by Norman Rush
The rest is sketchier than it should be, because I was stopped from noting things down in situ and it was a fair while before I could get back to reconstructing the event. And then the event itself took such a swerve toward furor.
First there was an ineffectual flurry of dinging. In a way I experienced that as a tolling for something lost. I had never seen anything in Tsau as uncivil as what Leta had done. I was full of clear energy. I wanted to fight, not that I had any special right to and not that doing it would have been anything but counterproductive, granted my status, meaning my link with Nelson and my race too, I suppose. But still I wanted to fight. I was tremendously galvanized. And my head was perfect.
What had been in preparation was a potpourri of falsely spontaneous grievances ostensibly brought into being by Leta’s salvo. Nothing had anything to do with the subject of the parlamente. The attempt was to inflate the churchbuilding issue into an umbrella unrelated issues could shelter under. Say how he has interfered amongst our underclothing, was a facetious reference to Denoon and the brassiere imbroglio I overheard. I think this was humorous and probably not meant to be part of the developing potpourri, but one of the batlodi also overheard it and brazenly shouted it out, even though that issue long predated her arrival in Tsau and everyone knew it. There were four or five foci of objections spread throughout the crowd, the most active one being among the people around Hector and Dorcas. Everything critiqued Nelson in one way or another, but the protest was always directed to Dineo, with Nelson referred to in the third person, which was an insulting strategy in itself.
He has made us to eat from a wheel, someone said. This had been mentioned to me. At an early point Nelson had tried to introduce the lazy susan into household mealtime protocol as a delicate way of promoting a more equalized access to food, protein in particular. Nelson was well aware of the statistics on household males, senior males, getting the first pick and the lion’s share, then the women, then the male children, then the female children. He was perfectly right, because the statistics about men hogging the food in the third world, and I don’t mean only in Africa, are horrifying. I could understand Nelson’s feeling that here they were, engaged in wringing food and drink from bare rock, in a sense, and he was seeing it reticulated directly into a stratified consumption pattern which anyone seeing it from the outside would want to do something about. I don’t know how sensitively he’d promoted these lazy susans, but they had fallen out of general use, although we did encounter them on occasion when we went out for corso, where they might be in use for serving sweets. It was an elderly gentleman who had raised this complaint, so presumably he had personally undergone the wheel and it had clearly left a mark on his soul. I was pleased that there was at least a little negative trilling by the loyalist women after he spoke.
There was another complaint, a feeble one, and sidelong, that Nelson was frightening the children with pictures of monsters in the water we must drink. This referred to a feature in some of his popular-science lectures, where slides of water were magnified and projected on a wall so that all the animalcules there are in unboiled water could be appreciated. I suppose it was an oblique way of protesting all the emphasis on handwashing and the rather comic civil surveillance he tried to keep inflated to monitor it. Denoon even privately jokingly referred to the monitoring as his campaign of terror against unwashed hands.
Someone then said He at one time forced us to run amongst ourselves like phuti, meaning deer. Nelson later explained to me what this was about. He had tried to promote a few village-green-style sports, mainly kickball and some limited footracing. Kickball was still played in a desultory way down by the kraals and was a game particularly popular with a group of the aunts. What I said when he told me about the games was that surely organized exercise in Tsau was slightly nugatory, Tsau where people are on their feet morning to night doing work that’s primarily physical, not to mention the perpetual up-and-down-the-koppie process. I said Life here is thoroughly aerobic. He agreed but said that everything was an experiment and that he had never understood why field sports had to be limited to the young. They could take place in a slower way, but he saw no reason why the impulses behind people wanting to do games should go away. If I was wrong I was wrong, he said. And in fact the very mild form of kickball, where the ball is rolled to you and you run to base and back to home, if you can, after the kick, had survived on its own.
Denoon seemed satisfied not to answer each thing: these were patently such mock objections, I suppose he felt, that he could let the derision most of the complaints provoked answer for him. In fact he seemed almost beatific, probably because everything seemed so civic to him. But I knew better. I decided to creep near my enemies, the Raboupis. Why not? Dorcas could slide around anywhere she pleased.
