by Will McGrath
Blank weeks rolled by. I kept a cloud journal, each page as empty as the empty sky. I had never so much as blinked at a cirrocumulus or a nimbostratus before, but as the barren days stretched on, the cloudvoid took on devastating proportions. It felt anticipatory; it was a clearing-out, a making-room-for, an announcement of ________________. The ceiling of the world yawned in mocking midrange blue.
Then one day.
I was walking along the gorge—heading to the Whitehouse just as I am this very minute—when I turned to look back toward our rondavel, sensing a presence. A darkness crept over the surface of the mountain, engulfing shrub and gulley, plunging shepherd and flock into gloom and swallowing our hut. Deliberate and sentient and enormous.
Cloudking.
It was a month of missing clouds, a condensation confederation. This object, this entity, this impossibly massive thing drifted overhead with staid and grandmotherly dignity. I stood gaping. I bathed in its shadow. It eased across the empyrean like a sky-whale from a child’s fantasy novel. Then it slipped over the rim of mountains and was gone. I felt shaky and baptismal. I may have wept, it’s hard to say. Cloudking, this epic poof, restored balance to the world.
The Whitehouse is a bar—the very bar, in fact, where I introduced myself as Moshoeshoe Mochochonono and a man’s brain short-circuited. The Whitehouse sits forlornly in a field of ankle-high vegetation, a sweeping scrubby flat, squatting out here in self-imposed exile because it used to be an airport. This was before Mokhotlong realized it didn’t need an airport.
Even the word “airport” is misleading. The Whitehouse is a single low building in a field. There are no terminals or baggage claims, no loading zones or security fondlings. There is just a house—white—and a piece of flatness, the only flatness around, making this flatness de facto the airport. The control tower stands a hundred yards off, only one and a half stories high, as if shrunk by a miniaturizing ray. In the distance hangs an orange windsock, limp and humiliated. As Papa Hemingway once said, it looks like the flag of permanent defeat.
At some point, a crafty entrepreneur realized that although Mokhotlong doesn’t need a fully functioning airport—there’s maybe one arrival per day, the occasional helicopter bearing supplies for the LDF, or the infrequent Piper Cub flown in by missionaries—it can always use another bar. Thus, the Whitehouse.
Or, to put it another way: all airports have bars, but this bar has an airport.
As I approach the Whitehouse, I can hear the soft pop of gunfire coming from the LDF base across the gorge. The Lesotho Defense Force, the country’s army and air support, has a tiny outpost on a remote plateau across the river, unreachable save through a single gated entrance. The base languishes in perpetual gray inactivity, having penetrated my awareness only through occasional gentle reports from target practice. Up here, these sons of Moshoeshoe prepare to rebuff whoever it is that might need rebuffing.
Today there is a car parked out in the field in front of the Whitehouse, its four doors flung open. Three men are holding quarts of beer and dancing beside the car, blasting a single song on repeat. The hip-hop singer Akon, whose voice is tinny and Auto-Tuned, is plaintively declaring—
I wanna make love right now, na na.
I wanna make love right now, na na.
—which seems reasonable.
I head inside and secure a quart of Redd’s, a type of South African beer that tastes like apple juice. It is for women only. Many months later I will take a tour of the facility that produces Redd’s and will discover, in its promotional material, that Redd’s is “for the hard-working woman who deserves time out” and, additionally, “for the woman who likes to showcase her vibrant, vivacious side.” I am guilty of both.
This afternoon Ellen is off interviewing some local religious leaders about their perception of the AIDS crisis. I have been wandering about town, happy to be purposeless, and have come this way specifically seeking the mellow Whitehouse vibe. The bar is sleepy most days and today is no different: a weary unloved couch, some plastic lawn chairs, a bored young barmaid leaning against the counter. Will it be a cliché to report that a ceiling fan turns lazily overhead? But it does. The revolutionary languor of this fan is nonpareil.
