From a teacher to a fisherman, he says

Yesterday was Saturday and I went out with Sega’s husband Sinvula, a teacher at the secondary school, to see their fields. We drove in their little loaded-up van towards Parakarangu (the village where Sinvula is from and where is family is) through an expansive landscape, dotted with palm tree, acacias and the occasional cow munching grass here and there. As we passed a few beautiful water birds along the way, Sinvula would murmer the Sesubiya name for them, and his son Tsiamo would repeat it ‘till he got it right. English is the “official” language of Botswana (in which government affairs are conducted), Setswana is the “national” language, and the other tribal tongues like Sesubiya get spoken at home. Tsiamo is seven and pretty much fluent in all three.
At Parakarangu, we greeted Sinvula’s various relatives, including a toothless old great aunt who was lying on a mat outside her dusty hut, apparently asking Sinvula (in Sesubiya) if he had now taken a white lady as a wife and if she (i.e. me) could buy her a chicken because she hadn’t had anything but porridge in days. Sinvula gave her a small tin of paraffin and I remained quiet, never knowing what to say or even think in such situations. I think if you found an old lady on a dirty mat who hadn’t had a proper meal in days in the U.S. you would call social services or something, and I’m constantly trying to change my frame of reference here, to see things differently, to find some sort of balance between cultural relativism and recognition of the glaring inequalities between here and home.
After visiting the relatives, we drove out to the Chobe River, a part of it I had never seen before, and Sinvula pushed off in a mokoro to catch some fish while whilst I remained on the banks with the family’s Zimbabwean herdboy Thaba, who would be dropped off afterwards to round up the cattle. Sinvula made his way through the reeds, watching for crocodiles and hippos, until he was out of sight and Thaba and I sat in the shade of the car idly chatting. He was here because there were no jobs in Zimbabwe and despite having finished Form 4 of school, herding cattle in Botswana was currently his best option for earning some money. He asked me a lot of questions about how much things cost in the U.S., how far it is, how many countries are in North America, and if it’s hard to get permits to get there. I am constantly being asked if it’s hard to get permits to go to the U.S., and I wonder what the chances are of a Zimbabwean herdboy in Botswana ever getting there. After 9/11, slim to none?
Sinvula comes back, they tie up the fish (tilapia and bubble fish, or “dituni”) and we drive back to the village. Sinvula’s mother, a striking lady in a faded madras sundress, has prepared a snack for us—cooked lerotse (watermelon basically) mashed with a porridge made from sorghum (“bogobe”). It’s actually pretty tasty, sort of like flavored oatmeal, though I’m not a fan of pouring in the sour milk that SInvula is liberally mixing into his bowl. I think back to teaching Matheba last week to make oatmeal and her hesitation and unease at both the taste and texture of what to me is the most obviously common and yummy breakfast food. It’s funny how taste buds are so habituated.
The sun is beginning to sink and the three of us (Sinvula, Tshiamo and I) hop back in the bakkie, making a quick stop at their vegetable fields before starting the trip home. Sinvula is filling the water tank and I take some pictures of Bobo (Tshiamo’s nickname) running barefoot through the fields, singing and snapping off sugar cane, cracking the bark with his teeth and devouring the sweet insides. He is clearly enjoying himself thoroughly and I have this sudden feeling of nostalgia but I’m not sure for what. For childhood and the fun of running around in the backyard, or for generations of grown-ups in urban places who grew up somewhere rural, with barnyard animals and seasons bringing new harvests, and now lament that their kids think milk comes from Safeway? I can’t quite put my finger on it. But after reading volumes and volumes of literature on agriculture in Botswana, and the same line over and over again about how farming here is “a cultural way of life, despite it being economically unviable, lacking markets,” etc., I can see why. Sinvula picks some bunches of greens (“merego”) and I think about my farm box back home—isn’t this what all of us in Berkeley and beyond are striving for, this direct line from an afternoon on the farm to the dinner plate? Why are we (Western conservationists, development technocrats) trying to convince these people they should instead clean toilets in lodges? Because for the most part that is what “getting involved with tourism” here entails. I know farming is hard work and not all running around in spinach fields, but it is clearly a part of Sinvula’s life of which he is proud and content.
The sun is now gone and the winter chill has set in. We roll up the windows, and drive home. The dust is settling around the trees, the palms in distance are looking hazy and pink is lingering around them. After a few days of sitting in the village wondering exactly why I am here, or what it is I’m doing, or trying to do, I feel like I have had a good day. I’ve learned a lot, and I have had that sort of out-of-body feeling of some kind of amazement or incredulity that I am really here, really sitting in this extraordinarily beautiful place, talking to people who’s lives are so extraordinarily different from mine and ours at home and getting to think and write about it.

