Decoration rampant. No object too minor. Framing, lintels, all carved and stained. Crank handles on composters carved spirally. The dung carts. Sandal straps have designs burned in. Walkways in compounds edged with painted stones or mouth-down bottle butts. There is a tool here for sawing up scrap glass, bottles especially. Intaglio in the planking around the toilet holes identifies each one as to function, and at face level in the wall opposite as you sit is a wooden plaque bearing an eye-shaped piece of glass over gilt paint intended to glint at you and remind of correct procedure. When I first saw these I thought what wonderful mementos of Tsau they would make, which I read as meaning that I already saw myself as leaving Tsau — as fascinating as I found it and despite the fact that I had just arrived. Do you belong anywhere? I asked myself. Denoon loved a book by James Joyce’s brother in which their father is described as someone it was impossible to imagine as a happy, productive member of any society the mind of man had yet to come up with. I immediately thought of myself, of course. Crockery heavily glazed in spectrum colors, but odd because the black-glaze floral motifs applied are clearly thumbprints. After the rondavels are painted a mastic is applied to the lower third of the exteriors to defeat termites: various herringbone and serpentine designs are created in the wet mastic, using the fingertips, including one design that looks very much like dollar signs.
How serious is this place, au fond? I once said to Nelson that he should call Tsau Occam’s Torment instead, because he was always multiplying entities unnecessarily. This was during the long period when he could be teased pretty freely. If it looks like rain you pull a string and a gutter made of overlapping flappets of wood flops down that extends beyond the edge of the roof thatch so that a drop of rain is never wasted. The gutter feeds a buried cistern equipped with an iron hand pump out of the nineteenth century. There is a box on a post next to the stoop: this is for messages, either in chalk on slate or in soft pencil on oblongs of frosted glass sealed to a wooden tablet: you rub out the message on the glass with a damp cloth or the heel of your hand. Reuse is king. Paper is precious here, so writing on both sides of a sheet is universal. You shower in the afternoon, having earlier raised a black polyvinyl sack of water up onto a shelf at the top of a stall, where the sun heats the water. The sack plug turns into a showerhead when you twist it. You raise the shower sack via pulley. The number of things that can be raised and lowered or operated at a distance via pulley systems is greater than I would ever have dreamed.All tables are dropleaf, with very solidly made fly rails. All candle stands and oil lamps have mirror reflector attachments.
I understand some things and not others. I can understand why the proportion of older women with some visible defect or deformity is high. I understand this in a general way because we know that illness in the culture is interpreted as being the result of some transgression of what the ancestors wanted you to do. So that permanent defects must mean serious transgressions. But why is Dineo here? How did she get cast into destitution? She could be a model! Many of the younger women have been shunned over prostitution coming to light, other patriarch-enraging actions or disobediences, or witchcraft accusations. Dineo is atypical in some way. Her Setswana is pure, without dialect traces. When I ask what tribe she is, people say Bamangwato, but on questioning it turns out that this is an assumption, no doubt based on her self-confidence, and two people have said Bamalete. She slightly obsesses me, which I have to control because asking personal questions, especially about other people, is très gauche in Tswana culture.
There is amenity here. If you’re white and you stay any length of time in an African village, you can find yourself unconsciously counting the moments until you get back to the properly upholstered white West. Anybody can adapt for a while to perching on stools or sitting crosslegged on mats when the time has come to stop standing up, but the feeling is wholly interim. In Tsau you could be comfortable in the Western sense. Mattresses were foam rubber slabs of the best density, although you were welcome to sleep on one of Denoon’s experimental palliasses made from shredded maize husks if you were a total loyalist. He was also certain there must be a way to make passable toilet tissue out of maize husks, but he never was able to connect postally with the right expert. His drive toward import substitution almost amounted to a tragic flaw. In Tsau there was an adjustable chair, like an Adirondack chair, with a sling back made of hide, in which you could attain what you never can in a normal African village — the semireclining position. Mopane wood furniture: larger tables with marquetry: chairs have thong or strap mesh seats: chairs and tables seem to be built slightly lower than the American norm, are comfortable, suggesting that furniture in the West is built to a comfort median set by the taller sex. Indoor temperatures fine. Rondavels have thick walls, especially lower down, and are so thermally efficient you canheat one up in fifteen minutes with a container of warm ashes, almost. In the morning, in cold weather, you open your north-facing double-paned windows and the sun heats the place decently all day and you retain the heat for the night by closing the shutters and rolling down a thick feltlike shade. There is a turtleshell-shaped smallish mud stove, vented to the outside, which is mostly used for boiling water. There are larger mud stoves outside, which people seem to use equally with the solar ovens they complain continually about over having to keep adjusting the tracking mirrors. Children can be gotten to do this if they arent in school, but you have to pay because it’s boring. The children are darling fiends. There is nothing wrong with this place so far.
Tsau is permanently on edge over certain matters. Omnipresent mindfulness about water, not wasting it, conserving it. There is no such thing as having a leisurely stroll off the beaten path anywhere on the koppie: the entire upper surface is engineered for water harvesting: cement barriers, damlets, sluices: these empty into two deep underground cisterns, one Z and one W. There is a supplementary system under construction on the south slope below a broad face of bare rock — this system is not exactly an afterthought, because the cistern was dug before the construction people left, but the catchment structures are cruder, rock and cement rather than the pure cement of the main system. A distinction is made between the cistern water, called saved water, and the fresh water from the artesian springs at the SE edge of the koppie, around which the fields and kraals are laid out. Solar pumps and the three windmills move both kinds of water into the huge storage tank sunk back in among the citadel rocks. Public buildings and house plots are reticulated, house plots have standpipes, but water is released into the system only twice a day, morning and evening currently, and then not for long. Each house plot has a cistern for thatch runoff and a smaller tank for graywater. Finally, in the mongongo grove deep south on the sand river is a primitive boom and bucket apparatus to get water from shafts dug next to the bank. These yield a little rather turbid water which is trucked around on carts for various animal needs. The supply of water is just above average for this time of year, but people are hoping for a freak rainstorm or two, as has happened five times in the last eight years on dates everyone can tell you. In addition to being attuned to water, the community has to be alive to several other recurrent threats, depending on the season. As I picture it, the entire settlement convulses itself to get all its solar equipment and the netting on the nethouses under burlap shrouding if it looks like hail or a serious sandstorm.The solar ovens in the yards have a wooden housing that is easily shoved over everything delicate, but shrouding all the solar panels that run pumps or do batch heating at the central kitchen is a major undertaking. There are teams for this. There is the equivalent of a fire drill, bells are rung, children rush out of school. Then there is the question of the very high level of maintenance going on: cleaning of the gutters in the water catchment, chlorinating cisterns, checking water levels, polishing mirrors on the various solar devices and oiling their joints and gears. People are also on the qui vive about public health. Flyswatting is done religiously, sometimes frenziedly. There are very few flies, in actual fact, especially in winter. But the feeling seems to be that there should be none. There is a kind of casual social monitoring, not only of children, over being sure that hands are dipped in the disinfectant solution outside the privies as you exit. It is perfectly to be expected that you will be shouted at from the next yard or the street if someone notices you being remiss. When you come to Tsau you take a virtual oath to do this faithfully. Is all this a tonic thing or not? Would you tend to wear down over time? Compare this to living at a less comfortable level but in a condition where you are free of the obligation to become part of a collective self-defense organism every time a bell rings. Or does that generate feelings of connection you can only get in some such way? Housefires not a source of anxiety because mud block is not flammable and thatch is impregnated with a fireproofing substance. Newly treated thatch smells like cinnamon, but this fades as the thatch ages.