IT’S MIDDAY— burning
hot, shimmering. Even the chickens are silent, crouching on bleached
sand under a bleached
sky. The village looks abandoned, its thatched huts bared to the sun
like stranded shells on a vast flat beach.
But
one pair of dark eyes sees something move through the heat. A cloud
of dust, billowing above stunted acacia trees, proclaims the bus
is on its way. The lookout — a ragged, black-tufted kid with legs
long as a stork’s — runs around the village summoning
passengers.
Resting
in the merciful black shade of her hut, Dikeledi hears the
call, hoists a blanket-wrapped bundle onto her head and steps blinking
into the sun. Her mother and grandmother watch her go — one
of a small group that climbs aboard the ramshackle bus bound for
a new
job and a new life in Gaborone, the capital of Botswana.
Gaborone — a shallow lake of concrete fringed by squatter shacks — is
only 25 kilometres from the village. But it might be on another
planet. In the village mother and grandmother look at each other,
shrug sadly,
and retreat to their hut to wait for the lesser heat of the afternoon.
An hour later Dikeledi alights from the bus into chaos and noise.
The city stops for nothing.
Her
grandmother, MmaShoro, has never been further than five kilometres
from the village. Change, when it has come, has had to come
to her. She remembers the first tractor — filthy, oily and red — come
chugging into the village pursued by screaming children and
barking dogs; she remembers the first school teacher, the first can
of beer.
Today
the village store is full of unfamiliar items in unfamiliar wrapping.
Labels in English, Setswana, Afrikaans are all foreign
to her — the
smart new school is for children, not their grandmothers.
And
she’s suspicious of the changes. As fast as the new things
arrive, the young people leave. And each time someone like Dikeledi
steps aboard the bus to Gaborone, a little of the old village goes
with her. Yes, the standpipe with its clean water is good. But MmaShoro
misses her grand-daughter’s vigorous young voice
in the singing choruses at beer parties and her old arms
ache with lifting the heavy
pestle to grind sorghum for the evening meal.
If
the new things turn the young away from the village, they turn the
old towards each other. Old Semele learnt
to speak
English during the
War, when by some mysterious and absurdly arbitrary dictate,
he
fought with the Allies in Greece. Today, though he wears
his medals with
pride and made a special pilgrimage to catch a glimpse
of the Queen when
she visited Gaborone in 1979, he refuses to speak English.
His household, like MmaShoro’s, is unbalanced. A visit to his compound finds
him wrinkled and smiling beneath a battered felt hat, surrounded by
old friends — and young children. A generation
is missing.
As
headman of the village, he presides over the kgotla — the
village meeting place where disputes are aired, politics debated, decisions
made. In the past kgotla meetings were noisy, lively events. Nowadays
he knows they look more like an old folks’ tea party — just
a small group of dusty elders in the shade of a thorn
tree. Something needs to be done. Semele reaches for
his walking stick and goes visiting.
Next
day the kgotla is nearly full and the chatter gives way to cheers
as Semele announces that the committee
of elders has decided
to revive
the bojale — the initiation ceremony of the
Batlokwa tribe.
Three
months later Dikeledi’s white employers decide to take
a holiday and it’s time for her to go home.
Sitting on the bus, smearing vaseline on arms and
face to make her dark skin gleam, she
surveys her feet with satisfaction.
The
shoes are all strap and heel — rickety structures like flimsy
scaffolding. They make her walk carefully, gingerly, like a new-born
giraffe. But they’re precious — a symbol that she’s
escaped from the village. And they make the long months polishing ‘madam’s’ floors
and ironing her endless clothes worthwhile.
As
she arrives she catches sight of the kgotla and gasps. It’s
as though the village was preparing for a siege:
the once-dilapidated wooden fence has been repaired and a new, much
higher, fence is being
erected by the old women. She sees MmaShoro
struggling stoutly with a pile of wooden posts on her head, while
her mother wields an axe
near the entrance.
They
welcome her warmly, exclaim over her shoes and are delighted with
their gifts. But the
diffidence and respect
she was
expecting is lacking.
They listen politely to her boasts about
city life but then hurry back to the kgotla.
Dikeledi’s pride is hurt. ‘Silly old women’ she mutters.
But soon she’s surrounded by admiring friends who whisk her away
to the young teacher’s house where someone has a battery-run
record-player and a scratched copy of ‘Saturday Night Fever’.
There she hears about the bojale. Some of the young women are laughing
about it. Others are looking forward to earning the title mosadi — a
real woman. But one thing is certain: no-one
of the appropriate age is exempt.
With
John Travolta crackling in the background, Dikeledi is told what’s
in store. Twice a night — once in the early evening, and again
two hours before dawn — she and the other initiates are to gather
in the new kgotla. She must arrive dressed only in shorts and a vest
and is forbidden to wash for the rest of the month. They couldn’t
tell her anything else. Only the old
women knew what was going to happen.
That
night she would have given anything to be back polishing floors.
Old women
who had
tugged
a comb
through her hair
or called her
over to eat from their plates when
she was an infant, whose authority she later
dismissed
because
they
could not read
or write or tell
her the
capital of America — these same
old women were transformed that night.
One
bent over a drum in the firelight, beating out a complicated rhythm.
Others
pushed the
initiates roughly into a circle
and began demonstrating
the routines, dances and songs they
were to learn. Still
more prowled the new kgotla fence
armed with heavy sticks to repel
intruding
male eyes while the remaining old
women looked on —laughing, chanting,
jeering. The tables were well and
truly turned.
That
night — and every night that month — the old reigned
supreme. Dikeledi was young and
supple, could speak English fluently, knew how to use an electric
kettle, had a new pair of shoes. But she
was no match for her grandmother.
MmaShoro’s energy was boundless. She and her cronies leapt higher,
whirled faster, sang louder, danced longer than any young woman. Soon
Dikeledi’s shining skin
was grey with dust, her knees
and feet bleeding from thorns
in the sand, her carefully perfumed
body streaming
with sweat.
Just
one night was enough to teach her a new respect for the
old village
women.
But
there
were another
thirty to
endure. By the
end the initiates
stood out clearly from the
rest of the village — hair dusty and
matted, knees bandaged, clad in filthy ragged shorts, eyes dull from
lack of sleep. But if their eyes were dull, those of the old women
shone brighter than they had for years. They knew that they had reclaimed
just a little of what is lost each time a young woman steps onto the
bus to Gaborone.
new
internationalist 112