The scarred snooker table is currently occupied by the bar’s only customer: a mother lining up her next shot, her one-year-old daughter wrapped pepa-style to her back. The child’s head, shoulders, and arms poke over the top of a blanket that swaddles her to her mother. As the mother thrusts her cue sharply forward, the child tilts precariously side to side like a bronco buster in the saddle. When the mother leans over the balding green baize to eyeball a tough angle, it seems the child will be ejected onto the table, but she remains astride and unflappable. The child stares me down with blasé, beautiful eyes. Across the room, the barmaid has fallen asleep, her cheek on the counter.
I take my Redd’s outside and settle into a white plastic chair under the eaves. The three men are still drinking and dancing to Akon, the mountains spraddled righteously behind them. I laze and savor the moment, then take out my book of Hemingway short stories. The cloudless sky offers no respite from the noon sun. It will be cold after sundown, but for now my shirt is sticking in patches to my chest and a delightfully warm gauze has drifted down over my field of vision. The beer is cool and my responsibilities are minimal. I start to read but quickly abandon the undertaking. At this moment, Papa Hemingway’s words are the verbal equivalent of a hard-knuckled noogie to the crown of the head, unpleasant horseplay from a gruff uncle.
Then, in my periphery, I notice that the three dancers have been joined by a fourth man, a soldier in an LDF uniform, and they are assembling a gun of some kind, which the soldier has pulled from an olive rucksack.
Let it be noted that I see guns in Mokhotlong all the time. Policemen with pistols stroll down the main road. Soldiers with ancient carbines guard the post office. Two men with rifles once sauntered into the safe home to collect back wages for a fired employee, while the children stared saucer-eyed at the jackbooted goons in their playroom. Even the Chinese-run grocery store hires a Mosotho with a pump-action shotgun to stalk the aisles, discouraging theft. I have never shoplifted once.
Over the course of its short national history, Lesotho, which gained independence in 1966, has seen every shade of putsch, coup, attempted coup, military ouster, constitutional suspension, contested election, and state of emergency—many of them prominently involving the Lesotho Defense Force. And while elections from 2002 to 2012 were generally peaceful and democratic, another attempted military coup in 2014 resulted in political upheaval after LDF soldiers opened fire on Prime Minister Tom Thabane’s security detail and forced the PM to flee into South Africa for a week.
But as I observe these four men from under the brim of my baseball cap, considering whether or not to abandon my post, I realize there is something slightly off about this rifle. Even a non-expert in firearms like me can see that the proportions are wrong. Then I realize it is a BB gun.
The LDF soldier appears to be off duty, or at least I hope he is off duty, for he is already supremely drunk. From his rucksack—his shooting kit, I suppose—he also produces an old metal pitcher, which he places in the low vegetation as a target. It is the kind of metal pitcher you might pour lemonade from if you were at your grandmother’s garden party, or which you might pour gin martinis from if you were a character in a John Cheever short story. The four men pull heavily on their beers as they prepare for sharpshooting practice.
The soldier assumes a relaxed stance thirty yards off from the pitcher. Even though it is more or less a toy, he handles the gun with a fluidity that speaks to an intimate relationship with weapons. The three dancers hang back. The soldier exhales and then pops off several quick shots—ting! ting! ting!—against the target. Easy.
As he moves to pass the BB gun on to another man, the soldier quickly draws a bead on the man who comes forward. The man yelps in surprise and ducks away. The soldier laughs, clucking his tongue
at his friend’s sheepishness, and then surrenders the gun. He hands it stock first to the next marksman, then stares off toward the target and emits a tiny dart of spittle from between his teeth.
The other three are clearly amateurs. They giggle nervously as they shoot, mostly missing, occasionally notching a lucky hit, strutting when they do so. The soldier steps into the rotation intermittently. He is smaller than the other men, wiry and filled with lithe confidence, his movements perhaps lubricated by his drunkenness. He does not miss.
Even from my perch under the eaves of the Whitehouse, I can hear the BBs leaving the rifle with impressive velocity, a high whine. After a few rounds, the soldier goes to retrieve the target, examining his handiwork. The pitcher is dented and pockmarked from the metal pellets. This prompts a single repeating comment from Akon.