I got close enough to hear an exchange between them, Hector hissing that someone must say about the streets made too small for cars to ever go, and with steps up to interrupt, to which Dorcas made a motion that said No. I got closer still. Hector said Say about the mokete. Mokete means big party. Again Dorcas silenced him. He was working to keep himself in hand. Mokete rang a bell with me. People had been talking about wanting to have a big celebration for Tsau. After all, eight years had passed since the founding. Denoon was in favor in principle but he was always arguing postponement until the right time, when Tsau would be ineffably more complete, better. People had deferred to his feelings, but less readily, lately, it seemed to me.
I wanted there to be more support for my beamish man. What was going on was caviling. Women were doing it, by and large. Why weren’t the loyalists louder in defense? What was this place, I was thinking, if people were unable to see Nelson for what he was, someone pure?
Thank god, I thought, when two children spoke up to defend Nelson—King James and a younger boy, whose name I’ve lost. I was remiss about recording the names of the children thinking that because proportionately there were so few of them and because they were all so vivid to me at the time, I would always remember them. I remember King James said that because of Rra Puleng, Tsau was the village in Botswana with the most less of snakes. This was in English. We were speaking mostly Setswana but jumping back and forth between it and English hors protocol now. King James’s heart was in the right place, but this tribute was received mixedly, since it may have been Denoon’s idea to organize the snake women, but it was the women who caught the snakes. Then again it may not have been Denoon’s idea at all. I realized I had just been making that assumption.
Hector tried to start a wavelet of sneering at this, but again Dorcas stopped him, to his evident unhappiness. Children are so popular in Tsau that treating them with whatever is the equivalent for children of uxoriousness for wives was the rule. Hector’s desire to stimulate a contagion of complaints was being thwarted. I had the distinct feeling that the crest of whatever he might have expected had passed.
We were almost in the clear. The dais was proceeding with the next act of the program. This was a good choice, I thought, because it was boring: we were having something very much like a book report on the monastery period in the Middle Ages, mostly in England. The point was being made, not subtly, that the monasteries were good examples of church edifices being permitted for one purpose and then accruing power and becoming quite something else. Mma Sithebe was reading this report from sheets of paper, and she was a perfect choice for the job, with her strong, clear delivery. Dineo ran this presentation well, with some interpolations and questions of her own. We were in Setswana. One reason this exercise was calming was because it was history and not something anyone could argue with. Also lists are calming, and we were presented with long lists of taxes and penalties imposed by the monasteries on their serf populations. A few injustices were particular hits: the heriot was one, in which the monastery gets the second-best animal owned by a dead serf, after the lord of the manor takes the best beast. An intervention established that, yes, even if a serf left only two beasts, the church would still take the sec
ond, plunging families back into destitution. This was perfect information, considering how the Tswana feel about their cattle. They hissed the merchet, which was the tax you had to pay if you married someone not chosen for you by the priest. I knew it was the Catholic Church in particular that Denoon wanted never to stain the premises of Tsau, if he had anything to say about it. The Church was his favorite infernal device, and he hated everything about it, with particular emphasis on Catholic population policy in the context of African poverty. He claimed to know for a fact that the archdiocese was already looking for ways to sidle in.
Also calming was the malty odor of bogobe arriving in a tub from the kitchen. Its place in the program had been moved up by an aside from Dineo. For the Tswana, bogobe is the real right food. I even wondered if the bream snack had been a feint, giving people a food item they knew they were supposed to like but weren’t actually enamored of and which, if it did anything, would only whet the social appetite for something as counterexotic as bogobe.