the witches' brew

After two weekends of attending SDA church related activities with Bio, I found myself sitting on the couch with Matheba during a freak rainstorm in June, listening to her talk about the strange things that had happened when she first moved to Gaborone. She had been staying at her brother’s place and for the first several nights, would get into bed fully clothed and would wake up in the morning totally naked. One of the nights she had woken up to see a “monna o mo khutswane” ( miniature man) leaning over her bed who had then suddenly disappeared. She was so upset by all of this that her boss at the supermarket where she was a teller gave her a few days off.

With the rain hammering on the tin roof and Matheba speaking in Setswana, I was still pretty confused about the story. What she describing some sort of rape? Or just a dream? She continued on and then things became clearer. After a few days of these goings-on her mother came from the village and she along with the brother took Matheba to the ngaka ya Setswana—the traditional doctor. After paying a hefty fee, he in turn mixed up a concoction that was of course to get rid of the witch that had been plaguing Matheba. Where did this witch come from, I asked? From her relatives, she said. They were jealous that she was off in Gaborone, living in the big city, making a decent income at the supermarket, and so they had used witchcraft to send this little man to her and to have these strange things happen like her clothes coming off and her looking into the mirror and having a completely white face (please see the irony in this last part). I couldn’t quite figure out whether the “moloi” (witch) was the disgruntled relative who had sent these spells or if the witch was the mini-man himself, but the point was she really and truly believed in the stories she was describing. She then went on, prefacing with a laughing “Clare, you really just don’t know” (in Setswana), to describe all the strange things that have happened in Moshupa, her home village where I stayed two years back. Meeting strange sepoko (ghosts) in the road, one who was very very tall like a person on stilts, another with the top half of its body separate from the bottom half (apparently Janet had encountered that one). I spent most of the time while she was talking just nodding, but I couldn’t help put in a small interjection. What about the fact that her whole family, including herself, were Christian (Seventh Day Adventist to be precise)? I didn’t want to be rude, I added, but how did that work—believing in witches and spells and also the Christian faith? To me it was all the same, whether you believe in half-bodied witches grabbing cell phones or men who can walk on water, but I was pretty sure her church did not approve of these beliefs, no? I guess I got the answer I was expecting, as she rolled her eyes and said something along the lines of, oh please, you think all those church goers don’t also go to see the traditional doctors to protect themselves from jealous cousins and the like?

This evening conversation, which took place a couple of weeks ago, was the first time anyone had candidly talked to me about witchcraft. I knew it had a presence in Botswana, but I also knew that it was not something that people talked to casual visitors about, especially white university students from the States. I guess Matheba and I had spent enough time together just the two of us hanging out at the house with Junior, watching T.V. and chit-chatting, that it finally came up. It was still sort of surreal though—there is a difference between knowing that a society, or a culture, believes in something you find outlandish, and then hearing your good friend talk with such credulity about it.

