by Will McGrath
Overnight, a heavy storm blows through Mokhotlong. The camptown is always cold in the winter but rarely gets heavy snowfall; this storm rattles the windowpanes all night and dumps half a foot on the ground.
In the morning, Ellen goes out in front of the nursery’s big glass window, scraping and molding the snow into a waist-high mound. The children are pressed up against the window, the bo-‘me’ curious as well, all of them trying to decode this latest makhooa oddity. Ellen is shivering in the cold. She adds raisins for buttons, small twigs for arms, finds a traditional Sesotho hat to place on top. It is the carrot nose that does it—for whatever reason, this is the tipping point into absurdity. The bo-‘m’e are doubled over, the children jumping up and down, thrilled to get the joke.
Out there in the villages, out beyond the edges of the camptown, people are hunkered down in their rondavels, wrapped in layers of blankets, burrowed deeply into their beds—Ma and Pa Mohlomi are out there, Kapoko and Jesi too—everyone in quiet villages, trying to stay warm, waiting.
We are heading home soon.
Ellen is below, gathering her belongings. Tonight I have hiked up the mountain by myself. I am standing alone as Mokhotlong unfolds before me. There is the pitso ground where they held Tseli’s kindergarten graduation, there is the Thia-La-La butchery, there is the Whitehouse, there are the joala shanties. I can see the high school buildings at the edge of the gorge, brooding like hens huddled in the wind, the property hemmed in by the sinuous course the river cuts through town. To the west there are men working in the Stock Theft Detection Unit corral, and past that is Nthabeleng’s neighborhood, lit up where the sun has started to dip. The candy-cane radio tower marks the empty dining room of the Senqu Hotel. And although it is invisible, I can trace with my eyes the hidden footpath that winds through Mokhotlong’s backyards. The metal roofs of the houses are ablaze with reflected light—it looks like someone has shattered an enormous mirror against the valley floor—and everything is far away and washed in the mournful distant light of the setting sun. It is the time of day when ghosts move through the terraced graveyards carved into the mountainside.
I am thinking about those shepherds as I climb. I wonder if they killed that man, if he died out there alone in the snow and rock. I wonder what it can mean to live like that—an existence of bare-bones pastoral simplicity, of violent biblical retribution, of psychological and physical extremes. These young men, these young boys, they float in gauzy oblivion across the mountain, smoking dakha, drifting for days or weeks without seeing a human face, out on some desolate peak talking only to their flock. What can it mean to be removed from human congress like that? Sometimes I’ll find shoulder-high spires of stone up in the mountains, things that shepherds have constructed, balancing rock atop rock until a perfect tower rises from the earth: some way to pass the lonely hours, perhaps, or a system for counting the flock? Then I’ll see an identical steeple on a peak across the gap, a hand-piled response: I was here, too.
As I come over a rise, I am suddenly confronted with a rudimentary morabaraba board etched into a flat-top boulder. The spiderweb design is clear, and some pebbles and bottle caps are gathered around the base of the boulder, the two teams of likhomo. It looks primordial carved into this boulder, ancient and chthonic, somehow predating the hands that engraved it. It is a meeting point for wandering shepherds, some place of communion. I wonder how long they wait here by this rock, hoping for a game, before drifting further into the wilderness.
I think back to those men in front of the barbershop, the joyous caffeinated energy of that moment, the brotherly badinage. Far below I can hear the activity of town—sound carries for miles up here—scrapping dogs, children hollering the wild fantasies of youth, the incessant braying of taxis, and perpetual song: schoolchildren as they walk home, bo-‘m’e singing while they sweep out their shops, soldiers and police in countermelody as they jog in formation along the main road—the endless communal song of Mokhotlong. Up here on the mountain, the town feels imminent, haunting and intangible, a shadow world attempting to manifest.
