The traffic was light, as the morning rush that saw people streaming into Gaborone for the day’s work was over by the time they pulled away from the outskirts of the town, the small office blocks and other commercial buildings that gradually spread out into the surrounding bush. They left the dam behind them and the riverbed that had been dry for long, parched months; they drove past the turn-off to Mokolodi Reserve and the first of the farm roads that joined the main highway at irregular intervals. On a rutted track running alongside the tarred road, they saw a cart laden high with firewood, pulled by a rickety donkey. An elderly man, his hat battered to the point of being barely recognisable for what it was, raised his whip in greeting. Mma Ramotswe sounded the van’s horn in response, and Mma Makutsi waved from her wound-down window. “The old ways,” said Mma Makutsi. “There are still some people who believe in the old ways. Nobody waves to one another any longer, Mma.”
Mma Ramotswe agreed, in spite of her optimistic conviction that things were never as bad as they seemed. The old ways had been superseded in so many places by an indifference to others; how else might one explain the failure of people to notice one another, let alone to utter the greetings that strangers in Botswana had always exchanged.
It took them half an hour to reach the turn-off to the village mentioned by Blessing when she’d come to see Mma Ramotswe. She lived there, she said, with her mother and an unmarried sister, who was away at present; Tefo lived next door in a house she said he had built himself a few years earlier. “Unofficially,” she explained. “It is an unofficial house, Mma, because the headman would not give him permission to build a proper one.”
The road to the village was untarred, and although in the dry season the baked earth surface was easily passable, Mma Ramotswe imagined that in the rainy season it would quickly become impassable. Here and there, where erosion had been particularly bad, the surface of the road degenerated into long cracks, like small fault lines, that had to be avoided by steering onto meandering deviations made by previous traffic. Stunted acacia lined the road, along with thorn bushes and the occasional tree, and these were covered with a fine red dust from the surface of the road.
“This is not a good place,” said Mma Makutsi, gazing about her. “It is hot down here, and there is very little grazing for cattle.”
“We are seeing it at a bad time,” said Mma Ramotswe. “When the rains come, this will be different.”
“When the rains come,” said Mma Makutsi, longingly. “But will they ever come, Mma? Each year they seem to be later and later, and when they do break, they are sometimes no more than a wind with a few drops of water in its eyes.”
Mma Ramotswe did not respond. She had been busy guiding the van round the obstructions that impeded their journey at every turn, and now, at last, the village came into sight. At first it was just the occasional roof, popping out above a canopy of thorn trees, but then there was a shop, with a brightly painted blue sign above its door: All Needs Foodstuffs and Household Good. Mma Makutsi surveyed it critically. “Goods, I think, Mma. They have lost an s. Household Goods. Plural.”
“These stores have everything,” said Mma Ramotswe. “And you need these places if you live out here.”
There was a school, a low-level building painted yellowish-cream, in front of which a sign proclaimed: Tshekedi Khama Junior School. This was no more than a couple of small, square buildings, each endowed with a verandah, and surrounded by a dusty playground dominated by two large oil drums painted in the national colours. There was a minuscule clinic, marked by a red cross on its front wall. Underneath the cross was a painting in naïf style of a nurse holding a thermometer and, in a dialogue bubble above her head, saying, “Don’t ignore the signs!”
“Of what?” asked Mma Makutsi, pointing to the mural. “Signs of what, Mma?”
Mma Ramotswe was not sure, but ventured that the message was perhaps that a high temperature should be taken seriously. “A high temperature is a bad sign,” she said. “That is well known, Mma.”
“Yes,” said Mma Makutsi. “You cannot ignore a high temperature.”
The village was somnolent, with few signs of activity other than that which surrounded a small roadside stall where a woman was selling maize cobs. Several women were standing beside her—customers, thought Mma Ramotswe—and they all paused their conversation to stare at the visitors in the van.
Mma Ramotswe drew up to the stall and addressed the women through the car window. Greetings were exchanged before she asked if they could direct her to Blessing Mompati’s house. It was a short distance down the road, the stallholder replied, and then added, “Why do you want to see her, Mma?”
Mma Ramotswe smiled. “I am a cousin.”
“And I am this lady’s colleague,” chipped in Mma Makutsi.
It was an unwise addition, thought Mma Ramotswe as she gave Mma Makutsi a quick, discouraging glance.
The woman nodded. Then another asked, “Colleague in what, Mma? In an office?”
Mma Ramotswe replied quickly. “Yes, in an office.”
She had given her answer in the tone of one who would not welcome further questioning, but this was the countryside, where everybody felt entitled to know everybody else’s business.
“What sort of business is that, Mma?”
