorporated. The bricks are embedded in the walls in random arrangements. If you look at Tsau at night from out in the plain or from the top of the koppie you can imagine the dots and dashes the lit bricks become constituting a message in code. Apropos his vitromania I once asked Denoon to make the thought experiment of asking himself what he would have done with his life if he had been born into a world evolving on its own decently enough that his personal attention was not required: would he have been a glassblower or glass artisan of some kind? I meant this innocently, but it was taken as needling him. This was precisely the question to ask if I wanted to make him more seclusive about his glass projects, about which he was already defensive because it was so evident how lavishly his glass workshop was outfitted. He had a very expensive — in the thousands — solar crucible and a plethora of other devices and supplies, including sacks of rare sand. His glassworks was better equipped than the carpentry shop with its ludicrous pedal-driven saw. I had exclaimed the first time I saw his place. He didn’t like my reaction. It was unfair to call glasscraft a hobby. He was forever going to find someone appropriate to train, although his maiden foray in that direction had gone wrong when the young woman who was his apprentice burned her arm badly. This had traumatized him and led him to keep the workshop as his own sealed bailiwick afterward. When I pointed out to him that it was odd that the glassworks was the only venue in Tsau, apart from the Sekopololo office and the post office, ever locked at night, he stopped locking it — but I think he never forgave me for making him feel he ought to. My last thrust at getting to the roots of his vitromania came when he told me the tale of going as a boy to the part of Oakland below Fourteenth Street where the Japanese flower growers and truck farmers had a settlement, just after the Japanese were taken away and put into camps at Tule Lake. There was absolute destruction. Mobs had come there. Acres of greenhouses had been smashed, houses trashed and vandalized. There were acres of broken glass. He was incredulous. It still depressed him to think of it. I suppose he partook in the cult of the working class his father followed. There was an important but tenuous connection here. Oakland and San Francisco were then, by our standards, citadels of union power, he claimed. How could the destruction have happened in a union town? was his question. I said The people who wrecked the greenhouses were hardly detachments from the Central Labor Council or the CIO, were they? No, I said, undoubtedly they were young boys. But no, he knew the mobs were men. I gather that the question was why the unions had permitted this, if they were what his father had said they were. I wanted to know where this episode lay in relation to his father’s assault on Nelson’s bottle sculpture, a reasonable enough thing to want to know. But with that the portcullis came down with a vengeance.
There is the credit system operating through Sekopololo, there is private barter outside that system, and there is a regular pula currency system operating, with regular banking through the post office. I keep looking for someone who is existing totally outside Sekopololo, something theoretically possible, but no one is, including the very hostile health post nurse assigned here by the government. She considers this exile, but people here are seducing her into liking the place by being unfailingly nice to her. Everyone says she was much worse formerly, which is hard to believe. They wish she would go if she is unhappy. The woman being trained to replace her is already more proficient at giving shots. The health post nurse is too young for this place. The government also wanted someone on government pay to run the post office, but Denoon succeeded in getting a Tsau woman deputized for that, if that’s the word. But what the systems conjoin to produce is an amazing equality of condition. Equality is relaxing, Denoon liked to say. Certain powers only arise under conditions of equality, meaning absolute equality, and even then not at first, until people believe it is going to be permanent. Don’t you feel it yourself? he would ask, and sometimes I did.