Mating

by Norman Rush

  One reason you’ll have to import food and pay cash for it is that as a socialist country you’ll only get gift food if your people sink to the point of starvation as they have in Mozambique.

  Five was a mess. He couldn’t get it schematic enough, and during it some people got bored to the hilt. My notes, which I made when I went home that night, say that there are two ways to extract the social surplus—confiscatory via the state, or individual and voluntary, whereby people sweat and compel themselves to save. I think the point was that the rate of capital accumulation was much lower in systems where you have to rely on only the first method and that this will express itself in the need to rent capital in perpetuity from the more fecund market economies.

  There was something related about the adaptive slowness of socialist systems in general, with efficient units subsidizing inefficient ones to an unconscionable degree. Exit and entry of firms was not controlled by efficiency, and since people would have political entitlements to jobs, the inefficient units would accumulate and encumber the economy. In this phase I was listening to the voice more than the man.

  I caught Grace looking at me. I must have been being somewhat rapt. I think I caught a gleam of triumph in her eye before she looked away.

  His wrap-up was good and was to the effect that in a nutshell orthodox socialism, which one was welcome to choose, was a system that was slower, more rigid, and more fragile because decisionmaking was centralized and there couldn’t be any risk-spreading, and had extraordinary recurrent costs not characteristic of the economies of its socalled rivals. And it was a system that would in all probability be permanently dependent on its socalled rivals. And even though the distribution of benefits withinsocialism was more equal—its sovereign virtue—there was a long-run tendency to inequality that could be argued about. And there was what he had said about the incompatibility of socialism and agriculture to remember.

  There was a mixture of for and against outcries. Somebody from the Russian embassy was suddenly present and I gather was expected to say something—but he was shrugging. He had been out of the room, unfortunately. Mbaake was all set. In fact he was making the up and down waving motion Batswana use when they hitchhike instead of putting their thumb out, which conveyed sarcasm.

  DENOON:

  I just want to say—

  More cries, including “Ow!” and the word “Menshevik.”

  DENOON:

  Comrades, I just want to say—

  If I search my mind for permanent marks I left on Denoon rather than vice versa, this is one I can be sure of: I made him stop overusing the intro “I just this” or “I just that.” I convinced him that it was always taken as preapologetic. I warned him especially about beginning phone conversations that way. He got the point and after a couple of false starts completely stopped.

  MBAAKE:

  Now please hold on, my comrade said sardonically, for you are just catering for confusion. For you first cry down capitalism as making slaves and next time you say we must turn from scientific socialism lest we pay five great surcharges. So then we must just set to idling and look at our hands whilst all about us white guys are undertaking everything. It is just that Karl Marx was only very late to find out about all what we have been stopped from doing since many years by whitemen. And once we begin again with socialism you forgot to say how whitemen always kill us, as with Asegyefo Nkrumah.

  So now you must tell us what is this suigenerism where we must turn and what is said very bitingly vernacular development.

  DENOON:

  But again I repeat I have not used the phrase you just used, for twelve years.

  And I just want to say I am straying from my brief, which is just to talk about villages, can we somehow right away devise a few things we can do to save the village.

  And what I have been doing up to this point is to say, One, capitalism is killing the village everywhere, bleeding it, killing it, throttling it, stealing its young men. So I hope I established that, because I think I saw my comrades very much agreeing at that point.

  So then, Two, is socialism the way you save the village? Which I was prepared to hear said and to which I wanted to say no in advance to save time.

  So tonight I am not talking about general systems except as answering objections in advance. So, One, the first question is, What is destroying the village? Answer: capitalism. Two, What can save the village? Answer: wait for socialism. The first answer is true and the second is false. Now about villages—

  A VOICE:

  So then we are just deceived if we see revolution upraising before our eyes.

  DENOON:

  Ah, revolution.

  Nothing is more interesting than revolution, or should I say insurrection, because all the imagery of revolution comes from insurrection, which is a different thing.

  I’m getting so far outside my brief it makes me nervous.

  I should just say that even if you think socialism is the way, a way, to save the village, then revolution is the worst way to bring in socialism—positively, hands down, the worst.

  This is what I meant when I said, also long ago, Socialism is the continuation of the romantic movement by any means necessary. This was a parody both on Clausewitz and on some people, socialists, who no longer exist, called the Black Panther Party. Revolution equals insurrection and insurrection is the icon at the heart of socialism.

  You can see why! Socialists, especially young socialists, love the idea of revolution. Every circle of sociology majors and bookstore clerks wants to call itself the Revolutionary Party of the Left or the Party of the Revolutionary Left or the Left Revolutionary Party of the People—anything so long as revolution is in the title. We can understand this. Everything we want in a society is what we find brought out in people in the moment of insurrection. Spontaneity! Spontaneous hierarchy! Self-sacrifice! Staying awake all night! Working until we drop! Audacity! Camaraderie! The carnival behind the barricades—what it feels like when the police have just been kicked out of your quartier! Free eggs, free goods … until the stores that have been sacked lie empty. One man one gun! And don’t forget what it feels like to throw open the gates of the prisons! What a great moment! This is the moment the true socialist worships and thinks will be incarnated in the society on the morning after.

