Tears of the Giraffe

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Then there was Mr Mandela. Everybody knew about Mr Mandela and how he had forgiven those who had imprisoned him. They had taken away years and years of his life simply because he wanted justice. They had set him to work in a quarry and his eyes had been permanently damaged by the rock dust. But at last, when he had walked out of the prison on that breathless, luminous day, he had said nothing about revenge or even retribution. He had said that there were more important things to do than to complain about the past, and in time he had shown that he meant this by hundreds of acts of kindness towards those who had treated him so badly. That was the real African way, the tradition that was closest to the heart of Africa. We are all children of Africa, and none of us is better or more important than the other. This is what Africa could say to the world: it could remind it what it is to be human.

  She appreciated that, and she understood the greatness that Khama and Mandela showed in forgiving the past. And yet, Mrs Curtin’s case was different. It did not seem to her that the American woman was keen to find somebody to blame for her son’s disappearance, although she knew that there were many people in such circumstances who became obsessed with finding somebody to punish. And, of course, there was the whole problem of punishment. Mma Ramotswe sighed. She supposed that punishment was sometimes needed to make it clear that what somebody had done was wrong, but she had never been able to understand why we should wish to punish those who repented for their misdeeds. When she was a girl in Mochudi, she had seen a boy beaten for losing a goat. He had confessed that he had gone to sleep under a tree when he should have been watching the herd, and he had said that he was truly sorry that he had allowed the goat to wander. What was the point, she wondered, in his uncle beating him with a mopani stick until he cried out for mercy? Such punishment achieved nothing and merely disfigured the person who exacted it.

  But these were large issues, and the more immediate problem was where to start with the search for that poor, dead American boy. She imagined Clovis Andersen shaking his head and saying, “Well, Mma Ramotswe, you’ve landed yourself with a stale case in spite of what I say about these things. But since you’ve done so, then my usual advice to you is to go back to the beginning. Start there.” The beginning, she supposed, was the farm where Burkhardt and his friends had set up their project. It would not be difficult to find the place itself, although she doubted whether she would discover anything. But at least it would give her a feeling for the matter, and that, she knew, was the beginning. Places had echoes—and if one were sensitive, one might just pick up some resonance from the past, some feeling for what had happened.

  AT LEAST she knew how to find the village. Her secretary, Mma Makutsi, had a cousin who came from the village nearest to the farm and she had explained which road to take. It was out to the west, not far from Molepolole. It was dry country, verging on the Kalahari, covered with low bushes and thorn trees. It was sparsely populated, but in those areas where there was more water, people had established small villages and clusters of small houses around the sorghum and melon fields. There was not much to do here, and people moved to Lobatse or Gaborone for work if they were in a position to do so. Gaborone was full of people from places like this. They came to the city, but kept their ties with their lands and their cattle post. Places like this would always be home, no matter how long people spent away. At the end of the day, this is where they would wish to die, under these great, wide skies, which were like a limitless ocean.

  She travelled down in her tiny white van on a Saturday morning, setting off early, as she liked to do on any trip. As she left the town, there were already streams of people coming in for a Saturday’s shopping. It was the end of the month, which meant payday, and the shops would be noisy and crowded as people bought their large jars of syrup and beans, or splashed out on the coveted new dress or shoes. Mma Ramotswe liked shopping, but she never shopped around payday. Prices went up then, she was convinced, and went down again towards the middle of the month, when nobody had any money.

  Most of the traffic on the road consisted of buses and vans bringing people in. But there were a few going in the opposite direction—workers from town heading off for a weekend back in their villages; men going back to their wives and children; women working as maids in Gaborone going back to spend their precious days of leisure with their parents and grandparents. Mma Ramotswe slowed down; there was a woman standing at the side of the road, waving her hand to request a lift. She was a woman of about Mma Ramotswe’s age, dressed smartly in a black skirt and a bright red jersey. Mma Ramotswe hesitated, and then stopped. She could not leave her standing there; somewhere there would be a family waiting for her, counting on a motorist to bring their mother home.

  She drew to a halt, and called out of the window of her van. “Where are you going, Mma?”

  “I am going down that way,” said the woman, pointing down the road. “Just beyond Molepolole. I am going to Silokwolela.”

  Mma Ramotswe smiled. “I am going there too,” she said. “I can take you all the way.”

  The woman let out a whoop of delight. “You are very kind, and I am a very lucky person.”

  She reached down for the plastic bag in which she was carrying her possessions and opened the passenger door of Mma Ramotswe’s van. Then, her belongings stored at her feet, Mma Ramotswe pulled out into the road again and they set off. From old habit, Mma Ramotswe glanced at her new travelling companion and made her assessment. She was quite well dressed—the jersey was new, and was real wool rather than the cheap artificial fibres that so many people bought these days; the skirt was a cheap one, though, and the shoes were slightly scuffed. This lady works in a shop, she thought. She has passed her standard six, and maybe even form two or three. She has no husband, and her children are living with the grandmother out at Silokwolela. Mma Ramotswe had seen the copy of the Bible tucked into the top of the plastic bag and this had given her more information. This lady was a member of a church, and was perhaps going to Bible classes. She would be reading her Bible to the children that night.

