by Will McGrath
Hamburger: Not what you are expecting. Order a hamburger at the Thia-La-La butchery and you get a sandwich of buttery grilled Texas Toast around ground beef pressed so atomically thin that you can see the whirring of valence electrons. This meat wisp is slathered with orange cheeze and ensconced in warm mayo, the end result being shamefully delicious. But order a hamburger across town at the empty Senqu Hotel and an entirely different experience awaits: a recently unfrozen patty, shipped from South Africa, garnished with cold cheese slices, diced pineapple, a thick slab of cold spam, dead tomato, and a noble crown of fried egg.
Iron Brew: Again, I don’t know exactly what Iron Brew is, but what a fantastic name. There should be an exclamation point after it. This soft drink tastes like Dr. Pepper mixed with Big League Chew bubblegum. To its credit, it does not taste like iron.
One time I bought the most expensive can of Iron Brew ever sold. Ellen and I were in Maseru, fueling up at a gas station. A refrigerated beverage cooler stood outside, so alluring on a hot day. Through the cooler door, a can of Iron Brew sang to me in a strange and lilting falsetto, and I informed the gas station attendant of my desire.
“No problem,” the attendant says. “Only one problem. The cooler is locked and the keys are lost.” As I turn to leave, the attendant stops me. “No, no,” he says. “We will break the cooler open.”
I tell him this will not be necessary. Then another gas station attendant appears; he too believes the cooler should be opened with force. I protest once more, out of courtesy, but these men have made up their minds.
“We will just have to do it at some point,” the first man says.
So we proceed to beat the shit out of the lock on that cooler door. One of the men finds a screwdriver inside and the four of us take turns stabbing at the locking mechanism, but the lock is more stalwart than anticipated.
“Wait!” Ellen says, rummaging through her bag. With a flourish, she removes her Leatherman Super Tool 300, an item given to Canadians at birth. This will do the trick, we all think.
It does not do the trick. The Leatherman Super Tool 300 breaks almost immediately. The pliers snap clean off. Consequently, the Leatherman Corporation will be receiving a strongly worded letter, as well as a request for a new Leatherman Super Tool 300, unless there is a specific clause voiding the warranty due to instances of breaking and entering.
Disheartened by the broken Leatherman and the unbroken lock, we resort to desperation and animal rage. There is no turning back—the lock is still engaged but now mangled, and no key will ever turn in it again. We take turns beating the lock with the butt end of the screwdriver and the now-defunct Leatherman Super Tool 300, going through a four-person rotation as our arms get tired.
Suddenly the lock goes click. Out comes the Iron Brew, the best I’ve ever had, at a total cost of: one (1) hardened-steel padlock @ 101R + one (1) deluxe Leatherman Super Tool 300 @ 473R + one (1) can of Iron Brew brand soda pop @ 5R = 579R (at conversion rate of 1R = 0.14 USD) = $79.75, plus tax.
Joala: Basotho homebrew, discussed in depth later; decidedly not for cowards.
Makoenya: Deep-fried dough balls, sometimes referred to as fat cakes. Best when purchased fresh from the ladies who sit deep in their makoenya lair—that weathered tent behind the taxi rank, their patchy plastic tarp propped up with tree branches, where the hot stink of cooking oil billows out into the day. Roll while still hot in a light dusting of cinnamon and sugar, and only then will you know Beauty.
Moroho: A general term for leafy greens that have been chopped, sautéed, and seasoned; a common component of the Basotho meal, often served with papa (see below).
Nama ea nku: This is the Sesotho name for “mutton,” which itself is the English name for “elderly lamb.” Mutton can be purchased at the Thia-La-La butchery, where the meat is run through a band saw. The result is random mutton chunks—some of pure meat, some laced with dense gristle, some with intricate configurations of bone shard to navigate—all generally delicious. The band saw approach to meat preparation creates an unusual effect: each bite of mutton is a game of chance, to be met with anticipation and some caution; it restrains the chewer from plowing mindlessly through a meal. This is positive in that it teaches the virtues of patience and awareness, and negative in that I prefer my food does not shame me with didactic moral lessons.