Mma Sithebe kept on with it. Probably owing to the overlap in my painkillers, to which I’m abnormally sensitive, I began to feel rather exquisite. My ears were ringing. Usury came up, and how the priests preached against it and practiced it at the same time. There was something about only priests and lords being allowed to keep rabbits, the rabbits having the run of the fields and gardens of the serfs, snaring being forbidden. Somewhere in this bricolage was a reminder that because women were barred from choir service in those days, the idea of procuring sopranos in perpetuity by castrating boys and then training and keeping them had been adopted by the Church and had spread from there throughout the Holy Roman Empire, even as far as the people putting on operas. The event was seeming brilliant to me, Dineo brilliant, Nelson brilliant, with his wonderful patience. This was not a thing to be ashamed to be auxiliary to. Have faith in the mind that thought of this, was the dazed sort of injunction I was giving myself in my elevated state.
We broke for porridge. Since it was getting dark, hurricane lamps were lit and placed here and there throughout the crowd, giving a sort of family campfire ambience to the event as we reassembled for what ought to have been an amiable conclusion to things. I was mellow. Appreciate the absence of pain, I was telling myself. I reminded myself how struck I’d been when Martin Wade said that once you’d been in prison you never forgot it and that the feeling of day-to-day life, however hard, once you were not under restraint, was always sweet. That was the kind of thing that should be kept in mind. Another hint that I was overmedicated was that I had no appetite whatever, even though I’d eaten very little all day.
Denoon was the chair as we resumed. There had been a reshuffling among the opposition. Dorcas and the batlodi and their other cadre women were settled in a ring around Hector and his male cadres, four or five of them. They had moved up en bloc and were only eight or so feet from the dais mat. I was certain this meant something disagreeable, some new thrust in embryo.
The last subject was apparently to be the afterlife. Three or four questions had been sent up from the crowd. I remember thinking the questions were good, even the ones defending the afterlife, and that Denoon had his work cut out for him.
He began with a virtuoso overview of the paradoxes involved in fitting the main hells and paradises and limbos of the leading religions into any single continuum. This was good for closure because it allowed him to be both encyclopedic and funny. En passant he displayed facts such as that in the Muslim paradise the beautiful houris who wait on the heroic dead pogromists are specially created beings who have no genitalia. There was always something fresh. I knew that there was a Jewish hell but not that it’s actually physically next door to paradise and that the saved can look forward to peering over the wall to watch the damned in their sufferings, if they like. Tackling the afterlife was clever also because by not attacking a particular religion but instead juxtaposing the incompatibilities in all the different lives to come, all religions were made to appear childish and wishful.
Suddenly it came to me where he was going with this. He’d been polishing an argument he was quite proud of but which was too complex for a group discussion, in my opinion. He’d tried it out on me. The argument was that even if you could demonstrate, somehow, the existence of god, there was no way you could rule out—and in fact you had inadvertently strengthened the case for—the existence of many gods. In other words, any arguments confirming the existence of a god simultaneously undid the contention that there could be only one of them. This is as I remember it. And since all the great surviving imperial religions, except Hinduism, were monotheistic in an exclusivist, and contradictory, way, this argument was supposed to let him illuminate a critical disjuncture facing people when they undertook credulism or, as he sometimes more gently put it, credism. I’d told him that this was all too Thomistic to be useful. But my saying that seemed to make him feel I was falling below a certain standard he had for me, meaning I was rather dimmer than I should be or, worse, than he’d thought I was. This was the true elenchus, the coup de grace, he said, and I was failing to appreciate it. So this was what I saw about to be bracketed to the afterlife piece, his pièce de résistance. Well, it was what he wanted.
The overview was finished. The bridge—if I was right—that was to lead to his set piece on multitheism was a dialog, now just beginning, between Nelson and Mma Isang, who had joined him on the dais mat. We were continuing in total Setswana. With the dialog, the trouble began. At first I thought I was hearing an animal sound coming from some source not apparent to me.
But then it became clear. I couldn’t credit it. Each time Nelson’s turn came in the dialog, Hector’s group, just the men at first, made an obstructive sound. They started in a low groaning mode, but got louder and more organized-sounding each time. Mma Isang could say anything, and nothing would happen.
