The Mud Hut I Grew Upon HISTORICAL DRAMA

Thabo Katlholo

THE VILLESCENCE bOOKS GABORONE BOTSWANA

 biklmnpqrcgi The Villescence Publishers©

Gaborone, Botswana www.thabokatlholo.com First Published in Botswana in 2014 by Brandfire Publishing

Copyright© Thabo Katlholo 2015 Thabo Katlholo has asserted his right under the Copyright & Neighbouring Rights Act, 2000 (Act No. 8 of 2000) to be identified as the author of this work

This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact; any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead is purely coincidental. Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Katlholo, Thabo, 1988- The mud hut I grew upon / Thabo Katlholo. ISBN 9789996802546 LC classification MLCS 2015/00584 (P) LC control no. 2014320372

Typeset in 11/14 Palatino Linotype by The Villescence (PTY) Ltd. Printed and Bound by: Printing & Publishing Company Botswana (PPCB). PPCB is committed to a sustainable future for our business, our readers and our planet. This book is made from Forest Stewardship Council® certified paper.

 biklmnpqrcgi Prologue

“Maleka, Maleka, Maleka!” Makhelio said tauntingly as he approached her. He jumped on her and stepped on her throat. “Please leave me alone. What do you want from me?” “You must think you are invincible don’t you? Do you know who I am?” Makhelio asked her, his foot on her throat while Shimmy held her feet down like a cow about to be slaughtered. She nodded frightened, tears soaking up in her eyes. “Good, then you know what I’m capable of don’t you?”, Again she nodded. “I’m going to take my foot off your throat and if you even breathe out wrong I’m going to crush out your larynx you hear me?”, She nodded again. Makhelio released his foot from her throat and pulled her up with her hands. “Do you know who this is?” “Yes I know him. His name is Shimmy” “Wrong. He is one of mine and you fucked with one of mine. There is a price people pay for fucking with my business” “He raped me!” She reacted angrily “And why didn’t you go to the police?” “I couldn’t. I don’t have papers” “Zimbabweans. Fucking Zimbabweans. Why do you have to make everything so damn complicated? All we asked for from you was to come work for us and look where your

 biklmnpqrcgi impertinence has led to” “To be a slave?’’. He hit her with a fist and broke her nose. “No... no baby girl you don’t talk back at me like that, you hear me? You don’t fucking talk back at me like that”

 biklmnpqrcgi This book belongs to my daughter Masa; My siblings Chawa and Wangu; and My grandmother Tizhani

 biklmnpqrcgi Book I

 biklmnpqrcgi Chapter 1

 biklmnpqrcgi Maleka Tjilume Gaborone Botswana 24° 39° 29° S, 25° 54° 44° E

or a moment she stood in front of the broken mirror hanging on the door. Naked. Inspecting the bruises on her arms and the black spots between her thighs. I’m a mess, she lets out a huge sigh and shakes her head in despair. The wrinkles on her face and her swollen left eye are just, but occupational Fhazard. The fading makeup beneath her eyes reminds her of a rough night out in the jungle. Like a gazelle she knew her time would be up soon as long as she keeps up with this ecosystem. Her hair had begun to fall beneath her old weave and her cheekbones had started to retreat inward. Hers was an abusive relationship, on and off with different breeds of men. The new bruises on her arms had started to show a few days ago after a drunken orgy with some really fucked up boys from the University of Botswana. She’d wanted them to hurt her but she did not want to be hurt badly just enough to remind her of where she came from. What she left behind. Just a little. In a few instances the bruises had manifested into black-eyedness and bruised ribs. It was hard to get accustomed to this world of sex, violence, humiliation and exploitation.  biklmnpqrcgi The constant battering she endured every night at the hands of her customers was unimaginable. Drugs numbed the pain. For some girls at least. She’d sworn across heart never to go further than she already was. Wandering into the world of drugs was a totally different reality, one she never wanted to encounter. This brutal world was all she could settle for. A world so new to her. She remembered broadly how nervous she was when she first bought the basic tools required for her job — condoms, lubricant, kitchen roll, whips and dildos from some Zimbabwean gentleman who gave her a stern warning about his business’s privacy. She got a few jealous glances on a few occasions when she first started. Her tall, slim, D-cup appearance was botha jewel and a thorn to her existence. Most girls on the streets were out of shape, old and wrinkled with many layers of makeup and masks of concealed insecurity. The mismatching mascara on their eyes that made them look zombiesh; like they’d just walked from a gruesome scene of The Walking Dead. Classless bitches. She made one final gesture to the mirror, a self- motivational ritual to remind her of the real reason behind her struggle. The pain that had made her this artist; this creative genius of the night; creative with her tongue, articulate with her hands. A calligrapher of emotions for men seeking solace away from home. She sculpted pleasures and drew desires with her hands, her lips, her tongue and her words. A maestro who only came alive with the break of dusk, waking from the slumber of the endurance of her genitals from last night’s hustle.

 biklmnpqrcgi She slid into her attire - a skimpy Jean skirt and a twined black top that revealed her navel. She did not bother with the underwear. Grabbing her weave off the floor she headed for the door and just as she was about to leave she hesitated, returned to the bedroom, slid into a dirty G-string, then on second thought she wriggled out of it and put on something more warm. Before she walked out she reluctantly took out an old greyish Uzzi shoebox and looked into it for a minute, a fog of sadness overcoming her almost pretty face. She took a picture of a small boy from the box and kissed it. Mama is coming home soon. A promise that she wore around her heart. Starring at the picture sorrowfully with resolve and an undaunted dedication to keep the promise she made to her son when she negotiated her body through the barbed wire separating The Republics of Zimbabwe and Botswana. He was only two years old when she left. The woman who had taken the responsibility of mothering her when her mother passed on agreed to take care of the boy only if Maleka sent money on a monthly basis. The little boy wept so hard it felt like her entire being was breaking at the seams. Every moon that preceded that day had become uncomely and everyday bitter. Sorrow had gnawed at her heart, tears swelled in her eyes but she fought them. Hatred poisoning her heart as she sat next to a strange dark-skinned man with a big scar running across his forehead at the back of a Mazda van. Zimbabwe had betrayed her.

10 biklmnpqrcgi Mother—nature groaned in darkness as they made transit through some dim lit villages of Botswana that night. The sky was packed with blankets of dark clouds, with distant flashes of thunderbolts. She said a silent prayer to the gods of her ancestors, her head lifted up to the cold 120km/hour cold breeze of winds from the south and begged them to hold off the rain. Mama is coming home soon, she repeated in her heart. The first few days were sad and dreary for Maleka. She wondered if she had made a good choice; if her son was safe and in good hands. As much as she could not afford the guilt she couldn’t fight it. The further she travelled into Botswana the more she felt the vinegar of emotions soak into her heart and soul. The pain was unbearable some nights and she would sit outside her temporary corner and watch the clouds pass by covering the stars and that alone would inspire her. The clouds pass and stars will shine again. No gunshots in the air. This shall pass, she’d convinced herself. Maleka didn’t want to become a victim like many of her sisters back home, she wanted to survive this like her mothers before her. Zimbabwe has gone through this and came out still a great country. Botswana on the other hand had so much more to offer and yet so much cruelty in its barrel of kindness. I have to survive this for my son. It pained her than anything else to leave him behind but then she couldn’t bring him across the border into the unknown. She did not want to end up a nameless, a faceless stereotype that appeared once a year on a greeting card with her virtues set to prose.

11 biklmnpqrcgi She had been dealt countless foulness in her cards all her life and she played them one at a time the best way she knew how. Ambivalence rushed through her veins at the thought of never having a chance to be good or bad, laughing or serious, loving or angry with her own son. Her own mother had been nothing but an amazing pillar to her existence. On Friday 10, December 1999, she became an illegal citizen of a Country she’d never visited. People spoke of Botswana, the cruelty of the Kalanga people who still craved vengeance against Zimbabweans because of the pain their ancestors endured in the era of Mzilikazi, she heard stories of Francistown – its beauty and its buzzing railway station where hundreds of women from her country gathered to sell bananas and other fruits with no hassle from the authorities, as long as they had papers. But she also heard of Gaberone, the capital city. Not much was said of Gaberone except its riches and its danger. The prisons were said to be in-escapable, the shanty towns cheap, the police didn’t bother the illegal immigrants unless they were caught committing crimes. A dangerous paradise. She had no intention of engaging in criminal activities. All she wanted was a well-paying house-maid job, surely she would get one. MaNcube, her neighbour had spoken of her daughter Margret who’d made it big in the city after starting as a house- maid. If that dumb Margret could do it surely she could too. The insults she was ready for them, the Zimbo or ‘mokwerekwere’ are a part of Africans heritage. The borders that were erected by the Europeans in their greed had become the source of hate amongst Africans. A Motswana in Zambia or Zimbabwe was referred to as gwerekwere and so was a Zimbabwean or Zambian in Botswana. 12 biklmnpqrcgi Post-colonialism tragedy. She heard rumours of some mean Batswana tribes towards Zimbabweans and how passively xenophobic they were. Apparently that had been caused by some of the men from Zimbabwe who started crime syndicates when the war erupted, tormenting villagers from neighbouring countries now that guns were like sticks and stones on the streets of Zimbabwe. These syndicates had soared into big cities like Lusaka, Johannesburg and Gaberone where banks were robbed, rich people were killed in their homes, cars were hijacked and all these crimes led to Zimbabweans. As it was, being a Zimbabwean immigrant was the worst thing a person could be in Southern Africa. They were the new Hebrews – homeless. When it started in the early 90’s, she was just a little girl, 10 years old, innocent and gullible. Living in a bustling working—class colony at the hard terrain extremities of Zimbabwe. Houses snaked up in haphazard bursts whenever their inhabitants could afford to salvage a little more space. For outsiders the situation seemed too harsh, uninhabitable and unjust and cruel to not one but many human rights. For outsiders the shacks seemed less like homes, more just slivers of precarious brick slapped together for shelter’s sake. But for Maleka and her single mother, Patricia, there was more, there was psychological solidarity: a toehold on life, there was hope of a better tomorrow. Often she reminisces and imagines her mother’s voice shouting from a crowd of crops at the fields telling her to study and quit chasing after the birds. Those are the few good days her memories still holds. The days they sat around a dim fire in a 13 biklmnpqrcgi tiny mole hole of a room, in a warren of other similar rooms eating in silence and both seemingly tired from holding onto a dream. Patricia would have been working relentlessly for two days without sleep at the market trying to sell vegetables, fresh maize, beans and dried groundnuts. The markets never slept so did she. Maleka would spend those nights alone, curled under the oak bed, locked inside the room in silence. Those were the instructions from her mother. “Lock the door, push the table to hold the door and put a chain around the lock. If anybody knocks don’t make a sound. Get under the bed and cover yourself up. This is a dangerous place Leka.” It was a dangerous place. She’d often wondered if all the Shanties in the world were as dangerous. She remembered the worn—out Coca Cola tin by her side with its top scraped off, filled with coins and a few Zimbabwean dollar notes all amounting to 878 ZWD. Those were the good days. To understand what happened in Zimbabwe its worth trying to see things through the Zimbabwean people prism for a moment. Immune from the propaganda and the western media mind- bend. The real issues started a long, long time ago before the current regimes. Those who came bearing greed and seeking to rip off the cradle of Sub-Saharan Africa orchestrated the demise the people of Zimbabwe found themselves reeling in. As an ancient cradle of Iron Age civilization, Zimbabwe has a great emotional importance to the economy of Southern Africa and that’s especially true for Botswana since both countries are landlocked. Harare was the site of some historic scenes and the best trade regimes, and it is where generations of Southern 14 biklmnpqrcgi African children have gone for their education. Bulawayo was a trade giant amongst the people of the north – the Bakalanga, the Venda and the Shona. Now brick-by-brick the empire was facing a second fall after the last fall of the Great Zimbabwe. It is said that until 1963 the then, Rhodesia was a partner in the Central African Federation - Northern and Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland; now Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi. The Central African Federation which was strongly opposed at the time by many people eventually separated into the three countries as Zambia and Malawi fit better with central African countries while Zimbabwe was more akin with South Africa. An important reason for including Zimbabwe with southern rather than central Africa at the time was the government attitude to the sharing of responsibility between white and non-white people. The attitude was similar to, but not as severe as what was happening in South Africa. “Wars have always been a part of us”, Maleka had listened to her mother explain the conflict when it began. “We respond to differences through the barrel of a gun. It’s who we are. And now when you throw in the tribal divide the mess is irreparable. It will always be like this” In 1997 the rumours started of a new era – a new beginning for Zimbabwe under a different leader. A man they called Tsvangirai founded and organised the Movement for Democratic Change, an opposition party that would oppose President Robert Mugabe and the ZANU-PF ruling party. That’s when it started. Farms were burnt down, clusters and communities known to be supporters of the Tsvangirai movement were targeted and soon enough smoke from burning tyres, shacks and 15 biklmnpqrcgi sometimes human bodies was bread for the day. Cholera soon began claiming lives more than bullets. Everything went to shit real fast. Regional powerhouses distanced themselves when things started going south. SADC countries called for Zimbabwe to be banned from the organization for violations on human rights and in seeking international acceptance and favours in the form of donations and foreign aid most countries surrounding Zimbabwe closed off their borders and refused to pull the falling giant from the bottomless pit it was heading into. Many of those would regret the blind eye they gave to the crumbling economy of Zimbabwe when the borders became porous and millions of Zimbabweans migrated from their country into neighbouring territories to seek better livelihoods for themselves and their families. When a country like Zimbabwe is falling apart, it may seem a bit finicky to worry about the shouty nature of Mugabe’s rants at the existence of a strong opposition party in the country. But in one respect it was the very thing that was dividing a nation more than tribalism. It was like another version of Mugabe versus Nkomo versus Ian Smith, but this time more than before there would be bloodshed. The habit of minds that treated the opposition as villains but not as decent people who, however misguidedly, have the nation’s interest at heart persisted, but unlike Joshua Nkomo, Tsvangirai and his supporters did not flee, they fought for their country, determined to see it to the elections. The minority white population who were disowned of their hundreds of acres of ploughing fields migrated out of Zimbabwe to Australia and New Zealand. Food production spiralled down even though some would contend it had nothing to do with the land redistribution. The brewing brouhaha was not between the whites and the blacks but between the blacks themselves. A tribal war. Chapter 2

atricia had dreams and the best of ambitions any parent could sustain for their only child. She had for a while put all her ambitions aside to take her daughter through primary and secondary school but when the turmoil started in early 1989 she had totally abandoned any prospect of ever going back to school to get her diploma. Her strength had all been shifted to Pthe welfare and success of Maleka. Patricia was just but one among millions of faceless Zimbabweans trying to break through the new stifling fixity of their lives. Her father, Mwedzi Tjilume, had left rural Bayi Bayi, a small village in the Matebeleland North Province decades earlier in search of a larger life in Tsholotsho and later Bulawayo then Harare but failed to find it. Having run through a series of petty- jobs in small industrial towns, he had come back to Mutare from Harare on Tuesday 12 August, 1995 with a new wife and a child. That was the last time Patricia had seen her father and Maleka her grandfather. Patricia carried a schism in her heart because of it. Her impoverished father had only had money to educate two of his sons. One of her brothers Tachiwana had a job in the military, he wore no uniform, Patricia wasn’t sure what it is that he really did; the other had risen to be a singer in a band 18 biklmnpqrcgi and later became a drug-lord in Bulawayo. Patricia had been left to take care of her dying mother and therefore been fated to remain a casual farm labourer after failing to scramble a life out of some rural fringe. The bitterness Patricia carried in her heart had fuelled the ambition she had for her daughter. Understandably, education was the driving hunger in the household. Working gruelling double shifts, first as a maid, then as a labourer for a Chinese construction company, earning a mere 15 ZWD a day, Patricia had managed to put Maleka into one of the best schools in Tsholotsho. Maleka was hungry for school even as a toddler. Patricia had ensured access to reading material over dolls, plastic tiaras and the normal children entertainment. She profoundly recognized that she was her child’s first teacher and that her daughter’s first education began before formal school and was deeply rooted in the values, traditions and norms of family and culture. A mother barely surviving strived day in and day out with one aim - to educate her child and prepare her for a life which hereafter she would occupy. The future did not seem so blurry anymore and from that tenuous perch-the mole-hole home in the ground Patricia envisioned her family rising from oblivion, they had begun to build a life. Maleka - obsessive, industrious, optimistic, face always set inexorably to the sky - was the centrepiece of that life. She had an innate taste for resplendence and a spark within her of determination to carve a slice of heaven for her mother and herself. She hardly had any friends; besides her being profoundly introvertish she never had any time. The one thing she hated more than anything was seeing her mother working well beyond the set limits of any living 19 biklmnpqrcgi person. She would always be in a hurry to get back home and help her mother and sometimes the only thing to eat in the house was pap and some few granules of sugar to add some taste to it but there was a wonderful atmosphere at home. Together they were working to improve their lives and they could both feel the good times were coming. Maleka had become a young responsible woman and her mother often silently looked up to the heavens and thanked God. Then one morning they woke up and that dream was a blur, a week passed and the dream had become a nightmare. The lives of these two hopeful women were thrown to the deep end with the rest of their community in Tsholotsho as they were targeted for being Ndebele. At one level the story of the second fall of Zimbabwe can be read as tragic yet a courageous one: a simple but soaring binary about unfounded courage in the face of immeasurable oppression. But at another level, it is a window into a much more complex, perhaps even darker and sadder, narrative about contemporary slaveship and the terrible collision of aspiration and frustration and the need to survive that has been unleashed upon the people of Zimbabwe. Exploitation and oppression are not matters of race. The country’s system fell apart, the apparatus of worldwide brigandage called imperialism played a crucial role in collapsing Zimbabwe’s economy. The violent land—grabs that pushed white farmers off the land were seen at first as some sort of salvation, a first grip at black empowerment but the short-lived victory soon turned into the greatest blunder economically. The economic chaos resulted in unprecedented hyperinflation, driving the entire country to an ultimate crash 20 biklmnpqrcgi and an economic standstill. Food production collapsed and one of the continent’s richest economies was dragged down and reduced to nothingness. The West quickly dismissed Zimbabwe as another failed state, cutting all ties with it. The lights went out in the country. The Zimbabwean Dollar weakened and without it the country became weary. The sublime idea citizens had of their government soon began to collapse with dizzying speed. Within two months everything would break in chaos. In most districts there were no longer seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity and even life started giving away and the potent void reigned everywhere. Dead animals lay rotting on the street pavements, dogs feasted on shallow graves. The Zimbabwean Dollar got so weak, at one point Maleka had to take the entire Coca Cola tin that had served as a bank in their one roomed house for years to the kiosk to buy a loaf of bread with all the money in it. The clustered community became even more congested as more people were driven out from the cities and towns by poverty and the inability to pay the rents. Most mines and factories had stopped operating. Eventually the people started to clash amongst themselves. Blame was thrown around like confetti that President Robert Mugabe’s policies were favouring the Shona over the Ndebele or anyone who did not support him. Maleka had heard of the wars that had ravaged Zimbabwe not so long ago when the whites rode on horses and chopped people up with swords or melted plastic on legs of old women who refused to give up their hunted rebel sons locations. She prayed now more than ever that history should not trace back its steps. 21 biklmnpqrcgi Maleka had never seen this Robert Mugabe everyone talked of. This monster people feared more than AIDS. She’d only heard of him, his power and the magic he possessed. Some said he once turned into a tsetse fly to defeat his enemies. The man was a myth. A feared legend, especially amongst the Ndebele people. The truth however is that Robert Mugabe or Big Bob as the Tswana called him is a very intelligent man. He has served as Zimbabwe’s leader since 1980. He was Prime Minister from 1980 to 1987 and has been President since 1987. He became a hero across Africa after leading rebel forces to victory against white minority rule in the 1970s. In recent years, many have accused him of ruling with an iron fist and destroying his country’s economy and democracy and yet those who saw the struggle for independence hold him in the highest of reverence. Mugabe was born in 1924 in what was then the British colony Rhodesia. He is described to have been a lone wolf who preferred his own company at school. Mugabe left Rhodesia to continue his education and on his travels, he met many influential African leaders and politicians among them Kwame Nkrumah. He earned a total of five Bachelor’s and two Master’s degrees from different universities around the world and taught at different schools in Zambia and Ghana. Mugabe joined the Zimbabwe African National Union in 1963. A year later he was arrested for making a “seditious speech” in which he called for greater equality for blacks. He spent the next ten years in prison. From 1975, Mugabe led the resistance against white rule with the likes of Nkomo. He won the general election in 1980 and changed his country’s colonial name. 22 biklmnpqrcgi 1997 marked a new era to his Presidency. A period marred with mass violence and deaths due to starvation, civil violence, a refugee exodus and increase in crime. The Western communities and their media powerhouses distanced themselves as their interest seemed to be limited to elections and seizures of white—owned farms and many attempts to paint Mugabe as a dictator and seeking international approval to oust the Zimbabwean leader. On May 24, 1998 Maleka was on a school break. The winter seemed colder and meaner than any other year; her mother had gotten frail due to the troubles the community was facing. They no longer felt free in their little domicile. Farming had become almost impossible because of looters. Maleka felt the pain in her mother’s eyes as she sat by the dim fire trying to insert a tiny bead into a small weaved cotton to make a hand bracelet. They sat there silently, listening to the chaos unfolding outside. Neighbours quarrelling over which tribe was superior between Ndebele and Shona, dogs barking, children crying and gunshots roaring at a distance. Everything had changed so fast and the place they had begun to love and call home had decayed into a war-zone. One desperate night Maleka and her mother, had to go out into the streets to sell bags of water. Thieves broke into their house that night and took everything valuable. They went through the neatly folded clothes, picked out the best pieces and packed them into a suitcase. They even took a pair of shoes, books, school clothes and the few remaining grains of maize hidden under the bed. These became normal crimes; the police officers did not bother, it was a waste of time to even file a complaint. The general view was 23 biklmnpqrcgi why waste Police resources on peasants when there is a war on the horizon. The Ndebele had begun to revolt against the oppression. The stories repeated themselves across Zimbabwe; crimes small and large everywhere. Under the guise of “social-cleansing” policy, the police were targeting people associated with the opposition party. It became common sight for the police to pick up their targets in vehicles with no plates. There hadn’t been a more depressing time than that for Maleka. She was convinced then, that if she survived this she can survive anywhere and anything the world could throw her way. Life is unfair, she decided. For many days that followed she watched her mother decay into unfathomable sorrow. Was it too much to ask, to live in a world where all human gifts were channelled towards the benefit of all? Where the daily activities of each and every person contributed to the healing of the biosphere and the well-being of other people? The elite in the country lived lavishly at the expense of the underprivileged. Six days after their house was broken into she came back from the market and found her mother lying on the floor, eyes wide open but no life in them. She’d seen dead people before. Shanty town funerals had no age limit like back at the village. Her mother’s burial was as dignified as it could be. No family members, just friends and women who’d been her friends at the market. She was buried at the Tsholotsho District cemetery at night because they couldn’t afford a proper burial with a casket. She watched her mother get thrown into the grave like a bag of potatoes, wrapped in a blanket she’d worn for three years when she sat at her stall at the market. They left no markings on 24 biklmnpqrcgi the grave, just the candles that they lit with when they covered her with muddy soil. Maleka didn’t cry. She just watched, her mind far away, in a beach somewhere in a country they called Mozambique. I could sell fish there. Hell, I don’t know how to fish, but I could learn. Maybe find a man there to take care of me. Chapter 3

otswana was different. More peaceful. Unfamiliar but a bit hospitable. Sometimes she just sat in the summer sun. Having taken a dehumanizing bath she’d become accustomed to at the pit latrine, she sat in her sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a fake reverie, amidst the mulberries and jacarandas in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds Bsang around and flitted noiseless through the house. The shanty towns of Gaborone were much different from those in Tsholotsho. More organized, the people more friendly. Surprisingly they were exceptionally quite too, during the day when her neighbours were at their day jobs. In the evenings that’s when they woke up. The people here had affection for kwasa kwasa music. She’d first encountered Kwasa music back in Tsholotsho when their neighbour who’d worked in the Congolese mines brought home Koffi Olomide’s Tcha Tcho. She hated it – all that guitar and a noise from the drums, all that buzz. She couldn’t stand it. Especially when she was trying to study and he would open the windows of their shack and blast the music out loud 26 biklmnpqrcgi without regard. She hated it. She painted her nails and watched them dry as she rested in front of her shack, until the sun began falling in at her west window, she was reminded of the lapse of time. Today was one of those days. There were no clouds and as the sun went down in a limpid, gold-washed sky. She did the finishing touches on her face. Just as the lower edge of the disk rested on the high fields against the horizon, a great black figure suddenly appeared on the face of the sun. The noise eruption startled her causing her to smear the toenail she was dotting with the nail polish. “Fuck” she shouted at the helicopter. The nail polish container slipped and fell onto the cement floor and shattered into pieces, leaving an almost artistic splatter of the pink polish on the wall. “Urg fuck maan” These helicopters were becoming a common sight here. A nuisance. They chased after thieves and other criminals who always figured the slum a better hiding area. She went back inside her one room quickly and locked then bolted the doors. Hide under the bed. Her mother’s voice always reminded her, but she couldn’t. She was a big girl now. The racket outside aggrandized as the residents of the slum ran past the tiny houses like a herd of buffaloes. Mob justice was common here and many young men who lived in this slum took a great sense of delight in punishing criminals who were caught here or those who thought they could escape the police by hiding here. This in the long run had made the slums a whole lot safer for those who dwelt in them. Even though the houses were not as securely built and fitted with screen walls and security alarms 27 biklmnpqrcgi as the big fancy houses on the suburbs, theft was a taboo; rapists who got caught were castrated before the police even arrived at the scene. Once, she’d watched a boy get his fingers cut off with an axe for stealing an Omega Radio. That however did not prevent the thieves who dwelt on the slums from going across the river and robbing the rich folks of Maruapula. She lit her last cigarette while standing by the closed window, peeking through the laced curtain until she could hear the helicopter and police sirens submerged by the resident’s noise hundreds of meters away. She always avoided getting involved in the Ginger—mob justice system lest she got caught by stray bricks being thrown onto the faces of perpetrators, or an occasional bullet from a police rifle aimed at the fleeing criminals. After the noise had sublimed she opened the door and left the house carrying only her handbag and holding her dying cigarette butt.I have to quit this shit. She dissolved into the darkness, leaving behind a silhouette against the embers of bright city lights like a distant barbaric dream that keeps fading into the horizon but never completely leaves. Gaborone is a multi-layered city. Her business was far away from the CBD – a place called the Red Café Pub. She’d learnt a few tricks over the past couple of months. Learning Setswana had been her first mission and she’d done well on that part. “It’s Gaborone not Gaberone and you don’t pronounce the Ga- the way you pronounce the Ga- in Gabon. No, it’s Ga- ga-ga-borone”, her friend Tracy emphasised pronouncing “Ga” more like “Ha” but a bit too soft and exotic.