The best mutton in town comes from MP Kitchen, which is a tiny metal shack that vanished once. Restaurants come and go, but rarely does an entire structure disappear without notice, and even more rarely does the same structure reappear the next day, completely intact but in a different location. This is what happens to MP Kitchen one day. Its departure is so sudden, so final, that I can almost believe I’ve imagined the whole thing, but for the fact of the shanty’s ghostly outline in the dirt. I continue down the road, perplexed. I am even more confused the following day when Nthabeleng’s son, Neo, and I are returning from playing soccer. There it is—MP Kitchen, exactly as before—just on the opposite side of the Chinese trading post, like it fell through a rip in the cosmic fabric and re-emerged with the wrong coordinates.
Just as we notice the resurrected restaurant, the skies open and begin to soak us. Neo and I run for the shanty’s doorway and duck inside. Everything is identical: ‘M’e MP is stirring a giant pot of mutton, the single communal table is occupied with local VIPs having lunch, and every inch of the tiny shack is cramped with cooking supplies, burners, hot plates, and seasonings. MP looks up from her cauldron, understands we have come to take shelter from the monsoon, nods at us, and returns to her culinary tasks. The rain roars against the shanty’s metal roof like the end times have come.
Papa: The sine qua non of the Basotho meal. Nothing is more important to the Mosotho stomach than papa, which is ground maize meal cooked in water, resulting in a dense, starchy mound that looks like a stiffer version of mashed potatoes. For shepherds, it may be the only food consumed during a meal. In more rural areas, papa is eaten with the hands and used to sop up any last scraps of moroho. At the Thia-La-La butchery, the steam trays are pillowed high with it. Out at the high school, students heft lunch plates laden with gargantuan domes of papa, along with beans or peas or moroho—and, on Fridays, the additional treat of pilchards (see below).
While I have grown fond of this corn mush, the thing I love best about papa is the utensil that accompanies it: the stick. Every kitchen, every smoky hut, every household in Lesotho has a wooden stick—a lesokoana—which is used for stirring and distributing papa from the common pot. In the villages, this stick is whittled down from a branch until about a foot long, perhaps a half inch in diameter. A certain amount of symbolism and ritual revolve around the lesokoana, including a rain-making game played between villages, where a young girl steals the lesokoana from the chief’s hut and relays it, girl to girl to girl, until she is either caught or reaches her home village safely.
It is the elegance of this utensil that appeals to me, though. The lesokoana has no moving parts; there is nothing to rust or stain, nothing to clean or disassemble; it is immune from foodie obsessions over brand name or composition or provenance.
It is just a stick.
Pilchards: Canned fish spines in red sauce.
Steam Bread: The traditional Basotho bread; the dough is cooked over a pot of boiling water—instead of within an oven—for the fairly straightforward reason that Basotho huts don’t have ovens. This cooking method produces a dense, moist bread with an oddly gummy exterior—an anti-crust—delicious nonetheless.
Stoney: This is ginger beer, which means it tastes like ginger ale plus methamphetamines. It is an unassuming milky white color and can be found in various locations across the African continent. In addition to being a good mixer for whiskey, Stoney is renowned for its curative powers. This according to Ellen, who chugged a bottle at the top of Moteng Pass after she barfed from altitude sickness.
Stout: Specifically Castle Milk Stout, which is a brand of beer that tastes a bit like Guinness and has a similarl
y dark body, although its nutty brown head distinguishes it from the classic Guinness “priest collar.” It is Castle Milk Stout I am imbibing one night as I talk with the bartender Ntate Mokati, a friendly guy I run into frequently around Mokhotlong. I tell him I’m about to set out for the other side of town to meet some friends, and—as he is just finishing his shift—he says he will accompany me. I buy another quart of Milk Stout to share as we travel.
The darkness outside is complete. Cloud cover blots out the stars and the moon has not yet risen. It is only eight but it feels like the midnight of some prior century, my eyes refusing to adjust to the total black. I stay close by Mokati’s side, keeping pace with the genial tone of his voice as he muses about reggae music and girlfriends and whether or not he believes in God. The night’s depth is beyond comprehension. As we walk, Mokati occasionally sends a friendly greeting out into the void and a disembodied voice responds, sometimes just feet away. Then a shadowy outline takes human form and Mokati stops to chat for a moment. It is not clear to me whether Mokati knows these ghosts or not.
