When Rain Clouds Gather

by Bessie Head

  They shrugged again. “Can’t people reason things out for themselves?” they said.

  He looked at them appalled. So that’s what colonial authority amounted to? Do your bit and the job was done. He bought the millet seed and walked out. One day, these colonial authorities were so unfortunate as to pick up a rumour that all was not well with Gilbert in the village of Golema Mmidi. They wrote him a pally letter: “Why not come and join us, old boy?” He sent them an unprintable reply.

  It was Dinorego who confirmed the story of the authorities. It was true, he said. Millet was only grown and eaten by ‘inferior’ tribes. But once Gilbert grew it on the farm as a cash crop, Dinorego quickly followed suit and grew it on his own land.

  Drought-resistant breeds of maize and sorghum, which more people on Botswana were prepared to eat, were hard to find. There was a certain species of slightly drought-resistant sorghum, but this species produced a layer of black substance just under the outer husk, and when pounded and cooked, it made the porridge look black in colour. For this reason it was unpopular and never grown.

  Year in and year out people had grown the exact same crops. Somewhere along the line they had become mixed up with tribal traditions. They had become fixed. They were: sorghum, maize, watermelon, and sweet reed. There was even a feeling of safety about them. Never mind if the hot sun of the drought years burned whole fields of sorghum and maize. Never mind if the rain was no longer what it used to be in the good old days when the rivers ran the whole year round and the dams were always full. You just could not see beyond tradition and its safety to the amazing truth you were starving – and that tough little plants existed that were easy to grow and well able to stand up to rigorous conditions and could provide you with food.

  How could a start be made? How could people and knowledge be brought together? Could the women of the village be given some instruction? And why not? Women were on the land 365 days of the year while the men shuttled to and fro with the cattle. Perhaps all change in the long run would depend on the women of the country and perhaps they too could provide a number of solutions to problems he had not yet thought of. Things could start in a small way with crops like millet, with talks, with simple lectures, and with some practical work done on the land.

  ♦

  Gilbert had drawn up a broad rough outline of his plans for instructing women, and this he handed to Makhaya to study. Makhaya in turn had a mind like a sponge. It soaked up knowledge. By the end of one week he had fully grasped the background against which he was to work. Strange as agriculture might have been to him a week previously, he settled down quite happily with books on soil conservation and tractor-ploughing, and catalogues of wild veld grasses. He was quite unaware that while he sat up reading at night, Chief Matenge was losing a considerable amount of sleep over his presence in the village and his employment at the farm.

  Chief Matenge lived in the central part of the village in a big cream-painted mansion. He had once been married and divorced, his wife retaining the two children of the marriage. For many years he had lived alone in the cream mansion until quite recently he had acquired a guest and friend in a certain politician named Joas Tsepe. The central part of the village was about two miles from the farm and it contained, apart from Matenge’s mansion, one very poor General Dealer’s shop, which supplied the villagers with only the bare necessities like sugar, tea, flour and vegetable fats, and cheap materials and shoes; one three-roomed shack, which was the village primary school; and a square brick building that was the depot for collecting and distributing mail from the post office of the railway village, twenty miles away. Mail was received and distributed once a week at this depot. A group of mud huts clustered about the cream-painted mansion, and in these mud huts the servants of Matenge lived, not servants in the ordinary sense, because they were paid no wage, but slaves he had received as part of his heritage.

  The mansion, the slaves, and a huge cream Chevrolet, which he parked under a tree in the yard, were the only things that gave Matenge a feeling of security in the village. At least this part of it was in order. The chiefs had always lived in the mansions while the people had lived in the huts. His world had always known two strict classes: royalty and commoner. Golema Mmidi was a village of commoners. No one could claim even distant relationship to royalty and dispute his authority, and the old men whom he had elected as advisers on village affairs were not so much advisers as messenger-boys who had to transmit his deeply resented orders to the villagers. True enough, there was Mma-Millipede, a commoner, who had once been married to the son of a chief. But she was also a rejected woman and, in his eyes, a degraded woman. He was aware of her popularity in the village and that people often consulted her, but after investigations he found out that this was only because of respect for her religious views, and she no longer troubled him. The villages were full of such cranky old women with a bit of missionary education and the Tswana version of the Bible.

  Still, he felt insecure. He should have reigned supreme over the commoners, and yet his eight-year administration of the village had dealt one shattering blow after another to his self-esteem. It was he who displayed the arrogance and pride that were part and parcel of the bearing of a great chief, and yet life had placed an amiable, pleasant nitwit of a brother in the supreme position, who was not above shaking hands with the commoners and talking to them as equals. It was he, Matenge, who really commanded the largest following of diehard traditionalists, the ones who from generation to generation saw to it that things remained as they were and whose company and advice were anathema to his carefree, pleasure-loving elder brother, the paramount chief. It was he, Matenge, who understood tribalism, that it was essentially the rule of the illiterate man who, when he was in the majority, feared and despised anything that was not a part of the abysmal darkness in which he lived. (Matenge was the epitome of this darkness with his long, gloomy, melancholy, suspicious face and his ceaseless intrigues, bitter jealousy and hatred.) All this was tribalism and a way of life to the meek sheep who submitted to it. And all this had been highly praised by the colonialists as the only system that would keep the fearful, unwieldly, incomprehensible population of ‘natives’ in its place.

