by Robyn Scott
But the shouts of rioters were the only things that had ever reached us. And tonight, because of me, was the first time a militant, uncontrollable crowd had actually made it inside the Convent walls.
♦
The talent show had, until a few hours before, promised to be an unmitigated, unprecedented success. A film premiere, supplemented by a few cake sales, was the usual final year fund-raising strategy.
♦
My class was raising the money to build classrooms at a desperately poor rural primary school that we’d visited several months earlier. Appalled by the raggedly dressed children and dilapidated buildings, we had then resolved to do something grand: to raise more money than any class had ever raised before.
All over Bulawayo, we advertised the Convent Talent Show for Sontala School: “dancing, comedy, a fashion show, pop music, rock music, rap music, hip-hop, and the opportunity to win a variety of valuable prizes from our generous sponsors.”
Some of the talent was provided by Convent girls, but several professional performers also donated their time, and groups from other schools auditioned too. The spirit and the diversity were too good to crush, and the programme swelled daily; even after the dress rehearsal, acts ‘too good to miss’ were still being squeezed in.
The night was sold out; desperate latecomers willingly paid the full fee just to stand at the back. The nuns, the VIPs of the evening, sat in the front row, and hundreds of parents, students, and outsiders filled the rest of the beautifully decorated hall. Rarely in its history had the school had an event with a large audience drawn from such a colourful mix of Bulawayans.
Clad in elegant evening gowns, my classmates and I ushered people in and then introduced the show, its worthy cause, and the first of the performances. The happy crowd laughed and cheered at all the appropriate moments, and enthusiastic noise rang through the hall. The nuns even smiled tolerantly at the more suggestive pop songs.
But some of the acts took longer than their allotted time.
By interval we were running more than an hour late. During the break, we rushed around selling drinks and food to the starving crowd, as well as hundreds more raffle tickets, “for the excellent cause,” we said, stirring up a fever of generosity. The girls manning the doors were sucked in to help. In their absence, as we’d later discover, teenage boys off the street slipped into the hall and mingled with the crowd.
The performances resumed.
A gangster-looking all-boy pop group, one of those I had not seen audition, took the stage. When they finished, the applause – mainly from the riotous, dodgy-looking gatecrashers – was tumultuous. The band, scheduled for only one song, struck up again.
I was watching, from the wings, standing beside Rutendo Maziva, a friend and classmate, who was jointly responsible tor organising the talent show.
“Oh, God! Oh, no,” I whispered, as we glanced at each other; first in outrage, then in horror as, moving to the very front of the stage, one of the singers began to gyrate. In time with the music, directly in front of the nuns, he ran his hand up and down his crotch, singing and grinning lewdly. Sickened, Rutendo and I looked on as families with young children stood up and walked out. Gatecrashers rushed forwards to take their seats.
“Close the curtains on them,” Rutendo instructed the young girl manning the crank.
The tall velvet drapes slithered towards the band. The boys just shifted to the front, dodging the curtains.
I marched on stage, mid-song, and asked them fiercely to leave. They laughed, and kept singing. Desperate, I turned my back to the audience, grabbed one of the boys, and pushed him through the thick red drapes. I pushed another, and the surprised gang, instruments and all, receded shamefaced behind the curtains.
Forcing a smile, I turned back to the appalled crowd. I apologised, joking about the incredible variety and enthusiasm of the evening.
The next act was blissfully professional. The crowd looked calmer, and I started to hope things might be salvaged. I returned backstage, cheered – only to see Laura Hudson, one of my most pragmatic and resourceful friends, slowly thudding her forehead against the wall. “I want to die,” she moaned. “They’re smoking dope in the gallery…this is so, so, very bad…What shall we do? This is how we’ll be remembered, Robyn…”
A security guard was found to evict the marijuana smokers. But some had hidden in the toilets and reappeared later. Several teenage boy bands were still to come. Egged on by the swelling, insalubrious half of the crowd, they pushed their luck: censored swear words were reinserted into songs, more suggestive movements were made.
