by Robyn Scott
“You must interview both grandpas.” The encounter with Lady Khama had precipitated a week of Khama and Botswana-centric homeschooling.
Beneath this umbrella section of Mum’s amorphous, invent-as-you-go-along syllabus had fallen the usual odd mix of subjects. To begin with, she read to us from A Marriage of Inconvenience, the new account of Ruth and Seretse’s story. Later, we pored over chapters about gemstone mining from the huge set of science encyclopedias, which precipitated the creation of another one of our beloved crystal gardens.
Moving to the Botswana history books, Mum started with the BDF, a theme certain to enthrall even Damien, the hardest of us to keep interested.
Formed in the late 1970s – Ian Khama, Seretse’s son, was appointed as deputy commander – the BDF’s main purpose had been to defend Botswana against aggression from the neighbouring white-ruled regimes in Rhodesia, Namibia, and, particularly, South Africa. Two years before we arrived, the South African army did raid Gaborone, searching for ANC ‘terrorists’ and killing several people.
Also on standby to deal with the problems of civil war in Angola, the BDF had nothing similar to contend with at home. Which took Mum to Botswana’s tribal makeup. This is often thought to underpin the country’s peaceful history, for while there are more than twenty tribes in Botswana, eight of them, representing the vast majority of the population and including the three largest tribes, are of Tswana origin. But even between the Tswana and the other tribes, some of Zimbabwean lineage, relations are generally good, the most strained being with the Basarwa, or Bushmen. But this has never provoked anything close to war.
Mum, her curiosity trumping her judgment of what would interest us, began to read more about the ‘fascinating’ detailed tribal breakdown, and was soon reading silently to herself as we ran off to ask Matthews what tribe he was from.
The next day, remembering what she’d originally intended, Mum took us on a special trip to Phikwe to interview Grandpa Terry, who had met Seretse Khama on several occasions.
“Remarkable man,” said Grandpa, sounding emotional. “Quite remarkable.”
The encounter that Grandpa remembered most vividly was in the 1970s, when Khama visited Phikwe during a campaign for reelection.
Grandpa, as a senior representative of the mine, sat on the podium with the president as he addressed the crowd. He was impressed by Seretse’s quick mind and thoughtful policies, but what struck him most was the contrast with similar rallies he had witnessed in post-independence Zambia. There, he told us, President Kenneth Kaunda had lectured to crowds that had remained, throughout, uncritically adoring.
Seretse, too, had firm ideas, which he conveyed during his speech. But afterwards, a microphone was handed around his almost entirely Batswana audience and the president was publicly interrogated, which he seemed to relish, inviting some of the loudest hecklers to join him on the platform.
Had he travelled down to Phikwe on government money?
No, said Seretse, calmly. He had used party funds, as per the laws relating to campaigning. He referred the questioner to someone else should he want verification.
Had the president used his position to allocate land to his friends and family?
Presenting a compelling set of facts, and without a hint of indignation, the president addressed this too, and the speaker sat down satisfied.
The questions went on and on until everyone had spoken.
Afterwards, when Grandpa was talking to Seretse, he mentioned how struck he’d been by the rigorous questioning that followed the rally.
Seretse Khama smiled. “People here, Mr. McCourt, like to talk. If you don’t let them talk, you have problems. I know this, and I let them talk.”
Grandpa eyed us gravely. “And that, in my opinion, is what makes this country different to everywhere else in Africa.” He went on in a lecturing voice. Mum watched, smiling slyly as Grandpa veered off topic, clearly enjoying himself in his unwitting recruitment to homeschooling.
♦
Botswana became, at independence, Africa’s first lasting multiparty democracy.
But long before then, before it even became a British protectorate, the Batswana had been living under their own democracylike – albeit male-dominated – system.
At the heart of this was the kgotla, a large stick-fenced semicircle found in every village. The kgotla was and remains both a meeting place and a discussion forum, presided over by the chief. At meetings, everyone has the opportunity to express his or her views, and issues are debated exhaustively, until everyone is satisfied. Often the satisfaction lies as much in the debate as in the conclusion.