  This is intellectual loneliness showing, I thought. It was evident he had a kind of hysteria to talk that was getting worse the more he was interrupted. He was veering all over. Who was Clausewitz to Mbaake? Denoon was supposed to be aiming himself at youth and he was talking about Clausewitz! The man was too lonely. I had no idea who he had with him out in the bush, but this scene suggested that they left something to be desired as discussants. The same sort of hysteria was familiar to me. I had experienced the same thing coming in from the Tswapong Hills to Keteng. I could be useful to this man. I love to talk, needless to say. Also I was pleased at how much of his rap I was getting, even if it was slightly outside my academic bailiwick. I love to talk. For a woman, I’m even considered a raconteuse. I remember jokes, for example. But then I also remember everything.

  Also he was doing something else I considered compulsive, saying things that might constitute laugh lines in other settings, but not here. Who cared if he was willing to say of himself that he was wellknown to be gung ho for half measures and that if he had been in the October Revolution he would have been saying some power to the soviets?

  And it was also compulsive and part of the same thing to recommend books in passing like Soil and Civilization and Evolutionary Socialism that no one in Botswana could get if they had a million dollars. They were hard to find in London and New York. He fought me on this. He had onlymentioned Soil and Civilization because it contained the key phrase Man is a parasite on soils, which had been a strobelike experience for him the first time he read it. I agree that man is a parasite, but I made the point that mentioning books when he was proselytizing that people could never hope to get their hands on just drives mankind crazy.
This is the third world, I told him. Mention books you have copies of or offprints of the main passages of.

  DENOON:

  Making the point that the feelings that abound at the onset of insurrection fade away. The moment is artificial and based on adrenaline and so forth. The prisons refill. Look, if you look nowhere else, at Algeria. Of course there is much more to say on this, and I see my colleague from Local Government and Lands not smiling.

  So as much as I appreciate the opportunity you have all given me to spontificate he was doing it again, I should return, I mean rather I must return, to my topic—which is how we can, all of us, of all persuasions—join to redeem and preserve Botswana’s villages. We must get back to the village.

  BOSO VOICES:

  Yes, back to the village! Back to the village! Yes, go back to the village! Go back to the village! won out as the predominant cry. Denoon was patient until that stopped.

  DENOON:

  Back to the village—

  MBAAKE:

  So but you will not tell us what is vernacular development and nor will you tell us what is your great scheme, even in some some some short terms. Mbaake was excited, which showed up not as a stutter but as a word repetition syndrome. I sensed he had something up his sleeve en route.

  Nor about our ancestors as to if they they were socialists or whatnot.

  DENOON:

  My brief, as I said, is to talk about some few things that can be done right now, today, in the villages, in particular some low tillage schemes I can describe, some specialty crops that makhoa in Europe want and will pay for very handsomely, some—

  MBAAKE:

  Ehé. Oh, all about how we can grow some some flowers in the sandveld and such things, yah.

  Well, these are things we like to know, as well.

  But but you see it is just the same as always with whitemen because once again a lakhoa is saying what we must hear and whatnot. So it is just the same.

  You say comrade, yet you take us as small boys.

  DENOON:

  Comrade, I am under the instructions of your government in this, as you well know.

  I would love nothing better than to stay long into the night to talk about all these matters.

  But, Rra, I am a guest in this country. I—

  MBAAKE:

  Ah, my comrade, but what can you say at all as to your your holy of holies, your your New Jerusalem, not can we raise up some flowers in the sandveld?

  What is … what is, what is, if you can say … what is this very slyly solar democracy?

  Or must whitemen just time and again produce more secrets that we in our own country must beg to know in our own country?

  DENOON:

  If you suppose there is anything sinister in—

  MBAAKE:

  No, my comrade, because when have whitemen done ill to us or made schemes behind our backs? Can you think when?

  Some kind of transgression had occurred involving mentioning solar democracy. Denoon was steely for a change.

  MBAAKE:

  So what can you say is this this city of the sun, yah?

  DENOON:

  After a long pause. There is no such thing. Another pause. Solar democracy is … is still … He trailed off. He drank some water.

  The peculiar passivity of the white presence was patently determined by their interest in seeing if Boso’s heckling was going to jab Denoon into revealing something about his project that they were interested in knowing. But under the passivity was a palpable intensity. We were all excited.

  The permsec of Local Government and Lands, I noticed, had left. This meant something.