Nelson dinged his glass object and tried again. They kept it up. Dineo took the dinger from him and got immediate silence. I don’t think she grasped yet that the chant was solely by men and solely directed at Nelson. She said something general about courtesy and how late it was getting.
Nelson began again, and again the growl came. I badly wished I could be next to Nelson to be sure he understood this was something specifically orchestrated by the Raboupis. It was dark and he was in fact more nearsighted than he liked to admit. Also I wanted him to be certain to let a woman handle this, please.
Again Mma Isang was permitted her turn. When Nelson spoke he tried to ignore the chant and raise his voice to get above it. But they matched him. There was a point to what they were doing that went beyond showing contempt for Nelson. They were demonstrating that any woman could speak but that no woman could prevent them from obstructing Nelson. I think Dorcas didn’t care for this, although this may be overinterpretation on my part. The obstruction was cold. There was no armwaving. Even while the chant was going on the chanters projected stillness, normal attention.
There was more of it. I was bursting to intervene.
I saw it clearly. The women had to act to contain or stop this before it unraveled to the point where it would be up to Nelson to stop it. Something atavistic was developing. Nelson’s being steely in the face of all this was beside the point. He was in a vise. If he let the chanting silence him, Hector had won. The growl had evolved into nonsense syllables, which on closer inspection were not nonsense: they were chanting bo-so, bo-so, bo-so.
I took another Compral, dry, chewed it up, and swallowed it assisted by saliva and nothing else. This itself was irrational. Also irrational was putting into Setswana in my head Denoon’s theory of male gangs, their inevitability, how deeply he saw into them and how essentially unhostile his view of them was. He had belonged to gangs, or cliques that were ganglike. I couldn’t remember all of it. But young men needed gangs as an experience to pass through because, as I reconstruct it, power in the family unit is given, you have to obey regardless of the qualities or lack of them you perceive in your parents, your masters. In gangs
there would be a sorting out based on some sort of competition, at least. I don’t know today if this is a parody of what he’d said or not. But then you would pass through the gang stage. The reason I took the last Compral was because I felt a tickle inside my head that suggested my headache returning, which I couldn’t permit, because someone was going to have to act, probably me. I had a piercing ringing in one ear. There was nothing relating to women in Nelson’s theory of the normalcy of gangs, of course, because we are on our own, in the real world, as I put it to myself.
Denoon tried a couple of times more. Some of the small fry evidently thought the blocking chant was funny and shyly joined in. Their mothers reacted instantly to make them stop: in fact for the first time ever in Tsau I saw hands being raised threateningly in the direction of the cherubim. An apprehension of the extremity of what was going on was spreading, resulting in the female contribution to the proceedings largely dying away as people listened more intently to see if they could possibly be right about the turn things were taking. Direct unadulterated intermale conflict had become for us a novelty, with something transfixing about it. I felt that myself. We were not used to it. It even brought out a fleeting regression in me, like wondering if this feeling I had would be what I would feel at a prizefight where two brutes were consummating their entelechies by bashing each other into unconsciousness while I ate peanuts. When I was fairly tiny I went through a brief mania about prizefighting, wishing I could see one in person. Nelson was trying again. I shook myself away from the toy chest of my psyche and tried to think. The mutterance this time was the loudest yet.
Dineo said something feeble to the effect that it was bad if people could not be heard. The response was sarcasm from someone in Hector’s claque: But we hear all you are saying so very well, mma. I could feel the scene tipping over. The darkness was speeding things up, or rather the anonymity that went with it, and so were shadows around the lantern lights. We had to conclude somehow. It was cold, and that was another reason people needed all this to come to an end, as well as being an explanation for their upsetting passivity: they were letting the disturbers of the peace produce a condition someone would have to use fiat on so we could all go home, I told myself. But the dais seemed paralyzed. Nobody was moving toward closure. You are playing as animals, Dineo said directly to Hector, who said back If you can say we are animals then you must tell us who is forcing Batswana to live as elephants. This was said ringingly, in English for Nelson’s particular benefit and then in Setswana so that no one would miss the point.