  “Your children are down there, Mma?” asked Mma Ramotswe politely.

  “Yes,” came the reply. “They are staying with their grandmother. I work in a shop in Gaborone, New Deal Furnishers. You know them maybe?”

  Mma Ramotswe nodded, as much for the confirmation of her judgement as in answer to the question.

  “I have no husband,” she went on. “He went to Francistown and he died of burps.”

  Mma Ramotswe gave a start. “Burps? You can die of burps?”

  “Yes. He was burping very badly up in Francistown and they took him to the hospital. They gave him an operation and they found that there was something very bad inside him. This thing made him burp. Then he died.”

  There was a silence. Then Mma Ramotswe spoke. “I am very sorry.”

  “Thank you. I was very sad when this happened, as he was a very good man and he had been a good father to my children. But my mother was still strong, and she said that she would look after them. I could get a job in Gaborone, because I have my form two certificate. I went to the furniture shop and they were very pleased with my work. I am now one of the top salesladies and they have even booked me to go on a sales training course in Mafikeng.”

  Mma Ramotswe smiled. “You have done very well. It is not easy for women. Men expect us to do all the work and then they take the best jobs. It is not easy to be a successful lady.”

  “But I can tell that you are successful,” said the woman. “I can tell that you are a business lady. I can tell that you are doing well.”

  Mma Ramotswe thought for a moment. She prided herself on her ability to sum people up, but she wondered whether this was not something that many women had, as part of the intuitive gift.

  “You tell me what I do,” she said. “Could you guess what my job is?”

  The woman turned in her seat and looked Mma Ramotswe up and down.

  “You are a detective, I think,” she said. “You are a person w
ho looks into other people’s business.”

  The tiny white van swerved momentarily. Mma Ramotswe was shocked that this woman had guessed. Her intuitive powers must be even better than mine, she thought.

  “How did you know that? What did I do to give you this information?”

  The other woman shifted her gaze. “It was simple,” she said. “I have seen you sitting outside your detective agency drinking tea with your secretary. She is that lady with very big glasses. The two of you sit there in the shade sometimes and I have been walking past on the other side of the road. That is how I knew.”

  They travelled in comfortable companionship, talking about their daily lives. She was called Mma Tsbago, and she told Mma Ramotswe about her work in the furniture shop. The manager was a kind man, she said, who did not work his staff too hard and who was always honest with his customers. She had been offered a job by another firm, at a higher wage, but had refused it. Her manager found out and had rewarded her loyalty with a promotion.

  Then there were her children. They were a girl of ten and a boy of eight. They were doing well at school and she hoped that she might be able to bring them to Gaborone for their secondary education. She had heard the Gaborone Government Secondary School was very good and she hoped that she might be able to get a place for them there. She had also heard that there were scholarships to even better schools, and perhaps they might have a chance of one of those.

  Mma Ramotswe told her that she was engaged to be married, and she pointed to the diamond on her finger. Mma Tsbago admired it and asked who the fiancé was. It was a good thing to marry a mechanic, she said, as she had heard that they made the best husbands. You should try to marry a policeman, a mechanic or a minister of religion, she said, and you should never marry a politician, a barman, or a taxi driver. These people always caused a great deal of trouble for their wives.

  “And you shouldn’t marry a trumpeter,” added Mma Ramotswe. “I made that mistake. I married a bad man called Note Mokoti. He played the trumpet.”

  “I’m sure that they are not good people to marry,” said Mma Tsbago. “I shall add them to my list.”

  THEY MADE slow progress on the last part of the journey. The road, which was untarred, was pitted with large and dangerous potholes, and at several points they were obliged to edge dangerously out into the sandy verge to avoid a particularly large hole. This was perilous, as the tiny white van could easily become stuck in the sand if they were not careful and they might have to wait hours for rescue. But at last they arrived at Mma Tsbago’s village, which was the village closest to the farm that Mma Ramotswe was seeking.

  She had asked Mma Tsbago about the settlement, and had been provided with some information. She remembered the project, although she had not known the people involved in it. She recalled that there had been a white man and a woman from South Africa, and one or two other foreigners. A number of the people from the village had worked there, and people had thought that great things would come of it, but it had eventually fizzled out. She had not been surprised at that. Things fizzled out; you could not hope to change Africa. People lost interest, or they went back to their traditional way of doing things, or they simply gave up because it was all too much effort. And then Africa had a way of coming back and simply covering everything up again.

  “Is there somebody in the village who can take me out there?” asked Mma Ramotswe.

  Mma Tsbago thought for a moment.

  “There are still some people who worked out there,” she said. “There is a friend of my uncle. He had a job out there for a while. We can go to his place and you can ask him.”

