by Aaron Barlow
The headmaster leaves his office and walks to his car. He says, “I am going downtown to pick up more cans of oil, sacks of rice, and medicine. You give first aid to many of the students with your own ointment and band-aids. Thank you!”
The headmaster continues, “If I don’t see you any more today, I will see you tomorrow mwalimu [teacher]. Enjoy your chakula at noon!”
I return to the teachers’ workroom until the history period begins. The day passes slowly. At the end of forty minutes, geography class begins. Then I teach English; we review for a test. Pressure is on! Students must pass the eighth-standard exit exams before they go to high school.
It is not long now before we see a 1956 Austin-Healy burping along the one-lane dirt road toward the school with Mr. Mpacama and perhaps two students in it. We could not see them clearly because the car windows are taped with newspaper. The shifting gears and ill-repaired clutch seem to enhance the old-fashioned scolding they receive. When the car stops, the badgering continues.
“It amazes me that none of your teachers could see you run away from school, in the middle of the day, over the bridge, up the hill to meet the bus! Why do you do this?” says Mr. Mpacama angrily. “Just to buy fish! I saw you wave your hands, and stop the bus. Then you boarded it, unpacked the fish, and placed them on the steps, stacking your purchases on the bus steps! You have no discipline! You should be studying! You caused the bus to be much later than usual getting to Mbeya town! This is a bold act! Meet me tomorrow after school, and I will give you your punishment!”
Apologetically, the students look at him and say, “We have a Friday ritual; we purchase fish for our families!” After school, Mr. Mpacama calls a meeting at his home briefing us about the incident. Hunger grips us; we nearly taste his boiling curry meat and ugali dish cooking on the stove.
He informs us that the school suffers from a lack of discipline. There are too many broken bricks that need to be re-made. The compound suffers from a lack of paint; just like many of the students, it suffers, needing revitalization. The fiery head master says, “It is sad that our school is behind Itope, Iringa, and Mpala, and other well-known schools in the district!” He continues, “Yesterday, during school hours, two of our model students left the compound to buy fish from a local bus driver. The punishment I will give requires the efforts of the entire seventh and eighth standards since others probably have been guilty of the same misdemeanor. Beginning tomorrow afternoon, students will make bricks to replenish the exhausted supply.”
There are hisses and cheers among the faculty. One teacher cautions him, “But, Mwalimu, the tradition of our school will be ruined if students make bricks for a punishment.” Nevertheless, the headmaster insists and teachers are dismissed.
Next day, after school is over, the seventh and eighth standard students meet in the compound.
As work begins, the old teacher, who is a traditional man, watches again. He pulls off his shirt and jumps into a pit. The arduous task of making bricks continues as he and the students dig three huge pits in the ground. Mounds of cut grasses are thrown into these holes and chopped up into small particles. Then the water bearers bring large cans of river water and dump it into the pits. Students jump in and press the wet clay with particles of grasses into a smooth consistency with their feet. Still others line up and scoop out the wet clay mixture and pour it into wooden brick molds, rectangular wooden frames. Each holds enough mud to form one brick. The old man and the students finally dump the first solidifying brick on the ground to dry, followed by the second and third ones. Unfortunately, I must oversee the brickmaking project. I feel like a camel herder.
At the end of the atonement week, two enormous pyramids of sun-dried bricks are piled up in a vacant space near the road. The old teacher is no longer watching or sitting by the side of the road. The bricks are fired using huge eucalyptus trees. They turn hard and indestructible.
The rain descends gently upon the cooling pyramids, but it does not abate the old teacher’s anger. He walks five miles to visit the district officer whose office is in the government boma (center). The old teacher explains the punishment to the district officer. Mr. Mpacama is summoned.
The district officer says, “Headmaster Mpacama, how could you inflict such a horrible punishment on your students? You know they walk barefooted seven to ten miles a day, over mountains and through valleys of maize to get to school each day. Surely, you could have punished only the two guilty students and allowed the others to go home to help with the afternoon chores! Surely, you could have waited until spring to make the bricks.”