The men continue drinking and shooting. The day blazes on, but the heat of the sun is suddenly interleaved with chill slashes of wind feinting and juking across the field.
And then I find myself up with these men, fitting the stock of the rifle against my shoulder. It is not entirely clear to me how this has occurred—some form of apple beer–infused participatory journalism, which perhaps is the only kind worth doing.
“You must aim it just so,” one of the amateurs is instructing me.
“Yes, yes, careful,” another one says.
The soldier cracks open the chamber. He is rationing his BBs now, dishing them out one by one. He digs into his pocket and pulls out a single metal pellet.
“Here is your bullet,” he says, holding my gaze. “Now you must kill the man.”
I roll the BB around in my palm. It is an insidious little shard of metal, silent and jagged.
“Yes,” I say. “I will kill that man.”
I line up the pitcher and ease my finger onto the trigger. The sun is disorienting and bright in my face and there is beaded sweat at my temple. A passage from The Stranger pops into my head—that icy, lifeless book—but I shoo it away.
I take a breath, then pull the trigger. The bullet whangs out of the barrel and touches nothing.
The three dancers laugh and slap me on the back. The soldier takes the rifle away from me and says, in a voice flatter than the surrounding field, that I have failed to kill the man. He reloads the gun and tinks and tanks the pitcher several more times, as if I might somehow absorb his skill.
And then, quite casually, as a bird passes low overhead, the soldier pivots smoothly and picks the bird out of flight with a single bullet. The bird dips off, then falls awkwardly from the sky and flutters into the brush. The three dancers fall silent.
The soldier smiles at us.
I can see the bird shuddering in the scrub vegetation behind him.
It is at this point that I decide—well, perhaps I shall be taking my leave of these fine gentlemen, and needless to say it has been such a pleasant afternoon, and how very courteous of them to include me in the fun, but really I am running late just now for a standing engagement, and would they be so kind as to excuse me, with the enduring hope that we all meet again soon?
I ease back toward the white plastic chair where my belongings sit, turning repeatedly to wave and smile, feeling distinctly uncomfortable with my back turned. As I collect my bag, I can see, from the corner of my eye, the soldier again genially menacing his friends, leveling the rifle at them as they duck and howl, their voices a curious blend of complaint and fear.
And yes, occasionally he pulls the trigger and little plumes of dirt geyser around their feet, and they are now yelling with a bit more urgency in their voices, cut it out, seriously, that sour note of fear beginning to predominate. But I am walking back through the field and heading home fast, the sky blue as blue overhead, hoping for Cloudking.
A postscript:
Unrelated, maybe. There is no way I can ever prove it, since I don’t know what his name was. Maybe it’s just a thing that happened.
“Hey,” Nthabeleng asks me one day, “did you hear about the LDF base?”
We are sitting in her office, debriefing at the end of the day.
“Some soldier, some crazy—he killed his friends out there.”
She shakes her head, wondering.
“He came into the barracks in the night and shot them while they were sleeping. They had some argument, I guess. Three men, just dreaming away, then bang! bang! bang! and that was the end of them. They said the soldier was very drunk when he did it.”
Nthabeleng sighs, looks at me, then looks out the window.
“What can you even do?”
A BRIEF PRIMER ON THE SESOTHO LANGUAGE (AS PRESENTED BY A NON-SPEAKER)
Human-Doughnut Grammar
Sesotho, the language of the Basotho people, is a captivating and complex idiom. Not only does it provide the non-speaker with such exotic delights as “pops”—written either as the letters q or qh—but it smashes consonants together in pleasingly non-Western fashion, resulting in verbal pile-ups on the expressways of the tongue. Consider, for example, words like ntlhoea (they hate me), qhaqholotse (to pull down), and hlahlobile (to examine).
