by Will McGrath
“Yes,” my deskmate ‘M’e Poho says, elbowing me and gesticulating in a way that would get one fired in some workplaces, “because with her cookie, you are talking about something else entirely.”
Ntate Pheko, who was almost hit by lightning, enters into the conversation. “In the same way, Ntate Moshoeshoe, you cannot comment upon Ntate Baholo’s carrot—only his carrots—or else people will become confused with your meaning.”
“No, no,” Poho agrees, “you should never discuss Ntate Baholo’s carrot, nor the length of his carrot, although it is appropriate to say that Ntate Baholo has sizable carrots growing in his garden.”
Mosa, having now finished her cookie, adds: “Yes, and in a manner relating to what ‘M’e Poho has said, you should not inquire about the potatoes of either Ntate Baholo or Ntate Pheko.”
“And you must certainly not ask which man has more nourishing potatoes,” Poho adds.
Baholo is laughing, but nervously, and wishes to steer the discussion away from his carrot and potatoes. “As a final warning, my brother, I should tell you about the cake of ‘M’e Mosa, or even of ‘M’e Poho. You should never say Ke batla kuku, which means I must have her cake, even if the cake of ‘M’e Mosa or ‘M’e Poho looks particularly pleasing. A comment like that may seem troublesome to those who hear it.”
The conversation continues in a similarly informative manner, but I must interrupt here to raise this question: why is food the dominant and cross-cultural metaphor for the human genitalia? While the Sesotho language provides “carrot,” “potato,” “cookie,” and “cake”—among many others—we see this in English in abundance, for men (“nuts,” “wiener,” “sausage”) and women (including variations on the words “taco” and “pie,” as well as a ghastly phrase involving the words “roast beef”). The male metaphor continues in Italian (piselli—peas), Czech (vejce—eggs), German (spaetzle, eier—noodle, eggs), Russian (khren—horseradish), Korean (gochu—chili pepper), and Spanish (polla—chicken). I am sure a dedicated linguaphile could compile an even more expansive list.
What is the nature of this comestible-genital relationship? Is it due to some basic life-giving quality that both share? Does it indicate that these are the two primary drives in the human experience—food and sex—and that the two are fused somewhere deep in our collective lizard brain? I won’t even venture a guess. My task is simply to pose these questions of lasting import, with the hope that our scientists, philosophers, and theologians will carve out answers for future generations.
Language of Love
During my time in Lesotho, I have met a handful of Christian missionaries. These missionaries spend the better part of a year living in Mokhotlong or some other district camptown, learning the Sesotho language, and observing local customs before they head deep into the mountains, sometimes for years. I met one young woman who was setting out for an area reachable only by helicopter. She told me she was prepared to never see her family back in Colorado again.
Somewhere along the way, I obtained a Sesotho phrase book that these missionaries often use to teach each other the language. This book is called Puisano, which means Conversation, and is printed by the Morija Sesuto Book Depot. The copy I have is the twenty-fourth printing, from 2005. I am going to reprint some passages here, verbatim, and I will try to avoid any editorializing. These dialogues, translated into both English and Sesotho, are imagined conversations that you, the missionary, might have with a local:
“Going to Church” (p. 13–14)
Missionary: Are you coming with me to church? Don’t you know that this is the Lord’s Day?
Local: Yes, I know; but it doesn’t matter. I am not a Christian.
Missionary: Do you never go to church?
Local: I never go.
Missionary: Does your father never go?
Local: Sometimes he goes.
Missionary: Come, let us go together to church.
Local: What shall I go for?
Missionary: You shall go to hear about God.
Local: No, I shall not go. How can you prove that all that is said about God is true?
Missionary: Is it not God who has made all things we see?
Local: How can I know that He has made them?
Missionary: Who do you say has made them? Have they made themselves?
Local: I don’t know; I don’t care for these things.
Missionary: But you will die, and then go to the judgment.
Local: You Christians say so; I am not convinced of it. I shall go where my forefathers have gone.