28 biklmnpqrcgi Chapter 4

aborone is a city with ambitions of geometric heights, a petrified desert extending from the Kalahari, with grids and lattices of brick houses and an array of infernally greenish abstractions under a flat sky. The city’s two dimensional discipline create undreamt-of-freedom for the dimensional anarchy with new structures germinating from the GCentral Business District which resembles the plateau side of Nairobi. The new grid define a new balance between control and de-control in which the city can be at the same time ordered and fluid. Expanding freely on both sides into the desert and the savannah. An infant metropolis within which man is absent by his own accumulation. Gaborone like many other cities across the world had become a refugee camp for many passport-less Zimbabweans in search of a better life. Gaborone became an emblem in refugees minds; everyone fleeing from the scattered civil wars erupting like bushfires across Southern Africa wanted to escape to Gaborone. Apart from the tangible export of goods and it being a trade 29 biklmnpqrcgi centre, it exerted its cultural instrumentality in a thousand phases. Young girls arrived humble and evolved into ‘streetwalkers’. Young men timid but the city plugged onto them a virus of sorts that made them lose their culture, and they became fans of a new type of music called hip hop. The locals called them Ma-Yo-Yo, with their baggy-saggy jeans and oversize T-shirts. There was freedom in Gaborone – freedom in all its forms and faces. People all across Southern Africa and as far as Congo, Angola and Somalia wanted to come to Botswana’s Capital -the enigma. A city wrapped in gaunt beauty, built from layers of perseverance and patience since 1966. When Maleka arrived in the half-magical metropolis in 1997, she was scrawny and big- headed. She had never been anywhere outside her Tsholotsho and the villages around before the day she finally left Zimbabwe except a short memory of Plumtree and Bulawayo when she was just a child. She arrived in the city on a spring that still ferried remnants of a winter so cruel, so cold that you could see the eagerness in people’s faces as they waited for the sun to come out, for the summer to emerge from the southern hemisphere. She had settled at the cheapest and most convenient section of Gaborone known as Ginger. Like her Shanty in Tsholotsho, Ginger was broken. Feculent and incoherent. A giant languishing in its tattered costume. The true vestige of a distant colonial past. It was as if Ginger had been robbed off of its glory by the new residential areas surrounding it. It had old monumental bars and churches but developments were below par. Roads were battered, sewage systems dilapidated and housing was haphazard and unorganized. Ginger, has no 30 biklmnpqrcgi real city structures and is little more than a dormitory centre like Naledi also known as Zola. She’d chosen Ginger because it was less dangerous compared to Zola. Ginger housing is bare and drab, but it could be improved if trees were planted, refuse was recycled, and small social centres were built. Despite its potential this was a true slum at the edge of a glorious city. As one stood right beneath the shades of the tiny shacks you could clearly see the towering and imposing high figures leaning to the winds of the Kalahari at the city centre. For three unforgettable days, she wandered amidst a maze of winding streets and narrow alleys, marvelling at the exotic foreign architecture in the City’s urban concession. The buildings here were different. Unlike in Bulawayo the buildings were not as vintage or intricately built. They were simple, bold and somewhat reserved on their foundation. Batswana had meliorated their city independent of influences from their former colonizers. It reminded her more of Plumtree. Well, the little memory she had of it. She often reminisced on her own dreams and ambitions to see the ultimate city. A giant she heard of all her life when she was just a little girl. Harare. She never got the chance to see it. The old notoriously rumoured grandeur and the sensation of walking on the sacred ground of the great Mambos and Mutapas who once ruled sub- Saharan Africa. The wonderment of Gaborone’s fast-paced lifestyle overwhelmed her and surpassed her mental imagery of what cities looked like. Her major difficulty was the loss of sense of direction which she encountered so very often. She got lost 31 biklmnpqrcgi more than twice every day and sometimes she could have sworn the sun was rising and setting where it wasn’t supposed to rise and set. West was South and South was East. Her cardinals were all jumbled up in a chaotic crescendo of despair. Crowds of people walking to work in the morning reminded her of flocks of Quelea about to ransack their field before harvest. Neatly trimmed trees lining the streets and hidden behind tall security walls. Construction trucks and people with wire brooms sweeping the roads and yearning for the sun. Most faces seemed undaunted by the city’s magnitude as they wound their way through the bazaar-filled city space. Most peculiarly she noticed the shapely legs of city girls in short skirts walking and laughing carelessly and cultureless along the roads. As the city shed off the last fragments of winter like autumn leaves it transformed into a blazing furnace. The day she arrived the old man who was in the car with her, looked at her, shook his head and said, “Do you have anywhere to go”, that was the first time they spoke. “No. No I don’t” “So where are you intending to sleep tonight?” “I don’t know” “What do you know? Do you know how dangerous it is out here? Ga se Tsholotsho mo!”, clearly Gaborone was not Tsholotsho. She’d heard her fair-share of stories about it. “My name is Moyo. I’m from the same place as you… matter of fact I knew your mother when we were children. I was friends with your uncle Zhiro, the one in the Biya Biya Supa band…” “I heard of him, never met any of my uncles” 32 biklmnpqrcgi “Yes, I heard. I have a family here. I can help you, follow me” They walked in silence from the Taung stop past BBS mall into Ginger. The old man led her to a tiny shack with falling windows and a door that looked unhinged. It was dark but the little light from the moon allowed Maleka to see the space where she’d lay her head for the night. “The rent is P200, no electricity, there is a standpipe down the road, you can ask the neighbours, the water there is free, toilets are at the back, you share them with six families who live in this yard. There are no fences here to separate the yards but everyone knows what’s theirs and what isn’t. Learn fast. Your life depends on it” “I, aah, I thank you greatly sir. Maita zvenyu” “Thank me at the end of the month with my P200. I’m sure you had a plan coming here…” “Maleka, zita rangu iMaleka” “Unobva kupi?” “Tsholotsho. I’m from Tsholotsho Sir” “Yes, Maleka that’s all the help I can offer. I have to get home now, we had a long road. Get a cellphone, I don’t want to be coming here looking for you every month end. I have to get to my wife. You will see how you fix the windows and the door”, with that he took his bag and disappeared into the cold of the wet night. She fell to the ground and thanked the Lord for taking care of her. The following morning she cleaned up her little shack, covered the windows with cloths she picked up from the street and used mud to hold what was remaining of wooden table tops onto the window space. The door she held into place using 33 biklmnpqrcgi electric cables she’d found inside the shack. It wouldn’t hold off thieves but it’d keep animals out. Who’d even think of breaking into a place like this? Inside the shack there’d been remains of what was once a wire mesh bed, the mattress was falling apart but she took what she could salvage and covered it up in a large plastic bag that’d served as a Fridge cover. She used some of her clothes to make the mattress a bit more comfortable. Not a bad start. The following days, she’d gotten acquainted to some of the women who lived in the same yard as her. Tamapo was fat and really muscular, it was easy to confuse her for a man when she wore men duck coveralls, plus the fact that she kept short hair. Gaba was quiet but she loved to gossip. It was these two women who got her a job as a maid with some old woman in Tlokweng – MmaSekai - a real slave-driver. She earned P250 a month and that was not enough for her to buy food, pay rent and have some left to send back home to her son. After two months she quit and got another job cleaning restroom toilets at the Bus Rank – a real risky job considering the fact that the place was swarming with cops and she didn’t have papers. Cops in Gaborone didn’t go out looking for illegal immigrants but it wasn’t wise for illegal immigrants to go out looking for cops either. She earned P450 at her new job. It was a nice working environment, despite the constant fear of being stopped by the Police. The malls bustled with action, young men sitting at stalls shouting, “T-shirts, cheap T-shirts over here”, and old folks with their unbuttoned shirts, selling brownish bananas and white grapes, fanning away the clinging humidity and nagging flies drawn to their sticky, sweaty skin. 34 biklmnpqrcgi There was an indefinite line between summer and spring. The city transformed from a cold den into a lovers paradise, with every bench inside each of the crowded parks occupied by not just one but two or three couples - young lovers in varying degrees of kissing, fondling, fumbling, and caressing, utterly oblivious to the next couple’s presence only inches away. It was a new, welcoming environment. The air was crisp with blue skies gently laced with white clouds. The city seemed content and settled in spirit having endured a long, cold winter, with quite whispers about the pending heat wave, not far around the corner. Maleka was glad to have missed the Gaborone winter. She heard rumours of it. Her favourite thing about Botswana so far was the diversity of churches. On a few occasions she visited the church in her neighbourhood. It was loud and rowdy and for some reason she loved that very thing about it. The short time she spent at the church she could not hear herself think. She could silence her demons amidst the prayers of her fellow worshippers. Even though she could not say a prayer for herself, she prayed along to the sounds and murmurs of those who stood next to her but every time she made an attempt to say her own personal prayer she fumbled upon words and ended up giving up. Most times she felt like the preacher was talking about her. The last time she went, he sermonized the nearing end, the arrival of Christ the King of all that breathes on earth. He said the prince of darkness is still triumphant in many regions of the world; epidemics still rage, death is yet victorious and mothers still abandon their kids in waste bins. The preacher spoke of Zimbabwe and what Zimbabweans are facing, likening Mugabe to Herod. She was sceptical. But she 35 biklmnpqrcgi needed something to believe in. She wanted a better path for herself. Every time she left the church she was more lighted to exit the darkness she currently found herself stuck in. She submitted her curriculum vitae to many Chinese shops and wrote on pieces of paper “MAID AVAILABLE” then placed the adverts at the shopping malls and centres. Maleka had picked up a pamphlet on one of the plastic chairs at church and the past three days she had sat at the entrance of her one roomed house reading about how our conscience forbids us to commit actions which the conscience of the savage allows, so the moral sense of our successors will stigmatise as crimes those offences against the intellect which are sanctioned by ourselves. She read that when the church rises above the obscurity of being thwarted by governments it will instill new values into society to reflect the true image of the creator. Idleness and stupidity will be regarded with abhorrence. Women will become the companions of men and no woman shall sleep with a woman or a man with a man, and the tutors of their children. Maleka had not been brought up in the church but had always thought of herself a believer. She knew the Lord’s Prayer by heart and could recite the Lord’s Sheppard in her sleep. She’d learnt them all at Primary school and read the Bible like a novel. Nostalgically she reminisced on her childhood books. Her Chinua Achebe, Alan Paton, her The Lion and the Jewel and the Poisonwood Bible. She hoped her son had befriended them. She had been a curious child. Absorbing as much of the knowledge from the stacks of books under her bed as she could but now she could not remember the last time she read anything besides a Score grocery receipt. A smile glistened on her lips as she slowly read each 36 biklmnpqrcgi word on the pamphlet. Her mother was a believer of Mwali and she told her that her grandmother was a great sangoma who made her living by healing people and was also feared by the villagers because it was alleged that she had sent a thunder to one of her nemesis, killing his entire family and livestock. The preacher at the church she visited talked about African deities and the worship of ancestors. He said to worship the image made of stone is to worship the work of the human hand. To worship the image made of ideas is to worship the work of the human brain. Most people from her lost village back in Zimbabwe were not Christians, they believed white people had brainwashed Africans with their hogwash. To them White-God-worship was idolatry; how stupid that most Africans had lost their religion and ennobled that chimera of the white man’s brain, they said. One day after they’d cleaned up the toilets, a young man came into the toilet just as Maleka was leaving. He took out his penis and urinated right on the wall. She saw this and without thinking of the consequences she confronted him “Bastard, who do you think cleans after you? Your mother?” “What did you say to me old woman?” she wasn’t that old, the coveralls made her seem old “Old woman this—”, she swiped him across the face with the wet broom she’d been cleaning the urinal with. “Disrespectful piece of shit, nzok’shaya uzibochele mgodoyi” People inside the waiting room heard the raucous and came rushing in to witness the fight. It was Tamapo who came and rescued the boy and possibly saved Maleka a prison sentence 37 biklmnpqrcgi and a trip back home in the back of a cattle truck. “Get out of here. Go, go Maleka, if the police find you here you are done” That was the end of her cleaning job. For many months after Maleka roamed the streets of Botswana walking to places as far as Mogoditshane and Tlokweng searching for a job. She found none. Despair began to wear her soul. Tamapo and Gaba would have nothing to do with her. “She is mad”, Gaba spread the word around Ginger. Things got worse, RraMetsi came knocking at her door at the end of the month. He came to her shack on a Friday in August threatening to evict her into the night. “Look, I don’t want to do this but you leave me no choice. This things cost” “Forgive me Rra-Metsi, please my brother, I shall pay” “When? Three months now woman” “It has been really hard, I will find job soon-soon” “No. No, no, no,.. pack your things Maleka. I don’t work like that” “Please, please sir, I have nowhere to go. I beg” “OK. OK… I don’t want to do this but there is a way…”, he’d approached her, cupped her breasts and when she tried to push him away he looked at her with blood-shot eyes “OK, pack up” “No wait… Please sir”, she begged him “Either that or you go”, he was pointing at her crotch “Condom. We use a condom”, she said “Obvious, I don’t want to get sick” He’d undressed her like she was a mannequin, bended her over a steel chair by the door and rummaged her for a good half an hour. It wasn’t his appetite that took her off guard, it was the fact that he kept calling his wife’s name as he thrusted. “MmaMetsi, ooh MmaMetsi” When he was done, he pulled up his pants walked out without a goodbye and left her sore and feeling more lost than ever. Maleka didn’t sleep that night. She weighed her options. Go back home to your son. Make this a business, you have already paid rent with it. Go back to your son. All night her thoughts were overcome with those two options. She kept glancing at the condom full of semen laying on the floor.Go back home. At dawn when the roosters began their morning ritual and school kids splashed bathing water on her shack wall she’d decided. Chapter 5

ith the arrival of new traders from the south and illegal immigrants from Congo, Angola and Zimbabwe, Botswana’s capital was exposed to social ills never before heard of, morality bridges were left vulnerable and the porosity that followed was something no one was ready for. WCocaine and heroin dealers swarmed the streets like locusts on a sunflower field. Drug dealers in time got involved in prostitution activities, controlling an underground network of women, some from the University of Botswana and most from across the Zimbabwean and Zambian borders. To these men, it was all a game in which they controlled and manipulated the actions of the young desperate women. Maleka had fought this and garnered scars in the process. Street prostitutes have lower status than prostitutes who work indoors or for a pimp. There were no body guards. No rules to the trade and business had been slow since the reports that some University students were prostituting using the University dormitories.

40 biklmnpqrcgi Street prostitution had deteriorated dismally since then. The Ministry of Health officials initiated a “HUGS, NOT DRUGS” campaign when the frenzy that had the nation on its knees escalated. Soon there was wild talk on the streets, dealers were being gunned down by the police in pursuits, and urine test almost became as popular as Breathalysers. University girls were found strangled in their rooms and sometimes with needles still stuck on their veins. Prostitution was once a taboo in Botswana. A hideous crime, if one was caught they would have gotten whipped at a kgotla, their family publicly shamed and the perpetrator jailed for it. As the grids became elaborate in the city, the ladies of the night became more prominent, more prevalent, like a disease eating away at the flesh of society. Those that claimed that they had led the founding process of the republic from the protectorate hated these women. They called them demons of the night. The nerve. That’s what the parliamentarians called them at freedom squares and public rallies. Damn crooked politicians! It angered Maleka and her flock of “comfort sisters” that the only way they knew how to provide for themselves and their children was by selling the only commodity not controlled by these capitalists. The same fools who yapped at conferences asking for foreign aid in the name of women empowerment and human rights advocacy only to squander the grant money on their lavish lifestyles. Hypocrites. Street-level prostitution is comprised of both pimp- controlled prostitution and independent entrepreneurial 41 biklmnpqrcgi prostitution. Maleka had scars on her face and needle mark on her arms - all these battle scars were a result of men who tried to control her and how she sold her body. A dozen of these goons had approached her on numerous occasions with proposals to become her pimp, some more forceful and some more philosophical. Her refusal to be owned enraged them and they beat her up. She could not report it. Most of the girls on the streets had social, economic and health problems that forced them into the trade. Most of the girls were not equally as committed to being street prostitutes. For Maleka it was a way out, but for most of these girls it was a lifestyle issue, some were only committed due to drug dependency and then there were those who were weakly committed, engaging in prostitution because it was an easy source of Friday money or handbag money. Maleka worked six to eight hours a day, five to six days a week and had five to eight clients a night. Although most sexual encounters did not involve violence, Maleka had heard some girls complain about rough customers. The clients who were typically referred to as “Items” by the girls were attracted to the illicit encounter by desire mostly. As the girls stood by the roadside and at the parking lots of the hotel with skimpy skirts and waving their panties with their hands men just could not help it but buy this commodity. Some clients came from endorsements and recommendations from previous clients including bartenders, taxi drivers and hotel workers. She stopped by the roadside and examined her surroundings to make sure there were no suspect looking figures lurking in the creeping dark alley she called her office. Rape was 42 biklmnpqrcgi common in this part of town. It was no excess, no aberration nor accident and surely not a mistake. Rape embodied sexuality as the culture defined it. It was OK to rape prostitutes. As long as these definitions remained intact - that is as long as men were defined as sexual aggressors and prostitutes were defined as immoral passive receptors lacking integrity - men who are exemplars of the norm could rape these prostitutes with no consequence whatsoever. Rape was fostered to suppress this trade. Legally the law, the government and its people said they deplored rape but mythically they romanticized and perpetuated it and it was overlooked as long as the victim was deemed a sinner of sorts. Waving at her friend Tracy she crouched over, pulled up her skirt a few centimetres higher and wiggled out of her panty with so much swagger from the daily practice and again she scouted the area to ensure no perverts were watching from behind the alleys and she stood-up straight with her black lace G-string shrivelled on one hand she took out half a cigarette stub with the other and placed it into her mouth. For about ten minutes Maleka stood there with an unlit half-cigarette in her mouth and her panty on her left hand lost in thought. This habit is costing more than I make. I should quit. Maleka did not hate her job as much as she would have loved to, she craved the sexual release, but also wanted the emotional attachment. Although she had many sexual partners, the majority of her sexual congresses were with a principal partner who served as her ‘number one customer’ and this partner received an overwhelming proportion of her emotional attention as well. Ronnie. Such a gentleman. “Need a matchstick?”, Tracy inquired dismissively 43 biklmnpqrcgi passing by, she was nervously fixated on an approaching pair of headlights that seemed to slow down. Trenchtown was a dangerous street corner adjacent to Maibe Street by which joined the Mandela Avenue at the Main Mall. There was a small group of shops in a complex, the locals called the area, Mobuto Mall. It was an uncared for area of the city hence a haven for street prostitution. The girls had to be extra careful which car they stopped and which one they let pass by without even looking at it. “Huh? Oh no I have a matchbox somewhere here in my bag”, Maleka responded, realizing her mind had teleported off her body for a couple of minutes and as a result she had forfeited a customer. She looked at the car and shrugged “He looks cheap anyway” she allayed her dismay at Tracy. She began to stroll back to where Tracy had previously been standing, by an electric pole. It was filthy and Maleka hated the spot but even more than that she hated the person who stood at the spot every night and yet never bothered to clean it. This was their habitat, their office and it sickened her to the bowels that her ‘co-comfort sister’ could not take care of their domicile. She’d arrive early some days, pick up the bottles and take the scattered plastic bags to the huge council waste-bins a few hundred meters away. She stood by the pole and reached into her bag searching for the matchstick box, her panty still on one hand. One of the girls who had been standing alone at the far end of the street started walking away towards the bright lights of The Black Marina Hotel. “I’m leaving too Leka, there is just two of us out here now. I’m going to check the hotel lobbies and if it’s as dry as 44 biklmnpqrcgi it is out here I ‘m going home. I sell hot dogs by the bars near my house”, Tracy called her Leka the moment she introduced herself when she first got her. That’s the name her only her mother had used and since then the two girls had formed a strong bond and grown closer to each other. “I can’t leave, I just got here. Can’t you stay a bit longer?’’ “Ruby will be back soon, that fat, old man she left with doesn’t last beyond five minutes” They broke into a spat of laughter, as they stood side by side, sharing a cigarette. Maleka thought of going to the University again. There was a lot of risk there if she got caught but the one thing she knew for sure was that business was guaranteed especially at this time of the month when University boys were feeling big-headed with their pockets bludgeoning with coins and feeling merrier than Santa’s elves. There was no business here. Standing here all alone was suicidal and she knew it. Most of the girls did not show up anymore and she heard rumours of a brothel that was opened up at the Main mall. The pimps who owned it had not approached her yet and if they did she was going to cuss them the hell out. On a normal day more than ten girls in skimpy skirts would have been lined up on the tarmac walkway gossiping and fighting for customers. Only about three out of ten of the girls lined-up on the streets on any given night were locals. Most were from Zimbabwe a few from Zambia and Angola. “It’s really amazing that you haven’t dropped all your nonsense ideals because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out in this business of ours. When you live by the vagina you need security Leka” 45 biklmnpqrcgi “Oh you and that pimp foolishness of yours again. Not in this lifetime. I’m no one’s possession Trace. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and being controlled like a puppet. Have you seen the bruises on Sharlee’s face? She says she got smacked for withholding some of the money” “You have the wrong idea about it. Sharlee is a liar, that bitch had her ass handed to her for refusing to do oral” “Are you hearing yourself? Who beat her? Customer of her big daddy” “Big daddy. Customer said he’d paid for the premium pack. Point is, there is regulation Leka, when you follow the rules you’ll be OK, at the end of the day you get your cut. Everybody wins” “No. I do the work. It’s my vagina that does the work, why do I need to get a cut out of what’s mine? If these machingilane of yours wants a cut why doesn’t he sell his dick to these married women in town. Or his ass to the starving gays that are all over this city. Fuck them” “Let’s go to the club, talk to one of the guys and see how it goes. It’s more about protection. Three of the girls died in the past years because of violence on this hell hole’’ ‘‘I cannot be owned. Never. Wait here comes that whore. I heard she was in prison” “YHO! What for?” “Tracy you didn’t hear this from me err?. Apparently missy over there was three months pregnant and she had an abortion. A foetus was found lying in the waste bin at the Bus Rank” “Oh my God, tell me you are kidding. Who does that?” 46 biklmnpqrcgi “In the middle of the mall. Imagine!” “But how did they know it was her?” “Pregnancy gone, no child to show. A neighbour reported seeing a trail of blood in the yard where she is renting a room. Plus the waste bin where they found the foetus is close to her stall where she sells fat cakes during the day” “Lord! I feel sorry for people who buy those fat cakes”, she spit on the ground. Another spat of laughter broke off as their conversation transformed more into hushed whispers seasoned with pints and puffs of a shared dying cigarette they had been exchanging for about three minutes. Ruby passed by and barely said a word to them. She was one of the local girls who only came to this part of town once or twice in a month. She stopped a few meters away from the two girls who were clearly talking about her. Xenophobia was a complex conundrum here. Batswana women hated Zimbabweans, Zimbabwean women hated Batswana women and they both hated Angolan and Zambian women. Sometimes the enmity materialized into hostility and belligerence. One of the Zimbabwean girls was recently sentenced to 5 years in prison for allegedly murdering one of the local girls in one of bouts. This then made this area a red- zone for the police and now the locals were pointing a finger at all Zimbabwean girls. The air was damp and cold, and the trees and grass heavy with dew; but presently the moon began to shine, the dewdrops fell heavy and large as drops of rain; the dogs chirped and fought with waste-bins and each other. “You know… all this things that are happening here now, all of them they are blamed on us amaZimbabwe. What one 47 biklmnpqrcgi of the local or Zambian girls does in these streets is her own responsibility, but what one Zimbabwean does is thrown back at all us Zimbabweans.” Maleka slowly spoke sadness slyly creeping into her voice. “Don’t worry about it my friend. Soon it will pass as the rest of the other issues have”, Tracy consoled her friend. The women on this segment of earth like the rest of the 21st century women or maybe Eve’s entire lineage barged across the gender divide on the shoulders of the feminists who had fought for them. Greedily they grab the power that they bequeath. But, surrounded still by more ancient expectations and stubborn ignorance, as many of them are a danger, to feminism’s central cry for collective action and social goals, they promptly forget much of what their predecessors had struggled for, choosing instead to focus on individual success and that of their children, their own intricate pathways to some sort of success over the other woman. Maleka had witnessed this behaviour amongst the women she cleaned with when she first got here. There was much prejudice towards women who scraped for a living amongst them with babies on their backs. They were ridiculed and told to woman up and care for their babies at home. One of the most invidious results of that forgetting is that women spend an inordinate amount of time attacking each other from political high offices down to the street lamps where Maleka traded her body. Women in the workforce quietly whisper that female bosses are the worst; women on the sides of the road sweeping roads under the poverty ‘eradication’ government schemes indelicately dissected each other.

48 biklmnpqrcgi Maleka felt that if women wanted to raise their collective voices and consequence there was need to start imposing temporary moratoriums on shooting one another down. She had wanted to become a politician at one point before all the turmoil in her country. She wanted to change her community, to inspire young girls growing up in the hard terrains of oppression. “Gaborone is too big, you can always change spots. I have a cousin who works in Francistown, and by work I mean you know… Our business---”, Tracy nods “She says in Francistown it’s much worse. She envies thina¸who are already in Gabs, because with the new travel restrictions, she can’t make it here without being nabbed at the checkpoints. She says in Francistown they get raped by the Police, they get beaten and shamed by the local magistrates. We have it better here”. Tracy, like Maleka is from Zimbabwe. She’s been living in Botswana for five years now and in all those years she never felt the urge to go back home. Ten years and she’d never left Gaborone. The tiny woman is fair skinned, with features that were perfectly built for her face. With a little more money she’d be a catch. Her behind drives men crazy and holds their attention whenever she passes by. A really calm person unless provoked. “I have to go my friend, I’m a little short on rent money and have to make at least P300 in the next coming two days.” “It’s alright love, I will be fine. I’m looking to do one, two or three more rounds tonight then I’m going home early” “Yebo girl. Winter is almost here so the after-midnight shifts aren’t workable. You can’t even get wet ha ha ha” “Well, we don’t have to do anything. Married men need cuddling too. You ever had one of those? The one that just wants to talk, maybe his dick sucked but no sex, just talk” “Nope. Not me, I’m not a good talker” “That’s the thing, you don’t have to, you just listen and say mmh… mmh” They laughed as Tracy walked away into the aureole of the city’s backdrop street lights. “Watch out for the police at the hotel”, Maleka shouted at Tracy and a horde of dogs from all across the neighbourhood frenzied into a bicker of barks. She lit another cigarette she’d hustled from Tracy and started walking towards a street lamp at the intersecting roads. She did not feel safe and silently she prayed for one of the sex hungry men of this city to show up and ferry her away to some sordid place of sexual marvel. Unlike her friend Tracy, her rent for the month was sorted, but she had to raise at least P200 to top up the P800 she was going to send back to Zimbabwe for her son. Something startled her. A man. He coughed for a second time and she nearly jumped out of her skin from fear, then she noticed that he was wounded. Maleka approached him with caution, reaching into her handbag for her ‘Okapi’ knife just in case it was one of the streets hooligans who occasionally came like a plague to chivvy her and the other girls. Chapter 6

he dropped the cigarette butt that had been lingering on her mouth. For a moment she thought of picking it up, after all it was her last but she hesitated and backed off a short distance. She contemplated running away seeing that all the girls had been picked up except for her. With a sudden surge he reached out his hand and tried Sto stand up but he staggered and fell face-down on a pile of dirt that had malingered out of the black plastic garbage bag that used to contain it. “Uuuuurg maan sies” he said, slowly trying to stand up The City Council had neglected this part of the city hence it had become a hub for gang rapes, prostitution and other criminal activities. The officials knew about this and decided to do nothing about it. The police never bothered to show up unless someone was dead and the smell of rot poisoned the air of the nearby streets. Rumour had it that the police feared for their lives because they had once been targeted by the scum that resided and did business in these dark alleys.

51 biklmnpqrcgi Gathering her courage, Maleka cautiously approached the man in the dark and instantaneously realized she knew him. His name is Jimmy or Timmy or something to that tone. She could not remember the name precisely but she knew the way it rung and the vile taste he had left in her memory all this time and the echo of how she met him still resonated inside her head. It had been on a cold winter night when they first met. July was on her usual rampage, scorning and scavenging all and every corner of the streets and business had been extremely bad. Customers preferred to stay at home with their saggy old, grumpy, nagging wives than to go out seeking for paid-by-the hour vaginas in the cold heart of the city’s dark alleys. But rent had to be paid, drugs had to be bought and kids had to be fed so street prostitutes braved the cold, in stiny skirts and crop-tops and lined up the streets. “Bereka mosadi, work woman, work” they would say to each other like an army of gladiators entering a grand battle- stage. Contrary to infamous stereotypes, prostitution isn’t as seasonal as football or farming of grapes. Most of Maleka’s friends abandoned the streets on winter for miniature jobs; Lira worked in a chain of hair salons on different shifts; Khimbe usually found temporary cleaning jobs around the city for a rich clientele list which she kept even after the winter. However those committed to what they know best – trade of sex – stuck to their trade. Maleka had at some point tried to babysit for a couple in the suburbs of Phase 2. She quit after a week when the man asked to fuck her while his wife was out at work. The bastard had left in the morning as usual then around 10a.m. Maleka was startled to see the man walk in, unbuttoning his shirt and grinning like a 52 biklmnpqrcgi boy at her. He blankly told her he wanted to fuck her and that he would pay her for it. She really considered the offer considering what a bitch the wife was – she would have fucked him right there on the white carpet had it not been for the baby who was happily playing on his cot. She told him off and threatened to tell his wife and that was the last of it. The following days the man acted like an ass towards her, so one day when the couple where in the bedroom preparing to go to work she wrote: “Your Man Try Fuck Me” on a napkin and pasted it onto the baby’s cot with a clear sellotape and walked out of the door. They never saw her again. That was two years ago, around the same time this dog that now lay in front of her, wounded - a seemingly rich, sad and scruffy middle - aged man who appeared to have been knocked out by life a number of times. He had been wandering the hotel lobby in flip flops like a street dog waiting for people to finish eating so it could scourge for bones. He carried a deeply rooted sadness embroidered in his eyes that reverberated from a mile away. She had noticed how he pretended to be talking to someone on the phone and the shy glances he stole and sent to the direction of the bar where she was seated alone waiting for a client who hadn’t showed up yet. They remained at the hotel bar until the closing hour and whoever they had been waiting for had not showed up. When the hotel’s bar attendant approached them a few minutes after midnight to notify them that the bar was closing they were on their third round of dry Southern Comfort shots. He was paying and his libidinous laugh was all that filled the 53 biklmnpqrcgi air. He said he couldn’t remember the last time he’d laughed so hard, the unagitated taste of freedom from the world of sadness he had become content with. Maleka was familiar with these types of stories from the married men in Gaborone. Their sad lives with their boring wives – it was said that most Tswana women only take care of themselves when they seek marriage and once they find it, it’s bye-bye to all that. They start growing pubic hair like they are residents of the wild African forests; they grow fat and flabby; they cover their heads with some nylon head-gear they refer to as molenza and worse – they start to oppress their men. Like an unchained rabid dog he was ready to break loose from the domestication and go wild. Without a verbal agreement they both stood up and left the bar. “Good evening” he paused to look at the name tag on the receptionist’s shirt. “Di....Dineo, I need a room for the night”, he turned and winked at the half drunken Maleka as they both broke into a bicker of drunken giggles. “Dumela Rra, alcohol is not allowed in the lobby area; please place your glass on the counter” “Huh? Hey, hey Voetsek! What sort of nonsense is this?” “It’s hotel policy Sir” “Police? What fucking police?. Now that I have spent money on this shebeen of a hotel you are gonna tell me about police? Fuck that. Fuck you. Know what? Fuck your mother” “Rra don’t insult me. I’m just doing my job, I don’t make the rules Mr. I ‘m just telling you what the hotel management say”