By the last act, nearly two hours over schedule, a third of the audience had left. When the curtains closed for the last time, the applause ‘was a dismaying mix of weak claps, from the remaining respectable half of the audience, and drunken cheers, from the now large and misbehaving section.
As the last members of the audience left, twenty shamefaced final-year girls stacked away the chairs and picked up the litter in silence. We were too traumatised to speak. The scraping of chair legs was punctuated only by the occasional despairing giggle, as banished thoughts of the evening resurfaced.
Everyone wanted to go as soon as possible. I was managing the money, however, and as the girls hurriedly departed, they deposited the evening’s rich spoils at my feet.
And amongst these, when the last girl left the hall, I had finally knelt and cried.
♦
“Robyn?”
I jumped, startled in my thoughts about the ghosts of nuns.
Sister Angela, the headmistress, stood in the wide doorway to the hall. I studied my hands as she approached, and sat down gracefully beside me.
“I’m so sorry,” I started to babble, “I should’ve been more careful…I should’ve listened to everyone who said it was too ambitious…I’m so embarrassed – I’ve disgraced the school – – – – ”
I tried to stop them, but the tears kept falling. I would have done anything to make amends. If Sister Angela had asked me to get baptised a Catholic right then, I would have agreed.
But all she did was put her arm around my shaking shoulders. Then she said, gently, “Look at all this, Robyn. Look at all this money. No one’s ever raised this much money. This is amazing. Think what it can do for those children.”
“What about tonight?” I asked miserably.
Sister Angela smiled. “There were some wonderful moments,” she said. “And I think you’ll find that we’ll survive.” She squeezed my shoulder. “I’m much more worried about you leaving. You’ve been a breath of fresh air in this school. You are a credit to your parents.”
And that was the final result of one-third of Mum’s experiment: me kneeling in a convent, sniffing back tears in the marijuana-scented air, handing bundles of cash to a warmly smiling nun.
The first months of the new millennium brought the heaviest rains in years.
All over the world, people watched images of the catastrophic flooding in Mozambique; hundreds killed and thousands left homeless.
Further inland, the Limpopo flooded too. Here, there was little humanitarian damage. But the high brown waters ate around dams, swept away ancient trees, and churned with the bloated carcasses of dead cows and goats. After years of moaning for more rain, the Tuli Block farmers were soon lamenting the devastation.
No one escaped. Houses near the riverbank were completely flooded. We were luckier than many, but on Molope Farm, favourite old trees disappeared overnight. The sturdy wooden deck on the Limpopo was torn out of the bank. Where once we’d watched the hippos and the birds, rubbish-filled brown water sped past, drowning out the worried birdsong.
Mum said, “Let’s hope it’s making a life raft for someone downstream in Mozambique.” Dad agreed, pointing out that he could always just build a new, better deck.
The floodwaters worried them for a different reason. Gaborone had become an island – just as, after months of work, Dad had finally arranged a date for a meeting in the
capital to discuss a phase III trial of the use of sterols and sterolins for HIV disease. The professor was coming from Cape Town, the doctors from Phikwe, and Dad from the Tuli Block. Government statisticians would be there, as would scientists from the laboratory.
The water made travelling to Gaborone by car impossible. But at the pace things moved in Botswana, Dad feared that to arrange another meeting could take months. We held our breaths, willing the waters to subside. But it rained relentlessly. All roads into the city remained closed.
“Over my dead body,” said Dad, “is this not happening. I’m chartering a plane. Don’t care what it costs.”
The plane collected the relevant people from around the country and flew them to the Gaborone. Everyone, miraculously, was there at the meeting. The consensus was that a large clinical trial should be carried out in Botswana to confirm the results from the South African study. Even with the price of antiretrovirals falling – and the government’s intention to provide them – sterols and sterolins, should they be shown conclusively to work, could be used to complement the drugs.