Mr. Mpacama says, “Sir, look at the progress here. We have planted gardens. Now we sell vegetables to customers at the market and have cash to pay for many of the school’s expenses. Also our soccer team is excelling and more of our students are passing the standard eight exams this year!”
How could Mpacama possibly have achieved all of this having been the headmaster at for only short time? “Enough!” the district officer replies. “Since traditionally the making of bricks is a labor of love and not of atonement, I dismiss you from the school.”
Mr. Mpacama was sent—loudly protesting—to pick tea on a plantation in Tukuru, in the southern district of Tanzania. According to the old teacher, who is a traditional man, certain rituals of work must be maintained in order to give stability to a community. These rituals outweigh any notion of progress the headmaster could conjure up. To the old teacher, the headmaster is like an empty can, for the Swahili proverb even says, “An empty debe can [for carrying kerosene] makes the most noise!”
Sandra Echols Sharpe served as a teacher in Tanzania from 1965-67. She now resides in Greensboro, North Carolina.
The Season of Omagongo
Alan Barstow
Sometimes the things we see and believe might better be seen and believed a little differently.
Tate Shikongo tells Timo to fetch the whip: “Eta ongodhi,” he says in Oshindonga. He adds in English, “Bring it here. I want it.”
Timo returns with the three-foot water hose. His nine-year-old frame, all beanpole arms and legs, walks easily. He hands Tate the hose with his right hand, his left hand cupping his right elbow, and keeps his eyes lowered in the way the Owambo people of northern Namibia show respect to their elders. Then Timo tries to jump away, but Tate’s callused hand grabs his wrist. He holds the hose above Timo and says in Oshindonga, “You left the cattle to wander into the fields.”
“Yes,” Timo says, his eyes shut tight above his bullish cheekbones. Tate whips him twice and Timo cries out and tries to break free.
“Because you were playing soccer,” Tate says. The thick muscles of his arms—arms that I’ve seen plow fields, fix engines, fire AK-47s—stand out as he whips Timo again and again.
“The cattle ate the mahangu,” Tate shouts. “The cattle destroyed the crop.”
Tate Shikongo’s eldest son, Petrus, is sitting next to me with the twenty-five-liter omagongo gourd between his feet. He removes his thin-rimmed glasses, wipes them on the collar of his business shirt, and laughs a thirty-years-ago-Tate-whipped-me-for-letting-cattle-into-the-field laugh. Tate Angula, the headman of Okatope village and Tate Shikongo’s older brother, sleeps peacefully next to us, barefoot in the sand.
I’ve seen Timo whipped before—the first time, two weeks after I’d moved into Tate Shikongo’s homestead during training in late 2002; I couldn’t sleep until I heard the midnight rain on the aluminum roof of my room. I signed up for Peace Corps to teach English as a foreign language just out of college; I wanted to work in development, travel to little-known places, learn a new language and culture; I believed Peace Corps to be the best face of the U.S. government.
A year after 9/11, as Bush made plans to invade Iraq, I arrived in Namibia confident that what Volunteers did here—teach in schools, coordinate AIDS awareness activities, find the common ground between Namibian
s and Americans—was a better way to spread goodwill and curb terrorism than invading countries. But, during the times that Tate Shikongo whipped one of his grandchildren, I’ve turned away, thinking no matter how much Oshindonga I speak, how accustomed to the traditional food and drink I become, or how accepted and welcome my work here is, These are not my people. I am different.
Tate Shikongo can seem the antithesis of a lot of what I stand for. He disciplines with corporal punishment, has a conservative interpretation of the Bible, and fought as a guerrilla and terrorist. Yet, I’m drawn to him and I respect him. He fought as a guerrilla fighter for his country’s independence from the racist apartheid regime of South Africa. At seventy, he still works as a mechanic to make enough to care for the AIDS orphans he welcomes into his home. He cries at any mention of his dead wife. I refer to him as tate (pronounced tah-tay), which means father, not just because he’s my elder, but because he’s like a father to me.