  THEY WENT first to Mma Tsbago’s house. It was a traditional Botswana house, made out of ochre mud bricks and surrounded by a low wall, a lomotana, which created a tiny yard in front of and alongside the house. Outside this wall there were two thatched grain bins, on raised legs, and a chicken house. At the back, made out of tin and leaning dangerously, was the privy, with an old plank door and a rope with which the door could be tied shut. The children ran out immediately, and embraced their mother, before waiting shyly to be introduced to the stranger. Then, from the dark interior of the house, there emerged the grandmother, wearing a threadbare white dress and grinning toothlessly.

  Mma Tsbago left her bag in the house and explained that she would return within an hour. Mma Ramotswe gave sweets to the children, which they received with both palms upturned, thanking her gravely in the correct Setswana manner. These were children who would understand the old ways, thought Mma Ramotswe, approvingly—unlike some of the children in Gaborone.

  They left the house and drove through the village in the white van. It was a typical Botswana village, a sprawling collection of one- or two-room houses, each in its own yard, each with a motley collection of thorn trees surrounding it. The houses were linked by paths, which wandered this way and that, skirting fields and crop patches. Cattle moved about listlessly, cropping at the occasional patch of brown, withered grass, while a pot-bellied herd-boy, dusty and be-aproned, watched them from under a tree. The cattle were unmarked, but everybody would know their owner, and their lineage. These were the signs of wealth, the embodied result of somebody’s labours in the diamond mine at Jwaneng or the beef-canning factory at Lobatse.

  Mma Tsbago directed her to a house on the edge of the village. It was a well-kept place, slightly larger than its immediate neighbours, and had been painted in the style of the traditional Botswana house, in reds and browns and with a bold, diamond pattern etched out in white. The yard was well-swept, which suggested that the woman of the house, who would also have painted it, was conscientious with her reed broom. Houses, and their decoration, were the responsibility of the woman, and this woman had evidently had the old skills passed down to her.

  They waited at the gate while Mma Tsbago called out for permission to enter. It was rude to go up the path without first calling, and even ruder to go into a building uninvited.

  “Ko, Ko!” called out Mma Tsbago. “Mma Potsane, I am here to see you!”

  There was no response, and Mma Tsbago repeated her call. Again no answer came, and then the door of the house suddenly opened and a small, rotund woman, dressed in a long skirt and high-collared white blouse, came out and peered in their direction.

  “Who is that?” she called out, shading her eyes with a hand. “Who are you? I cannot see you.”

  “Mma Tsbago. You know me. I am here with a stranger.”

  The householder laughed. “I thought it might be somebody else, and I quickly got dressed up. But I need not have bothered!”

  She gestured for them to enter and they walked across to meet her.

  “I cannot see very well these days,” explained Mma Potsane. “My eyes are getting worse and worse. That is why I didn’t know who you were.”

  They shook hands, exchanging formal greetings. Then Mma Potsane gestured across to a bench which stood in the shade of the large tree beside her house. They could sit there, she explained, because the house was too dark inside.

  Mma Tsbago explained why they were there and Mma Potsane listened intently. Her eyes appeared to be irritating her, and from time to time she wiped at them with the sleeve of her blouse. As Mma Tsbago spoke, she nodded encouragement.

  “Yes,” she said. “We lived out there. My husband worked there. We both worked there. We hoped that we would be able to make some money with our crops and for a while it worked. Then …” She broke off, shrugging despondently.

  “Things went wrong?” asked Mma Ramotswe. “Drought?”

  Mma Potsane sighed. “There was a drought, yes. But there’s always a drought, isn’t there? No, it was just that people lost faith in the idea. There were good people living there, but they went away.”

  “The white man from Namibia? The German one?” asked Mma Ramotswe.

  “Yes, that one. He was a good man, but he went away. Then there were other people, Batswana, who decided that they had had enough. They went too.”


  “And an American?” pressed Mma Ramotswe. “There was an American boy?”

  Mma Potsane rubbed at her eyes. “That boy vanished. He disappeared one night. They had the police out here and they searched and searched. His mother came too, many times. She brought a Mosarwa tracker with her, a tiny little man, like a dog with his nose to the ground. He had a very fat bottom, like all those Basarwa have.”

  “He found nothing?” Mma Ramotswe knew the answer to this, but she wanted to keep the other woman talking. She had so far only heard the story from Mrs Curtin’s viewpoint; it was quite possible that there were things which other people had seen which she did not know about.

  “He ran round and round like a dog,” said Mma Potsane, laughing. “He looked under stones and sniffed the air and muttered away in that peculiar language of theirs—you know how it is, all those sounds like trees in the wind and twigs breaking. But he found no sign of any wild animals which may have taken that boy.”

  Mma Ramotswe passed her a handkerchief to dab her eyes. “So what do you think happened to him, Mma? How can somebody just vanish like that?”

  Mma Potsane sniffed and then blew her nose on Mma Ramotswe’s handkerchief.

  “I think that he was sucked up,” she said. “There are sometimes whirlwinds here in the very hot season. They come in from the Kalahari and they suck things up. I think that maybe that boy got sucked up in a whirlwind and put down somewhere far, far away. Maybe over by Ghanzi way or in the middle of the Kalahari or somewhere. No wonder they didn’t find him.”