  And yet, things were changing rapidly. The colonialists were withdrawing, and the change was not so much a part of the fashionable political ideologies of the New Africa as the outcome of the natural growth of a people. Matenge could not see this. His brother the paramount chief could, and swam with the outgoing tide, enjoying himself the meanwhile. Matenge could not see this because it had always been his policy to transfer hate from one object to another, and if at last he found himself involved in the political ideologies of Africa and the cauldron of hatred, it was because it was the last camp that reflected his traditional views.

  At first Matenge had hated his brother because he felt the chieftaincy should be his, and this hatred drove him to overreach himself until he was discovered in a plot to assassinate his brother. For this his brother smilingly and politely banished him to Golema Mmidi under the guise that he was being given an administrative post. The shock of it kept him quiet for some time, but soon he transferred his hate to the villagers, most notably Dinorego, who had refused to sit on his advisory council. For this he tried to get Dinorego banished from the area, but the banishment order was immediately rescinded by his brother. And so it had gone on. The villagers were aware of the tug of war, but they feared Matenge too much to take open advantage of it. They merely avoided him as much as possible. Then, along had come Gilbert Balfour, who, with his brother’s backing, destroyed Matenge’s lucrative cattle-speculating business overnight. The hatred, which had by now become a mountain, was once more transferred to Gilbert. And if the times had not really changed he might have won this last battle and got Gilbert removed from the village by the colonial authorities.

  Co-operatives were not a popular cause. The cattle-speculating monopolies were in the hands of a few white traders, but once the people had voted a gov
ernment into power that gave its support to co-operatives, the traders had reacted in panic and started paying inflated prices for cattle. It all depended on how long they could hold out in competition against the co-operatives. Some people welcomed this development. The traders had become rich at the expense of the people, and now they were paying these same people fantastic sums of money for cattle. Surely that’s the best way a greedy man may dig his own grave? In the meantime, a fierce battle raged and co-operatives was the dirtiest word you could use to the monopolists.

  The agricultural authorities also believed they had a monopoly over the future development of the country, and they were not inclined to favour independent initiative, nor outsiders. Development was an ‘in’ business, for locals only. They were prepared to welcome Gilbert ‘in’, as he was a white man, but to their extreme chagrin, they found that he had independent ideas about that too.

  It seemed impossible to Matenge that one man could stir up so much trouble among the important people and still remain in the country. And he kept the pot boiling all the time, in the hope that one side or the other would step in and rid him of his arch enemy.

  Almost a week passed before Matenge became aware of Makhaya’s presence in the village and he got to know of it through the only friend he had, Joas Tsepe.

  Joas Tsepe was the undersecretary general of the Botswana National Liberation Party. There were four or five such liberation parties with little or no membership among the people but many undersecretary generals. All these parties opposed the new government. At first, this opposition had set as its goal the liberation of the Botswana people from colonialism. But after the self-government elections, it forgot about the colonialists and set itself to liberate the Botswana people from a government they had elected into power. The opposition maintained that the people did not know what they were doing. They claimed that the colonialists had rigged the elections, although prior to the voting the opposition had anticipated this colonial treachery and had specially asked to be represented at the ballot counting table. Strangely enough, in front of their very eyes, power had passed into the hands of the ruling party. Strangely enough too, Joas and quite a few others of his clan served six-month sentences for rigging election papers. They also spent some time blowing hot air about the stupid Botswana people who had voted for chiefs and then, to their amazement, found that they had a government of the sons of chiefs with an anti-chief policy. Joas’s party and the other opposition groups quickly reorganized themselves into pro-chief supporters, as the chiefs had by now become the only disgruntled section of the country.

  The opposition political parties had long been aligned to the Pan-African movement. They also called themselves the vanguard of African nationalism in southern Africa. To many, Pan-Africanism is an almost sacred dream, but like all dreams it also has its nightmare side, and the little men like Joas Tsepe and their strange doings are the nightmare. If they have any power at all it is the power to plunge the African continent into an era of chaos and bloody murder.

  Joas Tsepe, although born in Botswana, spent a number of years working in South Africa. There he also acquired a number of grievances, which even the whole world acknowledges as being justifiable. Having made a little reputation for himself as a speaker at political meetings, he was one day, from some mysterious source, given the order to go back to his country to fight for the liberation of his people. This mysterious source also supplied him with money which enabled him to remain unemployed and devote himself full-time to the liberatory struggle, and also to purchase a car. Every six months, he left the country ‘on a mission’, for which mission he was supplied with an air ticket to travel to various parts of the earth.