AN ENCOUNTER AT SANI BOTTOM
On the road from Mokhotlong to Durban:
Ellen and I are crammed into a rattletrap minibus, holding twenty, everyone bearing bags or people or both on their laps. The vehicle is stuffed with grandmothers and children, men traveling to find work in South Africa, and shepherds in heavy blankets—the whole minibus suffused with the rich scent of cookfire, as everything in rural Lesotho must be. As we jostle down the road, the subwoofers rattle the floor with famo.
Soon we arrive at Sani Top, the windswept border crossing between Lesotho and South Africa, about 9,500 feet above sea level. The border crossing here consists of a single one-story building where the guard sits forlornly, cocooned in winter coat, hat, and gloves. The height of winter has passed through—down below, spring is starting to emerge—but up here, the wind is unrelenting. The Mosotho border guard gives a cursory glance at our passports, a small nod, and then we are back in the minibus and heading down the mountain to Sani Bottom, the South African half of the border. I glance over my shoulder and see that sign one last time: Kena ka khotso.
In between these two border posts, we descend three thousand feet of mountain through some liminal territory. It is an hour’s worth of driving, the minibus carefully winding over tiny strippets of mountain water. Then we reach Sani Bottom and pass into South Africa, which is almost immediately flat and green. It is clear who drew the boundary lines.
Our minibus scoots down the road, then past the usual drop-off point, the driver disregarding our transfer site without explanation. No one in the minibus appears to notice or care. We pass a rolling golf course on our left, part of a luxe South African resort where the wealthy come to play golf in the shadow of the Drakensberg Mountains. The driver turns off the main road here, opposite the resort, and heads down a dusty track. Just over a small rise, and almost out of sight of the resort, the driver skids to a stop amidst a stretch of fifteen or twenty rundown shacks stranded in the middle of nowhere. He jumps out of the minibus, again without explanation, and heads into one of the shacks. The minibus and its passengers remain parked in the sun.
In this tiny hidden outpost, a handful of people are milling about. We are just a few hours into the new day. I lean out the window—it is boiling in the taxi now, our twenty bodies pressed tightly together, sweat lubricating the boundaries of our skin. Chickens scurry nervously through the dust stirred up by our arrival.
A young man sitting in front of one of the shanties gets up and approaches my window. He is somewhere in his twenties, shirtless, with sweat glistening in the hollow of his concave sternum. He wears the blue cotton Jonsson workpants favored by manual laborers, his dusty and worn thin. This young man comes up to me at the window, our faces level; I can see a small constellation of scars arrayed across his face, his eyes clouded and dreamy with drunkenness.
I know it is surprising to see white faces inside this minibus. Ellen and I have lived in Lesotho for a year now and have never seen another white person riding in a public taxi. The white people who travel this route do so almost exclusively in privately hired 4WDs with khaki-vested guides doling out factoids through the speaker system.
The young man stares at me for a moment, swaying slightly.
“Where do you come from?” He speaks lightly accented, but otherwise perfect English.
I point to Ellen and then myself: Canada, America. Then I tell him we have been living in Lesotho—in Mokhotlong—for a year.
“Lesotho?” This seems even stranger than the fact that we are riding in a public taxi. “You like Lesotho?”
“I love it.”
Something about this upsets him. His voice turns challenging, aggressive.
“What do you love about Lesotho?”
I think for a moment and say: the people, the mountains, the beauty of the land. I know this is a phony and packaged answer, but I don’t really know what else to say. How could I tell h
im about Thato or Retselisitsoe? How would he understand someone like Nthabeleng or my vallies at the high school? How could I explain what it meant to walk with Mokati the bartender in that sightless black night? It is difficult, sometimes, to verbalize deep emotional meaning to an aggressive drunk in a small slum in an unmapped corner of South Africa.
His eyes are hard. He gestures to the shanties behind him. “You like this? You like to look at this?” His voice is spring-loaded.
I pause, then tell him again: I love the people, the mountains, the beauty of the land. I know this is not the answer to his question.
He stares at me and continues to sway, his eyes locked on my own. Then his face softens, almost imperceptibly. His gaze drifts off somewhere else. His voice is suddenly gentle, almost tender.
“I am too afraid of snakes.”