Missionary: Do you know where they have gone?
Local: No, I don’t. Goodbye; I am going home.
Missionary: Oh no, let us go together to church!
Local: I don’t care to go, as I am not satisfied with what Christians are; their conduct shocks me.
Missionary: Do all of them disgust you?
Local: No, I know some who don’t.
Missionary: If so, judge by their deeds.
Local: Well, you have persuaded me; let us go to church.
“Death” (p. 19)
Local: I have lost two children. One was a boy, the other was a girl. Missionary: Were they already grown up?
Local: No, they were still small.
Missionary: Where were they buried?
Local: They were buried in the cemetery, where all the dead of our village are buried.
Missionary: Is it a place surrounded with a wall, and planted with trees? Local: No, there is nothing, as the Basotho don’t take much care of the graves of their dead.
Missionary: Is that true?
Local: Yes, it is true.
“Night, Light” (p. 21-22)
Missionary: In former times, how did the Basotho produce light, when they had no candles or lamps?
Local: They made a light with a piece of fat in a broken pot.
Missionary: Was the house well lit?
Local: Not at all; such a light was of very little use.
Missionary: What did people do in the evenings?
Local: They used to light a fire and sit round it.
Missionary: Did they sit up late in this way at night?
Local: No, they went to bed early like the fowls.
Missionary: How could they sleep comfortably when the huts were so small?
Local: Don’t you know that all the boys of the village used to sleep in one hut, and so did the girls?
Missionary: How was it possible in such circumstances for parents to bring up their children?
Local: It was very difficult, because that custom of not living together destroyed the love which ought to have existed between parents and children. Do the Christians still follow this custom?
Missionary: No, the Christians generally build larger houses in which the children sleep in separate rooms.
Sometimes I wonder whatever became of that young missionary from Colorado. She was small and beautiful and had golden ringlets of hair. I would see her along the main road from time to time, when she was on her way to study Sesotho. In my head I referred to her as Goldilocks, perhaps uncharitably.
Once we invited her to a dinner party we were hosting. In the common rondavel, we sat in a circle and passed around bowls of papa and moroho, quartered chickens, bottles of beer. We played ridiculous games, told fantastic lies. As with any gathering where more than a few Basotho are in attendance, this dinner party quickly became a dance party. The speakers blasted famo into the summer night and we stomped around the rondavel, but the missionary would not join us in the dance. She sat off in a chair, polite and distant, her golden ringlets shaking gently in refusal. “You are all too drunk,” she told us, but it was not true—we were just too happy, far out along the bridge.
That was the last time I saw her. Sometimes I wonder how she fared out there, far past the shepherds’ kraals. Perhaps she is still out there, or perhaps she has returned home. I don’t think I will ever know.
Before she left, she took the Sesotho name Lerato—which mea
ns Love—and then headed deep into the mountains. Even now I sometimes think to myself: Where has Love gone? Where can Love be found?
MIDNIGHT BASOTHO DANCE PARTY
We are drawn by the pulsing famo beat—drawn from our rondavel in dark of night, down past the turn in the river and the semi-deserted hospital, toward the grounds of the vacant hotel and into the gutted adjacent building—some defunct abattoir—where all hog-butchering has been laid aside to give the band some space to play. The building is a dusty cinderblock warehouse, windows painted over, walls shedding plaster, haunted and forbidding.
And there is an honest-to-God famo band napalming the stage—actually, there’s no stage, defunct abattoirs don’t have stages—but the singer is raging and the drummer is raging and the dancers are raging, not the accordionist or bassist, though, because those two stone-faced motherfuckers are motionless, wearing sunglasses, chain-smoking, sitting with their backs to the crowd, and laying down an absolutely dirty line of accordion-bass polyphony.
But perhaps I am getting ahead of myself. I don’t want to skip over the man with the machine gun, and I want to make sure, first of all, that we know what famo is.
(For the curious: it’s FAH-MOO.)