We drift through the abyssal dark like this for forty minutes, passing the Milk Stout back and forth as we talk. Briefly I wonder if we have passed into the afterlife—it is certainly peaceful enough, and I feel devoid of worry at Mokati’s side. But eventually my destination emerges from the gloom and we stop to part ways.
Later, Mokati will appear in various unexpected settings around the country and greet me as if there is nothing odd about it. When Ellen and I attend a wedding in a distant village, there is Mokati, cracking jokes to a crowd of partygoers. Another time he emerges onto the pitso ground in the town of Mapholaneng during the King’s forty-sixth birthday celebration. He high-steps his way onto the field at the head of a team of silver-suited dancers, lip-syncing along with music blasting from the PA, whirling and stomping before the tent where members of Parliament are seated. By this point Mokati’s surprise appearances will no longer be surprising to me—not in Lesotho, this country of wormholes, of ripples and tunnels in the fabric of the land.
We stand in the sightless Mokhotlong night and shake hands; the warmth of his grip once again endows me with corporeal form. I give him the remaining Milk Stout since he has farther still to go, and then Mokati fades off into the night.
I stand for a while outside my destination, the massive weight of the stillness embracing me. I consider whether Ellen might be back from her business out of town. I want to tell her what I saw tonight, or didn’t see. I decide it might be nice to simply wander back the way I have come, even without my Virgil, and so I do that, slowly. The ghosts are all about tonight, spirits moving close beside me, greeting me invisibly as we pass.
GOOD & BAD JOALA
This is a story about joala, or at least I think it is.
I should start by explaining joala. I know you don’t know what it is, because I barely know what it is and I’ve had buckets of the stuff. Joala is Basotho-style corn-beer, or corn-liquor, or corn-something. And to be precise, it’s actually maize-beer, not corn-beer, although it is occasionally sorghum-beer.
Generally speaking, you can identify joala by one of the following: either you are A) standing in the joala district of Mokhotlong, which is a row of shanties where grandmothers stir steaming industrial drums of possibly toxic byproduct, or you are B) down by the turn in the river, where the road curls up toward the hospital, and you are heading toward that slim crooked tree where the grandmothers now sit with their joala for sale, decanted into plastic buckets.
Generally speaking, though, you cannot speak generally about joala. Each joala is unique, each its own intoxicating snowflake. I’ve had joala that was the pale color of dead skin and I’ve had joala that looked like orange juice. I’ve sipped it from old coffee cans, sipped it from cereal bowls, sipped it from a jug being passed around the village hearth. There is no consistent joala experience.
The best joala I ever had was the brew ‘M’e Malereko cooked up in a rinsed-out laundry detergent bucket. That batch sat behind a couch for two weeks, keeping its own counsel in the dark. When Malereko finally unveiled it at Nthabeleng’s birthday party, it had mellowed into a lovely apricot color, sweet and winy on the tongue. At the birthday party, as I watched Nthabeleng and her siblings do a synchronized hop-step routine to pulsing clubby kwaito music, I dipped my cup into the communal barrel and watched as raisins bobbed to the surface. They looked like tiny dried mermaids coming up to wave hello.
Eventually, though, talking about joala is always talking about Retselisitsoe Mohlomi, he of oversized noggin and joyous drooling grin.
Retselisitsoe is one of the forty-some children who pass through the safe home during a typical year. Some children stay here for weeks or months, some even longer, until they can be safely reunited with extended family. Most of them are here because they have lost at least one of their parents. All of them are here because AIDS has rearranged the accepted tenets of how their childhood should work.
Retselisitsoe Mohlomi (like so many before him) arrives at the safe home a pre-corpse. He is HIV positive, a hollow-eyed skeleton with an oxygen mask engulfing his face. He lingers around the edges of death just long enough to ruin everyone’s month.
