What Country, Friends, Is This?
Since the job of getting up night soil from the privies takes a strong back, I was volunteering for it once or twice a week. This endeared me to some of the older aunts, which was nice. I also liked doing it because it could be seen as a concrete riposte to the question Mais qui videra le pot de chambre? which was the question, as I understood from Denoon, that had bedeviled the French anarchists in the nineteenth century whenever the reorganization of society on a voluntarist basis was proposed. The answer to the question of whether I was identifying not only with Denoon but with his Weltanschauung is yes. Complex propositions being supposedly confuted by the simplest of questions never ceased to annoy him, as when pacifists were asked by the British draft boards during both wars what they would do if someone tried to rape their sisters. Presumably the scales were supposed to fall from their eyes at the brilliant simplicity of this thing they had overlooked. I loved the answer Sir I would endeavor to place myself between them, which some notable person had given.
I was at a house on Queen Nzinga Way, just starting to work, when two children ran past in great excitement, stopped, and came back. They were looking for Rra Puleng, but in his place I should come with them to see about two makhoa coming amongst us with a weapon.
This was baffling. I knew that a dentist was due to fly in in two weeks, but no other visitors were authorized or expected. I knew what was in Nelson’s daybook better than he did. Tsau was a genuine forbidden city, by and large. I sent one child to look for Denoon at the gum tree lot, then went with the other to see who these intruders were. The great underlying civic fear was that one day Tsau would be attacked by Boers. The South African Defence Force came over the border to destroy houses and people with sufficient frequency that South African refugees were having difficulty finding landlords willing to rent to them in Gaborone and Ramotswa. And there were Boers raiding and killing nearby in Namibia. Mangope’s Bophutatswana agents were everywhere. The intruders had been sighted on the road from the airstrip. We took shortcuts. Along our way the consensus was that Boers were invading Tsau. The warning bell began to peal.
There’s some misunderstanding, I thought. I was sure I was correct when we got to the road and it was blank as far as the airstrip.
But immediately there were cries coming from our right, from a knoll outlying the koppie, where the cemetery was. A spur from the track to the airstrip led there. Whatever was going on involved shouting and flailing. We sped toward the cemetery.
Backing down the spur toward us were a man and a woman, whites. I thought I saw the man in fact sheathing a sword, if such a thing was conceivable. They were heavily burdened with shoulder bags and valises. Some women and children were following them, not being threatening in any way obvious to me, although they were agitated and were shouting questions at them. The couple saw us. We are UK! the woman shouted. Tell them!
Our visitors were Harold Mace and Julia Rodden. They almost clung to me. I felt I knew his name in some connection. They were actors and they were married. They wanted me to understand that they were nothing irregular: they were being sent about by the British Council to read Shakespeare at schools and whatnot. They showed me something from the British Council. The British Council had booked them. They went where they were booked. Someone here must be aware of them. Was there a district officer? The pilot had deposited them summarily because his schedule called for him to reach an airfield where it had been reported that the night lighting was down, so he’d had to hurry to arrive there before dark. He’d fairly thrust them out, they said.
The cemetery had obviously unnerved them. They were sorry if they’d trespassed, but they had thought they were meant to go that way. Here Harold gestured at the oddly decorated baobab tree that dominated the cemetery. I could see how they might think it had some beckoning or official significance. And I could see why, coming unprepared into the cemetery, they’d been unnerved. Five women were buried there. Each plot was paved with cement in about the dimensions of an oversize ironing board. There was a flat metal box set where the headstone would normally be, and in the box was a ceramic death mask of the deceased. There was a clear glaze baked onto the masks. On the lid of each box was a two- or three-hundred-word life of the departed, on vellum and pressed between panels of glass sealed all around with some hardened waterproof tarry substance. It was strange the first time you lifted the lid and looked into the box, and saw a mask, not only because of the glistening face confronting you, but also because an anchoring staple was fixed over the mask at the brow, its shanks going deep into the cement, giving the brief impression that this was a person somehow bound down or constrained. There were no religious symbols evident on any of the boxes or the pavings, which must have resonated oddly with Harold, given that he was wearing, I noticed, a fairly major gold crucifix around his neck. Then when your gaze strayed to the baobab, you saw, on the main limb overhanging the graves, five ruby red cast-glass objects, elongate, like tears or gourds, the size of gourds, more like giant drop earrings than anything else. There were holes in the necks of these glinting red pendants through which the chains attaching them to the tree limbs were threaded. There was something ineffable in the extreme about this baobab display. You thought of teardrops, blood, Christmas tree ornaments, pawnshop signs, traffic lights. Beyond this there was the sheer arrestingness of the baobab itself, with its surface more like living gray hide than bark, and the frenzied, clutching look of the limbs concentrated at the top of the trunk. Baobabs have always looked more like monuments to me than like vegetables of any kind.