Tate lets Timo’s wrist go after the beating. The boy falls back, his skinny chest rushing for air. Tate flicks the hose against his own leg and hands it to Timo, who replaces it in the house and returns with a used tongue depressor and a Black Cat Peanut Butter jar filled with tar-like ointment. Tate takes the jar and rubs the ointment on the ringworm rashes on Timo’s legs and arms, reminding him to stay out of the stagnant pools of water as he herds cattle. There are no welts or marks from the hose—nothing save his labored breathing shows that he was beaten at all.
Timo joins his cousins in their hut for sleep. Tate and Petrus talk about the fields, the crops, the rain. Tate Angula snores evenly. Only my ear still hears Timo’s cries and the smack of the hose. I know Timo should be punished for neglecting his chores, but I don’t think a whipping will teach him. I force this to the back of my mind, reminding myself that I’ve seen children face far worse than corporal punishment, like being hungry, orphans, or HIV-positive.
Tate Shikongo says to me, “Alona, you are too much quiet.”
I am Alona, but Alona is not me. I told Tate Shikongo my name was “Alan” the first time I met him and I traced it in the sand. Tate said, “Good name. Bible name.”
“My name isn’t in the Bible,” I said.
With the authority of a man whose father was one of the first Owambo ministers, ordained by Rhenish missionaries, Tate said, “Alon brother for Moses. Moses no speak word of God. Alon carry message. You are Alon. You spreading message.”
I had been in Namibia for less than a week and didn’t know there is no “R” sound in Oshindonga—”L” and “R” are interchangeable, so Alan becomes Aaron becomes Alon. Nor did I know that Owambos believe personal qualities can be attributed to people through names and, thus, what this name said about me. I was eager to be accepted, to feel a part of the family, and I hoarded whatever endearments I received, including the affectionate “a” they tagged onto the end of Alon.
Now, when he says my Namibian name and I think the of the significance of it, feeling impotent to prevent Timo’s beating and somehow culpable because I witnessed it, I think to myself, My name is not Aaron. I have no message.
Petrus takes the dipper from the omagongo gourd between his feet and fills a wooden cup with the lime-green beer. He offers it to me and I drink it, tasting limeade and tonic.
He asks, “What do you know about the season of omagongo, Alona?”
“Not much,” I say.
Petrus says March is the season of omagongo. The small, green marula fruit is picked, peeled, pressed by a cow horn, and left to ferment in gourds, with fruit flies hovering like steam. “It’s a good and bad time,” he says. Good because it is a time of rest between the planting and cultivating of the crop and the harvest, when the stalks of millet stand like warriors, spears in the air, and the Owambo watch the rain turn their dusty, semi-arid land into a crop-bearing land, when the sun is shrouded by rain clouds and the rain falls like a mother’s touch, nurturing the land after nine months of drought. It’s a bad time because everyone is drunk for weeks. So drunk, Petrus says, tribal law bans carrying a panga—a machete—because people often get into arguments during this time. He nods at Tate Angula, the village’s headman, who represents the tribal king, and says it’s all so ludicrous the tribal courts will not hear any disputes in this season.
Petrus refills the wooden cup with omagongo and hands it to me, saying, “When you marry at Tate’s house, Alona, I will give two cows.” He laughs. “But my brother, you are always too quiet.”
“You longing your home,” Tate Shikongo says.
“No,” I say, taking another drink of omagongo.
“Tell us what you’re thinking,” Petrus says.
Not wanting to talk about the whipping, I ask, “Who will be the next president of Namibia?”
Petrus coughs and says, “Pohamba.”
“Why?”
“He’s the most popular because he’s the Minister of Land Reform. The people want land.”
I ask about land reform.
Petrus coughs again and says that during the apartheid regime of South Africa’s colonial control of Namibia, the blacks were forced to live on small homelands that were surrounded by fences, known as red lines, and the rest of the land was given to white farmers. Since Namibia’s independence in 1990, the government has struggled with how the land can be bought from the white farmers and distributed to the people. “The whites set unfair prices. Say this cup of omagongo is worth five dollars, but the whites ask one hundred dollars for it. The government can’t pay the price. There’s hundreds of thousands of hectares of farmable land outside the red lines, and the people who own them live in Germany.”