And then he recovers. (See, this is what Nthabeleng does—takes really-should-be-dead babies and converts them into most-certainly-alive babies.) Gradually, gradually, Retselisitsoe’s body adjusts to antiretroviral meds. His metabolism stabilizes. He acquires muscle mass and bone density. Later he learns to walk, which is what many children his age would have done a year prior. When I comment on this transformation, Nthabeleng yells at me, as she will do.
“Hey, uena! Don’t you know yet—this place is where we turn babies into balloons!” She draws out the double-O sound in the word balloons, inflating those vowels in the same way that she inflates the children.
The better part of a year passes. Now Retselisitsoe is a fat and yowling toddler-tank. He is a doe-eyed bruiser, a knocker-down of children, a goofy stumbling future rugby star. The mental image of his initial form—that skeletal pre-corpse—is crumpled up and pitched into the wastebasket of unpleasant memories.
And finally, after a year, Retselisitsoe is healthy enough to return to his grandparents, who are caring for his four siblings in a small village about an hour’s drive from Mokhotlong.
Do I need to say that both of his parents are dead?
Perhaps this sounds like a difficult life: five young siblings being raised by two decrepit elders. Assuredly it is. And in Lesotho, especially up here in the mountains, it is a far-too-common way of life.
But I must note, to be accurate, that Retselisitsoe and his siblings do have something special going for them—that maybe their situation isn’t the absolute worst. This is because Retselisitsoe’s grandparents are among the most endearing and resilient human beings I have ever encountered. But before I explain what is most striking about Retselisitsoe’s grandparents, a bit of context on male-female interactions. In these outer reaches of Mokhotlong District, it is still culturally accepted, although now technically illegal, for a man to perform chobeliso: the kidnapping of a girl from her bed in dark of night to claim her as a wife. I have heard this practice—with the most disturbing of euphemisms—referred to as “proposing.” Walking through town, I once saw a married couple pass within feet of each other and not make eye contact. Another time, as I walked into a party with a Mosotho friend, the mountain wind whipping around us, I realized that he was intending to leave his wife sitting there in the passenger seat of the car, where she would patiently await our return from the celebration. And while I am certain that many Basotho would raise eyebrows at some of our own dissolute Western behaviors, the simple fact is that gender interactions here often strike my outsider eyes as bizarre.
What is shocking then—against this backdrop—is that Ma and Pa Mohlomi, these two crusty souls eking toward their eighties, seem deeply happy to be married. Proud, perhaps, of their shared decades scraping together a living
in an earthen hut on the side of a mountain.
And perhaps that raises a question. When two people do share decades in an earthen hut on the side of a mountain, how exactly do they scrape together a living, especially when that side of a mountain is in eastern Lesotho, notoriously devoid of arable land?
That answer, like all worthy answers, lies at the bottom of a bucket of joala.
We have inched the 4WD along the edge of a gorge where down below small goats are capering over loose rock. Ellen and I are heading for the rondavel of Ma and Pa Mohlomi. We have come for joala.
This is how Ma and Pa Mohlomi make their living, brewing joala in large stinking barrels in their hut. As we approach, they are standing in the doorway like a Basotho version of American Gothic, ramrod straight and stone-faced. Then Pa Mohlomi puts his arm around Ma’s shoulders and says mosali oaka, my wife. His nose accordions up as he smiles; she laughs like a teenager. Beside their rondavel an enormous hog is snuffling through the dirt, shaggy and mottled black and white, and on a nearby tree branch a scrap of white cloth flutters in the breeze, indicating homebrew for sale inside.
I should admit that our visit does not revolve entirely around joala. We have come mostly because we miss Retselisitsoe, that little piss-and-vinegar destructoid, and somewhat because we need a joala fix, but also because we are bearing a stopgap supply of his antiretroviral meds.
Ma and Pa Mohlomi, in addition to keeping Retselisitsoe happy, healthy, coddled, and clean, have also mastered his HIV regimen—a dizzying daily concoction of Medicine X (4 mL, morning and night) and Suspension Y (2 mL in the morning, 3 mL at night) and Syrup Z (3 mL in the morning, 2 mL at night)—despite the fact neither can read and neither has received even the most rudimentary medical education. But today they have gotten word to Nthabeleng that Retselisitsoe’s med supply will run out before their next chance to get to the rural clinic, a several-hour hike beyond their village.