About a week later, I bought a book called “The Screaming of the Innocent”, by Unity Dow, one of Botswana’s few internationally known novelists. She was the first female judge on Botswana’s High Court and is quite a high profile lady here. I’d heard her name mentioned at the conference “Mapping Africa in the English Speaking World” that I’d attended at University of Botswana, and her works contrasted with those of Alexander McCall Smith. So I was curious what her stories would hold.

“The Screaming of the Innocent” was timely reading after my talk with Matheba. It was a “cold case” story of sorts—about a strong-willed female health worker in a small village who accidentally unearths some evidence regarding the murder of a young girl, suspected to have been killed for ritual purposes. The novel is well-written, riveting, and at the end, quite disturbing. A penultimate scene that re-lives the girl’s murder, in which several “big men” (meaning prominent men, a businessman, headmaster, and another) pin down the girl and “harvest” certain body parts while she remains alive in order to use them later to make a powerful potion, made me feel sick. Not exactly Mma Ramotswe drinking bush tea and reveling in her traditionally built body. But the book felt much more true to Botswana, despite highlighting some of the darker sides to life here. The character descriptions, their interactions, the depictions of both village life and life for a city professional (the lawyer who comes to help out)—all of it manages to both tell an intriguing story and reveal a bit of Botswana from the perspective of a person born and raised here. Not that the “insider” perspective is necessarily more “true” to reality than a Scotsman’s, but I do think that for anyone captivated by Botswana after reading The Number 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, Unity Dow’s books would be an interesting and thought-provoking read too.

Prayer Camp

Again this weekend I found myself on a bus towards Lobatse, this time with the final destination being Bio’s 7th Day Adventist church youth camp, just outside the town of Otse. A large tent had been set up in the bush, under which the weekend’s activities were taking place, starting with sundown vespers on Friday. I arrived Saturday afternoon just in time for their panel discussion on “Health by Choice, not by Chance” followed by a lengthy vespers session (and some uncomfortable kneeling and praying). “Health by Choice, not by Chance” was fascinating to me—the church youth group leader, who by profession is a doctor trained overseas, opened the discussion with a brief lecture on how the topic of health might be tackled in a number of different ways by looking at the choices we make about food, water, exercise and other health-related behaviors (including deodorant choice—but do they really have aluminum-free Tom’s here, I wonder?). “Africans are often followers when we should be leaders”, she said, citing the fact that stores in the West now have special organic sections selling expensive produce grown without chemicals when our (Batswana) grandmothers have been growing fruits and vegetables that way since time immemorial. The youth then broke into groups, each assigned a different topic to discuss and to then present back to the whole group. Here’s where I got a little lost/disconnected. Our group was assigned food and water. I was thinking this was a particularly interesting topic, given that based on my past month here, it seems as though there is a huge gap between the type of food that gets cooked at home (cooked greens, rice, a little meat/chicken, all pretty healthy) versus what people buy on their lunch break or way home from work (greasy fries, KFC chicken buckets, fizzy sodas, etc.)—what do people think of these hugely disparate food options available to them and which each have their own connotations and stigmas (KFC = food from the West, a sign of modernity? vs merogo= traditional greens, old-fashioned)? But after a brief silence, there was an intense flipping of Bible pages and a discussion commenced out of what the Bible tells us we should and should not eat. The kinds of meat that are or are not okay, an old testament focus on fruits and vegetables, a close reading of what exactly was or was not said about consuming wine (a confusing topic based on apparently conflicting passages). Clearly this opens up a huge conversation that I am not prepared to tackle about how the degrees to which the Bible gets read literally, treated as a moral guide, or in my case, viewed as largely unnecessary for a discussion about health. But in any case, the fact is that the youth here (all about my age) were intent on using the writings of the Bible to guide them in their understandings of what constitutes health and healthy behavior. Watching them skim the pages, looking for answers, I had a hard time restraining myself from asking what insight Mark verse xyz might provide in regards to the pitfalls of fast food and car-based lifestyles that require us to go to gyms to get exercise—a question I realize to be limited in itself. I think what I found most hard to swallow was not that these youth were looking for guidance in the Bible, but that their intense focus on what the Bible had to say about x or y or z seemed to preclude any creative or analytical thinking of their own about the topic. I couldn’t help but wonder if this type of approach was a continuation of the type of rote learning that still happens in so many schools outside of the West today—listen to the teacher, spit back what you are told is the “correct answer”, no room for your own opinion or thoughts, etc. Perhaps I’m being too harsh—there were a couple folks in the group who had some thought-provoking questions and sharp counter-responses to biblical citations, and plus, we all learn from stories, whether they are the ones we are told in our yoga classes or in school or in church—but still, the overwhelming feeling was that this book, that was written so long ago by a few guys, somehow held the final authority. It didn’t feel so different from a Bible study group I attended once in North Carolina, which on the one hand might seem strange since I was at a camp in the middle of the bush in Botswana this weekend, but on the other hand maybe isn’t so strange when I think about the decades of missionary work that has been done in this area, and the lifestyle of many people who live in Botswana’s capital (more similar to my lifestyle than the lifestyle of say, the Malagasi people I visited in Madagascar after Christmas). I know I’m hugely glossing over major differences between Christian church groups in the U.S. and here—maybe just because the similarities are more striking or surprising than the differences—but one thing I can say for sure is that the 7th day Adventist preachers I have seen here in Botswana are no more interesting than any Catholic priests I’ve heard back home and perhaps like the sound of their own thundering voices even more. After a painful hour and half of their moruri (pastor) saying what could have been said in about two minutes (“pray, pray and PRAY even more!!), I suddenly very clearly understood where the phrase “stop your preaching” comes from, and was ready to go home to Matheba, Lesego and little baby Aneele. However that wasn’t quite in the cards. I ended up at a gospel acapella concert in Gaborone (invited by the girls who gave me a lift back, who funny enough stopped at a convenience store for fizzy drinks and cookies for supper, post health panel discussion ) for a couple of hours before I saw bed…and that was my Saturday night.