I am not sure how to respond to this.
“In the mountains,” he clarifies. “Too many snakes in the mountains.” He waves toward the peaks behind us. “In Lesotho.”
“Oh, yes,” I tell him. “I don’t like snakes either.” I say this having never seen a snake in the mountains of Lesotho, but this seems unimportant at the moment.
His whole demeanor has now changed. Something about what I have said is funny. He leans against the minibus—the sides of which are still cold from the mountain air—and takes hold of my forearm in a brotherly gesture.
“Is this your town?” I ask him.
“Oh no,” he says, “this is just where employees of the resort stay.”
“Well, it’s nice anyway.”
“My house is there,” he says, pointing to one of the shacks. “And that is where my sister stays.” Beyond the shanties, I can see a small boy chasing one of the chickens with a stick. The young man points to him and says the boy is his nephew. He yells and beckons the boy over, but the boy runs off and hides, peeping occasionally around the corner of one of the shacks.
“He is too scared,” the young man tells me and shrugs.
Across the road, I can see people out on the golf course now: whites golfing, blacks caddying. The young man lets out a sigh. “We were drinking too much last night,” he says. “There was no sleep because we were drinking too too much.” For a moment he looks exhausted, his face slack.
“Your English is very good. You must have studied it in school.”
He becomes stern. “Oh no, it is very bad. I am not good at it.”
“Then how can I understand you perfectly?”
“I am very bad. I can only speak isiZulu, which is the language of my people.” He stops for a moment. “But I can also speak Xhosa and Afrikaans and English and some Sesotho.”
I say a few words to him in Sesotho and he responds. My paltry Sesotho is embarrassing next to his, but he is happy to speak it with me.
“To communicate is the most important thing,” he tells me.
And suddenly the minibus driver is back, running out of one of the shanties. He jumps in and revs the engine, still without commentary on his absence, and now we are ready to embark once again. The young man at the window takes hold of my hand. “Maybe I will see you again next year,” he says with a quiet laugh.
He is still holding onto my arm as the minibus starts to pull away. “What is your name?” he shouts. He is loping alongside the minibus, holding tight. “And your wife’s name?” I tell him our names and he repeats them, feeling out their foreign syllables on his tongue.
The minibus is moving too fast now—the driver has no patience for this game—and the young man lets go of my hand. “What’s your name?” I call back through the window, but it is too late, the minibus rattling along, the music on again, and I can see him shout it but I can’t hear him. He stands in our dusty wake with his arm outstretched in valediction.
EPILOGUE: HOW SHE ALMOST DIED
I am on the phone with Nthabeleng, our voices tinny and muted, crisscrossing somewhere in the ether. This is back in the United States, where I awoke one morning to rather shockingly discover myself no longer in Lesotho. It was a strange sensation, as consciousness dawned and burned off the fog of dreams: a pang of loss deep in my viscera as the implications of the cream-smooth sheets became clear.
I am straining to hear Nthabeleng—trying to anticipate that lag when the words are nowhere, trying to avoid breathing noisily or even shifting my position, her voice so small in the back of the receiver. But I can see her exactly. They are rationing water in Mokhotlong right now and Nthabeleng is up the hill by the utilities office, waiting in line to fill some buckets. She knows everyone in line, queen of the mountain, and has spent these last few hours gossiping, laughing, working the audience, holding court. It is that glorious time of day when the evening sun sets the mountains humming, and I wonder for a moment if I’ll be able to hear the horses charging down the main road, the cattle lumbering through the gloaming toward sleepy kraals.
Ellen comes into the room and I wave her over. “Hey, Nthabeleng, I’m going to put the phone up against Ellen’s stomach. I want you to yell at the baby, okay? I don’t think a child should enter this world without knowing the sound of your shouting.”
“Ache!—uena Moshoeshoe—I’m not going to yell at a baby, you stu—” is all I catch before the sound is muffled against Ellen’s belly. At the time, I didn’t know if we would be back again. Our separation from Lesotho felt somehow permanent. I didn’t know that we would return again and again, that we would always return, that we would live there with our own small children.