To a student of the language, perhaps the most challenging aspect of Sesotho is the concept of noun classes. Nouns fall into seven classes, and each class has a different way of showing singular and plural. Unlike English, which generally denotes singular and plural at the end of a word—book and books—Sesotho takes care of this business up front. One native of Lesotho is a Mosotho, whereas a whole group of locals are Basotho. One person is a motho, several people are batho.
A word’s noun class is not arbitrary. Any Sesotho grammar book will tell you that nouns related to human beings are generally grouped together (with mo- as the singular and ba- as the plural). Additionally, nouns related to animals fall into a different category (n- and lin-), nouns related to abstract concepts are situated together (bo- and ma-), and nouns describing physical objects are cordoned off accordingly (le- and ma-). This brief summary is by necessity a simplification, as concepts like “the law of nasal permutation” are likely outside the purview of the casual reader. I will also acknowledge that reading about grammar is possibly dull, and for that I offer an insincere apology.
Here is my point: the word for “white person”—lekhooa—falls not into a human noun class but a thing noun class. The singular and plural of “white person”—lekhooa and makhooa—is shown in the same way as the singular and plural of “doughnut”—lekoenya and makoenya. Before we proceed, I should note that these makoenya, deep-fried dough balls of local specialty, are delicious.
When I first noticed this—lekhooa being a word that any white person in remote parts of Lesotho hears constantly, where children excitedly scream it across fields and from the tops of jagged promontories—I assumed I had made some rookie linguistic error. This is a prospect that remains likely. However, I soon noticed that this “thing” designation pertains not only to white people, but to any outsiders. Chinese immigrants are called le-China and ma-China. Albino people receive the somewhat derogatory labels lesoefe and masoefe. The same goes for lekwerekwere and makwerekwere, words that southern Africans use (often mockingly) to describe Africans from the north. When I pointed this out to Ntate Baholo in the staff room one day, demanding that the Zimbabwean teacher Ntate Gappah and I be granted full personhood under the Sesotho language, he assured me that I was mistaken. There was no malice or insult intended in our non-human classification.
Surely this is correct in the practical and daily application of the word lekhooa. It just means “white person.” I am confident that the Basotho do not really see outsiders as things rather than human beings. But language is often more powerful than we are willing to acknowledge. The words we use color our perception of reality in subtle ways. This is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, an idea—formulated in the 1930s, fallen out of academic favor by the 1960s, semi-resurgent since the 1990s, and now co-opted by me, a non-anthropologist, non-scientist trying to make a probably fallacious comment on grammatical minuti
ae—which states that the specific words we utter have actual effects on our cognition. The language we speak affects our perception of reality.
Studies in this realm, known in the journals as “linguistic relativity,” have shown that the language a person speaks can actually affect how that person perceives specific colors, distances, and spatial relationships—things that are objectively fixed and non-negotiable.
So would hardcore Sapir-Whorfians argue, as I jokingly suggested to Baholo, that Sesotho does ever so slightly dehumanize people of non-Sotho origin, linking them subconsciously to inanimate objects, to things like doughnuts? I don’t know, but I should stop before I spin completely out of control. In fact, I don’t even think “hardcore Sapir-Whorfians” exist. And while the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is intriguing in general, I can’t buy into any version of it that actually impinges on free will or leans toward determinism. No self-respecting scholar would claim that our thoughts are controlled by the language we speak.
My point is simpler, I suppose: our words are always charged just beneath the surface, our vocabulary freighted with personal history, half-remembered conversations, and forgotten inside jokes. Our lexicon is perpetually infused with a strange brew of the personal, the political, the emotional, and the spiritual. And in the end, I am proud to share a noun class with makoenya. Would that all human beings were as crispy and satisfying.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Food
I am eating lunch with the other teachers one day when I make an innocent comment to ‘M’e Mosa. “Your cookie,” I tell her in my cobbled-together Sesotho, “looks very nice.”
Mosa blushes and Ntate Baholo rushes to my assistance. “Ntate Moshoeshoe,” he says, “my brother, there are some things that it is not possible to say as you have said. You cannot talk about ‘M’e Mosa’s cookie, but only her cookies, using the plural.”