  It was even more exciting when the permsec came back leading his boss, the minister himself, Kgosetlemang. This raised the stakes immensely. Kgosetlemang was new as minister. He was very tough. He had worked his way up through the ranks of the Botswana National Party on the strength of his performance as an enforcer for the reigning BNP faction, the Serowe faction. The Botswana National Party hated the Botswana Social Front, who were upstart marxists who had astoundingly won two seats in the parliament at the last election. Moreover, Kgosetlemang hated Mbaake on a personal level. Mbaake was reputed to have seduced, if that’s the word, one of Kgosetlemang’s mistresses, which I had heard from Z.

  The tension accompanying the positioning of the various antagonists was almost sexual. Would Kgosetlemang bring everything to a stop, or, more likely, make a speech of some kind? At the moment he was trying to get his permsec to do or say something. Everyone there had his or her own mosaic of what Denoon was up to in the Kalahari, made up of true and false tessarae. Solar democracy was new and sounded overweening and interesting, so would Denoon say more or not? Memcons would be written tonight. Would there be enough substance for a cable, maybe?

  Something fleeting passed across Denoon’s face that I loved. It was subtle, like a cloud shadow passing over something in a landscape you’re contemplating. Overall and considering, I thought Denoon so far had done fairly well, my cavils notwithstanding. But a change of state was coming. Heraldically speaking, he went from sedent to rampant, but all inwardly. He was, you could see if you were me, going from play to work. I loved it. It was so male.

  Of course now I know Nelson was responding to yet one more proof that he had enemies in high places, because the solar democracy barb pointed to a document supposed to be genuinely secret and speculative and somethingonly two people in the cabinet were supposed to have seen. Mostly he had been speaking ex cathedra, but now he got up and went around behind his armchair and faced the audience, gripping the finials or whatever they are that stood up from the back. Grace was missing this. Kgosetlemang was starting for the front. Denoon loves the line For the night is gone and the sword is drawn and the scabbard is thrown away, which is something his father, who was a sot, liked to quote—and this is what I associate with the next moment.

  DENOON:

  What could that mean, solar democracy?

  To my colleagues and good friends at LG and L, I apologize for what I see I am about to do. I ask forgiveness.

  But suppose that we imagine a country the size of France, its borders not in danger because it is beloved of the white West for its prudence and uprightness and its parliament, with only a million inhabitants, and millions of hectares in public lands, mostly empty and unused. Imagine also that this country enjoys averagely two hundred and twenty days a year of pure sun pouring down, streaming down, a downpour of gold that no one stops to hold a bucket to.

  There are some whites in this country, in fact too many. Whites who are in the wrong skin for Africa. The sun is poison to us and we should probably say so and depart. Many of these whites are experts and advisers, who leave the iron skies of the north to come here with a lump of coal in their hands for you to worship, or petrol to sell. They think the sun is pretty, no more.

  Now suppose the Batswana, or rather the inhabitants of this country, for any reason, wanted to base every mechanical process without exception on the free energy of the sun. Heating, cooling, cooking, transport, water pumping, any process you might name, could be run directly or indirectly from this great tireless source. Industry as well, should they choose to, since there is space to run collectors of energy many times exceeding the demand of any industry one million people might need.

  The sun is wasted on these people unless they one day see it and use it. They could, you could, be rich, but only if you choose something better than being rich.

  Now as philosopher king of the country described, with only one million citizens—what would I tell these people?

  I would say to them that it could be done in a generation. Your children, if you train them, could be masters of the power of the sun. They could be a better thing than rich: they could be free.

  Expats here and there were rolling their eyes notably. He seemed not to care.

  You could be the first nation to give its people lives of freedom to devote to art, science, scholarship, sport if you like that
. Work could be as you liked, by agreement: half a day, a week at a time, one year on and one off, different times and kinds of work in different towns, different regions, however you wanted. You could be the first nation to make self-directed individual development the first goal of your political economy.

  Your villages could be like the great universities of Europe during the dark ages, and there is now a dark age of its own kind: your villages could be like suns or stars shining, because you could teach the use of the sun to the rest of Africa and beyond. Botswana—this country, rather—could be a garden of beautiful villages, each one different. You could be the first nation to tell your children to ask themselves what work in the world would most become their souls and to prepare to do it.

  Of course I am a lakhoa telling you this, of the race that brought you the hut tax to drive you into money slavery and is even today telling you that the point of life is to get rich, how the best use of your mortal life is to perfect a system in which a fraction of you can get rich, only a fraction, but never mind.

  But I am saying that you could make villages that are engines of rest. The ratios are there, if you control your numbers, if you seize your schools by the neck and change them. You can be the first whose women can say I work at what I please, the same as men, and as I determine. You can be the first whose children say We shall do this or that because it pleases us and not because the makhoa or the church say you must, or your father or the state or the iron hand of hunger or the itch to be richer than your neighbor and live behind walls protected by dogs and Waygards.