♦
Following the meeting, the protocol was finalised. Mid that year, it was ready for submission, which had to be done through the president’s office.
On the way there, Dad and John Penhall, the Phikwe doctor who would run the trial, met Charlie Sheldon, who’d taken the opportunity to arrange a visit to President Mogae himself. Dressed in smart suits and polished shoes, Dad and John were surprised when Charlie greeted them wearing faded jeans, a well-worn homemade potato-print shirt with a ‘matching tie’ of similar vintage, and a battered tweed jacket.
“When are you going to change?” asked Dad.
“I’m not,” said Charlie.
Later, chuckling at the memory, Dad described how huge Batswana men in FBI-style dark glasses had eyed them menacingly as they entered the presidential antechamber. Then, suddenly, the faces of the fierce guards had flashed with recognition.
“Ah, Charlie,” they said, smiling and slapping him on the back. “Good to see you. Come in. Come through. Welcome.”
Charlie, John, and Dad sat with the president and talked about the trial. The president said he was pleased to hear about it and would pass the protocol to the Health Department.
Dad was ecstatic. So was Mum – for Dad, and for the project. And also just generally because she’d found her own “part-time, short-term destiny.”
At the same time Dad was in Gaborone, meeting the president, Mum was in England, starting the first course of a part-time degree – picking up where she’d left off, twenty years before, when my conception had rudely interrupted her.
She’d stumbled upon her new destiny just a few months earlier. She was up in her study, reading about the achievements of old classmates in her college magazine, thinking of things that might have been, had she not ended up in the Tuli Block.
It was the Christmas holidays of 1999, and Lulu, Damien, and I were all at home, sitting with Dad in the lounge downstairs. Mum appeared at the bannister, grinning madly as she looked down upon us.
“I’ve found my new career,” she announced.
“Really?” said Dad, looking not in the least surprised.
Mum hurried down the steps, brandishing the magazine. Flushed with excitement, she showed us the article about an old Somervillian who’d started a postgraduate degree programme in nutritional medicine at Surrey University in England. The degree was part-time, spanning several years. Not sure what she wanted to do afterwards with the qualification, Mum was nevertheless determined to do the degree, and optimistic she could persuade them to accept her. They did, and Mum began a sporadic educational commute between Surrey and the Tuli Block.
In late 1999 Chris Phatswe, an Air Botswana pilot who’d been suspended from flying for failing a medical test, took off from Gaborone’s Sir Seretse Khama Airport in one of Air Botswana’s three operational aeroplanes. For more than an hour, with no one else on board, he flew around the airport, threatening to crash the plane into an Air Botswana building – as retribution, he claimed. When the aeroplane eventually ran out of fuel, he crashed instead into the airline’s two other working planes, which stood together on the tarmac. Chris Phatswe was killed, and all three planes were destroyed, effectively suspending the operations of Air Botswana. Later, it was announced that Phatswe had AIDS, and it was widely speculated that AIDS dementia had caused his irrational suicidal behaviour.
In 2002 the Botswana government started rolling out the intended countrywide provision of free antiretrovirals to people with AIDS. Botswana, rightly, was widely hailed as a leader in Africa. But it was still too late for many.
Elizabeth, who started to get sick again in 2000, was among them. Mum went to visit her, accompanied by Jenny Dunlop, an old friend of ours who taught Elizabeth’s daughter at the local secondary school and who had started the ‘Say NO!’ group.
The teenage girl, who was caring tor her once more skeletal and bedridden mother, greeted Mum and Jenny at the door and showed them inside.
Elizabeth smiled and weakly clutched Mum’s hand. “I got careless,” she said, “about looking after myself. About taking my pills. I worked too hard.”
Her daughter tried to feed her. Elizabeth choked and vomited food and blood across herself and the sheets.
Jenny excused herself.