Famo, the reigning musical genre in the Kingdom of Lesotho, sounds like some southern African step-cousin of zydeco. The music is filled with plaintive, reedy accordion runs built over a foundation of stuttering bassline and thumping basso kick drum, then filigreed with bright guitar flourishes and fluttering synthesizer trills. These last two instruments—the guitar and synthesizer—are unnecessarily rococo additions; accordion, bass, and drums will suffice. Layered over this three-piece shuffle-stomp, the vocals take the form of: A) breathless Sesotho raps, the words all fused into one Germanically constructed superstring, or B) melodic moans that follow along with the accordion line. It is, perhaps, an acquired taste.
But when there is a live famo band playing in a warehouse that doubles as a slasher-film backdrop, then one must go, even when it is late and one is in one’s pajamas and the man at the door is casually shoulder-slung with heavy firepower. Live music is incredibly rare up here in the eastern mountains of Mokhotlong.
To be precise, the man with the machine gun is not the first person to meet us at the door. The first people we meet at the door are collecting cover for the band and they try to jack up the price for us. But then, as we are haggling, the man with the machine gun comes over and ends the bargaining process. We will pay the same price that everyone else did, he says, and not the quoted price, which was double that.
“Kea leboha, ntate,” I say, giving him the tripartite Sesotho handshake, because it is always important to show gratitude to the man with the machine gun.
The band is burning through their set. The singer wails into the mic and flops onto the ground, his lyrics beyond distorted through the blown-out PA. The drummer bludgeons his kit until a cymbal stand topples over. His bass drum keeps sliding out from under his right foot, metal supports slipping over smooth concrete, even though the drum is held in place with several small boulders. An unsecured cymbal flips off and rolls away after a particularly vicious crash hit, and an audience member returns it to him. The accordionist is busy not caring and the bass player is busy not caring while at the same time slathering his dirty-dirty bassline all over the floor. The dancers—because the presence of a dance team is another famo fundamental—are three men in matching T-shirts, wrapped in traditional woolen Basotho blankets, doing coordinated hop-skips, shoulder-dips, and one-footers, all the while swinging their wooden molamo in beer-dazed ecstasy. These are people deep in their métier.
Here in the warehouse-barn-abattoir, the crowd is deep Basotho. Everyone is in blankets and gumboots, all the dudes are molamo-wielding shepherds, everybody is straight-up country. While Mokhotlong camptown is quite rural, it is the district hub and thus modernized to an extent. (Point: there is an ATM in Mokhotlong. Counterpoint: the people withdrawing money from the ATM often arrive on horseback.) The people in the crowd tonight are distinctly not modernized. They are grizzled and backwoods, in from the outer villages where they don’t run power lines. Everybody is staring hard at us, unflinching.
That is, until Reid gets up to dance.
Reid—my copilot on the hunt for Rapitsoe the mechanic—and his wife, Bridget, both work for Nthabeleng’s organization. So when Reid gets up to dance, borrowing my wooden molamo—an intricately decorated shepherd’s cane that was made for me by a friend, which I brought along because that is what you bring to a famo concert—well, when Reid gets up to dance, people are no longer just staring but bug-eyed and leg-slapping, hooting and ululating. The crowd is jaw-dropped at the fact that this lekhooa is not only dancing, and with a legit molamo, but this lekhooa actually seems to know the steps.
This is because we practice.
Any remaining semblance of propriety is hauled into the street and shot. Soon we are all jammed together on the dance floor, doing the hop-skip and the shoulder-dip and the one-footer, doing the scoot-scoot and the double-stomp and the clackety-hop. The locals are doing the tooth-whistle and the bird-whoop too, since Basotho are—by birthright—the most creative and dexterous of whistlers. This acrobatic whistling is another famo essential and is beyond the capabilities of any lekhooa.
The dancing goes on for some time. At one point, I split off from a wild pseudo conga line and head to the adjoining public bar to grab some quarts of beer. While I am waiting to pay, a man sitting at the bar asks me: “Are you a promoter?”