The kgotla was also traditionally a court, where punishments were meted out and executed. Even after Botswana had established a court-based judicial system, suspects for less serious crimes were given the choice of trial by a magistrate or at the kgotla.
“Which brings me to one of my other favourite stories,” said Grandpa.
Cilia Wilson was a good friend of Granny Joan’s and Grandpa Terry’s. She was also the ballet teacher in Phikwe, so both Lulu and I knew her from our early brief forays into the ballet world. We were consequently also familiar with the splendid black stereo system that Grandpa explained had once been stolen from Cilia’s ballet hall.
The thief was caught shortly afterwards. He chose to be tried at the kgotla, and Cilia, as the plaintiff, was requested to attend.
Reluctantly, she drove out to the thief’s village near Phikwe on the day of the trial. While the punishment for the crime was debated, Cilia hovered as far from the action as possible. The sentence was ten lashes, to be dispensed at once. Cilia made a dash for her car, only to be stopped and told that, as the aggrieved person, she must also witness the punishment.
The gentle sparrowlike lady watched, appalled, as the thief’s shirt was removed and his back given ten searing lashes.
The moment the last one had been delivered, Cilia fled towards her car, slid inside, and started the engine.
About to speed away, she was stopped by a tap on the window. Flabbergasted, she wound down the window. It was the whipped thief. “Mma, can I have a lift back to Phikwe?” he asked.
And she gave him one.
“Anyway,” said Grandpa Terry, as he concluded his thoughts on Botswana and the Khamas, “as I always say, the most important thing of all was that the man practised what he preached. None of this swanning around in Mercedes cavalcades. Seretse drove around Gaborone in an old secondhand Valiant. Says it all.”
It didn’t stop at land transport. In the early days of his presidency, when Seretse Khama needed to fly, he called on Grandpa Ivor and his battered Beechcraft Baron – the Valiant of the air-ways, as far as presidential humility and frugality went.
“Doyou have Seretse stories?” we asked Grandpa Ivor.
Grandpa looked aghast.
“Do I have Seretse stories? Course I bloody do. Flew the guy. Bloody great man he was. Everyone adored him.”
Grandpa Ivor’s most memorable Seretse Khama story began with Grandpa getting very drunk one night at the Tati Hotel in Francistown.
Near midnight, inebriated, he sat up in shock.
He was flying the president at nine o’clock in the morning. Normally he would have spent the night outside under the stars and the knob-thorn trees, sleeping off the whisky. But this he couldn’t miss, and he staggered outside to his ancient Land Rover.
“Never saw roadblocks in those days,” said Grandpa, “so I wasn’t worried. Especially on a Friday night. All the cops were getting blotto too.”
So it was with a mixture of surprise and alarm that, a hundred metres from the hotel, Grandpa pumped his capricious brakes and jolted to a stop in front of a roadblock.
“Dumela,” he slurred at the policeman, trying not to exhale.
“Dumela, rra,” said the officer. “We are checking lights.”
Momentarily relieved, Grandpa then cursed as the second officer disappeared behind the car and ordered him to press the
brake. A few seconds later, the officer returned, scowling.
“Your right brake light is not working. We have to impound your vehicle.”
Grandpa stared at us. “Now, I couldn’t bloody well have that happening, could I? So I told it to the chap straight that I was flying the president in the morning. Asked if he wanted to be responsible for the great President Khama missing his flight.”
The senior officer looked torn. After a moment’s thought, he said, “Let me check it again,” and disappeared behind the car.
Grandpa massaged the brakes once more.
“Knew the light wouldn’t work,” he said. “Hadn’t worked for years.”
The officer reappeared. “Your right light is now working,” he announced, giving the other officer an accusing look. “Go. Go.” He waved Grandpa on. And the Land Rover chugged away, before his bewildered colleague had a chance to protest.
Grandpa smiled at us. “All in a good cause. Anyway, old Ser-etse liked a good tipple himself.”
