Individual plots are roughly 150 by 100 feet, generous, but they feel crammed — what with two rondavels and a privy on each, plus chicken coops, animal pens, beehives, solar ovens, food dryers, composters, salad gardens, truck gardens, tub plantings, ornamental flowerbeds, maybe a parked dung cart or so. Plots are laid out in arcs along the ways, with dooryards facing, for neighborliness. There is something I am resisting about Tsau. Is there too much symmetry? I asked myself at first, but then asked Too much symmetry for whom? When you go into a real village everything is laid out otherwise, stragglingly, derelict compounds mixed in with thriving ones, stumps of rondavels next to flourishing setups. Materially Tsau is middleclass. I don’t know what my question is, unless this is it: There are thousands of villages in places as remote as this, villages which are hideous, unsanitary, demeaning, but people are living in them about as cheerfully as the people here, which means what? Am I half identifying with the feeling that there should be more gratitude being manifested toward Denoon and the benefactions he organized to get all this going? This is totally reactionary. Also these women have come from gothic personal situations. I have heard the stories of the lives these women lived, and they have made me weep. This shows my confusion as of then. I think what was bothering me had to do with political economy more than anything else. There was a question of amortization in the air that had to be settled before I could believe in Tsau. Enormous funds had gone into the setting up of the place. Tsau was no self-help settlement, not with slab concrete floors as level as ponds in every rondavel. This was not a perfect yet cheap idea working itself out. This was enlightened surplus capital coming in to lift a whole subclass of people up onto a pedestal and saying Go. What I was thinking over and over was This is all very well — but. Tsau was charity, or a species of it, which Denoon had to turn into something generically different or it was hardly worth doing. He needed more enthusiasm than I felt he was being given. I was very divided. You can only give what you can give. If you know in your heart something is in essence or origin charity you act differently toward it than if it’s utterly your own creation. On the other hand, couldn’t people see how extraordinary this could all turn out to be — in fact already was? I was in both camps at the same time. How happy should I myself be, was of course the unstated associated question. How happy should I be in Tsau? If I was holding that the average person should be more rapturous in this place, then all the eternal questions of what an average person is, what culture has to do with that, came flocking back, id est anthropology came flooding back. What I really needed was to ventilate with Denoon on all this. But where was he? We were having brief, stiff public encounters and no more. Days were passing. The Tswana think you can routinely see ghosts for a second or two out of the corner of your eye. Denoon was ghostly to me. He was at the edges of my vision, always going somewhere else.
