Accouchements
Among my mistakes was going twice to accouchements.
I went out of curiosity initially, and to sharpen up my midwifery, in which I have an actual certificate. I no sooner set foot in the birth house than I was deluged with complaints about Nelson, making me wonder if this wasn’t the real reason for my being invited to attend. He must remain away, was the main demand. Apparently he haunted the environs of the birth house during accouchements, in a proprietary way understandable to most of them but still a thing they could do without. In fact it was an improvement on his earlier conduct, which encompassed attempts to be present during births and to urge fathers to be present during births. His will may have been good, but I was amazed he would run headfirst against so fixed a tenet of Tswana culture as the belief that if the male eye landed on a newborn’s head the baby’s fontanel wouldn’t close. No one but me knew how apprehensive he got when a delivery was due. He was overflowing with horror stories about mothers typically getting to the hospital too late, after the child had turned in the womb, the child having to be decapitated to save the mother, about caesareans resulting in death owing to wretched aftercare, stories relayed by a woman who had been a maternity nurse at Jubilee Hospital in Francistown and told to him primarily, I think, to induce him not to want to insert himself into such gruesome scenes.
In Tsau you gave birth sitting up in a massive peculiar wooden chair with raisable stirrups to hold you in a knees-up position. The chair was a beautiful piece of carving and joinery, and there was something about the fact that all the babies in Tsau descended into the world via this chair that was extremely moving to me. I kept thinking that this was how things became sacred. Also I had a fugitive feeling of wanting to sit in the chair sometime just to see how it felt, particularly how it felt when the trap in the seat was unlatched beneath you. I supposed I was lacerating myself. I felt both that I wanted to sit in the chair and that I had no right to do it. The chair was set up on a U-shaped platform so that the attendants could get on their knees and slip under the mother to help the baby out, with or without employing a wooden chute that locked into place to guarantee against the child being fumbled and dropped. Tubs of flowers were always moved inside the birth room on the principle — as I understood it — that the first things the eyes of a newborn saw should be beautiful. I was told that sometimes the mother would supply a particular piece of printed cloth or weaving or picture she loved and that it would be held up for the baby before the child was held near the flowers. The room was immaculate, red tiles with a hatched surface on the floor and slick red tiles halfway up the rondavel walls. There was another of Denoon’s notional crank-system fans high in the vault, but I never saw it used. Everyone was barefoot, always, for deliveries.
I don’t know what I found so wrenching about the experience. It wasn’t the pain and mess of childbirth, which I was already familiar with and which at Tsau seemed so much less anyway. Childbirth in the vertical position went so straightforwardly and apparently so much more easily for the mothers that I felt essentially like a bystander. An hour or two was the longest any recent delivery had taken, and there was some amused conjecture that the mother had prolonged the action in order to get some dagga to smoke, which was allowed. Even the nurse who supposedly hated Tsau was heard to say once that she wished she could come back when it was time to deliver her own child. There was a little ceremony after the umbilicus was cut, in which each woman placed two hands on the child and told it that it had landed in freedom and that everyone there was the child’s mother. This was not an overpowering ceremony in any way. It also contained the wish that the child’s mother should never falter. When it was over, the team went in a body to the bathhouse to clean up. That was all. But both times I left feeling depressed and hostile and labile.
After the first delivery I went home and yelled at Denoon when he did nothing worse than ask for reassurance that the baby was normal and healthy: he was obsessive, he should stop haunting the birth house, he should stop being impossible and prepare himself for a different report someday because that was in the cards, undsoweiter. After the second I was as bad. I forget what set me off.
There was no point in being emotionally riven every few weeks, so I said I was going to stop attending, which seemed to relieve him, which set off another surge of feeling against him.
At no time was Denoon less than understanding and consoling. He was loving, whatever I did, even when I wanted to rant about my life being difficult, my feeling disadvantaged even though I came from lefatshe la madi, the country money comes from, my hating being self-evidently pitied by women who had so much less.
Chez Raboupi
Nelson was convinced Raboupi was using the Basarwa to screen what he called private-property hunting. It was true the Basarwa were coming up with considerable game lately, wildebeest in particular. And the rifle had been checked out ostensibly for use in lion watches. Nelson was certain that wildebeest killed at the nearest pan were reaching us after Raboupi and his men carved out the bullets and gave the liver and tongue and the fat around the heart to the Basarwa. He was convinced it was true because Raboupi had definitely been missing from his usual workplaces, the tannery and the blockyard. Nelson hated to admit it, but Raboupi was a demon worker and his absences made a difference in the amount of work done.
I was with Nelson when on impulse he stopped one evening at the Raboupi place to have a word with Hector. There were people in the house, among them the batlodi, whose hard loud voices were distinctive. It was dusk, early dusk, not late enough for us to be considered uncivil for knocking at a household where the welcome light was unlit. He wanted to thank Raboupi for something, was the unlikely story he gave me.
We knocked and at first there was no response. Then we heard suppressed talking and an evil laugh, and then Dorcas came to the door barebreasted, a towel around her neck but the ends pushed between her breasts so that everything showed. There was no excuse for it. The nights were cold. Tswana women go barebreasted in the countryside when the weather is hot, or they may do it en famille more than I’m aware of. But this was a mixed lot of people crowding up behind her to see how Denoon would react. Also Dorcas was very westernized. It was done to affront. She was cheaply asserting her crude version of Tswana earthiness and disdain.
I was enraged, but Nelson was cool. He asked for Hector.
Go and find him in the blockyard, she said.
I am just from that side, Nelson said. Hector has been away from the blockyard since Tuesday.
Is it? she said, pretending to be surprised.
Tell him I came by to thank him for a service, Nelson said, and then we all said gosiame, meaning everything was fine, and the encounter was over.
Actually Raboupi had done Denoon a favor recently.
What’s this? Denoon had said when he saw for the first time one of the Basarwa grandmothers in town, standing like a sentinel near the Sekopololo porch. She was in the usual assemblage of rags and skins, looking ancient and smiling the Basarwa smile of absolute innocence.
I told him that lately they had been coming around and into the plaza one at a time and doing the same thing there that they do at the Kings Arms in Ghanzi — that is, standing around until somebody gives them some food, and if nobody gives them food in a reasonable time, starting to dance in place with their eyes closed and humming to themselves. That usually mobilizes a donation. They can dance for hours.