54 biklmnpqrcgi “Tell your management to suck my long Mandingo dick OK?” Yes! Shimmy was his name. She remembered how he’d bragged about who he was and what he was capable of. He walked away cursing and swearing under his breath. He turned back and saw Maleka still at the help desk, dizzily watching him walk away. A dark tall man wearing a blue blazer, sitting on the lobby couch was starring at her behind hungrily, almost drooling even. Shimmy noticed and hurriedly staggered towards him about to start a scuffle. “Ay Boy-boy are you trying to disrespect me?” “Excuse me?” “So are not just disrespectful. You are dumb too? I said, motherfucker are you trying to disrespect me? I’ll knock all your teeth out of your mouth fool”. Shimmy got closer to the man. “Sir, look, I don’t want no trouble brazen” the guy replied politely, standing up from the couch and towering over the short, stout man. “I don’t even know what you are talking about”, he backed off a little, put his phone into his back-pocket and started pulling up the sleeves of his blazer. Shimmy slowly retreated. Maleka felt a speck of pride crawl up her spine. No one had ever fought for her but now she stood before these two not- so-ugly men who were about to go knuckles with each other for her. Shimmy was drunk and wouldn’t have stood a chance but he had acted jealous when he saw another man coveting her. She grabbed his arm, and whispered into his ear. “Let it go mabebeza, get a key and lets go. I’ll cheer you up. Let’s get out of here”. 55 biklmnpqrcgi Shimmy went back to the receptionist, roughly placed his almost-empty glass of Southern Comfort on the help desk and started talking to the receptionist calmly offering a half-ass- baked apology. Maleka watched and smiled at the gentleman at the couch who was still clearly undressing her in his mind. She took out a piece of paper from her bag and placed it on the table signalling him to take it. It had her number. She kept many more of those types of papers in her handbag. They were her business cards. She winked and walked away from the piece of paper, towards Shimmy who was almost done paying for the one room for him and her. The receptionist watched disapprovingly as the two staggered out of the hotel lobby towards the rooms and she stared at the piece of paper on the table as if daring the gentleman it had been intended for to pick it up. They stared at each other for a while until another receptionist came into the lobby and started talking loudly about the mess at the hotel bar and the couple she had found damn near naked at the door of room 154. They laughed and started talking about the promiscuity that wore the city’s darkness these days. Before they could realize, the man who had been sitting on the couch on the lobby was gone and so was the paper. Now this man who’d violated her in room 154 of the Black Marina Hotel lied before her, coughing like a dying dog. Maleka looked at him with disgust and yet felt pity crawl up her possum. Her conscience and need for revenge at a tug-of-war. She fought the urge to walk away and let him rot on his own blood but she remembered room 154 of the Black Marina Hotel like the cheap smoke of contraband Everest still lingering in her nostrils and mouth. 56 biklmnpqrcgi That night she had allowed herself to get intoxicated by a beyond her limitations. Her code had always been to stay clean, to avoid the cocaine and alcohol that her friends indulged in to mask their dark, night second-selves. She remembered how the following morning she had almost vomited her intestines out due to the Southern Comfort. The pain on her liver and how she couldn’t keep her eyes open. That was a night that changed her. She’d seen a different side of humanity and it had thus migrated into her so that the hatred she carried inside was serpentine. Things had gone awfully right that night and for a moment she’d considered him for the position of ‘Regular Client’. They’d started kissing at the stairway and by the time they got to the door of room 154 his pants where half-way to his knees, unzipped and three of the buttons on his shirt had been ripped off. Her cheap lace brassiere had willingly unbuttoned itself and he had his hands on one of her breasts and the other fumbling with the key and the door. Inside, the room barely had space for movement, the bed covered almost all the room and the bathroom was just by the door. He held her against the wall, her left leg lifted and coiled around his buttocks, and then he writhed the G-string out of her ass and pushed it down onto the floor as she assisted his attempt and wiggled out of them. His trouser at the ankles, with shoes still on his feet he almost tripped and fell as he tried to free his feet from one of the shoes. Maleka had seen this struggle a thousand and more times and she knew how to deal with it. She got on her knees and held his penis on her hand. Every time she had sex, she remembered her first 57 biklmnpqrcgi encounter with sex, three days after her mother’s funeral, with one of her mother’s friends who had come over to ‘console’ her. She cried on his arms into what later became her first sexual relationship. She fell pregnant on the first month and the bastard denied the child was his, saying he had a wife and kids. She went to the wife and told her what had happened and the old witch said she was a whore trying to steal her man. She learnt that sex was a dangerous act. An act that required thorough precautions which when violated resulted in a life-time of misery and punishment for that one round or orgasmless sex. But she’d also started to learn from her vocation that sex consisted of building up of bodily tensions and their release, a rhythm of stimulus and response, the reduction of tension, the ends to the means being gratification and relaxation. In the beginning, when she was unaccustomed to the trade she had hated it, but now sex was her authority, a powerful tool, the only thing that made her feel in control of her emotions and surroundings. Sex to her had two distinct categories: Traditional and Ornamental. Traditional sex was romantic, profound, serious, emotional, moral, mysterious, spontaneous, abandoned, focused on a particular person, and stereotypically feminine. Ornamental sex was pop, playful, funny, experimental, conscious, deliberate, amoral, anonymous, focused on sensation for sensation’s sake and stereotypically masculine. She hated emotional customers. The ones who whined about their fat wives and how lazy they had gotten five years into the marriage. She felt pity for them both. She’d spat the gum she had been chewing while they 58 biklmnpqrcgi kissed and stuck it under the light switch holder by the door and slowly started licking the tip of his half flaccid penis while stroking the rhizome of his hairy testicles. The Southern Comfort rescinded the bad odour of uncircumcised bacterial build-up beneath the foreskin. She worked her tongue like an artist, squeezing his balls with her teeth gently and then sucking onto them like they were a lolly. “You got smoke?” she’d asked “I don’t think they allow smoking in these rooms” “Fuck that. You got smoke or no?” He gave her a Peter, and lit it for her. She took three massive puffs, gave him back the cigarette and held the smoke inside her mouth before she took him in her mouth. He filled her up and his hands dug into her weave as he groaned in what Maleka assumed was a local dialect, Ikalanga. It took not more than two and a half minutes of sucking and sloppy sounds of tongue-meet-dick then she felt his thighs get tense and from her experience the muscle torsion only meant one thing - he was about to release his filth into her mouth. She made an attempt to push him off but his hands were dug deeper into her weave and he aggressively deep throated into her. Maleka lost balance as she sobered up with disgust at the sensation and smell of semen trickling down her throat. Shimmy fell onto the bed grinning like a conqueror. For years, sex had become an alien process in his life. He watched with pride as Maleka timidly walked into the bathroom to clean up. He took his phone and saw four missed calls, all from his wife. He ignored them, switched off his phone and took off his shirt. When Maleka finally got out of the bathroom, she lay 59 biklmnpqrcgi besides him and together they lit cigarettes and started smoking in silence. No one spoke. Shimmy downed what remained of the Southern Comfort and then they watched the tiny television set mounted on the wall until they fell asleep. It was in the wee hours of the morning, when Maleka felt him move her panty to the sides. She woke up startled and still woozy from the Southern Comfort and tried to avert him but it was too late – It was as if he’d suddenly become sober and an animal inside him had finally risen to its freedom. He pushed her face-first onto the bed, grabbed her by the neck and pushed her legs apart. Then he forcefully tried to penetrate her anus as she shrieked at the piercing pain. “Wha... what the hell are you doing?” “Shut the fuck up bitch. I‘m paying you for this aren’t I? You filthy Zimbabwean slut. Why isn’t your pussy shaven? Huh? I’m not going in there”. “Stop! Please stop”, she begged him while he held her down with one hand and covered her mouth with the other. Shimmy ripped off her perineum - a hairless area between the anus and the spot where the outer labia meet - that night as she tried to scream under the pressure of his large rough hand muffling his mouth. The perineum contains a seam of skin, a remnant of our fetal development more visible in some people than in others, extending from the vagina to the anus. It is very sensitive to touch, since the muscles beneath the skin are rich in both nerves and blood vessels and it is capable of stretching when a woman gives birth, but it may be put under strain when the child’s head emerges. It hardly tears but when it does, the pain is unthinkable. In many countries doctors routinely make an incision in the perineum, a procedure known as an episiotomy during childbirth in the belief that it relieves the vaginal muscles. If the perineum is subjected to stress, for instance by tight trousers, G-string underwear or panty-liners, it may suffer chafing or cracking. Chafing can also occur during sex if there is too much friction but it rarely breaks. The pain had been more excruciating than any she had ever felt, she tried to scream for help but he had held her down and muffed her cries with a pillow. For more than 10 minutes she tried to fight him off as he pounded her until she felt his cold semen on her rectum and he fell besides her, panting, groaning and worse, smiling. She bled on the sheets all night waiting for dawn while he snored besides her, smelling like faeces. She knew in her world rape is not as much a crime as prostitution. She couldn’t dare call the police. She would be more a criminal than this animal beside her. The victims become the accused, at the end it is her who is going to have to prove her good reputation, her mental soundness and her impeccable propriety. It is like this in many societies across the world. Rape has been fostered to suppress women in the sex trade business. Then the same people turn around when it happens to their innocent little girls and say rape should be punishable by death; they say men who rape should get castrated; sentenced to life imprisonment hung by the neck until they are fucking dead. Legally society say they deplore it, but mythically they romanticize it and perpetuate it, and privately they excuse and overlook it when it happens to a member of that same society deemed to be of lesser morals. Most of the customers whom Maleka had met over the year came to them for this sort of barbarism and they called it “rough sex”. They preferred to do the nasty and untold sexual fantasies they haboured to strangers at a price than to their own wives and girlfriends. In a hard way Maleka had learnt that in Botswana like Zimbabwe, the norm of masculinity meant phallic aggression. In her business, sexual restraint often became a huge factor. Some men lacked the morality and self restraint in regard to sex. It was difficult to fight this complex situation. Moreover, since the analogue of abusing a sex worker was not criminalized. She’d stood over him that night with tears defeating her eyes, a broken table leg on her hand, its sharp edge pointed at his throat. He was snoring and sweating and he smelled like a pit latrine. A tiny voice screamed in her head, “kill the sonofabitch”. But she kept reminding herself that she’d come too far to let her life end like this, one of her friends, Ivy, had told her stories about the other girls who had been to prison for minor offences like solicitation, or petty theft, how the prison guards would starve them for days if they refused to perform oral sex on them and how HIV positive lesbians would force new inmates to go down on them or face the sharp edge of a sharpened toothbrush on the throat. She’d also heard of the general dire state of the prison wards; the filthy ablutions; the tasteless food; the cruel guards and the uncomfortable beds. For almost half an hour she contemplated plunging the wooden splinter from the table leg into Shimmy’s throat. He groaned and made sudden movements with his hands, eyes still closed and he turned and faced towards the wall and continued snoring unaware of the lurking peril his pathetic existence was facing. When dawn came Maleka surrendered to her goodwill, picked up her purse from the floor and walked out of Room 154. Book II

64 biklmnpqrcgi Chapter 7

Taboka Moseki Nswazwi Village Botswana 20° 39° 55’ S, 27’ 13° 8° E

A stretch of endless hills hover over what appears to be where the skies embrace the surface; where the ground meets the roots of an endless constellate of grassland and a magnificent green veld of trees. The tops of mountains and hills brooding over this once so great empire are among the seemingly unfinished parts of a great kingdom’s walls, wither it is a slight insult to the gods to climb and pry into their secrets, and try their effect on the mighty humans that is the ba-ka-Nswazwi people. Many legends exist about the hills that surround the village. Sangomas often went to gather around one of the bigger hills called Nkome if there was shortage of rain or to pray for mercy if there was a disease outbreak. In the dockage of HIV/AIDS many trips were taken to the foot of the hill to plead with the deity, Mwali to spare the youth of the village who were perishing like flies around calabash of milk. Every weekend there were multiple burials of young men and women who caught the virus in cities far, far away. 65 biklmnpqrcgi Many cattle have disappeared from the village into that horizon and were never seen again. Herd-boys knew better than to wander off into the hills to look for them and kids were told not to climb those mountains as they harboured ferocious ogres, monsters and predators and that their tops are sacred and home to the ancestors. There were legends of some people who had wandered off into that abyss and never been seen again. It is the sacred distant dwelling place of Mwali’ and sanctuary to the beliefs and taboos of a tribe of men and women who once ruled the region of Southern Africa by virtue of gold and smelted iron. There are still old abandoned structures of schools in the area that were built upon rocky fields on the periphery of these hills and there are still odds and ends of what is said to have been factories that produced thousands and maybe millions of gallons of food, clothes, iron artefacts and spears to supply the region. Nswazwi village is lined with organized streets of huts, with fences like hurdles, and the thatch-grass projecting so that the owners may sit beneath it in sun or rain. Many yards have fences around them to keep away animals especially jackals and hyenas who came out at night to steal eggs and sometimes even kill chickens and goats. The doors of the mud-huts are not low as those of many nearby tribes. One doesn’t have to crawl in order to go in. There are no windows on the huts because there is adequate space between the thatch roofing and the wall for air circulation. The houses are single rooms therefore in each yard there is an average of six mud huts. In summer most families sit around a fire outside the mud-hut kitchen, under the stars, listening to stories from the 66 biklmnpqrcgi older people about life in the olden days. This is the marvel you witness when you look onto the horizon almost six kilometres away from the small village of Nswazwi – a view that is as breath-taking and intriguing as the two small figures crouching around a dying fire, motionless. Bare-feet, waiting patiently for an old woman sitting across them to narrate one of her intriguing tales of how history has betrayed their present condition, the two boys are seated uniformly and keep extending their hands towards the fire to keep warm. Two black skinny dogs are lying in a semi-circle with their feet towards the fire watching an empty plate besides one of the boys. A slight wind passing with the night howls by the fire and the dogs with pricked-up ears creep close to the ashes which are becoming grey and cold. The old woman and her grandsons live in one of the few remaining yards without a real fence in the village. Theirs is surrounded by a line of rotten and crumbling Mopane poles. On this evening the two boys sat outside the kitchen with their grandmother in a half-enclosed fireplace. The slowly dying fire seemed to suffer an incurable disease and was slowly conking out leaving the thick darkness to incubate the night. It was one of the few lights in a thicket of darkness, a servant to the three lonely wanderers and their dogs, a companion, and a guardian angel; it purified the miasmatic air. Normally they would have prepared the fire inside the kitchen but the floor was still wet. The old woman had re- muddied the kitchen floor with clay soil mixed with cow-dung for maintenance purposes and to prevent dust.

67 biklmnpqrcgi The roof and walls of the kitchen were smoke-dried but clean; in one corner of the enclosure was a pile of wood neatly cut up into billets, and in another is a large earthen jar filled with water on which floats a calabash and a worn-out vegetable bowl. Cow bells, axes, a mould-board plough, an old brownish lantern, quivers, and dried goat skins hang from pegs upon the walls. The old woman speaks ikalanga softly and articulately. She takes long pauses in between her narration as if to refill her lungs with air. Age and the civil war in Zimbabwe where she was on exile have taken a long toll on her. Eighty something years old she can barely see in the darkness but she has a good sense of her surroundings. Her amputated leg covered with a thin veil of old worn-out cashmere or what was left of it is much closer to the fire-place; and she rubs the stump slowly feeling the heat and remembering the pain of a century that left her crippled. She was once a legendary story-teller in the village. She would get invited to schools to tell children stories and tales of local legends and even at Kgotla meetings when the village chief was hosting some dignitaries. But that was a long time ago. Nowadays she is referred to as Nloyi-wa-ka-Kombani, The Witch of Kombani Ward. She became notorious for witchery after her son called her a witch, and exposed her to the villagers, accusing her of plotting to spellbind him to her so that he would never leave her side. He left the village many, many years ago leaving her with a battered reputation and two young boys he had fathered. To the boys, she was all they had – their rock of ages, the only family they knew. She was their end-all, be-all. Their favourite story-teller. 68 biklmnpqrcgi Her wisdom refined by age and a pile of bad experience and misfortunes enough to waste all her nine lives. She had become a master of the ikalanga language, traditions and history. Sometimes she would tell narrate to them a story she’d narrated the day before but they never complained. Today her mood seems down-in-the-dumps. She is narrating a story she has never told them – or anyone. Softly and slowly she begins to narrate the story of the roots of a small group of Bapedi who ended up in Nswazwi village. Tracing the roots of this group all the way back to the notorious Sekhukhune-land. She speaks with sorrowful vibrations in her tone, a sadness so embedded in her voice you could feel the falsetto in her vocal cords rise up in her voice and cascade down with her emotions like an avalanche from her larynx and the beat of her frail heart flat-line as she took in deep breaths readying herself for the next chapter in her tale. She tells them how it was merely an extension of the instinct to survive which taught the primeval men to give point and edge to their sticks and stones; and out of this first invention the first great discovery was made. ”There are many lies told on how the first fire was discovered. The truth is this - while men were patiently rubbing sticks to point them into arrows, a spark leapt forth and ignited the wood-dust which had been scraped from the sticks. Thus fire was found”. ”But fire was invented by the whites grandma. Aren’t they the ones who make matchsticks” the younger boy asks ”No my grandson. Fire was first discovered here in Africa” 69 biklmnpqrcgi ”By who? By who kuku?” the small child asks in amazement ”Your great, great grandfathers my son. With the assistance of fire they felled trees and hollowed logs into canoes, crossed a big river in Egypt, fished in Tanganyika and rowed across Zambezi with their intricately made oars. They hardened the points of stakes in the embers; and with their new weapons were able to attack the lions and other beasts, thrusting their spears through their colossal throats”, she stopped for a moment to listen to howling jackals not so far away from where they sat. ”Damn hounds. They better not eat my hen’s eggs again today” ”We put all the hens in their henhouse grandma” Taboka replied. ”Oh, that’s great my son. I’m getting sick of this. As I was saying, our ancestors made pots. They employed their new servant in agriculture and in metallurgy pioneering the Iron Age and made spears and arrows to defend themselves from their enemies. Fire was also used as a weapon; they shot flaming arrows, or hurled fiery javelins against the foe” she stopped again and moved closer to the fire. ”Above all, they prepared, by means of fire, the vegetable poison which they discovered in the woods; and this invention must have started a revolution in the art of ancient war. That is the revolution that led us here from the Transvaal”. The old woman thornily traced the history of Ba-ka- Nswazwi, taking the boys all the way back to the arrival of the Bantu speakers in the first diaspora. As a young girl she had sat on her grandfather’s lap and listened to series of events, this same story, dozens of time. 70 biklmnpqrcgi She narrated it to her grandsons as if she had been in the midst of all the wars, the betrayals, revolutions and the relocations. This Kalanga Rozvi tribe defeated not only some Nguni generals, as another general to be defeated was Kgari whose Bamangwato tribe was completely defeated and obliterated by the Rozvi under Netjasike in 1830. Bakalanga like many of those regal black tribes surrounding them are almost all of so deep a brown that the skin appears to be quite black; sometimes their skin is as light as a ma- coloured. The average tint is a rich deep bronze. Their eyes are dark, though blue eyes are occasionally seen; their hair is black, though sometimes of rusty red, and is always of a woolly texture. To this rule there are no exceptions—it is the one constant character, the one infallible sign by which the race may be detected. Their lips are not invariably thick; their noses are frequently well formed. In physical appearance they differ widely from one another. The inhabitants of the swamps, the dark forests and the mountains are flat-nosed, long armed, and thin-calved, with mouths like mussels, broad splay feet, and projecting heels. It was for the most part from this class that the American slave markets were supplied. One of the greatest inconveniences the boys experienced in such a narrative was the difficulty of getting to the same level of emotion as their granny as she began to utter big native words and big thoughts chided by blocked tears that clogged her eyes. ”Two years ago, we watched a film at school called the Gods Must be Crazy and I saw Bakhwa using sticks to make fire. I hear they still use those?” Taboka asked his grandmother curiously.

71 biklmnpqrcgi ”Bakhwa---”, she shook her head and kept quiet for half a minute. ”That’s a word meant to be offensive to Basarwa the same way lekalaka was meant to be offensive to us” she continued. ”Those are the original inhabitants of Africa, a dwarfish race with restless, rambling, eyes and a click in their speech. When I came back from exile in Zimbabwe I found many of them in Bukalanga owned by some of the rich families in Nswazwi village”, her voice became narrower, sadder and more lamentable. ”They were herd-boys and caretakers of ploughing fields for minimal wage. It was a sad thing to witness for us who came from exile, especially from people who knew how it felt to be treated like scum by Ngwato. Not only in Bukalanga, Basarwa had been driven off their hunting grounds by the whites who declared most of the country crown lands hence they became slaves to many tribes in the country. “Bakalanga are closely related to the Mashona. They are everywhere. There are more Bakalanga than there is any other tribe in Botswana. We mainly inhabit Zimbabwe and Botswana. When our grandparents arrived from the North in north eastern Botswana and south western Zimbabwe they had already split with the Shona”. This group of people is one of the largest of the so-called minority groups in Botswana. Bakalanga are linked to some early African states such as Mapungubwe, Khami and the Rozvi Empire. By 1690 the Portuguese had been forced off the plateau and much of the land formerly under Munomutapa was controlled by the Rozvi. The Kalanga dynasties fractured into autonomous states, many of which later formed the Rozvi Empire. Peace and 72 biklmnpqrcgi prosperity reigned over the next two centuries and the centres of Dhlo-Dhlo, Khami, and Great Zimbabwe reached their peaks. At the beginning of the 19th century, the Bakalanga Kingdom remained the largest and possibly wealthiest indigenous state in southern Africa. Massive amounts of gold and ivory were annually exported to the ports of Mozambique at the time of the first ruler known as Nitjasike. This was a vast empire, organized and peaceful; with less in-fighting and less enemies. They had built a conglomerate of tribes around them. Their supreme power transcended borders of the minor tribes around them; from the BaVenda of Limpopo to the Babirwa and Batswapong of Botswana as well as the Shona speaking people of the then metropolis Zimbabwe. The spiral of wars that ravaged the region before the arrival of white men is what some say led to the fall of the great Kingdom. The Mambos fell down from grace and after a series of attacks from pillaging Ndebele warriors moving north coming from the southern horn of Africa. ”The stories I heard allege that this tragic fall of an empire so great was because the last Mambo Tjilisamhulu Nitjasike failed to honour the protector god Mwali” “Mzilikazi?” “Yebo. uMzilikazi. There was a time when people trembled when they heard that name. He brought to our lands carnage that was never before seen. Your great grandfather said he was a boy when Mzilikazi tormented our people. They say he commanded an army so massive, so fearless no tribe could stand to him. She Kgari of the Ngwato once attacked Mzilikazi’s army and almost lost all his men” 73 biklmnpqrcgi Chapter 8

74 biklmnpqrcgi Bakalanga people of Nswazwi village are originally BaPedi of Mudjadji -The Rain Queen from Potgiteruss in The Republic of South Africa. There are several different stories relating to the creation and history of the Rain Queens of Balobedu. One story states that an old chief in 16th century ”Monomotapa” , was told by his ancestors that by impregnating his daughter, Dzugundini, she would gain rain-making skills; Another story involves a scandal in the same chief’s house, where the chief’s son impregnated Dzugundini. Dzugundini was held responsible and was forced to flee the village. She ended up in Molototsi Valley, which isin the present day Balobedu Kingdom. The village she established with her loyal followers was ruled by a Mugudo, a male leader, but the peace and harmony of the village was disrupted by rivalries between different families, and therefore to pacify the land, the Mugudo impregnated his own daughter to restore the tribes’ matrilineal. She gave birth to the first Rain Queen known as Mudjadji which means; ‘ruler of the day.’ The Rain Queen’s mystical rain making powers were reinforced by the beautiful garden which surrounded her royal compound. Surrounded by parched land, her garden contained the world’s largest “Cycad” trees which were in abundance under a spectacular “Tropical rain belt”. One species of cycad, the “Mudjadji cycad”, is named after the Rain Queen. The Rain Queen is a highly respected figure in present- day South Africa and many tribes revere and respect her and her land. The Queen’s influence and esteem is so high that even when states around the Balobedu kingdom are warring, they rarely invaded or even touched her land. Even Shaka Zulu sent 75 biklmnpqrcgi his top emissary to ask her for her blessings. Pedi in the narrowest sense, refers more to a political unit than to a cultural or linguistic one: the Pedi polity included the people living within the area over which the Maroteng dynasty established dominance during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Many fluctuations occurred in the extent of this polity polity’s domination during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and processes of relocation and labour migration and have resulted in the widespread scattering of its former subjects. The present-day Pedi area, Sekhukhuneland, is situated between the Olifant’s River and its tributary the Steelpoort River; bordered on the east by the Drakensberg range, and crossed by the Leolo Mountains. But at the height of its power the Pedi polity under Thulare who ruled about 1790 to 1820 included an area stretching from the site of present-day Rustenburg in the east to the low-veld in the west, and ranging as far south as the Vaal River. Pedi power, at its height during Thulare’s reign, (about 1790-1820) was undermined during the period of the difeqane by Ndwandwe invaders from the south—east. A period of dislocation followed, after which the polity was re-established under Thulare’s son Sekwati, who engaged in numerous negotiations and struggles for control over land and labour with the Afrikaans-speaking farmers who had since settled in the region. Sekwati’s success in these struggles, and later that of his heir, Sekhukhune I, was due in part to the firepower enjoyed by the polity, bought with proceeds of early labour migration to the Kimberly diamond fields. King Sekhukhune who ruled between 1861 and 1862 was the son of Sekwati I and ascended to the Pedi throne by force. It 76 biklmnpqrcgi is alleged that he threw a spear at his half brother, Mampuru II, as a challenge to a fight for the throne and Mampuru fled leaving Sekhukhune in power. Sekhukhune I’s rule was marred by tyranny as he attacked those communities around him if they refused to pay allegiance to him. His tyranny was ended in August 13 1882 when his half-brother, Mampuru II returned and killed him in his sleep. The Pedi paramouncy’s power was entrenched through its insistence that the chiefs of subordinate groups take their principal wives from the ruling dynasty. The resulting system of cousin marriage perpetuated hierarchical marriage links between rulers and the ruled and involved paying inflated bride wealth to the Maroteng house. The Ba-Ka-Nswazwi broke away from BaPedi during Sekhukhune I’s rule, under the leadership of Tjilalu after what is alleged to be a ”dynastic dispute”. The group under Tjilalu of Ramapulane left the Transvaal via Johannesburg, Mafikeng, Mogonono into the Kweneng region and settled around present day Tswapong hills where they stayed and planted crops and after some time the climatic conditions changed, rainfall became scarce and food was limited, forcing the group to leave the area. When the rains came back the group returned to the area but not for long. The group split after some time and those who crossed Motloutse River into the area known as Bililima gwa Mengwe which was located in the Shonaland area in Rhodesia. This group asked for refuge from Chief Mengwe of Banyayi who was the ruler of Bakalanga state. They settled around the Nyambamisi River, a tributary to the greater Shashe River. The groups separated into two both led by Tjilalu’s sons, Shabalume and Tjilagwane. 77 biklmnpqrcgi Tjilagwane’s group went further north-east and settled at Nkange River while Shabalume led his group to Domboshaba near the upper Shashe River where his uncle Ntale had settled with his Bakhurutshe people in present day Tonota. Shabalume settled between Maibe River which empties into Nswazwi dam and Mashawe River which is also a tributary to the greater Shashe River. Several hills are found in the area, the most conspicuous being Nkome hill which the village traditional healers use for consultation with Mwali. The area is dominated by the Mopane trees, shrub savanna and rich of grasses as is the situation in most of Bukalanga state. Shabalume became a famous hunter and it was on one of his hunting escapades that the name of Nswazwi was birthed. Legend has it that Shabalume used a spear to hunt and the stick was made from a large fruited bush willow, locally known as Mokabi tree and scientifically termed Combretum zeyhen. The tree is called Nswazwi in Bukalanga. It is said that Shabalume killed a buffalo with his spear and he praised his weapon saying ”Nswazwi ‘wa pomba ngombe” which translates to ‘Nswazwi has entangled the beast’. Shabalume is therefore the father of present day Nswazwi village hence the title Nswazwi I was given to him. To this day the Nswazwi tree is greatly venerated and held with the greatest honour in Nswazwi village. It is a taboo to cut down the tree for any reason especially for firewood. It is almost past midnight and the drumbeat is getting slower and mellow. Her narrative was broad but captivating. Across the curve of the earth, in the darkness before the point of the orange light that delicately merged with the horizon of 78 biklmnpqrcgi starry black skies, in the opposite end of the twilight in waiting before sunrise; a short few kilometres away, there were women and a few men surrounding a fire brighter than hers. They sing and dance the dull moon away, praising their ancestors, their Mwali. On a different day she would have been jealous, yearning to be in their presence but she had no time for such frivolities anymore. She needed firewood to keep her home alight, to prepare pap for her grandsons, to boil Five Roses tea for her raving nerves and to iron the worn out school-pants of her grandsons. She needed the strength to pull the day’s water from the well, to boil water for tea, to wash the boys’ clothes for school, and to water the dying vegetables in the backyard garden. ”Are you sleepy?” she asked the boys. ”No grandma, just listening”, Taboka lies ”I’m waiting for the part where you ended up living in Zimbabwe”, said his young brother. ”OK then. Like I said, Ba-ka-Nswazwi genealogy therefore started with Shabalume who became Nswazwi the first and strongly believed in the concept of ‘establish and expand’. He believed in the institution of family and the simple fact that if each and every family in his village was assisted and delivered from the clutches of poverty then the village would progress. This would later become the mantra of Nswazwi village’s leaders Ba-ka-Nswazwi faced many confrontations and sometimes were caught in cross-fires between the major tribes in Botswana who sought their assistance to attack the Ndebele and push them out of their territories. Most fled to different parts of the country and some settled in Letlhakane along the Boteti River and others near Dukwi Quarantine Camp. When the Ndebele were defeated in 1893 and the boundary between Bechuanaland 79 biklmnpqrcgi Protectorate and Rhodesia drawn in 1899, the home of the Ba-ka-Nswazwi chief was left inside the Protectorate, but some of his people were on the other side. They later crossed into Bechuanaland to join their chief, Kuswani Nswazwi also known as Nswazwi the Seventh in Line. They were a close ally of Khama, and Nswazwi was responsible for the Bukalanga area. Ba-ka Nswazwi people quickly adapted the ways of Bakalanga people, taking up their traditions and learning their language. They married within the Bakalanga and thus created a great relationship with Mengwe who was the overseer of the kingdom. Khama and Sechele were great allies of our leaders and there was mutual respect. No family was said to be poor in our village because like his great grandfather, Kuswani our leader made sure that there was coordinated efforts in ensuring each and every family was provided for in Nswazwi. When he died we were very sad but we knew we were in great hands since Kuswani’s eldest son had grew up right in front of us. He was intelligent, brave, kind and he valued equality amongst his people as much as those who had ruled before him. The scope was however changing with the allies as the previous leader passed on and their successors took over. Tshekedi Khama and Bathoen II were the most prominent Tswana leaders in the 1930s and they fought against incorporation of the then Bechuanaland into the Union of South Africa and possibly Southern Rhodesia. Tshekedi’s rule started around 1925 and it is alleged that some of Nswazwi’s councillors possibly urged on by some of his advisors started telling John that he cannot continue to allow that ‘young and inexperienced’ boy to be the master of 80 biklmnpqrcgi Ba-Ka-Nswazwi people. An uprising began and one the greatest tragedy of that uprising was the death of Levuna Mpapho who was heavily pregnant when they were kraaled by, one of Tshekedi’s royal uncles, in a stand-off that ensued between the Bangwato and Ba-Ka-Nswazwi. Trouble started in 1926 when Tshekedi ordered the BaKalanga to build a fence along the Southern Rhodesia border, The ba-ka-Nswazwi were instructed to take part in the construction of a disease control fence that divided Bechuanaland and Southern Rhodesia. That was not the best time for the ba- ka-Nswazwi to do that since it was the ploughing season and they also had to raise money for poll—tax, so they abandoned the project. Some believe that this was a move by the ba-ka-Nswazwi to assert their independence. Tshekedi also imposed a cattle levy on the BaKalanga to help pay for his trip to London. In October 1929, Nswazwi wrote a petition of grievances and sent it directly to the resident commissioner, rather than to Tshekedi. The petition brought Nswazwi directly into conflict with Tshekedi resulting in ba-ka-Nswazwi being ordered to Serowe but Nswazwi went to Mafikeng to appeal to Resident Commissioner Rowland Mortimer Daniel. Daniel referred the matter to Tshekedi and Nswazwi and others were brought to Serowe. In June 1930, the new Serowe magistrate, Gerald Nettelton, held the inquiry and ruled in Tshekedi’s favour. Nswazwi and five others were banished to Serowe, and Tshekedi’s representative, Rasebolai Kgamane, was sent with a party of Bangwato to rule the ba-ka-Nswazwi. Somewhere around 1942 Nswazwi got into a fight with the acting Ngwato overseer, and when the following year Tshekedi came to BuKalanga to reallocate land Nswazwi 81 biklmnpqrcgi did not attend his meeting. John Madawu Nswaswi and his people continued to defy Tshekedi Khama’s orders. That following year, he earned the regent’s wrath by requesting political asylum in what is today Zimbabwe, a request that was rejected. After committing a number of offences against Tshekedi Khama’s administration, he was tried and convicted of insubordination and in 1943; he entered prison for 18 months. When he was released from prison on the 5th of February 1945, Tshekedi instructed that Nswazwi should be relocated to Serowe so that he could be kept under supervision. On learning of Kgosi Nswazwi’s release, Tshekedi Khama sent some government officials to Palapye to collect him. Nswazwi chose to ignore the order and headed straight home. He was given a hero’s welcome when he arrived back home and his councillors continued to encourage him to resist Tshekedi. On February 10 of the same year, Tshekedi Khama sent Captain Robert Langley, a white Bechuanaland Policeman, to summon the defiant Nswazwi to Serowe. Lekgowe Sedimo, a chief’s representative and local policeman, accompanied the captain. When the three officials arrived, they found the ba-ka- Nswazwi in what seemed like a religious ritual at the Nswazwi kgotla, a curious place to hold such an event. The visiting officials waited for hours but the ritual never ended, prompting one Tshekedi Khama stalwarts Mfakusi Motswetla to walk over to the officials and greet them. This earned him the wrath of the ba-ka-Nswazwi who pounced on him with walking sticks and knobkerries. Captain Langley rushed to rescue the old man but was also attacked. The riotous crowd continued to assault Mfakusi, Langley and the others. Captain Langley 82 biklmnpqrcgi and his companions fled in their vehicle and as they drove away, the ba-ka-Nswazwi hurled stones and sticks at them. The colonial government retaliated against the assault of a white officer and a Ngwato regiment was armed with rifles. Armoured cars and teargas were brought in from Southern Rhodesia, and planes were flown in from South Africa and Rhodesia to circle above Nswazwis village. Nswazwi and 122 others were trucked to Serowe. Nswazwi and 35 others accused of assault were banished to Mafikeng. The British tried to banish Nswazwi to Ghanzi, but he successfully appealed against the decision. Those who remained launched a resistance campaign lead by World War II veterans. They elected Nyena Tjemela acting leader. In August 1947, Tshekedi ordered 150 of these agitators to live in Serowe, but they resisted by taking their case to court. They lost, but before they could appeal to the Privy Council in London, many women and children fled into Southern Rhodesia. By November 1, 600 refugees had crossed into Southern Rhodesia. Despite attempts by Tshekedi to crush the opposition, the Ba-ka-Nswazwi remained defiant and insisted on paying tax directly to the British. In October 1947, Tshekedi with the approval of the British administration sent a regiment under royal uncles to discipline the ba-ka-Nswazwi. The several hundred-men regiment would go to extremes making the Ba-ka-Nswazwi pay their taxes. They were locked down in a kraal which ended with the death of Levuna Mpapho. Oteng Mphoeng, the leader of the regiment and a World War II veteran who was known for his harsh dealings with the Ba-ka-Nswazwi, was the man in-charge. 83 biklmnpqrcgi He was sent to punish ba-ka-Nswazwi and what he did on those few days catapulted us into the dark abyss of solitude as a tribe. Far from home, unwanted by two governments”. “Grandma how did you lose your leg?,” The younger boy asked curiously looking at the stump of his grandmother’s left leg which she always kept covered with a dirty rug. The older boy smacked his little brother with his backhand at the back of the head so hard that they both nearly fell into the red embers taking cover below the pile of ashes. “Don’t be so rude”, he said angrily as the younger brother looked at him in protest. They both scuffled hushedly, hitting each other with elbows until the grandmother intervened. “Taboka I keep telling you again and again, stop hitting your brother. I will not be here for long and you are the only person who can protect him in this entire world. Stop this.” She asserted calmly and simultaneously used a stick she was holding to stroke the fire and bring it back to life. The cooking place where they sat just outside the mud hut kitchen got a little brighter as she continued her story. “We thought we had seen the worst savagery of mankind. There couldn’t possibly be any more cruelty out there in the world that could surpass the ruthlessness we ran away from in Botswana. His name was Ian Smooth or Smits something. He was to us what apartheid was to South Africans except our story was never told and our tears never televised, bodies lying dead all over our temporary villages had no caretakers and remained on the streets for weeks rotting as we ran away from hired militias who sought to wipe us all off of the face of the earth. It was as if we jumped out of a pot of hot water right into the fire,” She stopped for a while and waited for the racket of dogs barking in response to the howl of a jackal. “He swore that Southern Rhodesia will forever be ruled by white people”, she continued “...and at some point even insisted that blacks had no place in the future of Rhodesia. They chased after us through dark jungles of Jetjeni with only two aims, kill the women and children with any affiliation to the opposition and capture all the boys above 12 years of age to go and train them to be soldiers. This Ian Smooth had begun building an army...”, “Smith grandma. I think you mean Smith”, the little boy corrected his grandmother. “Smith, Smooth, what’s the difference. After two camps of blacks led by one Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo were heard to be plotting a coup against the white supremacy regime. Both camps had militants who were ready to die for their leaders and young boys were their hot commodity and the extremes they would go to in order to build their respective armies were unimaginable”. Taboka quickly stood up and ran behind the house to pee then returned shortly finding his grandmother waiting for him. “Our village had been spared from the chaos because we had no affiliation to any of the local tribal parties. Orso we thought. Smooth’s army arrived in our village on a rainy day…”. “Smith”, Mmula whispered. ‘‘I will...’’, she stopped herself from throwing a shoe at him. “Thunders cracked up through the clouds and bolts of lightning spiralled across the sky. We were sitting inside our tiny, house that was built to be a temporary home. I was happy that day because I imagined all the opportunities that rain fell down with every raindrop. I remember standing up to get a sack of groundnuts seeds which I planned to sow as soon as the rain stopped and as I grabbed the bag I heard the first gunshot, followed by screams”. She yawned and the younger boy yawned too. He was getting sleepy but he could not go to sleep before he knew how this story ended. How granny lost her leg. “We ran to the door and saw four trucks full of young men, in torn rain coats, waving guns and shouting at the villagers who’d been forcefully removed from their houses to assemble outside on the rain. Your uncle came running and pushed us back into our hut, panting and cursing. He took an axe and hit the wall once and so hard that a pile of bricks all went crumbling to the ground and he grabbed my hand and told me to take my mother and start running into the bush just behind our homestead. He picked up his little brother and handed him over to me, rushed out to his room to get food supplies and the baby’s milk. As we ran over large puddles and tiny streams foaming with angry water, I could hear several gunshots and shrieks of despair. We ran faster and further into the jungle; fear grappling at us, mud puddles intercepting some of our steps and the rain fell down on us harder. We got to the river a few kilometres later. As if common sense had vacated us we did not even stop for a second on the way and reckon that the river must be overflowing. Desperation whispered misguided ambition onto our minds that we could cross the fuming river. The border between Zimbabwe and Botswana was not so far away from the river. We often crossed into nearby villages to sell wooden crafts and clay pots but it was risky because the police and soldiers patrolling the border across the border regarded us as illegal immigrants and if caught the punishments was said to be very humiliating. Many had endured the ignominy of walking across the border for kilometres naked and empty handed. Due to the civil unrest in Rhodesia, Botswana had doubled its military presence at the border. The rain ebbed for a while. We were soaking wet and your father who was only eight months at the time had been crying for hours. Walking along the bank of the river we searched for any spot where we could find rocks in the river to cross it on, or bent trees to climb over to the other side. In a few instances we stopped under some trees and I breast-fed him. We ran through the dark forest that night. The stars were as blood red as the sunset that day. The halcyon we were accustomed to was all of a sudden turned into a dirty pile of chaos and caught at the centre of the fire we found ourselves stranded. Mother was very old then, we suspected that her other lung had collapsed and as we ran through the dark murk of Mophane and thorny acacia bushes she became weaker. There were three of us and I was carrying my youngest son, your father, on my back. Mother pulled me closer to her and told me to save the boy, to keep running, to run and never look back.” It was getting colder. She asked the older boy to go and fetch a few sticks of firewood. He came back a few minutes later and she continued. “A cockerel screaked from a distance as the North star began to descend into the far horizon. Our eyes were heavy. Our feet stoically consented to the abuse. Only except mother’s lungs were getting wearier and the cold rain had weakened her system. She fell down just before sunset and by the time the bloodied sun fully emerged she had succumbed to some short respiratory illness. They found me sobbing next to her dead body and their dogs came sprinting towards me, their teeth ready to dig into my skin. At that moment the only thing on my mind was dying to protect my infant son. After crying for so long, he had finally stopped, his eyes sore and I feared he would die from hunger if not from the fatigue and lack of sleep. One of the young men called at the dogs just before they tore through my throat and they reluctantly obliged. “Ol’ lady handi nziswise” “Handi taure chiShona kwazvo” I told him that I could not speak Shona with the little Shona that I knew. “Munotaura chirungu?” “Yes, small, small English” “Good. Nami, I speak small-small Chirungu. There is easy way and there is hard way”, the leader told me, grabbing me by the neck towards the white beam of the van and my baby was ripped off my back. I fought, kicked and screamed until I could no longer hear my own voice. “We don’t want to hurt to you, but we will if you make us. You see, it’s really simple; we want the gentleman who helped you escape from that house. One of my men has a broken hip because of your husband. Or is it your son?” I shouted and kicked, telling him we don’t want any part in their war. “Where are your manners? Where is your mother, and what would she say if she knew you were chasing and killing old women in the jungle like animals?” I asked. Taboka giggled. “If there is something I regret in my life it’s those words. He got so angry and insisted that I had insulted his mother who apparently had been killed by the Ndebele soldiers. According to him, my son had been part of the Ndebele guerrilla movement that took part in the murder. He bound me to the Cruiser’s and gave a harsh warning to the boys not touch a hair on me. I was tied to the bumper and a few minutes later he returned carrying one of those metallic bottles used by welders, a lighter and a 25 Litre empty plastic vessel that used to contain cooking oil and were now used as water containers. Mmula are you sleeping?” “No grandma”, he responded quickly, startled. She realized the boys were sleepy so she rushed through her story so he could go to bed. “The canister had a blaring blue flame as he approached me carrying the plastic vessel on the other hand he nodded to the two young boys to hold me down then he started to melt the plastic container with the canister’s blue flame. I kicked, screamed, begged and until I could no longer feel any part of my body”. “No.”, The little boy looked at his grandmother aghast. “A thick layer of plastic was left solidified on my leg and it stayed there for days as I numbly limped along the river bank carrying a twenty five kilograms hungry boy on my back, tracing my steps back trying to find the road to the nearest hospital. I was found by two old women who had run from their homes the same time as us and they took me to the hospital where the doctors amputated my dead limb”. The two boys looked at their grandmother as if making an attempt to feel her pain, to re-live her suffering and take away most of it. It seemed to them so unfair, so cruel that one human being could be subjected to so much suffering while the world did nothing about it. They had experienced some degree of suffering themselves but compared to what their granny had been through their struggle became nothing but a beautiful fairy-tale. They all stood up yawning and went to bed leaving her by the fire. Chapter 9