Elizabeth’s daughter rushed forwards, ignoring the gloves beside the bed. Elizabeth herself had lectured on how caregivers must always use protective gloves. Mum watched, nauseous and dismayed, as the daughter touched her mother’s face, wiping away the bloody mixture with her bare hands.
Then they said good-bye.
Elizabeth insisted on staggering to her feet, to say “Goodbye” and “God bless.”
…God, Robbie, seeing her like that, you know I wondered how Dad had managed to keep sane, seeing people like that, day after day, for so many years. I cannot find words to describe the horror. The despair of that poor girl trying to feed and then clean her mother, forgetting every simple rule. At the time, I couldn’t believe it: all that training and knowledge, ignored. And then I thought, What would I do if my mother was covered in blood and vomit? What would you do, Robbie, if it were me? What do you do in an impossibly desperate situation? And we’re adults. All over the country it’s children doing this…
Not long after, Elizabeth developed AIDS dementia. Ranting and shouting, she dismissed anyone who tried to help her, including, eventually, her own daughter. In the end, she sent everyone away. In early 2001, about fifteen years after contracting the virus, having touched the lives, and probably saved the lives, of thousands, she died mad and totally alone in a room in the AIDS refuge she had started.
♦
Around the same time, about a year after the floods, Dad had still not heard back regarding the outcome of the trial application. Phone calls and faxes to the Health Department went unanswered. Then documents could not be found. Eventually, Dad was told the application had been turned down. No reason was given, no written rejection was provided. The representative said he could offer no further help. In July, a year after submitting the application, Dad and Charlie Sheldon met with the minister to express their frustration. An explanation and documentation were promised. More calls and faxes went unanswered.
The promised explanation never came.
A few months later, Mum phoned me. I was in New Zealand, at university. Her voice as she said hello was soothing and measured – her bad-news voice.
I sat down, feeling weak. “It’s one of the horses. Or Dad? What’s happened?”
“No, no.” Mum laughed. “Nothing like that. But I’m afraid we’ve decided to leave Botswana. We’re going to sell the farm. Please don’t be too upset…”
The view from my window was of a sloping green field, dotted with a few muddy sheep; the same lush, safe, soggy world that nearly fifteen years earlier was all Lulu, Damien, and I had ever known. Until Dad had said, “We’re going to Botswana.”
&
nbsp; I felt profoundly homesick, for the first time in my life.
Knowing I’d be back, I’d never minded leaving before. I missed the farm, but always there was the comforting thought of returning – to smell the dusty dry bush, watch the birds glide across the glassy river, see the sun sink over our favourite trees, splendid and golden as ever, and maybe just a little taller. And Mum and Dad, there together, to watch it with, and marvel at the good fortune of living in one of the most beautiful places in the world.
“It’s time to move on,” said Mum. “There’s not enough here for us any more. We’ll only sell it to someone who really loves it too. And just think, it’ll be there forever in our hearts and memories…”
…Dad’s moving speedily as ever, and has just put his practice on the market. He’s getting plenty of interest – the clinics are busier than ever, and only getting more so. But Dad says if they made him millions, he still wouldn’t stay. The disgraceful trial debacle has been a real blow for him. Working towards a solution, I think, was what made the horror of his work tolerable for so long. But now it’s depressing him more than ever. So many of his patients have AIDS, and it will be so long before everyone who needs drugs has access to them, and then so hard to enforce and monitor. I believe, you know, he’s lost faith in Botswana, and more forgiving though I am, I do understand. We’re going to move to Cape Town, for the moment. Dad’s going to work in emergency medicine, until he can find something else and escape medicine at last.
Goodness knows what life holds for us now, but exciting times, I suppose. I remain optimistic, and on that subject, I am just so glad I had the privilege of helping with the peace pot mission before I lelt. I will look back forever on that trip, remembering the odd wonderful collection of people and those exquisite places, as a fitting end to wonderful years in a wonderful country…