by Will McGrath
“Any questions?”
No, sir.
“So I will write the fraction on the board and—”
Lowest terms, sir.
I go to the board and begin to write, using my notebook to shield the fraction from their eyes. This strikes them as hilarious and they roar with laughter. I finish writing the fraction, then look back at them, still holding my notebook in place.
They burst from their seats, hands raised, snapping fingers at me, nearly toppling over to get my attention, trying to resist stampeding the board, begging to be called on, ninety-two baby bird voices calling out in desperate unison:
Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir!
It is madness.
So I yell “Tholang, bo-abuti le bo-ausi!” and they become quiet. “You are raising your hands because you think you know the answer?”
Yes, sir.
“But you haven’t seen the fraction yet.”
No, sir.
“So how could you know the answer if you haven’t seen the fraction yet?”
Yes, sir.
For a moment I almost lose my teacherly composure, I almost smile. “Okay, when I take my notebook away, you look at the fraction, and then you try to put it in lowest terms. Is everyone ready?”
Yes, sir.
I shift my notebook one millimeter, just to see what will happen. The fraction is still completely hidden from view.
They burst forth again, hands raised, fingers snapping, straining out of their seats, ninety-two central nervous systems in synaptic meltdown.
I can no longer resist temptation. I choose Nkhopoleng, sitting on the front bench, she of widest eye, of sweetest smile.
“Nkhopoleng, yes, what is the answer?”
The classroom falls into an intergalactic silence.
Nkhopoleng: just one second ago in a frenzy to be called on, frothing with anxiety that she might not be called on, now suddenly and horrifyingly called on. Terror radiates from her wide eyes as she attempts to process the enormity of her situation. I can see the gears in her brain—still a bright brassy gold, still well-oiled and rust-free—I can see her brain gears lock up behind those translucent eyes. Her body settles into glacial stillness, as if I might somehow look past her.
“Nkhopoleng, you have the answer?”
Silence. For years.
“Nkhopoleng, yes?”
Finally a tiny voice, tinier than the tiniest grain of sand: “Eight, sir?”
I stare at her. I am bordering on sadism by this point.
“Eight? You think the fraction, in lowest terms, that is still hidden behind this notebook, that you have not yet seen, is the number eight?”
“Yes, sir?”
I sigh and let the moment ride out. “Well, you’re close. Anyone else?”
I did, sometime later, ask what precipitated the whipping.
Hlompho had caught the two boys in the middle of an end-of-exams prank. They were carrying a dead rat with them, which they planned to leave in the school’s kitchen with a lunch plate in front of it. The rat—the boys were hoping, in an attempt at pungent commentary—would appear to have consumed the daily meal and keeled over.
During my first week of teaching in Mokhotlong, one of my colleagues informed me that I too would be expected to punish when the children misbehaved.
Ntate Lebo, from the Scrabble cohort, is a young man only a few years graduated from this selfsame institution, fresh from teachers’ college now. “What kind of punishment?” I ask him, thinking about ‘M’e Khauhelo and her willow switch—prized for its thin, elegant form, its superior firmness, its tightness of recoil—which she slices down across the open palms of small girls who have violated the dress code. I think about Ntate Thabiso and the section of rubber hose that he keeps close at hand, a warning to students about how they will get hit if caught speaking Sesotho and not English on the school grounds.
Lebo sighs. He can’t be any older than twenty-one, this boy teacher. Months later, I will run into him on the main road and he will excitedly tell me about the saxophone lessons he is taking at his church. He is thin and gentle and—yes, that is the only word. Lebo is the physical embodiment of gentleness.
“As for punishments,” he tells me, “many of the teachers beat the students because it is easiest. But some teachers make the students do work instead, like cutting weeds or carrying rocks up from the river.”
“What do they do with the rocks?”
“They make them carry the rocks back down to the river.”
I ask him what type of punishment he prefers.
“Well, it is difficult. The punishment for the student must not also be a punishment for the teacher. But I do think the punishment should be something useful. For me, I make the students write poems, since I am an English teacher. They hate this writing too too much, because if the poem does not rhyme, they must write me a new one. But the best thing is that they are practicing and learning.”
Lebo asks me what I’m going to do when the time comes.
I think for a moment, wondering about the ways in which violence radiates out into the world, transmitted neighbor to neighbor, teacher to student, amplifying and receding—these small personal moments of degradation.
“Poems,” I say. “I’ll have them write poems too.”
Friday, late afternoon:
We leave the classroom, teacher and student alike pulsing with buoyant weekend joy. The end of the school year is on the horizon as well—we can all feel it coming. We are buzzy and humming with that mild electricity at the base of the spine.
We come out of our various classroom buildings and into the assembly space outside. Now here is the student body mobbed in front of the Form A building—the first year students’ building—the whole school gathered and jeering, calling for Form A students to show themselves. My ninety-two are out in front of the building, milling about with their peers, awkward, smiling, unsure.
When I ask one of the teachers what is going on, he turns to me and says: “Oh, they are mocking them.” He is surprised I don’t know that today is the day the student body gathers to mock the first-year students.
Then he comments casually, “And now they will beat them.”