91 biklmnpqrcgi Every day after school, Taboka sold water, sweets, cigarettes and sometimes marijuana in front of the brigade for his neighbour who was a popular drug dealer in the village. He sat by the side of the road close to the brigade and just a few meters away from the gates of the primary school where his brother went. When business was slow, the 15 year old left his little brother at the stall under a dried Mopane tree and went to Mrs. Nkosho who owned a tuck shop and sold tiny fat cakes and a watery potato soup to primary school kids. The local water standpipe was about 10 kilometres away and occasionally she called Taboka to go fetch water for her and paid him with a plate of soup and four burnt fat-cakes. He would watch his little brother gulp the soup with tears gathering at the corner of his eye wishing his mother was still alive. She would know what to do. Surely she will. The hardships they had faced since she passed away were inexpressible. He sat at his small table, next to a wooden stump by the road waiting for other kids to pass—by so they could buy the sweets, chips, and peanuts from him. He would stare at the stump’s shadow and the lines on the opposite end of the stump which was as old as he could remember. The lines drawn with precision horizontally against the shadow served as clock-hands. In the morning when they were going to school there was a line which if the stump’s shadow had crossed it meant trouble. They would run as fast as they could to arrive before the school bell was rung. It was their clock and the different lines along the stump’s shadow indicated different times of the day. He sat by the clock looking at the shadow become thin as the sun dropped down in western hemisphere.

92 biklmnpqrcgi Nothing had been bought that day except a few grams of weed for which his commission was only about ten Pula. It was going to be another cold winter night without food. At times he contemplated robbing one of the tuck-shops where fat cakes were sold, since it was common knowledge that the owner usually left unsold fat-cakes inside the shop for the night only to sell them the following day to school children. It seemed like a good idea. Good riddance even; an idea which he dabbled with throughout the night that day. He was listening to the radio and slowly getting annoyed. The signal was bad but he was too lazy to stand up and go shut it down. The presenter was interviewing some radical who kept referring to the nature of corruption within government and those who controlled the flow of money and wealth from the national coffers. “More than 500 thousand people in Botswana live under poverty while the top tire of politicians, business tycoons and the many corrupt men who own the government run the country’s wealth”. He recognized the voice. He had heard it a couple of times and this person at the end of the radio was always talking about the injustice to the lower classes. “The problem of poverty stems from the fact that these tyrannical bloodlines have always had the ambition of ruling the country by controlling the basic needs of survival, our God-given food, water, money, security and governments. In their quest to achieve dominance over us they have created structures in society where a few at the top are the masters and rest of us are servants”.

93 biklmnpqrcgi He listened carefully, missing a few words because of his poor English and the screeching sound of the radio losing signal. He stood up and hooked a thin copper wire on the tiny radio’s aerial to enhance its frequency. It didn’t improve so he flipped the radio and took off its batteries figuring it must be them that are causing the problem. He dug his canines into the middle part of the battery. He had learnt over the years that biting the battery often brought them back to life if placing them in the sun to recharge wasn’t an option. He put them back into the radio but the signal remained horrible. He stood up and walked towards a beat-down and broken oil drum a short distance from him and rolled it back to where he was seated. He placed the radio on top of it and the signal became much clearer. He sat closer to the radio and listened. “In order to control the rest of the population, they have bullied governments worldwide to bend the rules and laws to those that favour them such as tax evasion; no obligations for corporate social- responsibility, no community building in countries from which they acquire labour and raw materials at dirt cheap prices. They use organizations such as the UN, IMF, Worldbank and secure loans to third world countries worldwide on the pretext of development and bury them in the debt cycle thereby ensuring a continuous supply of raw materials needed to expand their global empires”. He hung on every word that was spoken by the radio maverick, whose name he did not know. “It is easy for them to talk these big numbers you see. How many times have you heard them brag to the world about 94 biklmnpqrcgi our country’s GDP and this recession of theirs. Recession or no recession we never get anything out of this ‘blooming economy’ of theirs. The economy of our people at the villages, in the streets selling rotten bananas from South Africa is not accounted for”, the signal died. Just as he was about to shift the radio it came back on, “...the economy of our youth stranded in the streets without land to start their own businesses is not accounted for, therefore I ask this economists and the stable economy of theirs which they so proudly brag about, who comes up with these bogus statistics?.” “So are you saying that our country leadership is portraying a false image to the outside world?” “That and more. Our political system has no autonomy from those who gave us independence slyly decades ago. They created loopholes for themselves to keep running our country’s system while giving us the impression that we are governing ourselves”. “Who is they?”, the radio host asked “The bigwigs. The government. Those who run our economies” “Oh I see” “You see, this is what makes it so easy for them to come here and cook up these figures and say it’s our economical situation. Corruption and day-light robbery of a Motswana who relentlessly pays tax without faulting. Now they have made us resort to the same means, crime has become the only way for the youth of Botswana to survive the pitfalls of the system. I don’t blame them. It is the---”

95 biklmnpqrcgi The radio signal suddenly became worse and Taboka stood up and shut it down angrily.

96 biklmnpqrcgi Chapter 10

97 biklmnpqrcgi Nswazwi village is about 55km north east of the tropic of Capricorn. The village gets semi-arid climate. Temperatures rise so high sometimes you can’t step on the ground without hearing the hiss of your skin burn and it gets so cold during winter. It receives rains from the south west monsoon and is bounded like a ring by two rivers — Mashawe and Maibe. During rainy season, all means of transport into and out of the village are blocked. The village gets completely isolated from the rest of the villages and when you are stranded in or out of the village you have to wait for the Rivers to flow away. The cultural and social life of the villagers is simple and comfortable. The people are contented with what they have. They are energetic and hard working. They go to the fields early in the morning and worked there until evening. They love one another and respect superiors. Like many other villages in Botswana the head of the family is the father who administers day to day family administration. He has the highest power over his family. The village is rich in culture. There is a number of traditional songs composed by the talented persons from this remarkable village. They also composed gospel songs which entered good and evil days. If any of the villagers die, not only relations but all the grown up villagers - men and women go to the bereaved family and spend the whole night singing songs meant for the affected. To console the bereaved family after the dead were buried, they stay with them for three consecutive nights and render assistance as much as possible. The village is a quiet and lonely place in summer when the leaves are brown and shedding from the branches but it was perfect for rest and appreciation of the beauties of nature. The 98 biklmnpqrcgi people do not live too close to one another. Some of the villagers stay at the farms located far away from the village. Taboka was worried about his grandmother. Two days ago while returning from the fields she had found the river almost full, it was getting dark and the only bridge to cross the river was about 20 meters far. Using her walking stick she made an attempt to cross the river and was swept away by the raging waters for almost 50 meters before she got saved by a tree. She woke up before sunrise on Friday morning and because the boys were now grown up enough to fix themselves up for school she left before they’d woken up. She’s been doing this for as long as the boys can remember – waking up at ungodly hours of the morning and embarking on the gruelling seventeen kilometre journey to the fields where she’d spend the day picking up bean leaves and plucking out weeds until the sun began to fall to the west. Sometimes she got lucky and got picked up by a donkey cart or got a ride on Mr. Hubona’s bicycle carrier but that did not happen very often. On this day she did not get lucky – she walked the entire seventeen kilometres and arrived at the farm just before 10a.m. She boiled herself a pot of tea and didn’t bother to go and check if the owners of the farm where she rented an acre where there on their section of the farm. After she drank her tea, she decided to take a nap. At around 1p.m. she was woken up by a soft hum from the east – where she’d come from – and when she rose from her mat, her face was met by a cold breeze and a dust being hurled all around the place. A dark cloud had risen from the east and was fast approaching. The cloud hadn’t been there before she slept.

99 biklmnpqrcgi Panic-stricken, she collected the tea-pot, cups and spoons and threw them under a pile of wood before the rain started. She stood under a morula tree when the rain started and she would stand there for the next three hours as the rain came harshly at her, thunderclaps roaring threateningly as bolts flashed before her eyes like they’d been sent. When it finally quietened down, the sun was vermilion, burning the edges of the clouds that accompanied it. It was late – too late for her to start making way back home. But she had to. She had to make it back home or else her grandsons would sleep on empty stomachs. She limped out of the farm, joined the gravel road and followed the water that was flowing steadily alongside the road. She heard it from a distance – the sound of the river murmuring through the darkness ahead, water and sand in an endless feud. She knew the river would be full but Mashawe has never stopped her before. Mashawe is not much of a river but a small stream with regular shallow spots and deep spots, you just had to know where to cross it. She thought she did. When she arrived, she picked up a branch from the ground and started walking along the river, dipping the stick in, checking where the river was deep and where it was shallow. She stopped after a few meters and tied her dress tight around her waist preparing to cross the river. When she stepped one foot into the water she slipped and went face-down into the heavy current which caught her off- guard and hurled her off like a leaf. She screamed and shouted for help but there was only darkness to hear her screams. A short distance from where she was swept up, she managed to grab onto a tree that had fallen into the river and stayed there all night 100 biklmnpqrcgi clinging to the tree. Mr. Maswabi found her four hours after sunrise hanging onto a large fallen tree, helpless, tired and injured. She was lucky he found her because usually people don’t go out to the fields on Saturdays as they are observing Sabbath. He put her into the donkey cart and took her to the hospital where the doctors told her she had pneumonia. Since then she had been in hospital and the two boys were all alone living in fear of losing the only parent they had since their father abandoned them. On the fifth day since her accident, Taboka arrived home with his little brother to find thirteen old women sitting, huddled around a pile of clothes, worn-out and frail in a tiny round, mud-walled, thatch-roofed hut. Those were the clothes their grandmother had been wearing at the hospital. Mmula started screaming and sobbing the moment he saw the gathered crowd. He knew what had happened. Their grandmother had just passed away at the hospital. The village too the responsibility to take charge of the burial proceedings since it didn’t seem like the family affairs were in order. Everybody knew everybody here and it was easy to see what was going on. Futile attempts were made to get in contact with the father of the two boys, who was reportedly ‘living it large’ in the city. There were no relatives and no close friends. Eventually the village chief volunteered to take care of the casket costs and the funeral proceeded. It was a short, sad funeral attended by less than twenty people. The village development committee paid for everything and even though it was cheap the casket was decent. Taboka stood at his grandmother’s grave for more than three hours after 101 biklmnpqrcgi the burial. He sat there tears brimming in his eyes worried sick about the days ahead. Life was getting harder and harder by the day. Since he dropped out of school there hasn’t been any suggested money scheme that he did not try besides robbing the Lucky Seven shop at the village shopping centre. He’d tried the drug selling gig but it only seemed as if he was making more money for Ta-Joni than he was making for himself, in fact he was getting paid peanuts by that crook. The idea of robbing the Lucky Seven Shop had crossed his mind a thousand times and a thousand times he had rejected it. After the funeral people departed, no one stayed for three days to console them. There were no pots to wash. The old woman’s clothes had been burnt before she was buried as it is custom. That night in the middle of sorrow and starving bellies he knew he had to grow up into a man. He had to stop selling sweets and cigarettes. If he didn’t, he and his brother would end up looking like kwashiorkor victims. Maybe robbery was the only way for him and his brother to survive after all. That night he took his little brother to the sangoma dance across the river. There was no food at the event but there was warmth – not from the fire – there was warmth in being around cheerful people. The dancers comprised a quartet of girls aged approximately 13-21 and a young man, maybe 26 years of age. He was the clown of the group, every so often, and to great hilarity, he would break out of the synchronised steps to do his own thing. This meant, however, that he had to concentrate hard to get back into step with the others when he’d finished. After a 102 biklmnpqrcgi number of dance routines and songs, the performance concluded, the dancers dripping with sweat. They planned to stay there all night, clapping their stiff cold hands, trying to get closer to the bonfire and singing as loud as they could. The melodies drowned their sorrow as they each quietly remembered the stories their grandmother told them last time there was a dance like this. At least Mmula was. Taboka quietly ducking in the alleys of his mind searching for a path, a weakness into the Lucky Seven. There was a door at the back where the night security guard usually slept and he was sure the door led into the store but he wasn’t sure whether it had burglars like the main entrance at the front of the store. His mind kept running around possible entryways into the store but he kept stumbling into reasons why he shouldn’t do it. The drumbeat hummed like a distant memory in his head as if it was a sound track to his plans. He looked at his little brother and imagined how life would become if he got caught and sent to prison leaving his baby brother alone.

103 biklmnpqrcgi Book III

104 biklmnpqrcgi Chapter 11

105 biklmnpqrcgi Kwezi Mpenza Boma Democratic Republic of Congo 5° 51’ 0’ S, 13° 3’ 0’ E

Gasping for air, his lungs at the apex of his throat, he glanced back over his shoulder, not out of fear but simply out of the strong desire to live and die another day. He contemplated dropping his gun, a rusty old AK-47 he had found clutched to by a pair of old smelly gloves a few centimetres away from a skeleton robbed out of some of its bones, by presumably Mother Nature. The gun slowed him down and yet offered insurance in case he ran into hostiles ahead. Panting and sweating he forged on. Bare feet running along fading trails that had been left by animals that used to roam free in these forests, he glances back again and realizes that the two uniformed men chasing him are getting closer; he could sense the anger in their pursuit; the rage and infuriation in their footsteps. He knows that there is only one outcome if they catch him - torture, excruciating agony and eventually a noose to his neck. A couple of his friends have submitted to this fate. He yanks the shoelaces around his neck with one hand, the other hand firmly gripping to the gun and he throws away the torn leather boots realizing that they are impeding his escape. Then he sees it, his great escape, a dim light at the end of his fading life and so he runs towards it as fast as his short, tiny legs can carry him.

106 biklmnpqrcgi His life has been turned upside down so abruptly he barely got a chance to adapt into it. A life that was abruptly stolen from him three years ago when the rebellion started. He ducks into a cave he was familiar with, waking up hundreds of bats that flew in all directions creating a moment of chaos that allowed him to come out of the other end of the cave and escape from his hunters. He runs back the same direction he’d come from, a tiny cloud of half-relief ebbing his lungs back from the throat. “Kwezi?!.” a tiny voice whispers and startles him out of his pants for a moment. He recognizes the voice and sharply turns towards its direction where he sees one of his friends Melvin hiding in a thick thorny bush slightly bleeding. “Melv what happened, are you shot?” he inspects the wound “No, I got bruised by these damn thorns. I saw you coming towards me running and those men chasing you so I hid in this bush” he says pointing at the leafless acacia, a weft of tears warping on his cornea. “You hid? You hid while I passed by and didn’t even help me? We could have taken those two Mongols out. The two of us, you and me Melvin – this is it, this is all we got. They are tired and hungry that’s why they can’t even run fast enough” “I‘m sorry, I just froze and wasn’t thinking straight, Plus I knew you would outrun them” “The plan is for us to stick together Melvin. You are the only family I got out here and I the only family you have too” “I said I ‘m sorry Kwezi, shhh! They are coming”. Melvin looks tired as if he has not eaten anything in the 107 biklmnpqrcgi past two days; he has lost his axe when they escaped from some gun-thugs who wanted to force them to join their rebellion. Catching his breath Kwezi angrily looks at Melvin not sure whether to rebate his cowardice or to feel pity for him. He can see how weak Melvin has gotten in the past two days but he was angry that Melvin had stayed hidden when his life was in imminent danger. He choked on an angry spat of verbal diarrhoea he was about to unleash and quickly grabbed his friend by the arm and pulled him back to the thorny acacia. “Jhara is going to kill us” “He won’t. He’ll try to starve us for not bringing back some food” “I’m hungry” “I know. Me too” “Farai caught me stealing some fish tins---“ “Ssshh” he mutedly signals towards the main gravel road and pointed out the two men who were chasing him, walking back to their crew looking tired but still very alert. They curled up under the acacia uncomfortably, each one of them holding their breath and still as a sculpture. There was no fear in their eyes, just indistinct memories of what it felt like to be a child, innocent, protected and safe. So much had changed in eighteen months. The Government had been taken over by the opposition party and the ousted failing to accept the results of the election had started mass demonstration across the country taking control of the army and the police forces. The army commanders and police commissioners were members of the defeated party so they 108 biklmnpqrcgi mobilized the forces to loot national the armoury for guns, hand grenades and other weapons to use against the newly elected party members. The demonstrations led to the obliteration of the entire system of the country; parliament buildings got torched, schools were closed, hospitals were burnt down to ashes and some members of the new ruling party were assassinated. In March 20, 2008 President Gondo declared a state of emergency. The army was disbanded and most soldiers laid their weapons down and returned to their families to protect them. Some joined the Mwenza Resistance Army led by the former President Levi Mwenza and his allies including the former army commander and minister of Defence and Security. The country’s foundation fell apart in a mere four months, by August the African Union and the United Nations decided to send Peace Keeping Forces to the Democratic Republic of Congo.

109 biklmnpqrcgi Chapter 12

wo years ago, Kwezi would have been playing with marbles-and-bricks, while looking after his parent’s livestock - a game where they placed two bricks next to each other and left a tiny space between the bricks to allow a single spherical marble to pass through. He and his friend Samumba would stand 20 meters Taway from the bricks and throw the marble aiming at the hole between the bricks and the more one scored the more the points. Kwezi remembered the rules of the game like he had played it yesterday. He remembered his friend Samumba walking in calculated steps on an imaginary straight line counting, “one, two, three, four, five six, seven, eight, nine, ten” loudly and innocently. His friend would proceed to mark his tenth step with a scruffy line with his foot then call Kwezi to come and start the game. Ten short-Samumba-feet away from the two boys were two half-broken bricks facing each other, with a tiny space between them where only two fingers could fit. Kwezi would throw the 1mm diameter glass marble ball, aiming for the hole between the bricks. He remembers the last game he played with Samumba.

110 biklmnpqrcgi “Awww no! That was close’’ “Nah nah nah nah, ‘close’ isn’t good enough my friend. My turn”, Samumba danced in circles around Kwezi mockingly. “I’m just warming up idiot”, he smiled “That’s what they all say” “Who?” “Losers, ha ha ha” Kwezi chased after Samumba playfully and they went back to the same line where he had stood to take his shot. He always got a bit sore about losing these games. The shot he took was too strong and the marble hit the brick and bounced back about 3 meters. He threw up his hands, in dismay as Samumba laughed out loud and pushed him off the line to take his turn. Samumba threw the marble softly aiming for the same hole Kwezi had missed but his marble did not reach the two bricks. They both started walking to the marbles each had threw and crouched by them. Kwezi remembers feeling a pinch of hate for Samumba whose marble was only a few feet off the hole while his was more than 6 feet off the hole. They had played this game since they were both only four years old and somehow Kwezi always lost and he’d suspected that his friend had somehow discovered a way to rig the game. He remembers crouching above his marble and holding his pointing finger with his thumb in front of it then applying some pressure on the thumb, then releasing the pointing finger to hit the marble towards the bricks. He remembers Samumba with his hands on top of his head, one eye open as he watched the marble rolling towards the hole between the bricks with precision and how Samumba had celebrated when it stopped right in 111 biklmnpqrcgi front of the hole. The two boys jumped up and down, one in dismay and the other in utter celebration as they argued about the technicality of the game and the shot. Kwezi urged that Samumba should not hit his marble when he takes his shot and Samumba urged that he had the right to knock off Kwezi’s marble off the hole with his own marble. In the middle of their argument Kwezi noticed his mother digging in their garden. She had just put his little sister to sleep and was tilling the ground to begin sowing beans. He remembers her face, her rough hands and her bent figure sweeping the yard. Their house was small but impeccably clean. A hanging sheet separated his bedroom from the living room, which was barely big enough for the old cloth-covered self- made couch stuffed with old clothes and chicken feathers. Two arm chairs sat right next to it and a single light bulb illuminated the religious memorabilia on the walls and tins of coca cola on the shelf filled with coins. The shower was outside, a roofless, door-less area enclosed by brick and brown tarp. As the two scuffled and had each other’s throat they did not notice the truck that approached their homesteads a few hundred meters away loaded with men carrying heavy guns and chanting war songs. “Go on; stop wasting time with your silly antics. No matter how much you pose and aim for the hole we all know you are going to throw the marble backwards”, he chuckled. Melvin swung his left hand back and forth, holding the marble and aiming carefully for the space between the bricks “Steady, One, two, three, fo--”, before he could finish, a ‘BOOM’ out of the old dirt road from the forest stopped him. 112 biklmnpqrcgi He stopped abruptly and the marble flew upwards from his hand. Before Kwezi could break into a clutter of laughter, a bullet rang through the forest grump and the bird chirps that were typical to the village transformed into frantic noise. Alarmed, Kwezi turned back quickly to see where the noise had come from, that was when he saw the green truck. It was only meters away from his hut and some of the men were jumping off the moving truck with knobkerries and guns on their backs. Some carried 2L Coca Cola glass-bottles stripped off their labels with what appeared to be cloths with fire embers on their ends. Immediately Kwezi new that the stories he had heard were not just fabrications and nightmares after all. He turned back to shout at Samumba that they should run towards the house and save their mothers and sisters but his friend was lying on the ground, face down, blood gushing out of his head. He was motionless. Kwezi froze at the thought that spiralled through his mind. He knelt before Samumba, his tiny hands on his friend’s forehead, whispering, “Samumba wake up, wake up Samumba” Samumba did not move. His eyes had were staring back at him lifelessly, his mouth agape and his hands sprawled on the ground. Death! It is difficult to accept and almost always impossible to understand. Death in any society is unfamiliar. In spite of the fact that it happens all the time, Kwezi never saw it. His parents had shielded him and his sister away from it.

113 biklmnpqrcgi Basic instinct told him to run. Run as fast as he could into the forest to find his father who had gone out to look for the three goats they kept. His feet could not carry him an inch further from where he stood right in front of Samumba who lay on the ground dead. “Kwezi, Kwezi run. Run Kwezi” He looked back again and saw his mother shouting at him and waving her hands. “Stand up and run Kwezi, run as fast as you can. Go!” She was running towards the house while signalling him to run away towards the forest. Kwezi had seen the rebels approach; he had seen them set ablaze the first house a few blocks away from his house. Like a block of dominoes the fire leapt from one mud hut to the next and those that survived the domino were set ablaze by the men parading in army clothes they defected with. The wind roared like a phantom, fervently crusading the blaze. Not knowing whether to run away or to run to his house to save his sister Kwezi froze and watched the men approach. He heard his father’s voice echo with his mothers. “Kwezi, dammit boy run!” The second gunshot woke him up from the shock trance he was under. He started running towards his father as fast as he could, words heavy on his throat as he jumped onto his father’s arms. He held tight onto his father’s hand, fear raging in his eyes, tears dried up in his cornea. Niko had quickly grabbed the boy and put him on his shoulders then started running towards the house but realizing 114 biklmnpqrcgi how outnumbered he was, he stopped and retreated, watched his wife screaming, with her hands on top of her head as she entered the burning house in a motherly attempt to save her only daughter. He prayed silently, guilt running the lengths of his veins as he watched helplessly the roof collapse onto his wife and daughter. In a trance he continued to retreat, instinct telling him to run. He was numb, pain riddled his heart and at any point he could have dropped the boy on his shoulders but he didn’t. He ran and ran and kept running for hours, circling the village hoping the army of men would leave and he would go check if his wife was still alive. The smell of burning flesh begrimed the air. Then the realization that armed mob was taking boys and loading them into a truck brought him from his deep loss induced trance and he started to run away from the village as fast as he could. The boy on his shoulders started crying and he would do so for the next twenty or so hours as they traversed through the forests of the once so great Republic of Congo. Kwezi remembers being tired, he’d cried for two days since their house got burnt down by the rebels. He’d watched as the thatching grass collapsed onto his mother who had gone back into the house to save his baby sister, only 11 months old. The smell of their burning flesh lingered in his nostrils and his clothes clung like ivy to the sweat on his skin.