Sir Seretse Khama, who died in office in 1980, left a strong economy and a country that was, by the standards of others on the continent, well educated and relatively corruption-free. Vice President Quett Masire – elected president on Seretse’s death – kept Botswana on an even keel: its economy continuing to grow, its record for democracy remaining good. Sir Quett Masire retired in 1999, and Festus Mogae was elected president.
Lady K, as she became affectionately known, died in 2002. She was buried in Serowe alongside Seretse, the Bamangwato tribal heads making a rare exception by burying a woman beside a chief.
Ruth and Seretse left behind them four children who, as the country’s royal family – and in the case of their eldest son, its vice president – remain flesh-and-blood reminders of what is perhaps their parents’ greatest legacy: a country where, in large part thanks to them, the significance of race generally ends with the fact that blacks and whites and ‘coloureds’ have different skins.
And while occasionally the government does PI expatriates for racist behaviour or comments, mostly, when colour is discussed, the discussion is free from the loaded sensitivities felt north and south of Botswana’s borders. In some of the small expatriate-dominated mining towns like Phikwe, race is felt more strongly. But even there it is rarely a significant source of tension. For the most part – in the rural areas, where there are few whites anyway, and in the bigger cities – Botswana is colour-blind.
There are exceptions, of course. And perhaps none more obvious than the Tuli Block, a narrow strip of freehold farms on the Limpopo River, where southeastern Botswana is bordered by one of the most racially divided regions of South Africa.
In every other respect, however, the Tuli Block was perfect.
Perfect, at least, for Dad, who in 1992 found and quickly bought two thousand acres of beautiful, undeveloped bushveld. With the Limpopo River on one boundary, the farm was also bisected by the Lotsane River and had almost eight kilometres of exquisite riverfront. It lay nearly two hundred kilometres from Selebi, the last forty on a badly corrugated dirt road. But Dad, who set about selling his Selebi practice, was able now to rely solely on his busy village clinics, for which the Tuli Block was no worse situated than Selebi.
Perfectly placed, in the middle of nowhere.
∨ Twenty Chickens for a Saddle ∧
Nineteen
Fiddian Green
The Lotsane River was nearly dry – a giant sandpit but for a few pools of sparkling brown water. Around each pool, the dark mud skirts were pitted with deep hoof-and-paw-print graffiti. Occasionally the still surfaces plopped, as giant whiskered catfish rose, gulped, and sank leisurely back down again.
Lulu and I suggested catching the fish and moving them to bigger pools in the nearby Limpopo.
Dad laughed. “They can look after themselves.” Later, he explained, when the sun and the animals sucked dry the last of the pools, the enormous fish would simply bury themselves in the sand and wait for the rains. He beckoned us to an almost dry pool. “Watch the mud carefully.”
After a few seconds, something twitched beneath the goo.
“There!” Dad said. “That’s one getting comfortable. They’re not very nice to eat. Taste muddy.”
“Good,” said Lulu.
Around the mud, the dry sand was hot enough to burn our feet. The afternoon sun glinted enticingly on the water.
Dad said, “I’m sure we can swim. Much too shallow for crocs.”
“Sure?”
“Well, maybe just a small one. No, man, just kidding. Beat you in.”
The cool, silt-soft water was even better than it looked. We swam and splashed, waded in and out, floated on our backs, and sank beneath the surface until our lungs felt like bursting. “Ha, ha. Thought I’d been eaten by a croc, didn’t you?”
Afterwards we ate popcorn cooked in a pot on the fire. Then, as the sun began to drop, we set up tents under the tall sweet thorn trees on the riverbank.
It was a few months after we’d bought the farm, and we were camping with our friends, the Blairs – spending our first night on our new land, pitching our tents just a few hundred metres from our planned house site, which was then untouched scrubby bush.
We’d camped before with the Blairs, and I watched, expectantly, as they began to unpack. Long after Mum and Dad had erected their little tent, Ian Blair was still carrying luggage from the car to his and Veronica’s enormous boudoir. Veronica wasn’t keen on camping, and if she camped, she camped only in style – thick floral duvets, pillows, boxes of tissues, numerous outfits.