I glance toward the warehouse-barn-abattoir, then back at the man on the stool. I tell him that I am not a music promoter, although I am enjoying the band.
He arches an eyebrow. “I think you are a promoter.”
I raise my beers toward him and head back to the music, nodding at the man with the machine gun as I enter. We pass the bottles down our row of folding chairs, throughout our group, then send them along to other rows and off into the night.
A short while later, I am talking to the man with the machine gun, casting sidelong glances at his weapon. Since my trip to the Whitehouse, I have become a bit more skittish around heavy ordnance, especially after the three soldiers were murdered at the LDF base.
“My name is Adam,” he tells me, using an English name he would have received in primary school. “I am the first man.” He grins broadly at his joke.
I tell him I am happy that he is here with his machine gun to make sure no trouble happens at the concert. Adam the First Man becomes bashful, eyes down, seems deeply honored by this remark.
The famo band continues to rattle the painted-over windows. The dancers whirligig across the cement floor. One little shepherd boy is out here, maybe eight years old and up well past his bedtime. He is in full pastoral regalia—a blanket worn cape-like over the shoulders, gumboots, wool hat—and he is hop-scotching and drinking from a giant glass Coke bottle, while everyone else is drinking Maluti or Marzen Gold.
Two youngish bo-‘m’e are sitting in the chairs in front of us. These women are laughing with us, or at us, or both, saying it’s fantastic that we know the dance steps and how to hold the molamo properly. Occasionally they grab the molamo and run off to dance with it—a move which is slightly transgressive, since only bo-ntate are supposed to dance with the molamo.
After a while, Adam the First Man comes up to me and whispers in my ear.
“Those bo-‘m’e, you must limit your interactions with them.”
He is holding his gun casually, like a walking stick. I look up at him, then over at the women dancing with the molamo.
He nods. I nod back.
A few minutes later, Adam the First Man comes back and whispers in my ear again.
“It is okay to talk with them, but you must limit your interactions with them.”
I nod again. I tell him that perhaps we will talk with these bo-‘me’, but we will limit our interactions with them. I have no idea what this means.
Adam the First Man
is satisfied and returns to guard the door.
Eventually—after we have danced a bit more, shown off our shoulder-shaking, our ululating, our molamo-swinging—we decide it is time to head back home. We have been doing our best to talk with the bo-‘m’e, who seem perfectly nice, while continuing to limit our interactions with them. As we head toward the door, the lead singer abandons his microphone to see us out, pumping our hands vigorously, and the band plays on without him. Adam the First Man salutes us, military sendoff, and asks to swap email addresses. We head into the night sweaty and smoky and bell-rung.
In the icy Mokhotlong air, the devil dogs are scavenging: glinting eyes and shadowy profiles slipping serpentine between rondavels. The moon burns with neon intensity, glazing the milky road and lighting our way home. All throughout the night, accordions and cymbals echo from the mountaintops, infiltrating our dreams, an electric lullaby for all the beasts who slumber.
KILLING A PIG
It begins with a party, as things often do.
“We will slaughter a pig,” someone says.
Since we have been living in Lesotho—nearly two seasons now, the summer days growing shorter—we have overseen the slaughter of two sheep for two different parties, one of which was Nthabeleng’s birthday. We decide it is time to expand beyond quotidian matters like ovine butchery into the more exotic realms of pig death.
In Mokhotlong, the celebratory consumption of meat is a matter of real gravitas, since most people are unable to afford it with any regularity. They derive their protein instead from the humdrum bean and the lowly egg. At a party, though, it is understood that the host will provide meat—usually mutton—a matter of long-standing tradition and personal pride. The scent of animal flesh wafts even from the invitation. “You must come,” I can recall Ntate Baholo telling me once. “My brother, we will be eating meat there.”
About ten days out from the party, I tell some teachers about our plan.
“A pig?” ‘M’e Poho says. “Ah no, I don’t eat that one. The fariki I think is too dirty.”