Everything Lost Is Found Again

by Will McGrath

  But I am wrong. Our former driver, the very small man, climbs into the front passenger seat and perches jauntily atop the passenger-side dashboard, his back pressed up against the inside of the windshield. He is staring directly into the face of the man riding shotgun, balanced in a position in which the errant bump or sudden acceleration will result in intimate congress between these two. The new rider puts the minibus into gear and we continue down the road.

  So then: twenty-three.

  Taxi Name: Any taxi worth taking has a name, a creative moniker that conveys the vehicle’s personality and brand, a name that represents the taxi’s best self. The following are vehicles that I have personally seen or traveled in, an alphabetized list that can only hint at the diversity of fantastically named minibuses that prowl Lesotho’s vertiginous mountain roads.

  Accessorize

  After the Storm

  Air Force

  All Good

  Angelina: Born from a True Woman

  Another Boy

  Appletiser

  Atlantic

  Black 8-Ball

  Chama Boy

  Chedie Boyz

  Chesa Mpama (trans: “Slap in the Face”)

  Chocolate Musse

  Cool Down

  Cure Ball

  Customer Care

  Deep & Quiet

  Diamond Lady

  Discount

  Dog Pound

  Dot Com

  Enjoy the Ride

  Feel It!

  G-String Dropper

  Gadaffi

  Glamorous

  God Never Fails

  Good Samaritan

  Helicopter

  Jealous Down

  Just Imagine

  Loaded Weapon

  Master Peace

  Masterpiece

  Me Against the World

  Mysterio

  Negotiator

  New Covenant

  Night-Bat

  Night Owl

  Oceanic

  Peace of Love

  Perseverance

  Pig Cannibal

  Play Boy

  Poison

  President

  Princess

  Razzmatazz

  Red for Danger

  Red Sea

  Saddam

  Salute

  Sexy Boyz

  Sexy Eyes

  Slow Poison

  Smooth Style

  Speed Five

  Storm

  Take Five

  Taliban

  Taliban II

  Tears of Joy

  Tennessee

  The Animal

  The Boss is Back

  The Eagle Has Landed

  The Heavens Are Telling

  The P.I.G.

  The Terminator

  Think Twice

  Thundersound

  Top Ten

  Toy Car

  Twice You Lose

  Undertaker: Dead Man is Wonderful Back

  Wrong Button

  Xonophobia

  Taxi Rank: A centralized lot where minibuses gather to collect passengers for specific routes; an outdoor minibus depot. This is where Ellen and I are heading after we arrive at the Bloemfontein airport. We have been traveling in South Africa and need to make our way to the taxi rank in Bloem so we can travel to the border crossing into Maseru.

  Outside the Bloemfontein airport, we run into a lanky driver with sandy hair falling limply across his forehead, a thin corn-colored mustache, and a face creased early from decades of smoking. He is happy to take us to the taxi rank. His name is Christian and he looks like he has been transported to this spot from the year 1982.

  In the car, we talk sports. I am wearing a jersey from the Bloemfontein Celtic, a soccer team with a strong Basotho fan base since they play in the Free State, the only South African province that is majority Sotho speakers. Christian gushes about cricket. He is delighted by my ignorance of the sport, as it gives him an opportunity to philosophize about rules of play, strategy, and the general artistry of the pursuit. His English is crisp with a clipped Afrikaner tint. I ask Christian if he is originally from Bloemfontein. “I’ve never left it,” he declares proudly.

  Some context: Bloemfontein is the capital of the Free State, an Afrikaner stronghold in South Africa, and the Afrikaners are an ethnic group who—whether fairly or unfairly—are best known for their role in the National Party, the political party that ruled South Africa from 1948 to 1994 and instituted a system of apartheid based on white supremacist beliefs and fears of “die swart gevaar”(“the black threat”). The Afrikaners ended up in the Free State after their ancestors—the Boers—migrated there from the Cape Colony over the course of a decade beginning in 1835. Their ancestors were primarily Dutch Calvinist farmer-frontiersmen who left the Cape Colony after the British abolished slavery there, something that proved significantly detrimental to the Boer farming system. As the Boers journeyed north into what is now the Free State—a voyage called “the Great Trek”—they occasionally kidnapped indigenous children to use as slaves (or “inboekselings,” as they rather euphemistically called them: “apprentices”). The Boers saw themselves as divinely chosen to wander amidst the savages, heading toward some distant promised land, and they compared their sojourn to the biblical journey of the Israelites, who also claimed that God had sent them into the desert. The Boers eventually invaded territory that was part of Moshoeshoe’s kingdom, which led to guerrilla warfare and general bloodshed throughout the region.

  I am glossing generations of intricate political and ethnic history in a handful of sentences, which is always dangerous. Surely progressive Afrikaners today reject the abhorrent racial tenets of their National Party forebears and their Boer ancestors. But the racial legacy of the Free State must be acknowledged, since interactions between Afrikaners (12 percent of the province) and Sotho speakers (64 percent of the province) are still fraught with hidden and obvious tensions.