Dad said to Ian, “By the time you’ve unloaded everything, Lin and I will have more room in ours.”
Ian shrugged and sighed. “Got to please the ladies.”
Veronica said, “Don’t complain, Ian. You like your feather pillow too.”
Mum and Dad smiled and turned back to the bird book.
Mum was writing a species-sighting list on the back of a packet of rusks. “There’s another one…extraordinary…can’t believe this place…birdwatchers’ paradise…”
In Selebi, having rapidly identified the major birds, Mum and Dad’s bird debates had mostly related to LBJs, short for ‘Little Brown Jobs’, the numerous nondescript sparrowlike birds that are almost impossible to identify:
“Dark grey breast, with brown flecks.”
“No, medium to light grey breast. With dark brown flecks.”
“Light brown wings with white flecks.”
“Another bloody LB J.”
But in the Tuli Block, with its mix of river and bush vegetation, there were more than 350 species, the second-highest density in southern Africa. Mum and Dad pointed and chatted and peered through binoculars, breathless with excitement.
Bright yellow weavers clamoured from riverside thorn trees bedecked with their neat straw nests; slim grey herons stood statue-like on rocks, peering at the pools down long elegant necks; brilliant beady-eyed malachite kingfishers perched on dead branches jutting out over the ‘water and eyeing the smooth surface. A majestic fish eagle sat in the top branches of a tall dead knob-thorn tree, its proud, mournful cry ringing far out across the bush and deep inside its listeners, making us shiver with pleasure.
And then there were the guinea fowl, everywhere, their soft spotted feathers littering the riverbank. Their vast numbers were not coincidental. Many years ago, an old Motswana woman had lived here on the banks of the Lotsane. She’d fed and nurtured the guinea fowl population, which had continued to thrive long after she’d died. That was how the farm got its Setswana name, Mmadikgaka: “Mother of the Guinea Fowl.”
But Madigaka was too much of a mouthful. So we were looking for a new name for our new farm – a fact I still couldn’t quite believe, playing in this campsite on our little piece of paradise. For a while, the name was going to be Koro Farm, after our beloved hornbills – until Dad had told his nurses, who’d burst out laughing and then explained that koro also describes a condition in which a man believes he’s be
en bewitched to make his penis grow inward, like the curving beak of a hornbill. And since then, every other name had been vetoed by at least one of us.
As the sun neared the treetops, everyone except Veronica once more stripped to their costumes. Veronica ‘watched her daughters, frowning. “Ian, are you sure it’s okay to swim in that water?”
“I’m sure,” said Ian. “It’s only a small pool. And Keith’s an old bush hand.”
“It’s fine,” said Dad reassuringly. “Do you think I’d let my own kids swim if I thought there were any risks?”
Veronica looked unconvinced. Jennifer, Kristeen, and Lorraine Blair all rode horses, and Veronica had watched many of my most spectacular ejections from a bucking, rearing Feste. But she said nothing, and we ran back into the pools, swimming and wallowing until our skin wrinkled.
The revs of an engine drowned the splashing. A bakkie appeared over the rise and shuddered to a stop on the bank. The driver, a rotund Motswana man, climbed out. He waved to us. We all ‘waved back. Then Dad, Mum, and Ian waded out to greet him.
We watched as they shook hands on the bank.
Suddenly, everyone turned to the pool. Dad let out a piercing whistle. “Time to get out, chaps,” he said. “Come on, don’t dawdle.”
The man’s name was Mr. Phethu. He owned the neighbouring farm. Dad said calmly, “Mr. Phethu’s just been telling us that a big crocodile lives in that pool.”
“The biggest in the Tuli Block,” said Mr. Phethu. “You are very brave to swim.”
Everyone turned silently to the still-rippling water. Goose bumps spread across my body. My legs felt weak.
When I looked away from the water, Mr. Phethu was peering curiously at the campsite, where the sashes of the Blairs’ grand tent were pinned open. You could see the floral duvet. He looked amused.
Damien said, “How big?”
“Three metres. Maybe bigger.” Mr. Phethu sighed. “It has eaten two of my cows.”