115 biklmnpqrcgi Chapter 13

ongo is a gigantic tableland. Its sides are built of granite mountains which surround it with a parapet or brim, and which send down rivers on the outside towards the sea, on the inside into the plateau. The outside rivers are brief and swift, the inland Rivers are long and sluggish in their course, winding Cin all directions, collecting into enormous lakes, and sometimes flowing forth through gaps in the parapet to the Sahara or the sea. Once upon a time The Democratic Republic of Congo formerly known as Congo Free State, then Belgian Congo, later Republic of Congo and Zaire was a great nation. That was before the wars, the revolutions led by young Africans. In a campaign to identify himself with African nationalism it is alleged that starting from June 1, 1966, one Mobutu Sese Seko renamed the nation’s cities; Leopoldville became Kinshasa; Stanleyville became Kisangani; Elisabethville became Lubumbashi and Coquihatville became Mbandaka. In 1971, Mobutu went further to rename the country the Republic of Zaire, its fourth name change in 11 years. Between 1971 and 1997 corruption was so prevalent the term “le mal Zairos” or “Zairean Sickness” meaning gross 116 biklmnpqrcgi corruption was devised. Theft and mismanagement were the daily order in this African jewel. An empire that once harboured dreams of emancipation for all humanity for the Bantu speakers on a Diaspora to escape the Persian, Egyptians and Roman squabbles was falling. The zero-to-nothing of Zaire with its coal-black maidens with bones of wild boars around their necks, and tiny snail shells on their hair, knee skirts trimmed, with Jessamine sweet flowers knitted onto them, and tiny Ghungroo bells on their ankles and little black feet, was well covered. To the Zairians, it was exasperating to see little brown men and little yellow men as they arrived beaten by the South Atlantic Ocean and undocked from the shores at Pointe Noire. The residents of the immediate villages of Nkayi, Loubomo, Kayes and Mossenjo say dark clouds gathered for weeks upon arrival of the first white men. The copper sun became a flaming ball; the scarlet sea became a restless tyrant. The strong regal black and bronzed men gathered to discuss the repercussions of allowing the unknown into their lands. They considered slaughtering all of them and sending them to whatever civilization age they’d come from. The white man came under the guise of missionaries, bringing foreign religion and later imposing it onto the Zairians who took it all up like an amoeba. Eventually those that did not belong to the white-man’s god were referred to as devils or heathens. They were cast off from the ‘new civilized’ society. Thus corruption was born. Soon more white arrived on the shores like sea-shells. They wanted more – more of everything – more riches, more power, and more recognition.

117 biklmnpqrcgi The Congo as the Westerners referred to it had risen from a loud primate black forest to rich gold mines and legends of treasures in maps buried within the heart of its ancient monumental jungles. In no time suburbs began to spring up everywhere. They represented the optimum of what people wanted to reap from their motherland. There was a certain logic leading towards the immaculate suburbs that rose at the heart of the Democratic Republic of Congo. For most part it was terrifying to see the rapid growth of a once scattered empire, the locals saw it and predicted that the rise of the Congo will result in the death of its soul. They said the republic was being turned into a prison by those who sought its riches and the indigenous population was to them, ‘just indemnity’

Then a new era arrived – the era of Steve Biko, Julius Nyerere, Joshua Nkomo and may other youthful Africans seeking independence for their nations. The revolutionary wave in the supra-sub Saharan Africa started in the advent of Kwame Nkrumah who was the leader of the Gold Coast from 1951 to 1966 and later became Ghana. In one of his famous public speeches Nkrumah said, “Africa is a paradox which illustrates and highlights of neo- colonialism. Her earth is rich, yet the products that come from above and below the soil continue to enrich, not the Africans, but groups and individuals who operate to Africa’s impoverishment”. Nkrumah’s voice echoed through many other African leaders’ voices as they began a movement to revolt against the 118 biklmnpqrcgi colonisers. By 1996, conflict from the Rwandan Genocide spilled over into Zaire and Hutu militias, including the Interahamwe, were using refugee camps in the Kivu region to attack Rwanda. Consequently, the Rwandan and Ugandan armed forces invaded Zaire to fight Hutu militias. The Rwandan and Ugandan forces were joined by Congolese politicians and militia leaders who were opposed to Mobutu’s rule and these groups joined forces to become the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (AFDL), led by Laurent-Désiré Kabila. In 1997, Mobutu fled Zaire and Kabila named himself President and changed the name of the country back to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Following his victory, tensions soon rose between Kabila and the various factions of the AFDL who came to oppose his rule. Rwandan forces retreated to Goma on the Rwandan border and formed the Rally for Congolese Democracy (RDC) and in response Ugandan forces instigated the formation of Movement for the Liberation of the Congo (MLC) under the command of Jean-Pierre Bemba. The Province of Bas-Congo became one of the most dangerous places in the world. Misery and want were the foundation of the social structure, famine was periodic, death from starvation common, disease pervasive, thievery normal and corruption was taken for granted. The spectacle of misery and starvation grew in its crushing volume. There seemed to be no end to the houses and shacks full of starved children simmering from kwashiorkor and wounds designed by the hard floors that ate at their bones when they 119 biklmnpqrcgi slept at night - peeling off their weak skin and shredding off their souls. There were all sorts of hell - Children with dysentery, children with scurvy, and children at every stage of starvation. The civil wars that erupted through the years had to some become signs of the apocalypse and to some a sign of freedom. In Congo this was not the first war to tear up through the womb of Africa’s cradle. Many, many years ago war was continually being waged among the primeval men who settled in the forests of Congo, and tribes were continually driven, by battle or hunger, to seek new lands. As hunters the originals had required vast areas on which to live, and so were speedily dispersed over the whole surface of Africa, and adopted various habits and vocations according to the localities in which they dwelt. But they took with them, from their common home, the elements of those pursuits. The first period of human history may be entitled forest-life. The forest was the womb of the human species, as the ocean was that of all our kind. In the dusky twilight of the primeval woods the nations were obscurely born. While men were yet in the hunting stage, while they were yet mere animals of prey, they made those discoveries by means of which they were afterwards formed into three great families - the pastoral, the maritime, and the agricultural. As the revolutions, starvation and terror tore through the districts of Congo, epidemics followed, and so did emigration. Poverty transcended well beyond the limits set out by the dictionary definitions. Niko, Kwezi’s father never got content with the idea of watching two year olds covered by a cloud of fleas and big 120 biklmnpqrcgi green flies, faeces dried up on their legs, with weak voices that no longer sounded like cries because of hunger. He made it his life mission to take away his family from this situation one day. Kwezi remembers his father’s stomach growling as he shifted his torso to accommodate his son’s head. He was hungry but determined to make it across the border at Dlolo into the Republic of Angola. For most part of his life Niko had adjusted to going for a week without food, his soul had become content with the pain and sensation of hunger. The slum where Niko grew up is one of the most treacherous in Congo. It is a labyrinth of steep dirt roads and single-storey houses made of exposed bricks and cinder block that has made headlines for the many massacres carried out there. Some of the houses seem to be trying to skulk behind tall, concrete walls. Others can’t hide their decay behind thin, metal bars on windows. Niko had tried to get out but his wife got pregnant and they decided to wait until the little girl was grown up. Niko had chosen to avoid any allegiance to any of the two squabbling sides. The one side claimed to be fighting a just cause, a cause aligned to the mandate of the International Criminal Court which was seeing a growing resistance against its virtues across the African continent. Many African leaders painted the court as discriminatory; a tool of neo-colonial oppression that only prosecuted Africans. A resonance of grumblings saying the court selected its cases according to political agenda had begun to ripple. The court was said to profligate in its spending but was simultaneously under-resourced, its lawyers and prosecutors were said to be 121 biklmnpqrcgi substandard and its evidence-gathering mechanisms were deemed flawed and witnesses were easily tampered with. Niko saw no justice in the aftermath of this fight so instead he chose to stay away from this misguided revolution that had no cause, he chose to survive and take care of his offspring. While the country has gone through various periods of instability and violence, Congo was supposed to be a safe place - a nation that had emerged as a gold-crusted global capital after decades of its own blood war with the Belgians and the Germans. Niko ran as fast as his legs could carry him, after almost three days of running and hiding in the forest with a sobbing boy on his shoulders he heard a truck from a distance. United Nations Peace Keeping Forces, he thought to himself and started sprinting towards the sound of the truck.

122 biklmnpqrcgi Chapter 14

wezi remembers wandering through a dusty camp somewhere deep in the stomach of the forest like a shadow, there were discarded tins all over the place – canned beans, fizzy drinks, powdered milk. He approached cautiously, checking the tins to see if there was anything left inside them. KHis small, disfigured head covered by a green sweatshirt and his little hands still trembling. He was still in shock. He’d gotten out of a truck to find his father burning after they were attacked by rebels who ransacked the truck they had hid in to escape the country. When he turned his father’s scarred face towards the sun, it revealed a skull with a hole for a mouth and ears flattened by fire. It was ugly. Only eleven years old, broken and lost, the boy sat by his father’s hot body, tears stranded behind his eyes. He couldn’t cry anymore. What was happening? All this felt like a dream and he was praying to wake up from it.

123 biklmnpqrcgi The Congolese war was entering its second year. There were rumours that Kabila had been killed. Every day became more desperate, bloodier, and the world got more tired of hearing about it. More Rwandan rebels arrived, raped women, and took boys and the massacres continued. The war turned people into numbers and dehumanized them. It stole their memories, their communities, and their chance of a better life. While he was still wandering in the wards of his memory someone hit him at the back of the head and knocked him out with something heavy. He woke up an hour later feeling woozy and realized he was surrounded by an army of boys almost his age. He’d been stripped off his clothes and he was hanging upside down on a tree. “Who are you spy?” He wiggled, trying to free his legs from the rope that bound him to the tree. One of the boys poked him hard on the ribs with a stick. “Who are you spy? You see Baza over there?—“he pointed towards a skinny boy seating alone by a stump starring at him. “—He is hungry. He’s been begging us to grill you and eat you” “No no—“ Kwezi cried out. “I’m no spy. Rebels kill my fada and mada and sister. I’m no spy don’t eat me” One of the boys who’d been sitting down stood up and Kwezi realized he was much bigger than the rest of the boys, taller, broader and his face was harder. “Get him down. What village boy?” 124 biklmnpqrcgi “Err?” “What village you come from?” “Boma” “Town boy err?” “You have to toughen up boy. You cry, you go. You don’t work, you go. You eat too much, you go. You don’t listen to me, you go. You hear? “Yes, yes” He lived with the group of boys, hiding in the forest avoiding being captured and turned into a mini-soldier. A skinny, tall boy with scars all over his face told him they’d been watching him. They’d found him sitting next to his father by the truck two weeks ago. Apparently he had been sitting there for two days. His father was beginning to decompose and the smell of death was all over his green jacket. They’d watched him limp from the truck towards Makushu forest, a safe, mountainous haven for those who wanted hiding spots from the rebels and the soldiers. The forest made it easier to evade both the parties and it made life for the soldiers and rebel militias a living hell since attacks could come out of nowhere hence the two fighting camps both avoided it. The camp was set up on a small hill surrounded by a legion of thorny bushes and muddy trails. It was a perfect fort of defence against any encroaching militia groups. “We need guns”, the older boy with scars all over his face said “Where will we get guns, J?” “I don’t know, but I do know we need guns. We have to be able to protect ourselves and as it stands right now we can’t even defend ourselves if we were to be attacked by a bunch of 125 biklmnpqrcgi old women with whips” The group was growing by the day – there were lost boys all over the forest. Each day they found a lost boy, starving and saved them then inducted them into their mini-army, but they were getting out of control, becoming a rebellion movement on its own. Lost in space, there was very little community remaining to put a limit on them. Kwezi remembers a group of six boys sat around the ashes of a fire that had died more than 24 hours ago. This was their temporary home. They were far from civilization, far from the city and the gunshots and revving Land Rovers. The distant smoke that snaked up into the sky reminded them what they were fleeing from. One of the older boys wore a necklace he allegedly made from human bones. He was the eldest and he sat further from the ashes than the rest of the boys. They listened to one of the other older boys telling them how he ended up here. “When I was three years old, there was a lot of fighting more than there is now. During that war I lost my father and my two elder brothers, I was just a baby but I remember being hungry I could have eaten my own faeces and the flies that kept sitting on my face. It was a much darker period than now. No water and no blankets and clothes. This one time we - me, my elder sister and my mother resorted to eating rats and even dogs that strayed into our yard. This other time our mother had to spit into our mouths when we were thirsty.” “Whoa... wait, what? Faeces? Uuurgh... Saliva? That’s disgusting”, the group leader asked. “My mother. It’s disgusting now that I think about it 126 biklmnpqrcgi but when she did it I was just a baby. I would have died if she didn’t.” “You ate dogs?” one of the boys asked “And rats”, he asserted. The boys cringed in disgust as they marvelled at Farai’s story. War stories have always been common to the boys but it was different when one of their own told the story and his experiences. When the elders told the story the proportions of the atrocities of war seemed a bit too exaggerated, as irrational and surreal as a bad dream. Two weeks ago most of these boys knew nothing about war or death. This was like a bad nightmare that refused to end and as they stretched the breadth of the country avoiding the towns and cities, the Red Cross and rebels, Rwandan soldiers and government soldiers the more it got real. ”This is the end of the world my friends. I read a book once...” “Wait, you can read? It’s truly the end of the world”, the boys laughed hushedly to avoid drawing attention to their camp “As I was saying, I read a book once. It said towards the end of the world men will self-destruct. It spoke of some funny name, Mayonnaise or something, that they prophesied that in the year 2012 a big star will open a door into other worlds” “What nonsense” “Some door to other Universes. Haven’t you watched Star Terek” “Star what?” one of the boys asked. “There were no TV’s where I grew up”, one chirped in. “So it is said that these Mayonnaise people determined 127 biklmnpqrcgi through their calendars that the world will end soon. They say the stars will stray from their places. Fire blazing from the sky and seas will boil. There will no longer be any use for stupid wars, food and water will become more valuable than money itself. Evil will just go away as everyone will be on their knees begging God for mercy. But it will be late’’ “Nonsense. There is nothing like the end of the world. Everyone faces their end differently and at different times. Nobody knows what’s out there except God.” “What God huh? What God would have kids living like this? Look at that lil boy sleeping over there. What kind of a God lets such an innocent child suffer to this degree? I don’t believe any of that shit” “Your lack of faith is the reason the world is like this. I used to go to church with my mother and I saw people faint in there because of the holy spirit. God is real and all this is Satan’s work.” “No. No, no, no, you see, religion is what has caused all this” The debate heated up and all the while Kwezi sat there listening to them go on and on cluelessly about the reasons countrymen were killing each other. To him the white man was the real reason. He used to steal his father’s book written, “African Fundamentalism”. Even though he could not understand most part of the book he picked up the fact that the white man came to Africa to rip off the resources and by the time the black man realized he was being ripped off and tried to fight back the white man retreated back to Europe and America leaving black men killing each other over scraps 128 biklmnpqrcgi That afternoon Kwezi was sent on a mission to scavenge on the village nearby with one of the boys Melvin. When they got to the village they found armed men guarding the village and so they returned to the camp empty handed. They met the wrath of Jhara. “These dumb useless fools came back empty—handed” one of the older boys shot through the enclosure. He was fuming. “Again?!, That’s it. They got to go. We can’t be sacrificing ourselves to feed useless spoilt babies who are of no help to us.” “They think this is a crèche” “They have to go. Last night I caught Melvin sneaking to steal some of the tinned stuff in the cave. He looked hungry so I let him have it, but we cannot keep feeding any stray dog that comes our direction but is not willing to work. They gotta go.” “Go and get ‘em. I ‘ll speak to them” “We have spoken to them enough. They have to leave or else some of us are going to leave. We can’t live like this” “I will go and get them so they can leave before the sun set” “Hurry up”. Jhara was the eldest in the group and Farai was his first Lieutenant. Together they had fought and survived an endless array of shit and this made them the closest of friends. Jhara could not afford to let two brats they had picked up on the road to spoil this relationship with his ‘brother’. The story he told the rest of the boys was that he escaped from one of the rebel camps. He said his parents had been killed during the mass protest at the beginning of the turmoil and he had been captured by the rebels, tortured and forced to swear 129 biklmnpqrcgi allegiance to them. His story lost its threads when he got to the part where he escaped from the rebel camp. It just sounded too heroic and bogus to be true. According to his account of events he escaped during an attack from the army soldiers at one of the districts closer to the Capital city. He asserted that he killed at least three of the soldiers and two of the rebels who were leading the convoy he was forced to fight under. He often sat with the boys and narrated to them the war stories he had featured in. Most were funny tales about some of the boys he fought along and the funny jokes told by some of the older boys in the rebel camps. At times his face would get solemn with poignancy, an abysmal sorrowfulness that overcame his voice and left some of the younger boys ridden with tears and fear. He told them the chilling expositions of rapes he had witnessed. He told them about this one time when they raided a village and captured two girls, took them back to the camp and he watched as the older boys gang raped the two girls, laughing and exchanging them like the sock-ball they often played with on their tiny football pitch. He slowly recounted how they took sticks and thorny branches and shoved them into the vaginas of the two girls once they were done raping them. He remembered their screams, their heart—wrenching cries and their pleas for mercy. The appalling power with which sexual lust was used to illuminate the nature of the civil war and vice versa was ignored. The media from across the world that reported and showed pictures focused mainly on child soldiers and the mutilations – on the poverty the war caused. 130 biklmnpqrcgi The rebels wanted to conquer these communities, they looted the country from one end to another and they raped it, they violated women, conquering them by force and plundering them off their treasure. At first it had just been him and one of the boys, Farai, he rescued from the outskirts of the city when he escaped. The boy reminded him of his baby brother who had died when the riots began. Six more boys had joined them along the way as they traversed the war torn districts, carefully ducking and eluding rebels and soldiers all the same. Jhara taught them skills of survival. Staying alive was key but more important than that was avoiding capture by both the rebels and soldiers. Becoming a captive in the rebel camps was tantamount to yanking out one’s soul with a fork strapped barbed wire. Becoming one of the rebels meant being forced to rape women older enough to be their mothers, killing babies by smashing their skulls with the back of the rusted AK47s they carried on their tiny backs and Jhara made it a mission to never go back to that hell. Refugee camps were a much worse type of hell. On the second year of the civil war they had become concentration camps were people fought to eat. Most died from hunger and some from disease. “Here they are J”. The boys looked frail and hungry. There was a sadness in one of the boy’s eyes that caught Jhara out guard. He seemed resigned to the hunger, his eye sockets had crawled up into his tiny misshaped skull and he looked timid but ready for a fight. Jhara had heard from the other boys what this poor 131 biklmnpqrcgi soul had been through. “You gotta go”. He did not even blink as he pointed towards the dark forest. “I am not your father and I shouldn’t be struggling to feed, protect and clothe you. When we met I told the both of you that in order to survive amongst us, each one of you has to work for their own survival. The only reason we are a group is to better fight off scavengers we meet but not to feed the weak ones and you my friends are the weak ones here.” “But... But where, why, nazali kobanga. Please don’t chase us. I ‘m sorry I stole the tinned beef, I ‘m sorry. Soki olingi” “You did what?” Farai asked angrily “I found him stealing canned beef on Wednesday”, Jhara told Farai. “But that’s not the point here. Some of the boys are complaining because all you do is eat but never bring anything” Kwezi kept quiet and watched the other young boy he was being chased away with beg Jhara to let him stay with them. He did not know him that well. On a number of occasions they were together as they went on a scavenger hunts for food, water and anything that could be used as a weapon against those who posed a threat to them. Kwezi carried a lump of anger, hatred and contempt inside his tiny chest. He was not about to beg like Melvin so he picked up a small axe from the ground and started walking away from Jhara and the rest of the boys. He did not know where he was going but he was going anyway. Melvin followed him. For three weeks they shrouded through a dense forest without a map. Melvin followed Kwezi religiously not knowing 132 biklmnpqrcgi where they were going. Kwezi followed the dream his father had died pursuing. Angola. The memory of that day still burned abstrusely into his head. At the border between Angola and Congo the clashes were more intense than anywhere else. Niko and his son almost made it into Angola but a road block set by the rebels had been their fate. The driver of the truck they’d snuck into had slowed down and Kwezi had listened as his father said what sounded like a prayer in a language he did not know. They were hiding in a compartment meant for the spare tyre at the bottom of the truck when the truck stopped and they heard voices order the driver to disembark. A gunshot rang followed by a thump and then footsteps around the truck as the rebels sought a way to break the padlocks and loot the truck. “Stay here Kwezi, stay here and don’t mo...” his father warned him before getting out of the truck after hearing rebels argue whether they should burn the truck or not. A few minutes later a gunshot exploded and Kwezi whimpered a little. He knew what’d just happened and he sat there crying silently as the rebels ransacked the vehicle for supplies. After about two hours the rebels had all gone away and Kwezi peeled himself from the wheel compartment under the truck and saw his father lying on the side of the road with a tyre ring around his torso burning. That was the last time he saw his father and he still felt the smoke from the tyre lingering on his clothes. Chapter 15

he flowers expanded their drowsy leaves and received the morning calls of butterflies and bees. The forest buzzes and hums like a great factory awaking to its work. As they shoved away from the noise of trucks, some in chase; some were flee-mode - the two boys felt a sense of relief. Before sunrise as they passed down the river between two Tfields of lilies that were still shut in sleep, the flakes of sunlight from over the bank fell on the surface of the water, whole fields of white blossoms seemed to flash open before them. As they floated along, like the unfolding of a banner, the clean water on their skins so sensible with its influence on the sun’s rays. The war had taken away most of their feelings but not the natural sense to recognize beauty. Over the months they have adapted not to merely anticipate the sunrise or dawn but nature herself. This must be how the first man had lived minus the war and constant chase-and-run of course. When man first wandered in this dark forest, he must have been nature’s serf; he must have offered tribute and prayer to the winds, and the lightning, and the rain, to the cave—lion, which seized his burrow for its lair, to the mammoth, which devoured his scanty crops. But as time passed on, he ventured, to rebel; he made stone his servant; 134 biklmnpqrcgi he discovered fire and; he domesticated iron; he sew the wild beasts or subdued them; he made them feed him and give him clothes. He became a chief surrounded by his slaves; the fire lay beside him with dull red eye and yellow tongue waiting his instructions to prepare his dinner, or to make him poison, or to go with him to the war, and fly on the houses of the enemy, hissing, roaring, and consuming all. The trees of the forest became man’s flock, he slaughtered them at his convenience; the earth brought forth at his command. He struck iron upon wood or stone and hewed out the fancies of his brain; he plucked shells, and flowers, and the bright red berries, and twined them in his hair; he cut the pebble to a sparkling gem, he made the dull clay a transparent stone. The river which once he had worshipped as a god, or which he had vainly attacked with sword and spear, he now conquered to his will He made the winds grind his corn and carry him across the waters; he made the stars serve him as a guide. He obtained from salt and wood and sulphur a destroying force. He drew from fire, and water, the awful power which produces the volcano, and made it do the work of human hands. He made the sun paint his portraits, and gave the lightning a situation in the post—office. Thus man has taken into his service, and modified to his use, the animals, the plants, the earth’s and the stones, the waters and the winds, and the more complex forces of heat, electricity, sunlight, magnetism, with chemical powers of many kinds. By means of his inventions and discoveries, by means of the arts and trades, and by means of the industry resulting from them, he has raised himself from the condition of a serf to 135 biklmnpqrcgi the condition of a lord. Like their forefathers Kwezi and Melvin slowly adapted to the dark leaves that provided them with shade, the chirping birds that warned them of approaching danger. Slowly they tamed the bustling jungle and made it obedient to them as they quietly walked on the fallen leaves. Their destination was Angola. Before his father got a bullet between his eyes his dream was to take his only surviving child across the Angolan border to seek asylum in Zambia or South Africa. Kwezi imagined that just like him his forefathers must have encountered some hell of their own in their age. The fact that he was here meant that they’d survived it. He had to survive as well. Owing to causes remotely dependent on geological revolutions, dark days must have fallen upon these creatures. Food must have become scanty; enemies surrounded them. The continual presence of danger, the habit of incessant combat, drew them more closely together. Their defects of activity and strength made them rely on one another for protection. Nothing now but their unexampled power of combination could save their lives. This power of combination was entirely dependent upon their language with their surroundings, the way they conversed with nature and its other elements. They knew the language of earth, wind and fire and they developed and improved until at length it passed into a new stage. The first stage of this language is that of intonation, in which the ideas are arranged on a chromatic scale. We still use this language in conversing with our dogs, who perfectly understand the difference between the curses, not loud but deep, which are vented on their heads, and the 136 biklmnpqrcgi caressing sounds, which are usually uttered in falsetto; while we understand the growl, the whine, and the excited yelp of joy. The altitude was changing as they got further south towards the boarder. The air got a lot thinner and the sun much hotter than they were used to. The tableland is seldom so uniform and smooth as the word denotes. The African plateau is intersected by mountain ranges and ravines, juts into volcanic isolated cones, and varies much in its climate, its aspect, its productions, and its altitude above the sea. Kwezi’s father had taught him that man can conquer Nature only by obeying her laws, and in order to obey her laws we must first learn what they are. When we have ascertained the method of Nature’s operations, we shall be able to take her place and to perform them for ourselves. When we understand the laws which regulate the complex phenomena of life, we shall be able to predict the future as we are already able to predict comets and eclipses and the planetary movements. “I bet no one predicted the war”, Kwezi says silently. It was difficult to avoid wild animals, rebels and soldiers all at the same time. The two boys constantly climbed trees to look far into the horizon and sometimes they had to stand still to listen to noises. The jungle was the safest but yet the most dangerous. It provided many hiding spots and there weren’t any landmines planted out here but it was easy to run into an angry chimpanzee or a leopard. But Kwezi explained to Melvin that all gregarious animals have a language, by means of which they communicate with one another. Sometimes their language is that of touch: cut 137 biklmnpqrcgi off the antennae of the ant, and it is dumb. With most animals the language is that of vocal sound, and its varied intonations of anger, joy, or grief may be distinguished even by the human ear. Animals also have alarm-cries, their love-calls, and sweet murmuring plaintive sounds, which are uttered only by mothers as they fondle and nurse their young. The language of our progenitors consisted of vocal sounds, and also movements of the hands. The activity of mind and social affection developed in these animals through the laws of compensation, made them fond of babbling and gesturing to one another, and thus their language was already of a complicated nature, when events occurred which developed it still more. Kwezi and Melvin moved on the trees with stealth silence. Their new stage of adaptation was to imbibe the language of the forest they now walked in; they learnt the language of imitation. Impelled partly by necessity, partly by fear, combined with mental activity, the two boys began to talk to each other by imitative sounds, gestures, and grimaces. When they wished to indicate sighting of a wild beast, they gave a low growl; they pointed in a certain direction; they shaped their features to resemble his; they crawled furtively along with their belly, crouched to the ground. To imitate water, they bubbled with their mouths; they grubbed with their hands and pretended to eat, to show that they had discovered roots. The pleasure and profit obtained from thus communicating their thoughts to one another led them to invent conversations and not walk quietly. This was how the primates’ ancestors communicated before they invented the conventional means of communication 138 biklmnpqrcgi when certain objects were pointed out, and certain sounds were uttered, and it was agreed that those sounds should always signify the objects named. At first this conventional language consisted only of substantives; each word signified an object, and was a sentence in itself. Afterwards adjectives and verbs were introduced; and words, which had at first been used for physical objects, were applied to the nomenclature of ideas. Combination is a method of resistance; language is the instrument of combination. Language, therefore, may be considered the first weapon of the human species, and was improved, as all weapons would be, by that long, never-ceasing war, the battle of existence. They crawled on thick branches and jumped from tree to tree. Their hands became their weapons. While walking the forest they had come upon a number of groups of monkeys. The funny looking creatures used their hands as feet, and the foot was used as a hand. Having grown up in the village, climbing trees was a common hobby for the young boys even though forbidden by the parents. They would go into the forest and find a tall tree with a lot of branches then they would climb the tree, each one of them choosing a branch of his own then when the game started they would chase each other through the branches and tag each other. The first one to get tagged was forced to get down from the tree until only two boys were left to chase each other on the branches. It was a dangerous game and on a few instances one or two of the boys fell and got injured. Kwezi and Melvin decided to use the trees to their advantage, scouting the horizons for any moving trucks, 139 biklmnpqrcgi enemies and dangerous animals. As they jumped from tree to tree trying to avoid making a racket, Melvin listened to Kwezi tell him about how a long time ago men only depended on their legs and hands but no weapons. The advent of spears and missiles came thousands of years later and caused that was when wars began. But when the hand began to be used for throwing missiles, it was specialised more and more, and feet were required to do all the work of locomotion. This separation of the foot and hand is the last instance of the physiological division of labour; and when it was put in effect, the human frame became complete. The erect posture was assumed; that it is modern and unnatural is shown by the difficulty with which it is maintained for any length of time. The two boys acceded to the fact that Mother Nature had been altered in a major way and as a result it had altered man himself. Man’s brain has been indirectly altered by the climate. They reached the border two weeks later after walking for almost a hundred kilometres and living on wild berries and muddied water in small ponds scattered all over the forest. After crossing the border they could hear the sounds of cars on a tarred road far ahead and they followed the noise guardedly avoiding any tracks and looking for footprints to avoid running into insurgents. “We are going to hide on the side of the road and wait for trucks marked United Nations. I heard some villagers talk about them and how it was the only way to get out of the country legally as a refugee.” “What if they think we are soldiers and shoot us?” “They won’t, we are unarmed” 140 biklmnpqrcgi “They might think we are bait, used by the rebels to stop the trucks” “Let’s just take our chances ok?” They waited by the road for two days with nothing to eat and a half empty plastic water container. A few cars passed by but they could not take a chance of stopping just any car. They waited patiently until around midday on the second day when they heard a loud noise approaching. Theirs had been a long journey. Extending over hundreds of kilometres and sometimes going around circles. The sun was their compass everyday and shadows became their companions leaving behind a cold trail of a blood-red horizon on the face of the Sahara which has been for millennia a great barrier between the great East and West African tribes and those of the South. It has been natural for anthropologists to imagine that this barren waste, by its isolating effect, favoured the emergence of two distinctive types of man-kind. Warlords and Peace-seekers of the Kalahari desert. The Kalahari Desert extended in a north-easterly direction across the Victoria Falls and the two Rhodesians in early Pleistocene times. It virtually severed the south-eastern from the west-central part of the continent. This old-time Kalahari barrier must have fluctuated with the Ice Ages, as did the Sahara, and at one time probably separated the Bushmen from the tribes of the west and from the Brown race to the north. At any rate the cradle of the black race, was in the basin of the Congo water-shed which had now became a war-zone. Thence many tribes were beginning to spread out in a north- westerly direction towards the Niger Valley and the Sahara but a few found themselves seeking the peaceful waters of the 141 biklmnpqrcgi Kalahari and greener pastures in the not-so-bloody mines of Kimberly and De Beers. “This is it. It has to be”, Kwezi woke up Melvin and they stood alert behind a bush by the road until they saw the blue print in front of the truck written “United Nations”. They went in the middle of the road, and kneeled down with their arms raised high and their heads bowed.