  As Christian guides our taxi through the arid Free State terrain, I am thinking about Palesa, a Mosotho woman who got her economics degree from the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein. She told me about the time she sat down on a bench outside the admissions office, only to have the Afrikaner student next to her sigh disgustedly and move several seats away. She told me about the student group that tried to get the dorms re-segregated. She told me how the University of the Free State made international headlines when a video surfaced on the Internet showing white students urinating into the food of black cafeteria workers.

  Of course, this is all secondhand from Palesa. Personally, I can only speak to the Afrikaner woman who let us exit her shop without a second glance while she rummaged angrily through the purses of the Sotho-speaking teenagers shopping beside us, or the bloated Bloemfontein hostel owner who joined us for dinner one night, only to launch into a lurid racial jeremiad after his second drink.

  I am eyeing Christian in the rearview mirror as he deconstructs cricket gameplay; he is unaware that I have found him guilty of racial crimes against humanity. Eventually, though, I dismiss my internal kangaroo court. It seems only fair, considering my own country’s horrific racial history. I do a quick calculation and realize that the American Civil Rights Act predates the end of apartheid by just thirty years.

  The Free State blurs beside us, rust-colored and flat. Christian—who is actually quite sweet—prattles on happily about wickets and bowlers and overs. After a moment, I remember that he is just a guy who wanted to give us a ride into town.

  Soon we have arrived in Bloemfontein city center. But when Ellen and I explain that we are going to the taxi rank to find a minibus headed for Maseru, Christian suddenly becomes concerned.

  “The taxi rank?” He begins murmuring to himself, starting to speak and then doubling back, trying to find just the right words for it. We are moving through city traffic now, sliding past the four enormous cooling towers painted with gaudy sunflower murals.

  “I suppose—if you preferred, of
course—I suppose I could take you all the way to Maseru myself, perhaps an hour, an hour and a half further—”

  He is looking at us in the rearview mirror.

  “I could take you to the border at least, although it would be rather expensive, hiring a personal car for that distance—”

  Drumming his fingers anxiously on the wheel.

  “It’s only that the taxi rank, well, I shouldn’t say dangerous—”

  He laughs softly, looks apologetically up at us.

  “But the minibuses, you know, and the taxi rank in general, well, it’s simply a matter of—”

  Christian sighs.

  “There are just so many—”

  We have pulled up to the taxi rank, loud and dense and jittery with life. He can’t figure out how to say it.

  We pay Christian and thank him for the ride, and he shakes our hands over the back seat partition. As we get out, he eyes us like a worried parent.

  Soon we have disappeared into vibrant chaos. It is oddly comforting to hear people speaking Sesotho again. There are families piling into taxis, kids chasing each other between stalls, women cooking street food inside tiny shanties, and men spilling out of matchbox bars as they yell at soccer games. I greet a man in Sesotho and ask him which minibus we want—there are upward of forty jammed into this little square—and he starts laughing and takes my hand. He leads us to an unmarked doorway where we buy tickets, then guides us to the appropriate minibus.

  As we walk, he points to my Bloemfontein Celtic jersey. Maselesele are not doing so well this year, he says, and maybe I should consider switching my allegiance to the Orlando Pirates. He pulls open his jacket to show me his Pirates jersey, emblazoned with that famous skull and crossbones. He is confident his team will be victorious this year.

  Eventually we reach our minibus, and the man heads back toward one of the bars. Ellen and I sardine ourselves in among our eighteen new best friends. Out in the taxi rank, the man looks back at us and points to his jersey, chuckling and shaking his head.

  GHOSTS IN SNOW & ROCK

  There are men now, ten of them, in front of the barbershop—a metal shanty near the spot where the main road wishbones into two. I have never actually seen anyone being barbered here, but the shanty is nonetheless a hub of masculine activity. It leans in the wind on a stretch of road just past the cobbler’s shop, Bad G’s Botique, near the two competing coffin stands where carpenters are joining wooden planks into frames. Today they’re building children’s coffins.

  The ten men in front of the barbershop are huddled over a game. It is called morabaraba and it is well beyond my comprehension.

  “Eh?” I ask.

  “MOH-RAH-BAH-RAH-BAH,” one of the men enunciates.

  It is a board game, a game of strategic positioning, involving two men, who move pieces around a spiderweb-shaped playing field, and eight men, who lean over them yelling directives and clawing their skulls in frustration. In this instance, the men are playing on a large flat piece of salvaged plastic, the spiderweb drawn on with marker. One man commands a team of pebbles, the other a battalion of old bottle caps. They are slamming the pieces around the board: tock! tock! tock! tock! tock!

  I ask a bystander, who is vigorously coaching one of the combatants, how the game works.

  “Morabaraba,” he tells me, “only for bo-ntate.”

  He points to three bottle caps. “Those ones are likhomo, the cows—”

  But cuts his explanation short to yell “Butle! Butle! Butle! Butle! Butler!” at his advisee, as the man starts to reach for an ill-advised piece.