Who said all of Botswana was flat?

Last weekend I took a bus to Lobatse to visit my friend Bio, who had invited me to a concert at her (7th Day Adventist) church on Saturday night. Most of Botswana is dead flat but in the south, towns like Lobatse sit in low valleys (freezing in the winter I can attest) encircled by bush-covered hills and rocky outcroppings. I arrived around lunchtime and we walked to over to Bio’s apartment, where about ten girls our age from her church were gathered to eat lunch after Sabbath services. Crammed into her and her roommate Barati’s little room, we sat on the beds eating a delicious and huge lunch made by Bio and Barati, while Bio and her friends discussed the pastor’s sermon and I rather hopelessly tried to follow a conversation in Setswana in which everyone was talking all at once and at break-neck speed. I understood enough (and enough English got mixed in and translated for me), that I was able to follow that they were talking about the pressures to get married, the attempts to feel comfortable with being single as a twenty-something year old female, the dangers of rushing into marriage, and the importance of good supportive girlfriends. Their conversation didn’t sound so far off from conversations we have back home. Add to that the fact that Facebook came up in the conversation (is it a useful tool to stay in touch with people? Or an addictive habit that encourages creepy stalking and exhibitionism?), and for a second I could have forgotten I was in a dusty town famed in Botswana only for its large-scale abattoir. Does Sarah Jessica Parker have any idea that young women in Botswana are comparing their friends’ shoes to Carrie Bradshaw’s and wondering what exactly a pair of Jimmy Choo’s looks like?