142 biklmnpqrcgi Book IV

143 biklmnpqrcgi Chapter 16

s you turn off the road that leads to Tutume village at the Makuta T-junction, you are greeted by one or two taxis parked by the side of the road, there are a few shops selling watermelons, sugarcanes, roasted corn and boiled groundnuts. There is no petrol station here, but one will find a school across the main road, a small government clinic, no Adoctors here, just a few nurses and medically trained staff. A big banner greets you out front announcing the fact that pregnant women should be immunized so that their babies are not born with a type of tetanus. There is no long line of people waiting to do so, but you can see some staff moving between buildings. There are HIV-warning billboards all over the Junction. It is still early and people in the yards that line the main road are going outside to cook their meals over firewood for the most part, children in uniforms and mostly without shoes are going off to school, making their way through muddy paths from the night’s rain. You can see some working out in the gardens, picking beans, or tilling the ground around maize plants, some children are carrying water toward their homes from the nearby standpipe. 144 biklmnpqrcgi Some people are sitting outside of their homes having breakfast of some kind or another. No coffee and toast here. Children will have some porridge out of a cup, the family will eat left over pap. Meat is not eaten often, protein comes mostly from beans. It takes two more kilometres than the nine in the board at Makuta, to get to Nswazwi village. Nswazwi is of total contrast to Makuta - the land is green and lush as one drives through it, there is not a dried out blade of grass, just green. A morning mist hangs over the land. The sun is peering out as a small boy yawns and scatters a crowd of chickens fighting over left-over porridge in a small burnt pot. He chases after them angrily, shouting and cursing their owners. “Makumbo a mai” he yells the words he’d heard his late grandma yell a hundred times. He hurls stones and discarded bottles at the chickens. Once he had killed one of them with one shot to the head with a stone. He and his brother ate it quietly and burnt its feathers so the neighbours would just assume the chicken had gone astray and never suspect them. There is a lot of land around, much of it cultivated, people enjoy eating, not much of it is sold, since most everyone grows their own vegetables and the things that are eaten. There is quite a bit of sweet potatoes grown around the houses, concealed under piles of dried groundnuts leaves which their grandmother had fondly cared for when she was still alive. People in villages live shorter lives for the most part, since there is no infrastructure here, there are no ambulances, and if you do get sick there is no money for private transportation to 145 biklmnpqrcgi the clinics. If you are lucky, a neighbour might assist you with their donkey cart but otherwise people depend on the traditional healers to get paid in other means – a goat, a cow or a bag of maize. The nearest pharmacy is 15 kilometres away in Tutume, but even that larger village lacks facilities; a medical clinic is there with a doctor unlike the small facility in Nswazwi which has a few things. The problem with government medical facilities in Botswana is that the medicines are often stolen and sold to individuals or traditional doctors by staff. This has the government making plans to specially mark government medicines that at times are given at cost, so that they cannot be resold in pharmacies or by individuals. The other obvious problems are water and sanitation. Water taken from creeks has to be boiled and boiled and treated. It is not. Children in Nswazwi become ill with diseases that could be prevented through the use of soap and water. Unless you work in a store or have a Spaza shop or work in the clinic or teach at the Primary school, there are no jobs except your garden. You can try selling food along the road such as tomatoes, beans, potatoes, maize, or fruit, but generally there is no way to make money but everything you need cost money. You learn to live on little and making every Thebe count. At times there is support from relatives and if you visit someone at Francistown, you bring those things that are not there at the village especially bread. Nswazwi residents are friendly and hospitable, kind and show their graceful ways to outsiders, kids just hover around; 146 biklmnpqrcgi adults come up to you and greet you like they have known you forever. There are those who despise the poor people around them, those who live in permanent sadness for them, those who try to shut it out; and those who are motivated to act to improve the situation and those who are resigned to the fact that life isn’t fair and there are people who have and people who haven’t. In reality, most of us have all of these feelings at different times. The village social worker seemed to be all those things all at once. Everything had changed so fast since their grandmother passed away. Taboka no longer sat at his stall; Mmula had to skip some school days. The social worker came by to check on them a couple of times after the funeral, bringing rations of food and faking moral support. Her visits became less and less frequent and a lot less fruitful to either of them. Taboka avoided her. He was getting sick and tired of her constant inquiries about the funny smell on his clothes. Every time she came to the house he escaped through a concealed hole at the back of the house. The last three times she came, she met with his little brother and instructed him to inform his older rebellious brother to come to the clinic to sign them up for the social welfare programme. “She just keeps showing up unannounced man. It’s annoying the hell out of me” Taboka tells the boy sitting next to him in a tiny donkey-cart being pulled by two tired animals. They’d been riding for days and had finally made it back to the village. “She is just doing her job”, the other boy shrugged and continued clipping his nails and waiting for his friend to finish 147 biklmnpqrcgi rolling a few grams of their remaining marijuana in an old newspaper “She has this, self-righteous air about her. The other day I told her if I wanted a priest I would have gone to church. “Hahaha, you? Church? The devil would walk straight out to hell, into the church and drag you out of there”. “Fokof hehehe” “Its hard being us man.” Nswazwi was starting to take a different form. There were corrugated iron roofs springing all over the place – not shapely, or organized. The corrugated roofs were makeshift kind- of, and looked temporary like the ones at Shanty towns in the cities. People with failed city dreams returned and brought this kind of fashion to the village. They acted like the new kings and pretended that they’d conquered the cities where they’d lived. No one told the truth about the hell they lived in. The corrugated roofs may look like poverty to outsiders, who prefer to see the houses from natural materials, but it’s was a valuable building material here. “Life is hard” was a common phrase amongst the villagers. The two boys smoked their last joint and got back, to whipping the backs of the two donkeys. Slowly they wound their way into the tiny passageways separating the tiny box-like tuck-shops. People, stopped and stared at them, small tuck-shops made out of dark, red clay, the ground seemed to churn up after a recent downpour. The donkey cart just inched its way along in order to avoid pupils in a hurry to school all around. The donkeys stopped at a nondescript hut. A young boy came out through the door covered by a filthy piece of cloth. A 148 biklmnpqrcgi big grin on his face, his eyes wide, he waved to them. Like so many children in this village, all Mmula had ever known in his life was misery, poverty, sickness, death, hunger and a shortage of nearly anything and everything. He looked at his older brother and said “Did you find him?” “You are not going to school?” Taboka replied with a question of his own “No, I don’t have uniform. Teacher said no come to school with no uniform” they embraced quietly while the other boy watched from the cart. “I found him but I did not see him. I talked to a couple of people from here in the village and some said they knew where he lived so we went there. It’s a big house. When we get to the house there was a girl and a woman there.” “Who are they?” The younger boy asked curiously “His wife and daughter” “Huh?” “It would seem our father got married again. Funny thing though, I waited and waited at the gate hoping to see him but he never came. I was getting hungry and it was cold in that city. Jacko, you know Jacko from across the river right? I saw him and he told me that our father was in the papers, apparently some people tried to kill him and took his body parts.” “What?!” “Yup” “Yebo!” the boy in the cart confirmed. The two boys sat on a small makeshift bench at the back of the house, sharing a warm Coca—Cola. The other boy who had come with Taboka joined them and he shared the stories of what he had seen in Gaborone. 149 biklmnpqrcgi His name is Sello. He told how his grandmother would go out at night or in the day even and try to find men to sell herself to, so that there would be some money for food. How the uncle would come and steal even the little there was in the house. How no one interfered with his uncle, since he had murdered three people in the last few years and the police were looking for him, but every time that they showed up, he would know it and disappear into the bushes or go to a nearby village. Sello came from Zimbabwe when he was only ten, running from the wars after his grandmother was slain. He was taken by a family across the river to be their herd-boy. They do not pay him. The old man says his wages are the food that he eats everyday and the land that he shits it on. He began to talk about his mother, her life as a prostitute, her violent death, her wanting to throw him into a pit latrine just after he was born. Tears trailed down his face. No words are needed from the other two boys, he knew somehow that they understood; that they knew what it was like; that somehow, even they were of two different nationalities their pain was similar. Age-wise they seemed miles apart, they came from different cultures, but somehow they understood each other’s pain. Nobody seemed to care about their poverty or sufferance. Such is the picturesque part of what was once called savage life. But to everybody else in the village it was not savage life - it merely lies upon the surface as paint lies upon the skin. Everybody is minding their own business. They seat under the shade of the house all day, shifting with the shade of the house until the sun goes down on the west. Then the drum beat summons the sun with its own serene language, so that those who are distant from the village 150 biklmnpqrcgi understand what it is saying. With short, lively sounds it summons to the dance; it thunders forth the alarm of fire of Mwali’s might, loudly and quickly with no interval between the beats; and now it tolls the hour of judgement and the day of death and so they migrate from the shadow and follow the hum of the drum. When they get to the Sangoma dance they see a man dressed in animal print examining another lying in a brown casket-looking like wooden box. He looks at the crowd and loudly tells them that this was the work of a witch. He casts lots with knotted cords; he mutters incantations; he passes round the villagers and points out the guilty person, a pretty girl wearing a leather brassiere and a short leather skirt, a gourd filled with the “red water” is given her to drink. To declare her innocence she acts as an emetic. These dramatic dance exemplifies life in the olden days. That the life of the savage was not a happy one, and the existence of each clan or tribe was precarious in the extreme. They were like the wild animals, engaged from day to night in seeking food, and ever watchful against the foes by whom they are surrounded. The dance was a story in motion. The men who go out hunting, the girls who went with their pitchers to the village brook, were never sure that they will return, for there was always war with a dance troupe from some neighbouring village, and their method of making war was by ambuscade. But besides these unreal and ordinary dangers, the barbarians believed themselves to be encompassed by evil spirits who may at any moment have sprung upon one in the guise of a leopard.

151 biklmnpqrcgi In order to propitiate these invisible beings, the new generation’s lives were entangled with intricate rites; it is turned this way and that way as imaginary oracles are delivered or as omens appear. It is not impossible to describe, or even to imagine, the tremulous condition of the village mind. Every sound, whatever it might be - the bubbling of a small drainage system, the rustling of the wind among the trees, the voice of a bird, even the grating of a wheel - inspired a musical idea, so - how melancholy is the contrast! - so how deep is the descent! - so to the mind that is steeped in sensuality every sight, every sound, calls up an impure association. Taboka sat down amongst smaller kids clapping his hands absentmindedly, he dreads to be alone; his mind is a monster that exhibits foul pictures to his eyes: his memories are temptations: he struggles, he resists, but it is all in vain: the habits which once might so easily have been broken are now harder than adamant, are now stronger than steel since his granny died. His life is passed between desire and remorse for actions he intends to do: when the desire is quenched he is tortured by his conscience: he soothes it with a promise to provide for his little brother; and then the desire comes again. He sinks lower and lower until indulgence gives him no pleasure: and yet abstinence cannot be endured. To stimulate his jaded senses he enters strange and tortuous paths which lead him to that awful border land where all is darkness, all is horror, where vice lies close to crime. Yet there was a time when that man iss as guileless as a girl: he began by learning vice from the example of his companions, just as he learnt to smoke. He wishes for so many things; had his father been more of a father, had his education been more severe; had 152 biklmnpqrcgi the earliest inclinations been checked by the fear of ruin and disgrace, he would not have acquired the most dangerous of all habits. He thought of the many boys he knew who would jump onto the crime he was planning in his head. His mind was divided by the duties of the day, the obligations to his brother, he really saw no choice but to go ahead with his plan, to assemble a team and converse. In his not so educated mind he still understood that men of similar talents and needs are drawn together and it is important that they interchange ideas. Many a poem, many an invention, many a great enterprise, he was born at neither one of the table; his was a path of crime-for-survival and he was ready to embrace it. When the pleasures of money and fame have been exhausted: when nothing remains on earth that can bribe the mind to turn from its accustomed path, it is labour itself that is the joy; and aged men who have neither desires, nor illusions, who are separated from the world, and who are drawing near to the grave, who believe that with life all is ended, and that for them there is no hereafter, yet continue to work with indefatigable zeal. Taboka ‘s actions were entirely directed by the desire to exist, not by the desire to obtain the praises of his fellows. As may be imagined, seasonal changes play a considerable part in modifying ordinary routine. During the ploughing and reaping seasons, for instance, when every able-bodied woman and, especially nowadays, every available, able-bodied man, is at work in the fields for a considerable part of the day, the villages stand practically empty except for children and very old people for a great deal of the time; and daily routine is changed accordingly. Taboka’s grandmother arrived in Botswana late around the 1980s and Nswazwi had begun recovering back into its old state of glory. Cattle posts were littered all the way to the north, and ploughing fields were plastered on the eastern frontier. When she arrived from exile she used to plough at her distant relatives fields when she was still able bodied. When her health started failing her she stopped ploughing altogether, depending on her old friend whom she spent days with at their fields and helped in some chores for food. In the middle of winter, when pasture for the cattle was scarce, the flocks with their herdsmen had to be taken far afield to graze, often so far that it is impossible for them to go out and come back in the same day, so that the cattle were kept for some period at the cattle-posts, the herd-boys staying with them, with a consequent change in the habits of the village. Taboka had often wished for that life – he imagined the abundance of milk and meat at the cattle post. The death of their grandmother had thrown them into a tumultuous life. Their uncle used to fetch them in the mornings to go help him at the kraal but since the old woman kicked it, the uncle was nowhere to e seen. The cows were milked in the morning before they go out and in the evening after they come back; but sometimes they were brought back in the forenoon to be milked for the only time, and then taken out again to graze. Taboka’s little brother would hungrily look at the calf as it sucked first, but it was soon driven off; their uncle would sit on his haunches to one side of the cow, then fill his wooden pail, after which the calf is allowed to suck again. The calves were always separately herded near the kraal, the very young ones being kept in it all day. The boys were used to a life where there was a bit of milk at home and the only price they had to pay was to find good grazing and water for their uncles herds. They learnt over the years how to protect them from wild animals, and what remedies to apply for such common ailments as liver disease, ophthalmia, and protrafted delivery. They’d loved their uncle’s dogs, the only other friend they really had in the village and they principally used them for hunting. But hunting is nowhere a regular occupation, except with a few people. It was carried out fairly sporadically, as occasion and opportunity permit, especially during the months when other food is growing scarce. Game was therefore merely a welcome addition to the daily diet of milk and millet. Hunting by pursuit is generally carried on collectively, and big communal hunts are often organized by older boys. The boys sometimes formed a huge circle round a spot where game is known to be abundant, and everybody brought their own dog. Every catch belonged to the dog which caught the animal and sometimes fights broke out over which dog had caught the game. But now the dogs no longer came to their yard anymore. Once Mmula had tried to go and get the dog from the uncle’s place but the little boy was promised a thrashing like he’d never felt before. But today that was the least of Taboka’s worries. He looked at his brother, innocent little balls to the soul on his face as he starred at the dancers a tiny smile on his lips. He looked around the crowd then he saw Sello. “Where have you been? Midnight was hours away”. “It’s still early man, relax. The moon still shines doesn’t it?” “Have you seen him?” “Yea, he is right there. I can see the torch gleaming in his pocket” “We only have about 25 minutes before he goes back there. Let’s go now” “Just make sure no one sees us leaving or even sees us together. Tell Mmula you are going to relieve yourself. We‘ll be back before he even knows we were gone”

Taboka went to his brother and whispered something in his ear then disappeared into the night. He met with Sello at the T-Junction just before the Lucky Seven. They had a very short time to carry-out their mission before the security guard returned to his post. They had spent days and days studying and casing the place for loopholes and just a few days ago they learnt of the Sangoma dance festival when they were returning from Gaborone. They found their loophole. The security guard sneaked out once every 30 minutes from the shop to go and watch the spectacle of possessed Sangomas and they knew that was their only chance. “Are you sure there is no alarm T?” “Trust me, there is none. Our only obstacle is getting you to fit through those windows and I’m sure you can” “Hurry up, we are running out of time” They arrived at the shop and cracked the window open silently with a copper metal Taboka had brought then they delicately removed the shards of glasses from the window seal. Sello slithered into the shop through the window. It was easier than they had both anticipated and in less than 3 minutes Sello was in the shop and started going through the shelves and picking up tinned staff and handed it over to Taboka who placed it in plastic bags they had brought. The cash register was locked. “Just yank it out dammit!. We have to go. Pull the damn thing out and let’s go” “Almost done” “Come-on, I see a torch coming” ”What?! Fuck!” He rushed to the window and tried to squeeze himself out through the tiny space which now seemed tinier. “The register?” “I left it” “Come-on, come-on, push yourself forward” The hole seemed a bit too small now and as they panicked they became unaware of the racket they were making. After fighting and clambering with the window-seal Sello finally managed to squeeze out of the window and they carried their heavy plastic and ran away as fast as they could. In less than 30 minutes they had stashed the bag full of goodies at Taboka’s place and were running back to the dance festival. It was cold now but they were sweating like weigh- watchers in a cake factory. The security guard was still captivated by the theatrics of the festival. “I thought you said you saw a torch coming”, Sello slapped Taboka on the back. “I did. OK I saw a light, not a torch” “I could have taken that cash register” “Wasn’t worth the risk. There is always a next time” “That was a once in a lifetime opportunity. That cash register was heavy plus next time the shop owners will have mended and reinforced that loophole we had. “Sshh, somebody might hear us. Let’s not talk about this unless we are absolutely certain that we are all alone. Don’t tell anyone. Not even the one person you think you trust the most” “Not a soul. Not even your brother” Taboka walked away from Sello to his brother and patted his back, they smiled at each other and Mmula created some space for his older brother and they sat next to each other just a few meters away from the blazing fire at the centre of the dance-space. At the break of dawn they left the festival and there were still people gathering around the fire, some sleeping in dirty rugs besides the embers while the drumbeat hummed mellow on the background. They got home and Mmula went straight to bed while Taboka and Sello went to the other mud hut where they had left their stash of goodies to divide the share. There were many tins of canned fish and beef, biscuits and many small bottles of a concentrated drink called ‘Sweeto’. After Sello took his share of the stash and left, Taboka dug a shallow hole inside the mud hut kitchen and squirreled up the tinned staff into the whole then he levelled up the surface and covered the hole with the goat-skin mat his grandmother used to sit on. Mission accomplished. He went to bed some hours later but he could not sleep. His mind kept coursing over ugly consequences and other devious opportunities. He tried to not think about ‘what if he got caught’ but rather ‘what’s the next score’. Chapter 17

his was an all too unfamiliar place; the bushes were not as thick, the roads not so fancy but yet so calm with potholes that softly caressed the tyres of the slowly moving truck creating small, enjoyable bumps for the small children in the truck who sat quietly between their mothers and fathers’ legs watching the trees pass by backwards. TThe rivers were remarkably cleaner than those back at home. A home they wished to never return to. The north- western limit of the Kalahari may be taken as the Omatako River, where the red Kalahari sands change to the white sands of the Omaheke. The main desert extends from the upper Molopo River to Lake Ngami, its eastern edge lies near the main railway line to the north, the western edge coincides roughly with the borders of Angola and Namibia.

It is an arid stretching midland, not so much a true desert; the countryside is scored by old river beds and eroded passageways created by the thousands of animals that migrate through these jungles yearly.

160 biklmnpqrcgi Lying between 3,000 and 4,000 feet above sea-level with un-drained depressions or pans scattered throughout the region which supply brackish water to the fauna of the Kalahari after rains. On a number of occasions the tarred road would suddenly disappear and the truck flogged the dusty dirt roads leaving behind a cloud of dust consuming the dark memory of those at the back of the truck. The soil consisted of red desert sand and white calcareous tufa formed by the alternating solution and re-precipitation of salts in the wet and dry seasons. The extension of the Kalahari sands as a geological phenomenon suggests that the desert region was possibly far more widespread at one time. Here and there, long parallel belts of loose sand, almost hug the truck wheels too tight but the large machine has no problem fighting its way out of the sand- embrace. One could easily guess that their journey had come at an opportune time when the weather is a bit kind, the sun a bit warmer and the clouds still roaring from the distant southerly horizons. The extreme north is regularly flooded in the summer months, sometimes heavily. The Okavango marshes are 100 miles long, choked with reeds and laced with channels of stagnant water. In the rainy season they drain into Lake Ngami and even into the Makgadikgadi depression. This latter is a great salt—pan in which water collects in the wet season, but soon evaporates to leave a large crust of salt. After rains there is profuse vegetation, acacia trees thrive along the river banks, but as they moved deeper into the north eastern part of the Republic of Botswana the acacia vegetation 161 biklmnpqrcgi was easily habituated by dominant Mopane trees, tall and thick baobab giants, and torchwood velds. The road got wider and the truck began to encounter many other cars on the road. A profusion of bulbs and leguminous plants decorated the roadside, while wild melons added a sparkle of vibrancy to the rich flora lining and shelling the road. The climate became tropical and less varied. The northern and eastern parts of the Kalahari are inhabited by the Bakalanga and Bangwato tribe whose environment allows them to divide up into small family settlements, the Bakalanga adopt a small town system from the fallen Rozvi empires whom they broke away from. A refugee camp was established in a small town known as Dukwi, the town lied within easy distance of adequate water, had its own wells and was loosely surrounded by scattered agricultural lands, while cattle are often grazed some distance away. During the winter months cattle—posts are built along distant streams, and the cattle migrate annually with whole families, or with the younger men of the village. Recently, with the imposition of revised Ngwato landboard regulations on all crown lands these tribes have been forced to constitute the cattle-posts as permanent homes, and a more scattered economic structure is appearing. The north-western parts of the Kalahari form an interesting complex in themselves. To the extreme north are the Okavangoers, lined with teak and other forest trees. As the trucks approached the cordon fence Kwezi felt a warm sense of relief shred through his nerves. For more than a thousand kilometres he did not hear any gunshot. Occasionally he got startled by the familiar sounds of trucks as they cut through 162 biklmnpqrcgi road-less forests breaking down tree branches and trampling on smaller velds. He slept with one eye open. Every whiff and sound made him alert. Always in flight mode, he swore never to get caught off-guard like his father. The bushes here seemed calmer, the air a little fresher and on dozens of instances they passed a few cows, goats and donkeys on the sides of the road. He read the signs slowly in his head as the road got wider and the kilometres written on the road signs got fewer. “Dukwi 50 km” he read slowly and smiled. The truck stopped at the cordon fence and two unarmed men approached. They looked tired and obviously unaware of the status of the truck or the cargo it carried. All they were concerned about was whether the truck was carrying any meat. “Foot and Mouth Disease Sir”, one remarked at the driver as he went around the truck spraying its wheels from a large strapped to his back. “I’m done. You can proceed. The camp is on the first left about 12 kilometres from here. You won’t miss the turn anyway. The Botswana Defence Force army will be waiting”. He said with a polite smile. He had realized what the truck was transporting from the United Nations stickers on its side. Again relief poured upon Kwezi’s lungs, and he stroked Melvin’s knee and nodded at him. “We made it”. There was about thirteen of them in the truck. None of them had said a word for three days. There was a girl with one hand, two of the boys had no legs and one had an eye patch on his left eye. It was as if they were all sitting there silently narrating 163 biklmnpqrcgi to each other the atrocities they had seen. None of them had slept for three days. Living on the run had tamed their need for sleep, adapted their eyes to take rest only for few minutes staying alert became a common sense above all the senses. Seven of the truck passengers were women. They wore bloody dresses and their eyes glistened with conquered rage. They had been raped, beaten and almost killed. The violence that attends sex when it is unmitigated by love and sexual excess that attended the Congolese war and their aftermath showed itself in their faces. Their eyes stayed fixed on the long bloody trail they left behind, none of them looked forward. It didn’t matter. There was nothing that could be worse than that which they left behind. Kwezi was the first to disembark from the truck and he helped Melvin down. They both slowly scouted their new home, like wounded souls, meek and timid. They knew nobody here. But it was home. For now.

164 biklmnpqrcgi Chapter 18

wo weeks later a boy was running past Melvin chasing after a dirty tennis ball. He was laughing. It sounded almost weird to hear that sound of genuine laughter that reminded Kwezi of Samumba, his friend who had caught the first bullet that racketed the onslaught of their village. One of the soldiers approached them and Kwezi almost Tfled at the sight of the camouflage army uniform but he realized that the soldier was smiling and carried no weapon. He directed them towards a parked truck loaded with blankets and clothes. Kwezi had loved his home and the little treasures it had contained, the lovely garden his mother took care of, his friends and toys. Well, that was all over now, except the old clothes he stood in. He should have felt miserable, but on the contrary he realized that he did not feel sad at all. He had a lively sense of adventure merely at being alive and free, even of possessions. No one expected anything from him. No one was chasing after him with machine guns and handcuffs. He had no obligations except to water a garden once or twice in a day. 165 biklmnpqrcgi When refugees flee their homelands, they hope to be able to find a safe place to seek refuge until conditions improve and they can return home. Instead they often find they have exchanged one life of danger for another. Life in refugee camps can be harsh. There is insufficient food. Parents frequently starve for days to make the limited rations last to ensure one meal a day for their children. Women often have to walk for hours to find a small amount of water for their families. They are at constant risk of abuse and rape. Tsetse fly, white ants, ticks, and mosquitoes abound. Days are hot, but owing to the altitude and the dry climate, nights are much colder, and the occasional surprise rain made it worse. Winds rose almost daily with the increasing heat, falling off with the cool of evening. The conditions were thus not suited to the hoe—culturists and the homes of more established refugees were distributed in strife relation to available water. For newer refugees, shelter could be a plastic tent in 50 degree heat; a torn sheet tent to keep mosquitoes away so thin the slightest touch could collapse them; a mud hut too small to stand up in. There was no security and no sense of permanency. Health services were grossly inadequate and sometimes paracetamol was the only medicine available. Where education is available, it is limited. Refugees are desperate for education but resources are often scarce. There may be 50 plus students to a room, with no desks, few if any textbooks and pencils shared amongst groups. Income generation opportunities are minimal and rarely provide people with enough funds to be able to live well. Malaria and diarrhoea are part of daily life. Everyone was at risk.

166 biklmnpqrcgi Refugee camps back in Congo were the worst. Men were beaten, tortured, kidnapped and forced to be soldiers. Women attacked, raped and survivors severely exploited. Refugee children also suffered. Many have seen people die. Some are kidnapped and trafficked across borders into prostitution or to be child soldiers. Young girls are at risk of sexual violence. Some children are born in camps and know no other life. Camps like this one were designed to be a temporary refuge. Kwezi had no intention to go back to his country or to live here forever. He often sat and listened to Melvin talk about going back to find his brothers and sisters who had been captured by the rebels and were now probably soldiers fighting the government regime. Nights were the worst. Each and every day that passed instilled bitter memories, anger, hate and grief. Learning how to sleep again was a painful process. Almost all the boys often woke up screaming from nightmares of the carnage they had witnessed. Kwezi remembered his father’s last dying scream, the smell of his mother’s hair as it burnt and her cry of pain as the fire ate at her skin. He remembered Samumba’s tiny body lying right before him, bleeding and motionless and most of all he remembered his little sister’s smile that morning of the attack when he last saw her. His mother had been his domestic world, his humdrum, she was predictable and familiar. His father despite being periodic on his first years had become more available, he was stronger, bigger and he instilled boldness above all. “They mustn’t know my despair”, Kwezi thought to himself as he dug through the hard clay in the garden preparing 167 biklmnpqrcgi a plot to sow Spinach. He couldn’t let them see the wounds he came bearing. He did not want their sympathy and their kind—hearted jokes. It would only make him want to scream and punch someone in the face. If he spoke he felt they thought he was being arrogant, his silence meant ridiculousness, he was rude if he did not answer, sly if he suggested any idea, lazy if he got tired, selfish if he ate with his mouthful more than he should, stupid, cowardly and crafty. The garden was his escape from all that. The only remedy he knew was to go outside, into the garden where he could be quite without elders coming to inquire, alone with the heavens, nature and God. Oh, what God!? He tried to speak to God often. To ask him why? Why me? Why us? But God never spoke back. Was God angry with him? No answers. The soldiers were surprisingly kind. Most of the refugees could not speak English. They spoke some native languages Kwezi had heard at his village but had never gotten to learn them. His father had a vision for his children. To get education and get the hell out of that God forsaken country. Kwezi only spoke English and he was one of the few refugees who understood the soldiers. He hated the term refugees. From his father’s stories he understood that refugees tended to be thought of in the mass whereas exile was singular. Exile is noble and dignified whereas refugee is more hapless.

168 biklmnpqrcgi The nuances implied that exile appeared to have made a decision while the refugee is the very image of helplessness. Kwezi knew the moment he arrived at the camp that there was no way he was going to live here forever or ever go back to Congo. He was a refugee in a crowded camp foundering off the forest of Botswana. A potential victim of totalitarianism should he stay here forever. Volunteer support workers, trained by Refugee Services, assisted new arrivals with practical resettlement tasks such as setting up their homes, and enrolling children in schools and adults in the appropriate English classes. Friendship and mentoring were crucial elements of the volunteer role. Throughout the first year families are visited by registered social workers and a case worker from the former refugee community. Communication between the ethnic groups is sometimes difficult as in many cases the only language they have in common is limited English. A six weekly Refugee Forum was established to make this communication between the different refugee groups easier. Many of the adults are already concerned about maintaining their own cultural identity. Some groups even started language and culture classes. Those were regarded as trouble—makers and most decided to stay away, to blend in with their new environment. The other refugees immersed themselves in the wider community through work, education, contact with support people, participation in community activities Kwezi shared a tent with Melvin and three other boys. They were shown bunk beds which they would share and for the following two days they were oriented about the expected lifestyle on their new community. They were told they 169 biklmnpqrcgi would be required to help water the vegetables on the garden. Kwezi remembered how things turned out with Jhara and he reminded Melvin to work harder so that they could not be chased from the camp. His resolution was to apply his reason to everything here, learning to obey, to shut up, to help, to be good, to give in. There was something to be said about losing one’s possessions after nothing can be done about it. Especially when that something was a home. The refugees had lost their homes, their lifestyles, families, friends, legs, hands, dignity and hope. Every night they lay down their heads, to dream, remembering all these things, these horrible of things they so wanted to forget and the travesties they overcame in their lives.