This is how the rock fight begins.
A granite hail pours from the heavens, falling first upon Form A students, flung skyward by the gathered upperclassmen, and then, in retaliation, a return volley from Form A, the air alive with projectiles, chunk after chunk thudding: rock, pebble, stone, knot, brick, clod, clot. Children are running, screaming with hilarity and fear, looking for cover, looking for ammo.
Perhaps it is inevitable.
Nkhopoleng—she of widest eye and sweetest smile and so very very small—Nkhopoleng staggers away from Form A, swaying woozily, her wide eyes glazed now, her eyelids beginning to droop, her head streaming blood in bright red rivulets, a little delta across her forehead.
Nkhopoleng slumps over like wet snow coming off an angled roof.
It is then that the teachers begin yelling at everyone to stop the rock fight—For shame!—this rock fight they all knew would happen.
It is then that Hlompho runs in, scoops her up in his arms, picks her up like nothing, and heads for the hospital.
PORTRAIT OF A PATH THROUGH TOWN
Ellen and I are making our way along the secret footpath, talking about nothing. We have wandered into a discussion about old sitcoms.
“Cheers?” I ask her. “The TV show Cheers? With Woody and those guys? It’s one of the most beloved shows in television history.”
“Yeah, I don’t know,” Ellen shrugs. “I just
always found it too dark.” “What do you mean? That show was relentlessly goofy.”
“No, you know: dark. It was always so dark down in that bar, no natural light. I just wanted those people to get some air, go run around outside or something.”
We pause to step over some barbed wire on the hidden footpath.
“I think that’s the most Canadian thing you’ve ever said to me.”
There is a hidden footpath that winds serpentine through the camptown, nosing between houses and curving across fields, disdaining perpendicularity as it meanders diagonal-ish through Mokhotlong. The path begins as a thin dirt strip out near the pitso ground—that flat stretch of land where town meetings take place—wide enough only for feet placed in single file. It quickly snakes between two stretches of homemade barbed-wire fence and then ducks out of sight. Experienced path-goers know to walk sideways here to keep the barbs from snagging hungrily in shirts or pants or dresses. On one side of this barbed-wire throughway, a small field of maize serves as a buffer from the road, and for a while path-goers are completely hidden, an odd and delightful sensation here in the middle of town. Soon the path emerges from the maize and comes upon planted rows of moroho—spinach, kale, chard—the boundaries of an old man’s property. This grandfather, ntate moholo, is out in his backyard every day, digging, stacking, dragging, prying, chopping. He pauses and waves, looking scholarly with short dark hair and a silver goatee.
The path then empties onto a small cow pasture—home to four or five bovine sunbathers, their tails steadily tallying seconds—and continues past an unfinished house, perpetually under construction. Abandoned cinderblocks lie scattered around the cow pasture. Now the path jinks boldly down an alleyway and through someone’s backyard. Another low barbed-wire fence must be hurdled—a challenge for dress-wearers and those wrapped in traditional blankets—and then a clothesline must be ducked underneath. Here the path disgorges onto the road lined with joala shanties, where old men sit out front drinking their homebrew and laughing at a joke they beat to death back in the early nineteenth century.
Ellen and I are picking our way along the hidden path when we come to the mini pasture. Instead of sunbathing cows, though, we find several mokhotlo birds—the southern bald ibis, the town’s namesake. In Sesotho, the letters -ng at the end of a word often indicate place, so the name “Mokhotlong” literally means “mokhotlo place.” Or, in our own personal patois, “Bald-Ibis-Land.” The mokhotlo is omnipresent here, familiar through its awkward hitch-step and squawking choke-cry. The bird’s Latin name, Geronticus calvus, is apt—it means “bald old man.” The curving orange beak comes attached to the face of an elderly butler.
“Have you ever noticed,” Ellen says, “that a mokhotlo sounds exactly like a person trying to imitate a mokhotlo?”
Before I can finish rolling this piece of recursive logic through my head, she demonstrates, producing a throttled shout from the back of her throat. The birds, generally fearless, bolt for the heavens.
Now we pass ntate moholo digging in his garden. Soon we are hidden in the maize stalks, invisible, passing sideways through the barbed-wire fences.
“I went out looking for a man named Kapoko today,” Ellen tells me. “Nthabeleng told me I should find him—a grandfather raising his two young grandsons by himself.”
Ellen had set out for his village on her motorcycle and was met at the road by two grandmothers, laughing as they hobbled down the hill to greet her. “We saw you coming on your horse!” one called out. The women sent Ellen up the hill, where she found another old grandmother, an ancient and blind nkhono, who was very slowly working her way toward an outhouse, inching along, nearly motionless, holding onto a piece of wire that had been run between the outhouse and her rondavel. This was Ntate Kapoko’s mother, and it was he who had run the guideline for her.
Ellen sat talking with nkhono in the cooking rondavel while they waited for Kapoko to return. The small space was immaculately ordered. Their set of enamel crockery was laid out on a bench along the wall with cups, plates, and bowls leaning against each other in precise repeating patterns, both to allow for efficient air drying and as visual embellishment, a decorative border—aesthetics emerging even in the simplest things. Mats sat folded beside the crockery, storage buckets nested in a tower, and the mud plaster floor was perfectly swept. There was not an extraneous thing in the rondavel, every inch optimized.