  The two men slide their pebbles and bottle caps rapidly around the web, occasionally stopping to flick the other player’s pieces unceremoniously into the dirt, resulting in roars of approval from the onlookers. Eventually one man wins and one man loses, the winner having guided his cows to some desirable end, I suppose. A new contestant sits down, the pebbles and bottle caps are gathered, and the game begins again.

  I continue my stroll through town. Behind me I can hear the men laughing and happily shit-talking, the aura of easy camaraderie hanging in the late afternoon air, this genial hum of conversation warding off the coming night, at least for a little while.

  This is later. It may seem significantly unrelated to morabaraba, and maybe it is.

  We are on our way back from Sani Pass, having hired Ntate J—a friendly man from the same village where Nthabeleng grew up—to give us a lift to Mokhotlong in his truck. An ice storm has encased the area overnight, and Ntate J is maneuvering through treacherous switchbacks, churning down sludgy tracks that run alongside the gorge.

  Whenever we pass another 4WD, Ntate J stops briefly to chat with the driver. In his thirtyish years, Ntate J has worked as a shepherd, a tour guide, and an auto mechanic. He is the kind of person who can fix or procure whatever needs fixing or procuring, and he knows everything that transpires on the mountain: a reliable man to have at the wheel. Most notably—and this is wholly consistent with the labyrinthine internal logic of Lesotho, where all courses must bend and curve and intersect again—I realize, when he pulls up, that I know Ntate J from somewhere. He is the man our comically overstuffed minibus once stopped for along a mountain road, he who leapt into the driver’s seat and took the wheel while the former driver went jauntily to the passenger-side dashboard and rode out the journey leaning into another man’s face.

  As we round a bend, we come across a group of four shepherds trudging through the snow, all wrapped in woolen Basotho blankets, all in gumboots, all with sturdy wooden molamo in hand, all masked in balaclavas—gray-faced phantoms moving through ankle-deep slush, eyes visible through slits in the fabric. These four shepherds are leaving a taxi, a 4WD minibus, parked in the snow behind them, and I wonder if their vehicle is stuck atop this remote pass. Ntate J calls out to them with the same thought in mind. The four shepherds stop at the window of our truck.

  Ntate J is quickly involved in a jovial conversation. The four men pull off their balaclavas, their eyes bright with some shared joke, their faces shining from exertion, and now the five of them are laughing, the shepherds pointing up over a ridge. Ntate J is shaking his head as he chuckles. Now that their balaclavas are off, I can see that two of them have their hair cut in traditional shepherd style, close-cropped all around, but one man has a single blunted rhino horn of hair, another sporting two wicked devil horns. After a few minutes, the shepherds pull their balaclavas down again and set off, waving at Ntate J.

  We drive on. After a moment, I ask if the shepherds’ minibus is stuck in the snow.

  “No,” Ntate J says. “They are leaving it behind so it will not be seen.”

  This piques curiosity.

  “But where are they going?”

  “They are going to beat that man,” Ntate J says. “They are going to beat him badly.”

  Silence in the truck. Then: “What?”

  “The shepherd who stays on that side. They are going to beat him very very badly.”

  Ntate J accurately interprets our further silence as an invitation to continue.

  “Those four men, they have found that the shepherd who stays on that side has stolen a sheep from the flock. He is the flock’s caretaker, yes, but he is not the flock’s owner, and so he does not have the right to eat the sheep’s meat. These men, they have found the oils on the rocks, they know this shepherd is the guilty one.”

  Ntate J swerves to avoid a donkey in the road.

  “They must beat him so badly. And maybe they will kill him.” He pauses. “Really, they must.”

  Ntate J is relating all of this in an amiable and even-handed tone, as if giving directions to a stranger at an intersection.

  “Because when someone is the thief, it means he does not want you to live. If the thief steals from you, it means he does not care if you can live. Kannete, he is threatening your livelihood. And if he does not want you to live, then you must kill this man.”

  His eyes go to the rearview mirror.


  “Even you,” he says, “if that man would kill you, I think you would kill that man.”

  We have no response.

  “When I was the shepherd, and I was ten years old, the other shepherds once stole a sheep. I did not steal it, but I did eat the meat, so even I was responsible.” He is lost in this surfacing memory for a moment. “Some other shepherds found us and beat us very badly for this crime. So badly that we went into the hospital.”

  The truck judders down the road, the door latch beside me rattling.

  “You see, when you are the shepherd, you will eat only papa, only maize meal. You will eat papa once during the day, and it will be this way for six months. Perhaps one time in six months you will eat meat—ichu!—you will be so hungry! But once I was beaten, I knew to never steal the sheep again, even when I was very very hungry. And when I was older, I taught the small boys not to steal the sheep. Because the thief—hei!—it means the thief does not want you to live. So you must beat that man very badly. You must kill that man.”

  His eyes are on us again.

  “And when you kill the thief, even God will be on your side.”