We talk for a while, telling stories about the safe home. Then Nthabeleng casually mentions how she almost died. She’s been saving this story for last.
For the last few months, she has been taking classes toward her university degree at a satellite classroom in Thaba-Tseka, which requires a multi-hour drive through the mountains each weekend, and on this last trip, she almost took the Isuzu over the edge of a cliff.
“I was coming around the corner,” she says, “when the stupid shepherd boy decides to take his sheep in the road. I had to brake fast but on the gravel this was no good.”
She swerves away from the edge of the gorge and toward the steep embankment on the other side of the road, takes the truck wildly up the embankment. The truck settles for a moment, pauses to collect its wits, tilts on some unseen fulcrum—and then logrolls laterally down the embankment, heading for the road and the canyon beyond.
“Hei! Stupid Isuzu goes up the hill but cannot go all the way—this lazy truck! Then it decides to roll on its back and put its feet in the air.”
I can see her face as she is yelling into her mobile phone—half anger, half amusement—surely playing for the crowd now, helping people pass the time as they wait to fill buckets with clean water.
“Then Isuzu decides this is a stupid thing to do—have its feet in the air—so it rolls over again and again.”
The truck tumbles down the embankment and comes to rest back on the road, on all four wheels, inches from the edge of the gorge. Perhaps this is the time to note that King Moshoeshoe II—previous king of Lesotho and father of the current king—died when his vehicle drove off the side of a mountain. And perhaps this is just one more of Lesotho’s otherworldly distinctions: it is a place where heads of state can meet their fate at cliff’s edge.
As she describes this, my stomach is bottoming out, that dizzying awareness of being powerless to protect those you love. Later, Nthabeleng would see that the car was wrecked, the roof smashed, hood mangled, lights blown out, passenger door inoperable. Later she would take stock of the moment, catalogue her injuries, comprehend her proximity to death.
I am sitting silently on the far side of an ocean. I don’t even know what to say to her.
“Were you hurt? Did you get to a doctor?”
There is silence—that lag again—as our words ricochet off satellites.
“Hey uena! Do you think I was on vacation? I had to go take my exams!”
There she is again on the hillside, the citizens of Mokh
otlong taking in her performance, watching her strut and yell in exasperation.
“The stupid doctor will tell me to go into the hospital while everyone else is taking exams! So I can go to bed and miss everything?”
And there she is again on that mountain road: the crumpled truck has come to rest at the edge of the cliff, the dust is settling around her like fine snow, the sheep and shepherd have scattered. Her seatbelt is tight across her chest. Her ribs hurt and her head is ringing.
Nthabeleng turns the key and the engine struggles to life.
She takes a deep breath, then heads down the road for Thaba-Tseka.
APPENDIX
LANGUAGE NOTES & MISCELLANY
GLOSSARY OF SESOTHO WORDS & PHRASES
Ache!: an exclamation indicating frustration, frequently used in my presence; the word is pronounced with a soft “ch” sound
Bo-‘m’e: women, mothers; plural form of ‘me’; used as a term of polite address for women who have given birth
Bo-nkhono: grandmothers; plural form of nkhono
Bo-ntate: men, fathers; plural form of ntate; used as a term of polite address for men who have children
Bo-ntate moholo: grandfathers; plural form of ntate moholo
Boroso: sausage or encased meats
Butle!: a command meaning “Slow down!”
Camptown: the term used for the major town in each district (i.e., Mokhotlong camptown is the largest town in Mokhotlong District); in conversation, Basotho often use the term campo
Chelete: money
Chesa mpama: the name of a minibus I once saw; it translates literally as “hot palm,” meaning something along the lines of “slap in the face”
Famo: a popular style of Sesotho music featuring accordion, bass, drums, and wailing
Fariki: pig; the word is from Afrikaans but is used frequently by Sesotho speakers; the Sesotho word for pig is kolobe
Ha kena lipompong: “I don’t have any sweets!”