“Yes, he is taking very good care of his grandsons,” nkhono told Ellen. “You can see. He is cooking, he wakes up early to fetch the water, he washes them.” She spoke proudly. “Kannete—he is like a woman in the household!”
Soon Kapoko himself arrived, a thoughtful man in his sixties, with a certain intensity simmering beneath the surface of his words. One of his grandsons, Jesi, was hanging tightly to his pants leg. Kapoko’s wife had left the family long ago, and he had raised their two children by himself. Then, several years ago, his grown daughter returned to the village, dying of AIDS-related complications. He nursed her in her final days, and after she was gone he took on the responsibility of her two boys.
He and Ellen were discussing his experience as the main caregiver for his grandsons—the challenges he faced raising the boys alone, the routines of daily life—when he echoed a comment that nkhono had made earlier.
“This boy, Jesi?” Kapoko said, rubbing his grandson’s head, “he thinks of me as the mother. He doesn’t know his mother, he only knows that his mother is me.”
Jesi ran outside to play, aware he was the topic of conversation. He picked up a stick and began trying to swat the leaves off a tree, he and some other boys taking turns.
Kapoko continued: “Sometimes he can even say Ntate Kapoko, are you my mother? I tell him that his mother is Pulane, but he doesn’t understand. Where is she? Where has she gone? What will she bring me when she comes back? But he is just four. He doesn’t understand when people are saying his mother is dead. He only sees that I am the one giving him food, that I am the one sweeping and cleaning, doing laundry, doing everything—so he says I am his mother.”
At the safe home, the house mothers stare in wonder whenever Ellen hops onto her motorcycle. They laugh in amazement when they see me sweeping our rondavel or doing the laundry. It is easier for us makhooa to buck culturally embedded gender roles, I think—the Basotho are willing to accept our irregularities as bizarre and probably harmless—but no one quite has an answer for Kapoko. If you ask any Basotho whom the best caregivers are, the answer is always women, fundamentally and unchangeably women. Yet Kapoko’s skill and dedication in raising his children and grandchildren is indisputable, and so he and the few others like him remain a marvel out here in the mountains, referred to in female terms, unable to fit neatly within an established paradigm, incomprehensible as solely male even to himself.
This doesn’t seem to bother him, though; Kapoko is not the type to genuflect before social norms. In the cooking rondavel, he told Ellen another story, about the time they came to take his grandsons away.
When Kapoko’s daughter returned to the village a few years back, it was clear that she was dying. “Her stomach was swollen,” he says, “and she refused to take the pills. She was ready to go home.”
Nkhono is sitting next to him, listening. “She died in his hands,” she says. “That girl died in his hands.”
Jesi was very sick too, but Kapoko knew the matter was beyond his abilities, so he brought the boy into the hospital. Jesi stabilized there, gradually, and after a few weeks returned to Kapoko’s household.
“Kannete!” interjects nkhono, “he is doing so well! Jesi is a man now. And always talking, talking—joooooeee!—he was not like that before!”
Jesi has been listening outside the door and takes this moment to run back inside and flop dramatically over his grandfather’s knee. He remains there, casually draped, trying to get a handle on what the grown-ups are talking about.
Kapoko is leaning forward now, his eyes lit up, an edge in his voice. “But when
Jesi was healthy, the other family came to take these boys. The father’s relatives.”
Kapoko is referring to the patrilineal nature of Basotho society. Traditionally—even legally—Jesi and his brother “belong” to the dead father’s side of the family, no matter who has been caring for them, no matter who has raised them, the same situation that Ma and Pa Mohlomi found themselves in after Retselisitsoe died.
“Those relatives came to take the boys, do you hear? And I stopped them in the road.”
Jesi is sitting on Kapoko’s lap now.
“I told them that my daughter had come to me very sick. I told them her marriage was not good, they had not paid all the bridewealth. And after the husband was gone, she was not living well in their village—kannete!—they had not been caring for her there.”
Jesi is tunneling deeper into his grandfather’s arms.
“I was the one who cared for her when she was dying. And after she was dead, I contacted the other family, but they would not come to see her buried. All these things I did by myself.”
He is holding Jesi tightly as he speaks, no longer addressing Ellen. “And now you come after some months, when these boys are healthy, after I have been caring for them—and you say you are coming to take these children? And I say to you: the children of whom?”
Kapoko sits back after a moment, stirs from his memory. He looks down at Jesi, then looks back at Ellen.
“So they went away without anything. There was nothing they could do.”
As Ellen and I walk back up the hill toward our rondavel, I find myself thinking about my own grandfather, gone for some time now but a giant still in my mind. I can see him standing in the shade of sturdy oaks during a childhood baseball game, watching me from across the distance as I fidget in the outfield, praying the game won’t encroach upon my peaceful territory. Even in the shadow of those oaks, he is towering. When my siblings and I were little, he often came to watch us, and I revered him, although reverence always incorporates some portion of fear.