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hree months later, with the sun coming up and the small refugee village anxiously coming to life from a gloom night, the soldiers are on high alert, with holsters unfastened, radios squawking, patrol cars darting up and down the streets, and every officer looking for a hint of trouble. Two boys have run off from the camp and they took a Tcouple of items that did not belong to them including two guns from the Botswana Defence Force Refugee armoury and clothes belonging to other refugees. There are spreading fears in the camp that the boys were mentally unstable and they are going to hurt one of the refugees or worse, one of the villagers with the guns they had stolen. The social workers speculate a condition they refer to as holocaust syndrome. The thin woman, wearing coveralls and flip-flops explains to one of the soldiers: “We are all born into some story you see, with its background scenery that affects our physical, emotional, social and spiritual growth. Me for instance, I harbour a burning hatred to all the so-called superior tribes in our country for what they did to my ancestors. I did not experience any of the atrocities they report they lived through but I still carry their pain. 171 biklmnpqrcgi Now imagine these kids who walked on hot embers of war and survived it with not a single parent or sibling.” Two social workers are driving around the village of Dukwi in a land cruiser, accompanied by three eager, young soldiers with eyes focused on every angle of the road like mighty hawks. One of the social workers, an older woman who is not particularly liked by the refugees, insists that the soldiers should hide their guns to avoid scaring away the boys who might be hiding in the bush. She continues to explain to them that while trauma can be transmitted across environments, so can resilience. Resilient traits such as adaptability, initiative, and tenacity, she says. The search goes on for three days but the boys are nowhere to be found, and three weeks later the search gets narrower and narrower. The defence force command centre that coordinates the refugee camps kept the news from the community and the media to avoid panic. There is a rumour that spreads like fire and spirals within the camp and amongst the soldiers that the boys had been talking about going back to find their parents and siblings, and soon enough everyone believes that the boys had gone back across the border to their homeland. Nobody knows how but as the weeks pass on, it becomes more believable. Meanwhile, hundreds of kilometres away, two mid— sized boys are hiding inside a freight truck travelling at about 80 kilometres per hour and only an hour away from the Capital, Gaborone, silently curled up in a corner ready to flee as soon as the truck stopped. They had thrown away the two guns they carried to the truck-stop after realizing that everybody they met seemed harmless and unaware of the guns they concealed 172 biklmnpqrcgi beneath their baggy clothes.

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heirs was a well-executed but vaguely thought plan. They knew how and when to escape from the camp without being seen and they knew how to evade patrol cars but they had no clue as to what their destination was. Kwezi didn’t care — as long as he was not at this camp or any refugee camp. He did not want to live the rest of his life as an almost— Twar—casualty. The plot to escape was conceived in the garden where Kwezi spent most of his days at the camp tilling the ground and watering spinach. He observed as the soldiers lazed around all day eating groundnuts and passing around lame jokes about men who got caught with other men’s wives and hid under bed- mattresses. “Melvin, I am getting out of here first chance I get”, Kwezi told his new best friend who looked at him in shock and disbelief. Melvin made an attempt to change Kwezi’s mind saying they were still unfamiliar with the country and the environment therefore they should wait it out and plan their escape properly. After some time he realized that it was impossible to try and change his friend’s mind so he got into the bandwagon and 174 biklmnpqrcgi helped put the plan into action. Two young soldiers stood guard that night at the camp entrance as usual. They were smoking cigarettes and talking about the hot female soldiers they met at their training exercises in some place called Panda. Kwezi watched the blurry dark red ember of a single cigarette being exchanged between the two with disgust. He could not understand why in hell anyone would load their lungs with poison and the fumes but worse he thought it dumb that two men could share the same poisonous stick. For a week Kwezi had watched the two repeat the same routine over and over again. They smoked nine cigarettes between each one of them and later on during the night when they realized everyone was asleep they dozed off with their rifles right next to them. When he’d established their routine he told Melvin the escape plan. That day they carried out their duties as usual, played with the other kids and smiled at the big people who were always observing them. Kwezi waited for dusk like a bride, he counted each step the night-watch took, observed their every move from the corner of his eye and finally when he’d confirmed that they were asleep, he made a run for it. He ran straight to them as Melvin watched baffled and amazed at the same time. Kwezi grabbed both the guns and tiptoed silently away from them into the darkness behind the tents then signalled Melvin to start running towards the small hole they had made on the fence. It was a cold, cold night, there was a riotous wind outside; the sky was harsh and the darkness severe, the stars twinkled a little less bright behind the constantly racing shades of 175 biklmnpqrcgi migrating grey clouds and worse the two boys were haunted by spiky trees and wandering branches with brutal thorns that grappled and hinged between their tiny hard toes. It was hard to see where they were going or even navigate where they were coming from. Kwezi felt like he had been there before, a déja vu moment he remembered too vividly as he felt the gun weigh him down like a bunch of bricks inside his pants. “You see that?” Kwezi pointed at a crowd of glistening lights ahead and Melvin nods. They slow down and approach the lights in caution, their guns concealed under the oversized jackets they had stolen from the other refugee’s lockers. As they get nearer to the lights they notice the warm smoke that is coming from the exhaust of a huge truck parked on the side of the road. On the side of the truck they can see two words but can only read the first, ‘KWENA’ and the rest of the second word ‘ROC’ is hidden by the shadow of the truck. The engine is still running and as they get closer something startles them — a fat- bellied man stood up a short distance from them half naked and struggled for a bit to pull up his pants over the hanging belly then he spent most of two minutes fighting with his belt to hook it. The two boys could smell the faeces the fat man had just sowed onto the ground which they could not see and as they slowly followed the man back to the truck their eyes were alert and careful not to step on the stools of the truck driver or any branches on the ground that could rattle him and give away their position. They still didn’t know where they were going but somehow they both knew that the truck was their escape plan out of the village. The truck started an hour later. 176 biklmnpqrcgi Ill-natured and always ready for flight, Melvin was getting anxious as dawn approached and the truck was still parked by the side of the road. Kwezi implored Melvin to be patient and explained that the driver was probably taking a nap. “My father told me before he died that this was the easiest way to escape. We were unlucky to be stopped by the rebels but I believe if we are patient enough this truck will get us at least closer to the border of South Africa”. The Truck radio suddenly was turned on, its signal was bad and immediately the driver reduced the volume and started the truck engine. When the car started moving the radio turned back on and a faint kwasa kwasa song that Melvin recognized from the camp radios owned by the soldiers was playing, he smiled a bit remembering the few good memories he had from the camp and feeling sorry for the two young Privates whose guns they had taken. He sincerely hoped they were not going to get into any sort of trouble. “These people steal our music” Kwezi whispers “Huh?” “Kwasa. You hear how they chant in these songs in their language? That’s our music, Kanda Bongo Man” “It’s Africa’s music” “No. Its Congo’s music” The truck encounters a couple of humps on the road and potholes that send them up and down the cold metal of the truck. The ride was more uncomfortable, there were no chairs mounted on the truck like the one that brought them to the camp. They sat across each other on the cold hard metal floor lined with bumps and groves and concrete stones. The two were oblivious to any of it, they did not care about comfort or the 177 biklmnpqrcgi pain their little bodies were being subjected to or the uncertainty of what lay waiting for them ahead. Surprisingly there are no police or security officers patrolling the roads and stopping cars on the road. Except for one road block a few kilometres from the city which was supposedly meant to be a control cordon line for Foot and Mouth Disease but strangely, the two men wearing brown khakhi uniforms just sat on the side of the road, waving and watched the truck pass—by slowly at around 3a.m. “Look Melvin look”, Kwezi whispered pointing at a huge billboard on the side of the road welcoming them to the city of Gaborone. Excitement imploded within their chests. They stood up, their eyes alert and peeping through the holes on the truck body. “It reminds me of the backdrop of Brazzaville. You ever gone to Brazza Melvin?” Melvin shakes his head. “When you arrive into the city there are hundreds of thousands of lined—up billboards just like what you see here, advertising nice cigarettes, nice hotels, nice women with buttocks that look like melons, nice cars and my favourite – America. If I could go anywhere, it’s America.” The truck is now on a freeway and there are bright street lights hurrying back on the opposite direction; the lights are mounted on blue, tall steel poles on a pavement separating the two roads. On some of the blue steel poles there are blue, black and white flags dancing to the wind. “This is where our lives begin. If we can survive Congo then trust me when I say this — we can survive anywhere. Remember as soon as the truck stops we run hard; hard and fast 178 biklmnpqrcgi but make sure the driver does not see us because he might put a one-and-one and figure out where we boarded the truck. By now I believe everyone is looking for us” “I thought we were going to Johannesburg. Mr. Bomboko said there were plenty of mine jobs in South Africa.” “Johannesburg? How are we getting to Johannesburg?” “Easy. How did we get to Gaborone?” “I don’t think we should risk it. I don’t want to go to jail” Melvin had been told by his father about some of his friends who had been caught trying to go illegally into South Africa and had spent many years in jails there because the government couldn’t spare costs to deport them. “We‘ll see. Like I said; if we could survive Congo then we can survive anywhere. Let’s just stick with each other and we’ll be fine” “Hush, the truck just stopped” They peeked through a hole to see why the truck had stopped and saw the driver disembark from his cabin to talk to a petrol station attendant. He gave the young man some cash and inquired on the whereabouts of the bathrooms then hurried away quickly. “This is it, let’s go”. Two petrol attendants and a couple seated in a black Honda Civic looked on curiously at the two boys in oversized jackets climbing out of a truck loaded with furniture and hurrying away quickly without even speaking to the driver. They crossed the road into a clustered neighbourhood opposite the petrol station and quickly they blended into the haphazard community of Old Naledi also known as Zola. 179 biklmnpqrcgi The on—lookers from the Petrol Station quickly forgot about them and they continued to mind their own business. That night was no different from any other, they were uncertain about where they were going to lay their heads that night; dinner was uncertain; survival was uncertain. As soon as the blanket of darkness began to mask the skies the two boys got up from the culvert they had been resting inside, dusted off their jackets and started scouring the surrounding, looking for waste bins in unfenced yards for some scraps of food or anything edible. It was a different setting than what they were used to – but survivable. The people didn’t stop to look at them with suspicious eyes full of contempt, the other kids invited them over to come and kick a sock-ball with them even. To their disbelief and shock Kwezi and Melvin saw many other kids that night in torn T—shirts and battered trousers kicking down dust bins looking for food too. We are right at home, Kwezi thought. When it was time to sleep a dispute ensued between some of the boys over sleeping-space in the culvert close to where Kwezi and Melvin had set—up camp. The culvert was newer than the rest and that is what must have caused the ruckus. The fighting and squabbling made them feel like they belonged. There was no authority here. The two new arrivals sat in their tiny space, cold and nervous hoping the fight wouldn’t spill onto their new—found space. They could not hear most of what was being said but from the physical confrontation and body movements it was clear what the brawl was about.

180 biklmnpqrcgi Life continued on that constant for almost three months with more fights occurring over culvert space territories and food in waste bins belonging to certain street kids who’d lived there for many years. This was not a life either one of them had anticipated. In Congo this kind of life would have seemed glamorous because of the war that was ravaging their livelihoods, it would have been a great improvement because of the circumstance and because other people around them lived exactly like them. Back in Congo their community members were at equilibrium, with two sides to the scale, the rebels and the army on the extreme ends. But here despite the lack of constant threat- of-death, their new habitat was harsher because they could see the difference between them and other people living in the same area. They were seen as outlaws - criminals who vandalized waste-bins at night like savages and animals with no morals. There is also much variety among the street kids in respect to manners, mental condition, and mode of life. Some of the kids live only on the fruit of their labour which include washing cars, cleaning yards and other minor chores and then there were those who stole whatever they could lay their hands on. Property is ill defined among them; if a boy makes a tool the others use it when they please; if he builds a better shelter within the culvert than his neighbours they pull it down. Others, though still in the hunting condition, have well organized sleeping cells. In this condition the smallest kids had little power, but most ensured their property is secured by hiring the bigger boys 181 biklmnpqrcgi who preferred to get paid in tins of glue to sniff or a half- loaf of bread. It was amazing – the fact that you could go to a spaza shop as the locals called them, and request for a ‘half-loaf’ of bread and the shopkeeper would gladly remove half of the slices and give you the other half at half the price of the bread. Amazing! In some of these situations, the older boys became despots who possessed a powerful bodyguard equivalent to a standing army, they ran mob courts with regulations of street etiquette, and a well—ordered system of patronage and surveillance to prevent the rich kids from interfering with their lives. In other scenarios across town the bigger boys merely became instruments in the hands of drug peddlers, and were kept concealed, giving audience from behind society curtain to excite the veneration of the druggies. History has long proved that the desire to obtain food induces any mammal to examine everything of novel appearance which comes within its range of observation. The habit is inherited and becomes an instinct, irrespective of utility. This instinct is curiosity, which in many animals is so urgent a desire that they will encounter danger rather than forego the examination of any object which is new and strange. This propensity was inherited by these street-kids, Bo-Bashi! Kwezi tried his best to avoid any sort of confrontation with the local older boys who stayed in the culverts adjacent to theirs. On numerous occasions two tall boys had tried to provoke him calling him, “mokwerekwere” which he later learnt it was a derogatory term meaning outsider. He ignored them. Melvin wanted to fight them and teach them a lesson but he was 182 biklmnpqrcgi almost half their size. “These small boys don’t know where we’ve been. I can bet none of them could even hold a gun in their scrawny hands. If they want war let’s give it to them Kwezi. We cannot be bullied by a bunch of wimps who think being foreigners means we are weak”, Melvin insisted, with his hand hiding a self—made knife inside his pocket. “Do you want to live the rest of your days behind in the prisons of Botswana, they have the death penalty too here. This is the rest of your life right before your eyes Melvin, you have come too far to let it all down the culvert slime all because of your pride. These fools know no freedom like you and I do, as a matter of fact they have nothing to lose and prison to them would be a great improvement. For us, at least for me, this is just a rite of passage because I don’t plan on spending the rest of my days scraping dirt off of dust bins. I am going to build an empire up in this motherfucker and I refuse to be brought down by a bunch of runaway street kids who don’t know what a real struggle smells like. Don’t tell me about weakness. I got nothing to prove here”. “If they come talking that dung at me again next time I’m going to send one of them to the hospital without an eye. Watch me!” He stood up and got out of the culvert, stood at its entrance and looked into the horizon and saw a dark cloud emerge from the northern skies with so much might, like a vigilante coming to wipe the ragtag and bobtail off the streets. He shivered a little. Went back into the culvert and told Kwezi what he had just seen coming. They both got out and stared at the clouds with fear wearing their hearts. 183 biklmnpqrcgi “We need to go. There is a mall just a few kilometres from here, I’m sure we could find some shelter over there. We cannot stay here” “We just won’t catch a break can we? What God does this? ” Melvin said in resignation. “God... Where? We‘ll be alright. Just put that knife away and stop being so war—hungry”. “War-ready” As they began their migration from Zola to the Bus Rank to look for some shelter from the arriving black clouds and raging winds they noticed a pack of other street kids with their tiny broken suitcases and plastic bags, right behind them. The four older local boys were not amongst the pack that followed and Kwezi felt a sense of relief. He was not ready to engage in another territory battle with those disrespectful mongrels. It started raining just before sunset, a few hours after they had arrived at the bus rank and found a number of spots to hide under. They also discovered a huge room at the bus rank labelled, “WAITING ROOM” at the entrance and there were many people inside looking exhausted, sitting next to huge bags and anxiously looking towards the entrance. There were two bathrooms, one for men and one for women inside the waiting room and as the boys scouted they realized that this was a 24 hour facility; no guards nor any sort of authority to monitor who used it or for what purpose. Jackpot! They slept on the hard chairs that night inside the waiting room. It was a small room lined with padded benches. The clear, strong ancient light of the Kalahari moon poured through a row of windows and fell across a table heaped with torn magazines that formed trapeziums and rectangles on a pebbled gray floor that had broken tiles and a tiny grove at the centre. The room smelled vaguely of wood-smoke and sweat and something else - an ambition of people new to the city with no clue of where they were headed; a hunger in their eyes, as they guarded their bags and their eyes kept darting about. Almost everyone in the room was looking at the entrance eagerly waiting for relatives to come and pick them up. The waiting room would become the gang’s home for almost a year. The water was always cold, the toilets were seldom cleaned and smelled like urine but it was home and it was warm, safer and more importantly sheltered from the abrasiveness of the city’s weather and the gnawing eyes of pity in the eyes of strangers passing by or waiting on the benches of the waiting room hall. Book V

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hen he arrived in Gaborone eleven years ago Shimmy was flat broke, hungry and in despair. His plan was to find a simple job either as a groundsman or a garden- keeper for the rich folk of Gaborone and stay in one of the small villages around the metropolis or Motse-Moshate as they call it down south. W He scavenged his way through the city looking for piece- jobs until he finally resigned to being a street hoarder. He scoured the suburbs for two months, door—to—door and sometimes he waited by the grocery shops with a cardboard written, Gadin“ Boy Aveilable”, hunger scribbled all over his face. On a few occasions he shamefacedly picked up banana peels from dustbins and used his teeth to scrape off the banana residue off the banana peel. He wanted to go back to the village but the thought of becoming a slave to his wife and mother once again deterred him. He lived in an abandoned one room shack in Tlokweng a few kilometres from Gaborone. It was not comfortable or hospitable. It wasn’t homely or welcoming. It was a dungeon with more rats and lizards than a cave itself; a slimy hole within which he curled up like a snake 187 biklmnpqrcgi day—in and day—out only to wake up the following morning to walk for eight kilometres to the nearest mall to scavenge for leftovers in Kentucky Fried Chicken boxes and beg for strangers to give him a job. Eating off of the garbage pails came as a last resort after he had stayed for two days without a gram of food into his stomach. Weak, beaten and dizzy he killed one of the rats that usually came into his shack to bite his toes. He lied there that night next to the rat, starring at it hungrily looking for a single reason why he should not roast it and eat it. He found none. He killed two more rats than night and ate them all. He continued eating from dustbins at the mall for about a year and eventually he became inattentive to the pestering students who jeered him whenever he was busy trying to look for food in the bins and the rats that nibbled at his toes while he slept. He became pervious to the hunger that gnawed at his gut and collapsed it into a deep furrow on his torso only suspended by ribs. He walked the mall cavalierly in torn clothes and a smile on his face like a victor. Life had given him lemons again and again and in the end he tuned his mind to accept the taste of lemons and adapt to their vile, sour taste. The pestering students seemed to no longer notice him either. He’d become part of the mall’s structure, with his own spot, some sort of domain he had established for himself. The mall security guards no longer bothered him while he sat there begging for coins and carrying his trademark misspelt cardboard which he’d changed to: “Hungri Pliz Help. God bles” 188 biklmnpqrcgi Eventually he became the mall’s popular Looney. School kids threw crumbs of bread at him like a pigeon and called him “Radimpanyana” a Tswana name which loosely translates to ‘a man with a huge tummy’ and. This one time he’d wanted to catch one of them by the throat and strangle the lights out of him to teach the rest of them a lesson. In all his life through the struggle to escape from Zimbabwe into Botswana with his mother when he was a child he thought he’d seen and experienced the worst of endeavours. He could not remember the last time his dignity and self—worth were so low. Then out of nowhere his salvation came.

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n a Sabbath when he least expected it - like the proverbial thief, a man came to him. He said he’d always noticed the old scruffy, fat man who begged for coins at the mall. He even knew where he stayed because it was one of the dungeons he used to send his customers to when he first established his brothel. OHe’d observed him for a while, noticing his change of behaviour when he was at the mall and when he was at the bar. He says all this to Shimmy who he is busy chewing on a meaty bone he’d found in a leftover KFC box left on a bench on the main mall. He was clearly not mad, but he pretended to be. He wanted the people who saw him dirtied up all day, every day to at least feel pity for him by making them think he was mentally ill. The stranger had slowly sat next to him casually pretending no to notice him. “I have a job for you”, he told him. At the mention of a job Shimmy was startled and grabbed the tin half—full of five and ten Thebes, then he looks at the stranger inquisitively. “You are much smarter than you let people to believe. The person you pretend to be is not who you really are, is it?” 190 biklmnpqrcgi Shimmy did not answer the stranger’s question as he impatiently fiddled with his fanny pack looking for his money compartment. “The job?” He asks frantically. “What is your real name? Radimpanyana can’t be your real name is it?”. “No it is not as a matter of fact, my name is Shimmy. The job?” he asks again impatiently and agitatedly. Together they stand up and walk towards a black Honda that is parked towards the entrance of the mall complex. Shimmy threw away the cardboard and all the dirty clothes that were wrapped around his body to keep warm. He pats his pants and a cloud of dust tornadoes into his immediate surroundings. The stranger shakes his head and laughs softly as they both get into the car and drive away in haste. That was the last time anyone ever laid eyes on Radimpanyana. For a couple of months a bantam of rumour circulated that he had gone back to the psychiatry hospital in Lobatse. Soon everybody forgot about the man that used to stand at the corner of the Maputo mall begging for coins and magwinya leftovers “This is yours”, the stranger handed a pair of old blue khakhi overalls to Shimmy and walked towards an old office building at the centre of the old Gaborone mall. Shimmy followed him and they passed a couple of offices, most filled with University students holding papers waiting in line to make copies of some documents and some holding out Floppy Disks impatiently. He was ready to start cleaning or doing whatever this man was going to ask him to do. He felt a huge sense of relief 191 biklmnpqrcgi surge through his muscles, like a burden finally lifted off his shoulders. He realized that he did not know his new boss’s name but fear dissuaded him from asking. He did not want to jeopardise his one in a million chances at finally having a job. The man opened the door at the end of the corridor and waited for Shimmy to enter then he closed the door behind him. They climbed the third and fourth stairs in silence. As they drew closer to the roof of the rambling structure, it became oppressively hot in the dark upper galleries. With the heat came a creeping stench that Shimmy knew well, for he had spent the past nine months living in it — a smell of long—dead rats in shadowy corners, of wet rot and creeping wood lice behind the plaster. The smell of age. It was a smell common only behind bars and pit latrines. Up here the boxes were piled helter—skelter in true junk-shop profusion. The man leads Shimmy through a maze of statuary, frame—splintered portraits, pompous gold—plated cupboards, the dismembered skeleton of an ancient tandem bicycle. He led him to the far wall where a stepladder had been set up beneath a trapdoor in the ceiling. A dusty padlock hung from the trap. “My friend this is an empire and I am giving you the keys to it. You are going to ask me why. Let me tell you. I am from the Democratic Republic of Congo. I have seen hell inside and out and I survived it” the man stopped to look at Shimmy. “If I survived that I believe I can survive anything and my friend, I believe I have just taken you from the clutches of Satan himself”, he looks at Shimmy as if waiting for him to nod, but Shimmy just looks at him, a blank stare of anxiety stapled on his face. 192 biklmnpqrcgi He continued, “Like I said I have been watching you. Watching you beg and pretend to be insane just so you could survive. I have been there and I done that. There is a lot of me in you and so my friend I give you the keys to my palace” he says this spreading his arms in messianic fashion. “We both have nothing to lose except this one life we got.” There was a blaze of glory in the man’s eyes as he orientated his new recruit into the conglomerate. He produced a key ring from his jacket pocket, selected a key, and he paused for a minute, his clean-shaven head gleaming faintly in the shadows. “I don’t like that mirror,” he said. “I never did. I’m afraid to look into it. I’m afraid I might look into it one day and see... what I have become.” “You can’t be that bad” Shimmy said. The man begins to speak, stops, and shakes his head, and fumbles, craning his neck to fit the key properly into the lock. “Should be replaced,” he mutters. “It’s —— damn!” The lock sprung suddenly and swung out of the hasp. The man makes a fumbling grab for it and almost fell. Shimmy caught it. The walls are hung — festooned is perhaps a better word - with imitation of BaHerero drapes, anonymous naked women holding haloed cigars while numberless angels flitted in the background, grotesque scrolled menorah, and one monstrous and obscenely dazzling chandelier surmounted by a libertine grinning dryad. The ambience of the hallway resembles a scene in one of the Godfather movies which is one of the man’s all-time favourites as Shimmy would later find out. He opens another 193 biklmnpqrcgi door and inside there is a hall with about six rectangular cubicles, three on his right and three on the left and at the entrance of each cubicle there is a purple lace curtain hanging in metal rails covering the entrance. There is an intrinsic vibrancy in the corridor as they walk past two of the cubicles and Shimmy sees a silhouette of a woman bending over a figure of what seemed like a man lying on his back. “This massage parlour, Shimmy. But more importantly this is a service centre for the many depressed men of this great city of ours. You can understand the risk that come with running this sort of business. I have about fifteen women who work for me and they need protection. This is why you are here”. They stop a few meters before the last cubicle, look at each other and both smile. A man was groaning Shimmy did not need any explanation. They went back, out of the hall and to another office at the far corner of the building where the man grabbed a chair at the end of a medium sized wooden table and pointed at a chair at the other end of the table. Shimmy sits down and they discuss wages and made small talk about Shimmy’s home village. Both men do not want to get involved in each other’s past or delve into cruelties they had witnessed. “In the meantime you can move from that hellhole you stay in and temporarily stay here before we find a better house for you” “House? Err.. ermm... Hellhole? Where? How?” “Like I said Shimmy, I do my groundwork” “I can see that” “And that’s very important in this business. We trade in 194 biklmnpqrcgi personalities. I have big plans for you my friend; soon you will be my human resource manager” “Human resos—what?” “You will be in charge of recruitment. It’s your first day, let’s get you settled in and not overwhelm you with the unnecessary canvas of the business” “I really have nothing to collect at the ‘hellhole’---” he uses air brackets. “---where did you say I could sleep tonight?” “The second cabin on your right. There is mattress in there”. “Thank you boss, thank you. I really don’t know whether this is real or not. I m just hoping it is not all up in my imagination. You pretend to be insane long enough eventually your brain believes it and you become—” he whistles using his hand to illustrate a defunct brain, “---for real” The orientation lasted only an hour then the man left Shimmy with one of the man who was introduced to as his co— worker. “You boys will be digging and burying a lot of dirt together. Get acquainted” the man said as he exited. “Kingdom” “Shimmy” The introductions were brief. Kingdom took Shimmy through the organization’s work. Their job was to monitor the business – a brothel - and ensure that everyone paid up and to rough any cheap horny bastard who figured they could come get laid and not pay the girls. “Your boss” “What about him?” 195 biklmnpqrcgi “What’s his name?” “Makhelio. Just Makhelio”

196 biklmnpqrcgi Chapter 23

ix month later Shimmy met the woman who’d later become his wife, Colleen, at a stag party for one of the other two bouncers who worked for Makhelio. A month into the relationship he impregnated her and decided to marry her but from the beginning the marriage was doomed. At the wedding, a hailstorm blew away the tent and the plastic chairs. Guests complained Sof food-poisoning the day after the wedding and none of their relatives attended the matrimony. There were many secrets, tradition was skipped and none of their family members had been consulted. The few friends who were involved in the wedding arrangements did so reluctantly. It was no ordinary love story if it could be termed such. It was more, a living arrangement between two friends who had sex, got pregnant and wanted to do right by their child. He did not know any of her family members or even where she came from. He knew the name of the small village from which she originated but he couldn’t even point it out on the map if his life depended on it. None of that bothered him anyway. She didn’t 197 biklmnpqrcgi know where he came from. Shimmy was obedient to his new master and was glad to have been saved from his other master whom he never wanted to return to. His experience with life of poverty made him a dedicated employee and very loyal to his boss. Soon he was allowed to sit at the table on Fridays at The Black Marina Hotel while the other guys he found on the job stood on the streets guarding the working girls. It was through this gathering that he had been introduced to his wife even though he approached her formally at a stag party. His first mistake was to fall in love with a woman he met when he was drunk out of his ass and the second was to marry her before he could even get to know her. His life got twisted into a coil of secrets and eventually the fighting between him and his bride happened every day. Colleen was recklessly flirtatious and it drove him bad- shit-crazy. Shimmy’s wife was a hot rod, not beautiful but intriguing all the same. She had on more decorations that a 21st birthday cake and she wore them all the time. Her Ethiopian hairpiece was the envy of many women who always stopped her to ask where she got it from. False hair was becoming a hit among women all over the world, from the Eskimos of the Arctic Circle to the village girls of Gaborone. She wore many other decorations, on her neck and wrists, some gold - fake gold - and some silver. It was all cheap but she wore it gracefully, her light skin blended well with the glistening crystals of rubies lining the fake gold and silver bracelets. She’d started as a hairdresser and was desperately on a thin boundary contemplating to quit altogether before she met 198 biklmnpqrcgi Shimmy. After they got married Shimmy channelled some of his savings into her business plan and helped her start a salon at the main mall. An enterprise which soared beyond what they could have both imagined. She made more money than Shimmy made in three months working for Makhelio and things became a whole lot uncomfortable at home; money was used to control certain facets of the household. Shimmy had hoped to tame her eventually but later he learnt that it was impossible. Shimmy made the third mistake of expecting his wife to be a trophy he could keep concealed at home and flaunt to his boys on weekends. They had their second child on the second year of their marriage hoping to ease the tension off their marriage but it only frayed them far apart when the small boy suffered an asthma attack on eighteenth moth birthday. Shimmy’s intolerance for his wife soared. He blamed her for the death of their son and began sleeping with some of the girls he was tasked to recruit into the brothel and eventually started falling in love with some of them and taking them to secret vacations in South Africa and buying them presents. He thought his wife would never find out but she did because some of the guys who sat at the table with Shimmy on Fridays sharing quarts of beer with him were very much interested in sleeping with his wife so they gave her all the information about the nasty things her husband got up to when he disappeared on weekends to the ‘cattle post’. In an attempt at revenge she slept with some of the guys but Shimmy was too busy to even notice. This hurt her deeply. The rhythm of the weekend, with its birth, its planned levities and its announced end, followed the rhythm of life and 199 biklmnpqrcgi was a substitute for it. Shimmy was never home on weekends. He had a mythical farm which his wife had never been to. So he would disappear for days and his wife eventually felt no bother. On weekdays the lounge of the The Black Marina hotel was full of jollity, with large comfortable men sitting in twos; the bar would be packed with talkative intellectuals full of witty insurgencies. Then on a weekend the hotel was suddenly full of dinner jackets and large hats, golf T—shirts and girls in the shortest mini—skirts in AFrica. Recreation carries with it a sense of necessity and purpose. However pleasurable this antidote to work is seen by some as a form of active employment, engaged in with definite ends in mind — to soothe the spirit or the body or both. Connotative in this idea of renewal — usually organized renewal — is the notion that recreation is a consequence of work and a preparation for more of it. Leisure is self—contained. In Latin licere which means “to be permitted” suggests that leisure is about freedom. But freedom of/from what? To Shimmy leisure was above everything else an opportunity to escape the hell he called home and a chance to do nothing but have senseless sex with strangers. Each weekend became an occasion for reflection and contemplation, a chance to look inward rather than outward. On the first anniversary of his son’s death he entered a bar, it was Friday night and the stars were all out. The girls in miniskirts were all out. He intended to blow his wallet to the shits.