The question hung unanswered in the air as cicadas, somewhere in the dryness, kept up their incessant shriek. It was Mma Makutsi who eventually replied, “We are enquiry agents, Mma. We make enquiries—general enquiries.”
Mma Ramotswe could not help but smile at the admirably vague answer, and, what was more, it was true. There were times, she thought, when Mma Makutsi showed complete brilliance. No wonder she had got ninety-seven per cent…
The women at the stall looked at one another. None wanted to be shown to be ignorant of what an enquiry agent did, and so there were nods of understanding. They repeated their directions.
“You will find her in, Mma,” said one. “I saw her go into the house a few minutes ago.”
As Mma Ramotswe parked a short distance down the road, she complimented Mma Makutsi on her handling of the question. “If we had said we were detectives, it would have been all round the village. There would be rumours that Blessing was in trouble with the police. People would have said all sorts of things.”
“These village people can be big gossips,” said Mma Makutsi. “The biggest gossips are found in the places where the least is happening, you know. Go to a place where nothing has ever happened, and you will hear a lot of gossip—that’s for sure.”
They approached the house pointed out by the women. It stood just off the road, and next to it, across a straggling single-strand fence, was a house that was half-shack, more of an outhouse or garage than anything else, with a decrepit motorbike parked outside it. A few discouraged-looking paw-paw trees clustered about the back of this house; otherwise, the yard was bare.
They walked up a narrow path that led to Blessing’s home. All along the edge of this path, empty bottles, upended, had been half sunk in the ground to provide an ornamental border. The bottles, mostly green, were coated with dried mud and dust, lending them a forlorn appearance; an attempt at beautification that seemed only to make more pronounced the slight air of desolation that hung over the village. This was not a prosperous place; this had none of the bustle of Mochudi, where Mma Ramotswe had been born and brought up. If the inhabitants of this village nursed any hope, Mma Ramotswe imagined, it was a hope of getting away rather than of making anything of local life.
She glanced at Mma Makutsi, who she imagined was thinking much the same thing.
“I haven’t seen a village standpipe,” muttered Mma Makutsi. “I wonder if these people have water. A well, maybe.”
“It is hard for them,” said Mma Ramotswe. “Everywhere in Botswana is getting better, but there are some places…” She sighed. The benefits of progr
ess had been unevenly spread. There was affluence in the big towns, but this did not always trickle down as the politicians said it would.
They approached the lelapa, the yard around which a knee-height wall described the curtilage of the home. From the gateway, Mma Ramotswe called out, “Ko ko,” the greeting for an invitation to enter. Blessing had seen them from a window, and the front door was quickly opened, from which she called out her own greeting. She was evidently pleased to see them, and enquired solicitously, and at some length, about their journey from Gaborone. Had there been much traffic on the road? Had there been many bad drivers? “Yes,” said Mma Makutsi, “almost all of them are bad these days.” Had they found the turn-off without difficulty?
The house was a small one—four rooms—the first of which served as kitchen and sitting room. There was a table, four hard-backed chairs, and an ancient couch covered over with a bright blanket which served as a throw. The shelf above the couch was lined with provisions—the familiar foodstuffs of the simple kitchen: a packet of sugar, a couple of tins of corned beef, a small bag of dried beans, sweetened condensed milk.
Because the room was gloomy, even in the noon light, Mma Ramotswe had not noticed the door at the back, which was slightly ajar. Now it opened, and an elderly woman entered, a shawl wrapped round her shoulders.
“This is my mother,” said Blessing.
Mma Ramotswe and Mma Makutsi issued the traditional greetings, referring to her politely as Mma Blessing—mother of Blessing.
“So you are Precious Ramotswe,” said Mma Blessing to Mma Makutsi.
Mma Makutsi put her right. “No, Mma. This lady here is Mma Ramotswe. I am Mma Makutsi. She works with me.”
Mma Ramotswe noticed that. Mma Makutsi worked with her, but this was not the time or the place.
Mma Blessing nodded as she absorbed this information. “So you are the lady,” she said to Mma Ramotswe. “You are the daughter of Obed?”
It had been years since her father had died—her daddy, as she still called him, but even now, after all that time, it made her catch her breath to hear his name on another’s lips. He came to her mind every day—every single day—but it was different when his name was brought up by somebody else. That made her feel all the more that he was still there somewhere, in that Botswana that had existed, but had faded, and that he had not yet been forgotten. The past was a vast congregation of people, countless, crowded; a Botswana that was slipping away now, as must inevitably happen, but that still harboured those whom we might recognise, who were special to us, and whose name, even if uttered by chance, triggered memories of warmth and love.
“I am his daughter, Mma,” she replied.