  All this VIP treatment gave Joas a swollen head. He was already the minister of finance in the shadow government, and this caused one to pause and puzzle out the motives of the financier of his mysterious source of money, since Joas was ill-equipped educationally to handle the complicated business of government, and a course in economics would have been far better than the VIP trips. Was it perhaps the intention of the secret financier to reestablish the rule of the illiterate and semi-literate man in Africa? Or was Joas his tool? Was it easier for a man like Joas to take his orders? Because Joas was a parrot. Not only that, he was a belly-crawler and it was his agility at belly-crawling that had won him the friendship of Matenge. Since he had come out of jail after the self-government elections, Joas lived as the permanent guest of Matenge. He had a co-operative to organize which would help Matenge to re-establish himself as the cattle-speculator of Golema Mmidi, and he had to educate the African masses in African socialism.

  ♦

  It was on a Friday afternoon that Joas passed by the farm and noticed the presence of a stranger. Devoured by curiosity, he swung into the farm gates on the plea that he needed water for a long journey. He took one close look at Makhaya and almost choked with excitement. The newspaper with Makhaya’s picture on the front page was in his car, and his car could not seem to drive fast enough back to Matenge.

  He burst in on Matenge, waving the paper. “We’ve got him this time, Chief,” he said, dramatically.

  Matenge looked bored. That was the way a superior had to behave to an inferior. Getting no response, Joas opened the paper and held it before Matenge.

  “Gilbert is keeping a refugee at the farm,” he said.

  The whole weekend Matenge stewed and simmered. Gilbert had overshot himself. If there was anything the new government disliked, it was a refugee, and because of this, no man in his right senses would harbour or employ one. Early Monday morning, Matenge climbed into his cream Chevrolet and drove to the village of his brother, Paramount Chief Sekoto.

  Four

  Even those who did not like chiefs had to concede that Paramount Chief Sekoto was a very charming man. His charm lay not so much in his outer appearance as in his very cheerful outlook on life. In fact, so fond was he of the sunny side of life that he was inclined to regard any gloomy, pessimistic person as insane and make every effort to avoid his company. It was his belief that a witty answer turneth away wrath and that the oil of reason should always be poured on troubled waters.

  Chief Sekoto had three great loves: fast cars, good food, and pretty girls. All the good food had made him very fat, so that he gave the impression of waddling like a duck when he walked. And one of the pretty girls had caused a major disruption in his otherwise serene and happy life. It happened like this. About two miles from his official residence, he had built a palatial mansion. He had sternly forbidden his wife to set foot in this mansion on the grounds that it was here that he entertained important guests with whom he discussed top-secret affairs. But it wasn’t long before the wife and the whole village knew that this was the house where Chief Sekoto kept his concubines. Still, not a murmur of protest was raised against him, it being taken for granted that a chief was entitled to privileges above those of ordinary men. For many years Chief Sekoto carefully divided his attention between his two homes until one day he chanced upon an exceeding beautiful woman, lost his head, and for three months took up permanent residence in the mansion of the concubines. The villagers took it lightly. The scandal was huge entertainment in the humdrum round of their daily life. Not so for the chief’s family.

  Towards the end of the third month. Chief Sekoto was forced to take a long business trip. His absence from the village gave his family the opportunity to make short work of the troublesome concubine. The chief’s eldest son drove up to the mansion, bundled the concubine roughly into a car, and sped with her out of the village to some unknown destination. Not only that, the foolhardy young man had an intense, upright character and quarrelled violently with his amiable father and walked out of the house, forever. This experience was a great shock to Chief Sekoto. He knew in his heart that he would never give up the pretty girls, but after that he kept his hunting grounds well away from home.

  Every weekday morning, Chief Sekoto listened to cases brought before his court, while the
afternoons were spent at leisure unless there were people who had made appointments to interview him. This particular Monday morning a lively and rowdy case was in session when, out of the corner of his eye, Chief Sekoto saw his brother Matenge drive up and park his car opposite the open clearing where court was held. Nothing upset Chief Sekoto more than a visit from his brother, whom he had long classified as belonging to the insane part of mankind. He determined to dally over the proceedings for as long as possible in the hope that his brother would become bored and leave. Therefore he turned his full attention on the case at hand.

  The case had been brought in from one of the outlying villages, called Bodibeng, and the cause of its rowdiness was that the whole village of Bodibeng had turned up to witness the trial. A certain old woman of the village, named Mma-Baloi, was charged with allegedly practising witchcraft, and so certain were the villagers of her guilt that they frequently forgot themselves and burst out into loud chatter and had to be brought to order by the president of the court with threats of fines.

  Evidence was that Mma-Baloi had always lived a secret and mysterious life apart from the other villagers. She was also in the habit of receiving strangers from far-off places into her home who would not state what dealings they had with Mma-Baloi.

  Now, over a certain period, a number of the children of the village had died sudden deaths, and each time a mother stood up to describe these sudden deaths, the crowd roared in fury because the deaths of the children and the evil practices of Mma-Baloi were one and the same thing in their minds. The accused, Mma-Baloi, sat a little apart from the villagers in a quaking, ashen, crumpled heap; and each time the villagers roared, she seemed about to sink into the earth. Noting this, Chief Sekoto’s kindly heart was struck with pity.