“Some in America,” Tate Shikongo says. His eyes are big and wet in the light, as they are when he’s talking about his time in exile or his dead wife. He’s shirtless and sitting on the end of a rusted gas cylinder. A misplaced bone crowns each of his shoulders. The one on the left is the legacy of his time as a prisoner of war; the one on the right, he told me, grew to match it. When I had asked him about it, Tate Shikongo said, “Your government sends teachers, but they should send doctors.”
Petrus takes a long drink and says that even after independence in Namibia, the red lines still inhibit his people’s growth because they cannot afford to purchase land outside of the homelands.
He takes my cup and gestures to the broadness of the night around him. “You see, with the good comes the bad.”
I take a long drink of omagongo, sweet and rank, and although I’ve been drinking it all day, in this, the season of omagongo, I’m not drunk.
The omagongo. The dry, empty air. The chorus of bell frogs. The clink of wooden cups. Tate says, “Twelve o’clock. Time for sleep.” Petrus and I keep drinking. “I’m tired,” Tate whispers. No one moves.
“Tell me, Petrus,” I say without making eye contact. “Why am I here? What do you want me to do here?”
He puts his cup down and covers its base with sand so it won’t spill. “To do,” he says. He puts his hands together and looks at me. “Americans must always have something to do.”
Petrus spreads his arms and I follow the broad movements of his hands beyond the bubbles of light in the trees to where the homestead ends in darkness. There’s no moon. Although I’ve lived in Namibia for a year and a half, the southern sky is still foreign to me: the upside-down Big Dipper, Orion rotated 90 degrees, the kite-like Southern Cross, scores of other constellations I don’t know. The southern sky holds shapes and patterns that I’m only beginning to recognize.
Petrus says, “You’ve come here to teach, Alona, but you’re learning more than you’re teaching. When you return home, spread your message. Teach your people.”
“Twelve o’clock,” Tate cries. “Time for sleeping.”
Petrus wakes Tate Angula, who stands up slowly, pats me on the back, and says, “Alona, you marry. I give the cow.” He laughs
. “Kala po nawa. Stay well.”
“Inda po nawa,” I say. “Go well.”
He follows Petrus out of the homestead, and I hear Petrus’ truck start. I watch the headlights in the tops of the marula trees until they’re absorbed by the darkness. Tate takes the omagongo gourd and goes inside.
I move the oil barrel in front of the opening in the homestead fence so the goats and cattle won’t wander in during the night. Walking back, I pass Tate’s window, fixed open. My young, white face is reflected in the glass. My name is not Aaron, I think.
Inside the house, Tate switches off the electricity and I feel my way through the darkness, past the framed picture of his wife, his diploma from the German university he attended as a refugee, and the mortar shells—relics of Namibia’s war for independence—that hold little souvenir Namibian flags. My hand brushes against the hose Tate whipped Timo with, the same hose that will be used in the morning to draw water from the tap. I pinch the hose in my hand, feel the veins in the rubber. With the good comes the bad, Petrus had said.
I undress in the room I slept in as a trainee, crawl under the mosquito net, and lie on top of the blankets. I wonder what Timo was thinking before he fell asleep after the beating, if he cried in the hut amongst his brothers, if he learned to never leave the cattle untended. I look at the corrugated tin roof above me.
Their voices surface in the silence of the room: war, your father and your mother, God bless America, Alona, Alona, Alona. I’m a Volunteer and my country is at war. I know Petrus is right, I’m learning much more than I ever thought I would.
As he always does, Tate calls through the house, “Alona, ka lale po nawa.”
“Yes, Tate, sleep well, also.”
Alan Barstow taught English as a foreign language in Namibia from 2002-04. A writer and teacher, Barstow has published several pieces about and inspired by his experiences as a PCV. The full version of “The Season of Omagongo,” of which this is an excerpt, appeared in American Literary Review. He is forever grateful to the Peace Corps for opening up a new world to him, and for the families and friends he met in Namibia that opened their homes, lives, and hearts.