Mma Blessing moved towards her to place a hand upon her right forearm. There was surprising strength in the grasp, as often is the case with the grip of the elderly—who might hold on to others as if clutching at a world they knew they must lose. Mma Ramotswe put her own left hand over Mma Blessing’s extended fingers: the skin was dry, not really flesh but just a cover for the bone beneath.
“Obed and I were children together,” the old woman said. “Our grandfathers were cousins, you see, and that made us cousins too, although far-away cousins, of course. But that makes no difference, does it? It is the same blood, isn’t it?”
Mma Ramotswe nodded. She looked into Mma Blessing’s eyes, and saw that they were white with cataracts. “It is the same blood,” she said.
“And that never changes, does it?”
Mma Ramotswe inclined her head in agreement. She wondered what Mma Blessing could see through the tiny white discs that were in the pupils of her eyes. They said that it made the light fade, as if the world was seen through a milky screen, though seen less and less as the condition progressed. But surely she could have them removed, because Mma Ramotswe had been told that it was a very simple procedure now, not nearly as complex, or expensive, as the replacement of a hip.
Mma Blessing relaxed her grip, and, feeling for the back of one of the hard-backed chairs, she sat down. “The last time I saw you, Mma, you were a little girl. It was not long after your mother became late, and you were being looked after by your aunts, or it might have been a cousin. I do not remember all that well now, although I remember you. I remember seeing you and you were wearing a red dress and you were laughing.”
Wearing a red dress and laughing…That was a memory anybody might herself wish to have of her childhood. Yes, she had been fortunate, because there had been so much laughter in her childhood. Some people remembered only tears and anxiety, and even fear; she remembered laughter.
“And now,” continued Mma Blessing, “now you are this lady living in Gaborone, and you have a husband and a business and everything. And they have even had your photograph in the paper, I’m told.”
“Only once,” said Mma Ramotswe. “And there were other people in the photograph with me.”
“That is still very important, Mma. Back in my day, nobody put photographs of women in the papers. Or if we were in photographs, they did not put our names. They put the names of the men under the photograph, but not the names of the women.”
Mma Makutsi had been silent, but now she spoke. “That has all changed, Mma Blessing. Now the women are deciding who should be in the photographs. There are ladies working on the newspapers and they put photographs of ladies on the front page, and there are men in the background.”
Mma Ramotswe laughed. “Sometimes, Mma. Sometimes.”
“Soon men will be in the back seat,” Mma Makutsi continued. “And we will be the ones who are driving the car.”
Mma Blessing drew in her breath. “That will be a big day, Mma. I shall be late by then, I think, but it will be a big day for Africa.”
“You must have tea,” interjected Blessing. “And I shall call Tefo. He will come over from his place.” She waved a hand in the air, in the direction of the shack they had seen next door.
There was no electricity in the house, and the tea had been brewing on a fire at the back. Mma Ramotswe had detected this, as there was a smell of woodsmoke in the air. Sometimes people would use a small paraffin stove; sometimes they would rely on the embers kept warm in a stone hearth. She suspected that Mma Blessing would be the one in this household to prefer a real fire.
As Blessing went out to make the tea, her mother continued the conversation. “It’s good of you to come and see Tefo,” she said. “He is your cousin too, you see. His grandfather was a cousin of the second wife of my uncle. The first wife went away. She was not much good, Mma. She went away.”
“It is sometimes best if people who are not much good go away,” said Mma Makutsi. “That is what I think, at least.”
There was the sound of a throat being cleared, just inside a dim back room, and then a man appeared in the doorway. This was Tefo, a tall man neatly dressed in khaki trousers and shirt. He had a walking stick, and was leaning heavily on it, taking the weight off his left leg.
They greeted one another.
“I have heard all about you,” said Mma Ramotswe. “And now we are meeting.”
“I have heard all about you too, Mma,” he said. “I have heard that you are a famous detective up in Gaborone.”
Mma Ramotswe laughed. “I am not famous, Rra. It is just a little business.”
“Two people,” said Mma Makutsi. “Two directors, and one boy.”
“I’m sure you do very important work,” said Tefo.
He made his way towards the chair next to Mma Blessing. He walked with a pronounced limp.
“I’m sorry to hear about your hip,” said Mma Ramotswe. “These things are very painful.”
“Yes, very painful,” said Tefo.
“And I’m sorry to hear that you cannot get the operation at the government hospital.”
Tefo sighed. “There is a problem for me. I am not a citizen, you see. I was born over on th
at side—in South Africa—and so they say, ‘Go over there and get it done in one of their hospitals.’ But if I go over there, they say to me, ‘You are not a citizen because you have lived for a long time in Botswana. You are their problem—not ours.’ ”
“That is what bureaucracy is like,” said Mma Makutsi. “They make up rules so that they can say that it is nothing to do with them. They are very clever, these people.”
How to Raise an Elephant Page 7