Thomas Friedman might say that this is all just further evidence that the world is flat. But despite the attractiveness of this thesis, and bits of evidence that seem to support it, the world is so very not flat, even here. And to highlight the way in which Western images, brands and technology make their way to places like Botswana and ignore the incredible differences that also exist seems to me to be to very selective--a depiction of the world that is seductive and thus very dangerous in terms of what it leaves out, or glosses over. All is not right and fair just because a kid in Bangalore can create an iPod app. What about the fact that while Sex and the City plays on the T.V., these girls in Lobatse are likely to be boiling hot water to take a bath, in a house where there is no running hot water, if running water at all? Or that Matheba, who used to work at an American-style supermarket here in the capital Gaborone asked me last night if there are bathrooms on airplanes or little shops on board where you can buy food in flight?
In a discussion panel on the portrayal of Africa by Western fiction writers that I attended at University of Botswana today, several scholars mentioned that Alexander McCall Smith’s Ladies Detective Agency novels, with their nostalgic dream-like quality, present a similarly dangerous one-sided view of the African world. In Smith’s Botswana, there are traditionally built ladies with admirable gumption, and men like J.L.B. Matekoni with respectable values, but there is no AIDS, hunger, conflicted identities or violence. Smith himself has said in interviews that with his books he has tried to counter the crushing weight of literature and media that depicts only the dark side of Africa—a worthy aim—but as much as I enjoyed reading his books, I have to admit that he may have swung too far in the other direction. The books are lovely to read, as a sort of escapism, but they certainly don’t go beyond the surface of any kind of life here. If only life were as simple as he makes it out to be for Batswana.

I think though, the difference between Smith and Friedman type depictions is that Smith’s works are self-labelled fiction—he may be giving the wrong idealized impression of Botswana to the Western world (creating complacency on our part? or so argued one scholar today) but he has never claimed to be doing more than telling a good story, with the backdrop happening to be southern Botswana. Friedman, on the other hand, really seems to believe that what he is saying represents reality (maybe that’s because he never leaves the cushy homes and offices of Bangalore’s top CEOs). And even if he taps into one component of one person or group of people’s reality, what seems to be equally important is all that is missing; all that goes unnoticed, ignored—the not so warm and fuzzy stuff that if brought to light, would remind us that the world is not only not flat, but full of bumps, sharp turns and unexpected contours.

bus station encounters

I had forgotten what out-of-the-ordinary people I met when I lived in Maun. Waiting for the bus from Johannesburg to Gaborone (it saved me 340 bucks in airfare but after twenty hours of flying cost me a portion of my sanity), I managed to bump into a friend of a good friend from my days in the Maun CI (Conservation International) office, whom I remembered was a Swiss pilot who had been building up his flight hours flying small bush planes out in the Delta. Turns out he was now headed to Botswana to visit friends, on break from his new job flying for the UN in Sudan. He had previously been flying big wig corporate oil guys around Algeria, and now was stationed in Darfur, a pilot for the food aid and relief planes in the region. How’s that I asked, trying not to sound too ignorant but fascinated by what such a job could be like. Oh it’s fine, the pay is good, I get long breaks, decent benefits from the Swiss air company, he responded. I must have just stared at him for a minute—that’s it?? That’s all he’s got to say about flying food aid planes around Darfur in the middle of a civil war and genocide?? I think he added something about it feeling pretty safe in the area where he lived except for sometimes gunshot sounds at night and that there was a volleyball court for the expat relief workers that he sometimes played on, but that just only furthered my incredulity. Under what circumstances does such a career and lifestyle become so normalized? How does that happen? Was this what would happen to anyone who spent enough time in such places? I would have written him off as just showing off his tough pilot bravado except that somewhere in the conversation—after I think I had said something silly like at least in Darfur he didn’t have to worry about hitting dangerous animals during landings like in the Okavango--he dropped a line about man being the most vicious animal on Earth anyways, given the things we do to each other. Hmm. So it’s not all volleyball nets and business as usual flying, whatever the context. Perhaps it had all got to him in a way, and maybe resignation and the treatment of the abnormal as part of regular everyday life was the only way to cope, when what should be the unimaginable in fact happens every day. Either way, I wondered what, after flying planes around the swamps of the Okavango, the sandy Algerian desert and war-torn Sudanese villages, he would do next.