200 biklmnpqrcgi “Good evening Gents” “Shimmmmmy”, one of his friends responded, stretching Shimmy’s name in a faked hoarse voice. ”Hello”, the girl under Shimmy’s arm addressed everyone at the table almost bending down her other knee and her hands put together in gesture of respect. “Talk of politeness. I like her, what’s your name beautiful? I’m Makhelias but my friends call me Makhelio--” he stands up and kisses her hand the way they do it in the movies. “--- you know, humanity is perishing. The sacred sphere of women is diminishing, look at how many of my sisters are prostitutes - how many from necessity, God only knows” Makhelio is bold, imperial almost and tall. He has not the least patience with exquisite dandy and the fashionable flirt attempted at defining new acquaintances. He is about the money. It’s all about the money – you get the money and the power comes running like a bitch and VW Polo. He admitted to having neither time nor patience for a set of croakers beat around the bush when it came to women instead of getting to the point. No one knows exactly where this man is from; he barely speaks of it. But one thing is for certain, he is not from around these parts. He speaks crooked English and has this funny Tswana accent like he had picked it up only a few years ago. His Black Honda is always pummelling with loud Kwasa Kwasa music no one understands and the way he eats is absurd as hell. They somersaulted in a concoction of topics ranging from women, money, cars, politics to prostitution, poverty and the recession. The girl Shimmy had brought to the table said her 201 biklmnpqrcgi name was Mellitta right after Makhelio went onto a spat talking about women, manners, empowerment and his entitlement. After four full glasses of some wine whose name she couldn’t remember she became an instant extrovert. She was a starlet. Shimmy watched her flirt with his boss in amazement. With annoyance and pretension she throws a question at Makhelio who is busy fingering another girl at the far end of the table “What has Tracy got? And how can I get it?. I mean clearly I’m younger, prettier and I just don’t get why all men seem to be looking at her” The table broke off into an eruption of laughter. “Well for one baby-girl, I’m older, maybe not prettier but I’m sexy-as-hell and experienced than your infant ass”, again the laughter thundered through the hotel bar causing everyone to turn to their table. “Ladies ladies relax. Ha ha ha, listen Mel, you see here is the thing, and the answer to your question lies in Tracy’s attitude towards herself. Along with her very evident feminine charms goes a genuine delight in being sexually attractive. An attitude that makes attractiveness seem as natural as sunlight”, Makhelio explains. “No amount of connections and calculated exploitation of beauty could achieve the same effect. To all these men Tracy is a symbol in a very different way from you sweet-cheeks.” Makhelio looks around the table at all the drunken men and women as they listen to him like a demigod. “Tell them rudo gwangu”, Tracy retorted blushing, kissed him on the lips and sipped her wine. 202 biklmnpqrcgi Shimmy was bored. He hated these deep conversations and he could see how deeply impressed the new girl was by Makhelio’s supposed intellect and brazen demeanour towards females. That is truly some fucked up shit – women all across the globe prefer men who treat them like dirt compared to the good guys who treat them like queens. Ain’t that some shit. Twice he had lost his girl to this man only to be rewarded later with worn out street prostitutes who could barely speak Setswana. Damn Zimbabweans. He hated them. Of all the women he bought and recruited, he figured Zimbabweans were the worst kind of prostitutes. Mostly they refused to do oral sex and their houses smelled like filth. Mellita had moved from the chair next to him to get closer to Makhelio. She was looking right into his eyes with so much intensity. He explained to her how the female interest physical love becomes respectable and proper, as if no one had ever thought it vulgar and immodest in a good woman. The nice girl as coquette or flirt is archaic and coy. Men love bad girls he says. Bad girls who have no business going to church; girls who can suck a dick and still grill a fish he explained. It was almost midnight and the bar was hinting closing time. The Dj was playing some boring music as if to chase the customers away. Most of Shimmy’s friends had left with their women and it was just him, Makhelio, Tracy, Mellitta, Kingdom, Gadzani and some other weird guy who seemed to be guarding Makhelio. He yawned, stood up and looked at Mellitta, signalling that they should leave and she remained seated defiantly. 203 biklmnpqrcgi He grabs his can of Ohlssons Lager, gulps and walks towards the door. Down, down, down sank the moon, and its blunt rays shot slantwise through the trees into the bar lobby. More prostitutes came into the bar and their friends ran out and greeted them as if they hadn’t seen each other for years, murmuring to them in a kind of baby language, calling them by their names of love, shaking their right hands, caressing their faces, patting them upon their breasts, embracing them in all even with the lips — for the kiss has no sacred among the people of the night. And so they toyed, babbled and laughed with one another till the moon turned red down in the horizon, and the air turned dusky, and the giant trees cast deep shadows across the street. Strange perfumes arose from the gang; fireflies sparkled outside the hotel windows; grey crickets came forth from the mini forest across the road, and flew by screaming round intending to enter the lamp posts scattered all over the place and some falling into the swimming pool adjacent to the bar. Shimmy exited the hotel, stood outside for a while and realized he had nowhere to go. He returned to the table. “I was taking my clothes off the washing line when I saw it. A perfect circle. What does it mean. There was a small string coming off the circle on the right. And a star on the right as well. I don’t know why but it made me excited”, Mellita was bubbling as she spoke; shifting her shoulders and darting her eyes about. “Yea I saw it too. I was outside smoking a joint. There wasn’t a cloud in sight, only clear heaven and almost full moon surrounded by a perfect circle. I ‘d seen this before, but this was the most intense ring I ever saw, the distance between the moon and the ring seemed vast, I couldn’t capture the entire view in 204 biklmnpqrcgi my camera” “Cheap—ass VGA camera, ha ha ha” “I read that, that sort of ring means rain or bad weather. Maybe we have another El Nino coming” “I doubt its anything special, it’s probably just the moonlight reflecting off the fog, but there was a perfect circle surrounding the moon with the moon directly in the middle. I’ve never seen anything like it” “That rare sighting means that anyone who saw it will have good luck’’ “Lies!. It’s a symbol that a great king is about to die” “God spare Mandela.” “Gentlemen... gentlemen easy; that was a halo around the moon. It is caused by ice crystals on the upper atmosphere. When the light from the moon shines through them it is diffused by the ice crystals causing the halo effect. This is the same condition that causes sundogs, the small strip of rainbow colours left and right of the sun and with opposing colour bands. Because the sunlight is much stronger and brighter you get the rainbow strips as the light is bent” one of the young prostitutes explains. “Ooooh we have an Einstein over here. What are you? An astronaut?” Makhelio laughs ”My mother actually told me that” Shimmy finally speaks ”She is a very smart woman that mother of yours.” “But rumour has it that this idiot is not taking care of her. Instead he is running around with the ratchets of this city.” Kingdom retorted angrily. “Learn to shut up if you don’t know the full facts” Shimmy stands up and spills a beer on the table 205 biklmnpqrcgi “Well do tell us then. I just don’t see any reason why I would abandon someone who went to hell and back for me. Why?” Kingdom stands up and faces Shimmy down. Shimmy smacks the plastic chair with the inside of his head and hurries away irritated. To his friends outside the brothel organization, he was a black sheep. None of them knew what he did for a living. To some he was a banker, or a merchant, a manufacturer, and what not. A big, loud man, with a stare, and a metallic laugh - a man made out of a coarse material, which seemed to have been stretched to make so much of him; a man with a great puffed head and forehead, swelled veins in his temples, and such a strained skin to his face that it seemed to hold his eyes open, and lift his eyebrows up; a man with a pervading appearance on him of being inflated like a balloon, and ready to start. He was burly but not intimidating as he should have been; a man who could never sufficiently vaunt himself a self— made man; a man who was always proclaiming, through that brassy speaking-trumpet of a voice of his, old ignorance and his old poverty; a man who was the Bully of humility. Ten or twelve years older than his eminently practical boss, he had not much hair left on his head. One might have fancied he had talked it off; and that what was left, all standing up in disorder, was in that condition from being constantly blown about by his windy boastfulness. The rumour that he was not taking care of his mother and two sons was beginning to spread like a virus in the Capital. He tried to make inquiries once as to who had started the mill but his attempts hit a snag. It was now more than six years since 206 biklmnpqrcgi he had been to the village. It was bruited that his village wife had passed away a year after he left. That witch, he thought to himself. He thought of his two boys once in a while and guilt consumed him when he imagined the life they must be living. It had become more difficult to help them financially since he got married again. Going to the village was not an option for him because he feared that ‘witch of his mother’ would jinx him again to keep him locked under her spell so he could slave for her for the rest of his days.

* * *

Cars honked behind him and startled him from the dark cave his mind had wandered into. He sped away leaving an angry mob of cars behind. He turned left at the next traffic lights and drove towards the University’s main entrance and decelerated as he entered through the main gate. A predator. Calculating, calm and manipulative. Dangerous on his element, he already had six girls from the University working for Shimmy at the brothel to pay their debt. He sees a girl walking on the side of the road and he slows down “Hey beautiful, where do I find Block 244” “Ummm this is Block 243, so.... That means Block 244 is either the next one or it is that one I’m facing”, she points at a dark vintage purple building with blinking lights like those in American horror movies. “That dark cave---?” she laughs softly “---that does not seem habitable sweetheart” “Well you can go check, the Block numbers are boldly written in front of the building” “Well, thank you. You have pretty eyes. Where are you from wrapped in a towel at this hour?” “I went to bath upstairs, the water is cold on the ground floor where my room is and thanks for the complement”, she said almost blushing, eager to leave. The stranger had killed his car engine in the middle of the road and was slowly fiddling with his car keys while dismissively typing a text on his big Nokia. As she was about to leave she felt his gaze following her and she almost tripped. She ducked behind the corner of the first hallway corridor and disappeared. Seven minutes later the light-skin girl who wasn’t on a towel anymore emerged from the light. She looked different from all the other girls he’d ever seen. Her Ethiopian weave shining against the backdrop of the lamp posts, her blue silky dress reflecting the distant embers of the misty street lights. She wore a bunch of thin silver bracelets that jingled as she approached his vehicle. He waves and approaches her with a smile. “Going somewhere?” “Not really. I’m going to watch a movie at my friend Rodger’s room”, she smiled, feeling awkward as she passed the car. She wanted to ask him why he was still here and not at Block 244. She turned back and saw him standing there watching her walk away. “Rodger? Your boyfriend?” “No, I said friend” “How about a movie at a cinema instead?” “Huh?” She stopped and gave him a contemptuous look. “Aren’t you supposed to be picking up some girl from Block 244?. You get stood up and now you want pick up just about any girl. I’m not a whore Mr. You should be ashamed of yourself” “Hold up, hold up... who said anything about being stood up. I came here to drop off some toiletry for my niece. I wasn’t picking anybody up” “Oh...” she’d stopped entirely now and was facing Shimmy. “I’m sorry”, Shimmy hoped the ground felt watery as embarrassment crept up her knees. “I just thought...” ”Don’t worry about it. So... How about a movie at a cinema instead of that tiny laptop screen?” “Well... I don’t know you and who said anything about watching the movie on a laptop. My friend has a large LCD monitor” “Nobody knows anyone until they do love. Plus you owe me an apology’’ “That sounds like blackmail. But yeah... true. Okay then can I bring my friend? I wouldn’t feel alright if I abandoned him, we had made plans and its Friday” ”Sure” She walked away towards a building marked Block 479. He guessed it was the boys Dormitory from the silhouettes showing through the passageway windows of the building. The girl he had come to see was ignoring his calls. He dialled her number again. “Nina answer the damn phone”, he whispered desperately. He and Nina had an arrangement, he picked her up on certain days, they had wild unrestrained sex and he would give her what they called “girlfriend allowance” and sometimes he took her to fancy restaurants in Rustenburg, South Africa. Nina was his first recruit but she was still not fully committed to the enterprise hence Makhelio insisted that Shimmy follow her up to make sure she was fully enrolled and always available for customers who requested for her. Each girl had her own profile that was only shown to vetted clients and the University girls were getting more popular and being requested more often than the older foreigners and locals who were recruited from the streets. At home his disappearance on Fridays over the years had become a ritual for his marriage. He told his wife every weekend that he was going to the cattle post and she never complained. She knew he was lying but she never felt bothered by it because she had arrangements of her own. Nina was not his girlfriend however. He was supposed to be recruiting her to become a prostitute. That was his job, one which he kept a secret from his wife whom he hated with a passion. Shimmy had never bothered to tell her that he was married to another woman at the village and she was the reason he left to come and look for a job in the city. The hatred he carried for his village wife was so wretched that he had convinced himself over the years since he left the village that she was his demon and all those who stood by her while she verbally abused him were nothing less – including his mother. Shimmy’s new marriage had turned out to be worse. The love—hate relationship between him and Colleen started off when they were drunk so the only time that they really tolerated each other was when they were both drunk. Theirs became a civil arrangement where they lived under one roof but never had any physical contact. They shared a bed but slept facing opposite sides. Only spoke to each other once or twice every day and eventually each one was glad to be in the absence of the other.

* * *

The girl came back a few minutes later accompanied by a skinny looking boy who looked around suspiciously around before he opened the silver tinted car door. He reluctantly got into the backseat of the car while his girlfriend sat in front with the driver. There was an awkward silence as they drove towards the main gate slowly. There were drunken students springing from pavements and corridors; crossing the University roads, so Shimmy had to drive cautiously lest he hit one of them and got himself into trouble. The security guards at the entrance lowered the barricade as he approached the entrance so he stopped and waited for the security guard to come to him. “Good evening Sir, can you open your boot please” “What’s the problem officer?” “Just a standard check” “Check for what exactly”, Shimmy asked casually. “There has been a series of thefts in the University plus we have illegal loan sharks who come into the University and confiscate students items and sometimes University items so please open the boot” “Alright, go ahead”, he gave the security guard the key and sat there with a proud smirk on his face as the security guard went back to search the boot. Shimmy knew how difficult it was to open the boot with the key and he watched on his rear-view mirror as the officer fiddled with the key desperately trying to open it. Cars were lining up by the numbers behind and a few were even beginning to honk at the security guard for delaying them. “Here, here, get out of here”, the security guard handed Shimmy the key annoyed and apologized to some really agitated lectures who were now hurling insults at him for delaying them. “Music please”, the boy at the back of the car pleaded. “Oh sorry, my bad, take the remote out of the cabin— hole over there and choose the playlist’’, Shimmy told the girl whose name he still didn’t know. She was tall, fair-skin and averagely beautiful in street terms and he knew she wouldn’t be his best recruit but not the worst either. The malnourished boy at the backseat wasn’t going to be a problem. As soon as they arrived at the cinema, Shimmy gave him P180 to go and buy the tickets and asked the girl to come with him to buy refreshments. “I still haven’t gotten your name”, he looked at her interrogatively “No, I didn’t give it” “Ha! Touché. I’m Simisani but my friends call me Shimmy” She smiled at his charm and looked at the menu momentarily. “What’s your budget?” “Sorry?” “Refreshments. What’s your budget?” “Just take whatever you want” “Really? I want this entire section of the kiosk”, she used her hands to indicate a section of the tiny kiosk containing, all sorts of snacks and smiled shyly at Shimmy who got the joke and chuckled quietly. “Guys lets go, the movie starts in two minutes” “Don’t worry, the first five minutes they will be showing movie trailers anyway. Go ahead we’ll find you in there”, Shimmy replied the boy dismissively not realizing the look of shock in the girl’s eyes. The boy walked away and disappeared behind a door labelled “CINE 1”. “That was rude”, the girl punched him on the arm. I... I didn’t mean to be rude. I m sorry but I bet he understood” “No, he didn’t. He is my friend and he is very sensitive” “So, he is like a ‘friend, friend’ or potential boyfriend?” “If he was a potential boyfriend I wouldn’t have brought him to watch a movie with a stranger I just met would I?” “Aah you never know these things” “He is gay and things have been a bit rough for him since he came out, that’s why I couldn’t just ditch him” “Gay as in boy—who—does—boys—type?” “Yes” “Oh, Fuck, so he had his filthy ass in my car seat? Fuck” “Wait what?” “No seriously, you had a moffie sitting in my car?” “Excuse me?” “Look, I don’t know what gets this generation going or what grinds your gears but I seriously have issues with any man who sees it normal to let another man enter him. What the fuck is that?” “I guess we should leave then” “No I didn’t say that, please understand that I m from an age that had none of this bullshit” “Bullshit? Come—on now, homosexuality has been a part of our society for centuries. It’s even cited in the Bible itself” “Well the Bible is a white—man’s manual, it’s him who brought all this shit to Africa anyway. But look I’m sorry if you think I insulted your friend but please don’t leave’’ “Ok but be polite, or else we are out of here. Let’s go, the movie has probably started.” They went towards “CINE 1” and the security guards handed them their receipts which had been left by the gay boy for them. It was dark inside and they could barely see their seat numbers on the chairs. Not many people were in the cinema so it was easy to spot him and they quietly went and sat beside him, Shimmy odiously avoiding any contact with the boy. The girl sat between them and held a large box of popcorn which she had intended to share with the two but Shimmy decided he wasn’t going to put his hand into the popcorn box. “My name is Katjivisa but my friends all me Katji”.

* * * The new, girl Katji was proving to be an easier target than Nina. After the movie last Friday they went back to the University to drop off her boyfriend who seemed like someone who needed to be on suicidal watch. Shimmy took that chance and enticed the girl with a small screen mounted on his car. They watched another movie on the car-screen after the young boy left the two of them in the car covetously and distrustfully. They talked about this and that, everything and nothing and he told her some stories about himself and a few concocted lies and sob stories he had synthesized over the past few months as he embarked into the recruitment process of luring her and many of other young girls into Makhelio’s enterprise. He could sense Katji’s ambition, her thirst for a faster life, for the thrills life had to offer and he was willing and ready to show her the direction to all that which she wanted. That Friday, like a gentleman he did not make any attempt to fondle her, kiss her or even insinuate any sexual tension. They just talked and talked through the night until when he took her to her room, gave her a hug and thanked her for a beautiful night. As he drove back to the office, she sent a text,

I feel like you understand me more than anyone has ever understood me. Thank you for a great night Shimm. XoXo

What is this Xoxo? He pondered. He didn’t want to embarrass himself so instead he replied:

No, thank you Katji. The things I told you I never thought I could tell them to anybody. Ever!. We should do this again. Thank you. The texting became ceaseless over the next two weeks

Shimmy: I miss you babe. Wish I was there with you Katji: What would you do Shimmy: I’d kiss you’d own there to the base of your throat and take the tip of my tongue to kiss your moist lips while running my hand up the middle of your back to unhook your bra Katji: Haha you are such an idiot Shimmy: Why I thought you guys love this staff Katji: “Seriously?, sexting is way overrated by the media and not all people are slim balls who automatically forward dirty text messages to other people. Sexting is a way for teens to calm their hormones and relax without actually having sex. It is similar to watching porn just on a more personal level’’ Shimmy: Ha ha ha I get it. Look I need to go Katji: Wait, I need a favour Shimmy Shimmy: What is it? Katji: The other day you mentioned that you operate a cash loan business. I need a loan please. I’ll pay back as soon as I get my allowance Shimmy: Sure, no problem. But you have to understand that the business is not mine and ifI do lend you money you have to honour the terms and conditions of the loan’ Katji: Don’t worry Shimmy, I won’t get you into any trouble. I just need P3660 Shimmy: Isn’t your allowance only about P1400? Katji: P1420. *smiley face*. Don’t worry about it; I’m expecting money from my mom to top up Shimmy: Alright then. See you later’ Katji: Thank you, Thank you Thank you. xoxo The hook is in! That was the first move and Shimmy knew she was in deep, she just didn’t know it yet. He drafted a contract for her with a hidden 20% interest clause which most girls didn’t even bother to read until the day they were supposed to pay up. They met later that afternoon in his car in a parking lot behind her dormitory and he gave her the money and had her sign two copies of the payment loan agreement. “First let me tell you the oddest thing about this whole affair. I call it an affair because it is one. But do you know, for the whole three weeks since we first saw each other, we haven’t exchanged a single kiss?” “You never tried to get one”, she replied shyly “And the funny thing about it all is that we have met every day since our first date” “Date? You call that a date?. Oldass people...’’, she shook her head and chuckled. “I’m not old. I’m ripe”, he replied playfully. “We have though... Met every day since our first date I mean” “So you agree it was a date?” “Awkward as it is I guess it was” “My boss would kill me if he knew I was interested in you. He is a very slick animal that one. You never see him till he decides to show himself. Then he just pops up — click!. Like that! — in a coffee bar or a cinema, or out from behind a tree in the Park. Once I turned round and there he was right behind me at Spar and one of the guys was making a move on the customers – he broke the poor guy’s arm. He broke one of his old bodyguards’ knees a month ago” “Bodyguards? Who the hell is your boss? Jeeeez”, she exclaimed. “A very dangerous man” “But we knew each other before I borrowed the money. I can return it and borrow somewhere else?” “No, no... we’ll be careful” “You sure” “I suppose I am. See at the start I ought to have been scared, but I never was. Isn’t that odd? All I knew was here was someone who I really enjoyed being and I hope me lending you money doesn’t get you or me in wrong books with my boss”. “I don’t get why you are so scared of him you know. Can’t wait to meet this lion you are so afraid of” “No you don’t want to do that, I have finally met someone who gets pleasure out of just being in my company”. She could see the concern in his eyes and she wondered who is this guy who a grown—ass man like Shimmy could be so afraid of. “This boss of yours must be the loneliest man in town, I tell you.” “He is vested too damn much in his business. Like I told you he saved me from the grasp of insanity so no matter how crazy his rules are, I have to be loyal to him. I hope you understand” “I do love’’ “And that means you paying this loan at the specified time or else I won’t be able to help you when he wants his money back” “You worry too much, come here”, she grabbed Shimmy by the collar and kissed him passionately, slowly unzipping his pants; she slid her cold hand into his trouser moved the boxer shorts to the side and started rubbing on his penis while he moaned onto her mouth. They had unprotected sex in the car that night, taking advantage of the darkness outside and the milky dewy night outside the car that made the windows translucent. It was mediocre. Uncomfortable. But the thrill of the risk that aluminized the dirty deed they were doing made the sex all worth it. In less than seven minutes they were done and they sat in the backseat of the car holding each other tight, none saying a word. Just breathing and listening to each other’s breath. Chapter 24

he left the car around 2am and went to her room. Shimmy drove away smiling and feeling guilty all the same. He truly hoped that Makhelio would never find out. The following week Katji borrowed some more money from Shimmy and obviously he was obliged to inform Makhelio on his progress and he did. “She does know she has to pay all of it before the end of Sthe month right?” “I told her” “What’s the total?’’ “P9600” “No mistakes this time. I don’t want another Nina case” “No, no mistakes. I promise” “Good. I gotta go, I’m unveiling a tombstone for a family member at the Tsholofelo graveyard” “Family? I thought you had no family in Botswana... Or anywhere else.” Shimmy asked Makhelio following him as he walked towards the building exit door. “I do, I did. His name was Melvin. We came here together, escaped the refugee camp I told you about together and we started building this together” 220 biklmnpqrcgi “So... What happened to him?” “Stabbed. Right here in Broadhurst. We were living in the streets once, me and him and many other boys. We came up with a plan to swindle the rich men of this city, we controlled an entire block of street girls who lived amongst us and convinced them to sell themselves to some rich horny folks who we often saw prying in our neighbourhood hungrily looking at them. We did a scam, brilliant scam at first. We’d film the married men and other prominent guys in the act and then blackmail them to pay or get exposed” “So that’s how the business started?” “Yes and my brother became a casualty. He lies today in a grave marked only by two stones” “You never talk about him” “You never talk about your mother” “Wait? What? What did they tell you?” “It’s none of my business. See you later Shimmy. Tell Tracy to bring that other girl, to the party tomorrow.” “Which girl?” “The Zimbabwean” “Done Sir” Makhelio got into the car and revved the engine loudly as usual leaving the boys who work on the parking lot looking at his car in amazement. Since Melvin was stabbed on that Saturday night trying to defend one of their girls, the boy who was once known as Kwezi died with Melvin; he became Makhelio, hardened, motivated and driven to make the business a success for the sake of his friend’s memory. He hired a few more of the street boys whom he could easily control and in less than a year the business had grown 221 biklmnpqrcgi beyond imagination. They rented a large office, hidden behind a maze of other offices at the centre of the Main Mall. The secret of Kwezi – or Makhelio’s success was his character. He possessed a certain combination of mental and personal attractions, which in every age gives to those who exhibit it a mysterious and almost unbounded ascendency over all within their influence. He was finely formed in person, and very prepossessing in his manners. He was active, athletic, and full of ardour and enthusiasm in all that he did. At the same time, he was calm, collected, and considerate in emergencies requiring caution, and thoughtful and far—seeing in respect to the bearings and consequences of his acts. He formed strong attachments to those who served him well, paid them enough; he was grateful for kindnesses shown to him, considerate in respect to the feelings of all who were connected with him in anyway, faithful to his friends, and generous toward his foes. In fact, this combination of a calm and calculating thoughtfulness, with the ardour and energy which formed the basis of his character, was one great secret of Makhelio’s success. His most precious possession was the connections he had made with the many city businessmen. It had become a tradition that every weekend beginning from Friday all through to Sunday nights, they would gather around a table discussing politics, religion, this and that, nothing and everything. On this Friday, there was a new girl at the table whom Tracy had brought and Makhelio had great interest in. Her name was Leka, tall, dark and somewhat pretty in street standards. 222 biklmnpqrcgi She seemed out of place and a bit too judgemental of the crowd around the table. Tracy had informed him that the girl was Zimbabwean and had no interest in working for him. At first he had taken offence when he was told her exact words and how she had called him and his gang ‘dogs with no kernel’. He had sent his best soldier to go and recruit her and apparently Shimmy failed dismally to charm her like the other young girls he brought to the rooster. Makhelio knew this was his chance to lure her into the dungeon that night. Her price was higher than all the freelance girls and this made her a hot commodity for the customers. He chose a seat right next to her and kept pretending to steal glances at her and making sure she saw him do it. She sat silently, as if calculating her thoughts and revising the faces right before her. Makhelio’s entrepreneurial acumen was stiffened by his ability to do research so he had a mental file on this new girl at the table and he was going to use it as his arsenal. He orchestrated the conversation towards the one topic he knew would stir her into conversation. He asked her where she was from and sooner the conversation was about her country and yet she silently listened to them yap about it. “Afrocentrism is a massive lie. Telling the truth is not racist. Afrocentrists claim that whites are denying their achievements to civilization and even want to take away Great Zimbabwe. Nobody is taking anything away. The masonry style of Great Zimbabwe is Phoenician. If any of their claims had merit as fact I would give them credit where it is due, but they have no merit and are racists”, Makhelio said. “No it is not Afrocentrism nonsense. There is plenty of evidence to suggest the ancient Israelites were a black people, 223 biklmnpqrcgi and no, not all afrocentrism is racist and hateful, although I admit some of it is, but you are painting with a broad brush here. There are many ridiculous ideas brought forth by some Afrocentrists, but to just dismiss them all is also just as foolish”, retorted one of the friends who was said to be a University lecturer with a gambling problem. His name - Gideon. “There are what you would call sub Saharan Africans or blacks in every African country. Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Egypt all have black people living there, who have always been there. In fact it was the Arabs who invaded into Africa from the Arabian Peninsula, mainly during the Islamic conquest of Africa. Libya is one third black population. The original Africans were black. Look at all the Egyptian artefacts; they would make your statement appear asinine”. “So now you backtrack from saying the Egyptians were never black, to saying OK some of them were black. Those are the statements of a bullshitter who is caught in lies and has to tell an element of truth to not look like a complete idiot”. “Enough of your Zionist bullshit’’ ‘‘I think it’s all bullshit if you ask me. Speaking of Zion, there are so many questionable things in that bible of yours. For instance, if Adam and Even were the first people on earth does that mean we are all descendants of incest and apparently they had three sons so who did the sons reproduce with? It’s all a joke to me”. “Satan brought those questions into your head”, one of the girls sitting at the table said. “Makhelio I hear your friend Cee—Pee has a new church now, are you a member?” “I’m no mad man. Most of these worshiped city 224 biklmnpqrcgi celebrities are adherents to a new crazy supremacist theology. Their influence trickles down to all you weak—minded fools and soon you will be cashing at ATM in their church and making them shit—rich while you eat dirt at your own house”. The conversation wasn’t going anywhere near where Makhelio wanted it to go. The Zimbabwean girl was still silent. Sipping on her Hunters dry dryly; looking around the bar for customers. Conversing with drunkards is such work, Makhelio thought. “Who hurt you? ha ha ha. No seriously though, I have never in all the years that I have known you mention God” “What God?” “So you an atheist then”, Maleka asked. Finally. That was the first time she spoke and there was silence at the table as they waited for Makhelio to answer her. “No, not really. I just come from a country torn up by wars most of which are inspired by religion. I believe you come from the same background as I. Napoleon, one of my heroes, one of the greatest warriors of the centuries before ours, believed that religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich but in my opinion, I think religion is the only reason man has had to kill each other in the first place. Religion created the first divisions of poor and rich”, he replied delightfully looking her right in the eyes, his body shifted with the chair and his hands almost on her lap. ‘I have her’, he thought to himself as he watched her hang onto every word that came off his mouth as he whisked through scriptures of the Bible, punching holes on them and proving to them that he had actually read the Bible and the Quran and that 225 biklmnpqrcgi he probably understood it way better than all of them. She was at the tip of his wits and as she nodded he could almost taste her adoration for him. “I never subscribed to any religious faction myself. White people brought this thing to us and that’s how they control our governments without even being part of them. I’m not saying that Jesus was white personally I don’t think he existed so there isn’t even a need to give an ‘I think’ on the matter, but if he were real, and allegorically, yes Jesus would have been of a darker skin colour, but most likely more of an olive tone than the very dark. But to answer your question on whether I’m atheist or not, I’m none.” “It’s either you are a believer or not”, Maleka condescended. “No, not really. Atheism is a religion on itself. Most atheists spend their eternity trying to disprove Christianity. That’s not what I’m doing. I’m simply a none—believer” “Was Christianity not the religion of your fathers wherever it is you come from?” “It wasn’t. White missionaries came with Bibles, a new language, written in the best of calligraphies and to be honest it would have been enticing to anyone. Our fore—fathers lost their religion and imbibed these Christ of yours. Jesus has never walked where I walked, he’s never been to any country in Africa” ’’Egypt?’’ Maleka responds “Egyptians are not Africans honey, we’ve already discussed that” Gideon chirps in. “I think you are getting drunk. Egypt is in Africa isn’t it?” Maleka turns to look at him

226 biklmnpqrcgi “Oh yes it is, but Egyptians were never black. Many of the mummies of Pharaohs are white with DNA linking them to the British Isles even. There were a few who were black, it’s not like there were no blacks at all. But as a whole, the culturally Arabic modern Egyptians are mostly representative of the ancient Egyptians. Coptic Egyptians claim direct descent from ancient Egyptians and they’re probably right” Makhelio grabs back her attention “Man, you read too much”, Gideon said drunkenly, and everyone laughs out loudly except Maleka who quietly stands up, takes her purse and walks to the bathroom. Makhelio had a feeling she wasn’t coming back and he cussed her in his mind. “Gentlemen? Where the hell is Shimmy?”, Silence reigned at the table as each one of them waited for someone to come—up with Shimmy’s whereabouts. Nobody knew. “Mmmhm”, Makhelio sighed quietly, then as if the power button pressed back on the table was alive again.

* * *

Across town, Shimmy was in a tiny single bed at the University, sleeping next to a girl young enough to be his daughter. His fat belly collapsed on the small planks, their eyes locked on each other. The argument they were having was like timber in between them. “You have to get out of town for a while” “I can’t. This is my final semester and I can’t afford to miss any classes. I really can’t believe you set me up for a trap like this”

227 biklmnpqrcgi “I did not. You told me you would be able to pay and I believed you” “The contract...? Did you know about the conditions in it should I fail to pay up?” “I did yes” “And I just had sex with you dammit. You are a Pig Shimmy. I lost my virginity to you Shimmy, how could you do this to me? How can you even suggest that I pay by prostituting myself? Are you insane? You swine!” She sobbed on his chest and he just lay there next to her, afraid to even lay a hand on her shoulder. After sobbing for almost half an hour she stopped and got up, walked to her study table and poured herself a glass of water in a jug from a tiny fridge under the table. “Somebody Help!” she screamed at the top of her lungs and startled him. “What the hell are you doing?” he rose from the bed, grabbed his shirt and stumbled as he tried to jump into his trousers. “Rapist! Somebody help me!” she screamed again and Shimmy jumped up from the bed where he’d sat to try to squeeze into the trouser. He is nut-naked, his penis shrivelled up by the cold. She almost laughed looking at it all shrank up almost engulfed by his belly. “What the fuck Katji? What the...” he grabbed her as she continued to scream and he held her mouth to stop her from screaming. “You just made the worst mistake of your life bitch. You just had to open your mouth and make such a dumbass decision. I really was beginning to like you” 228 biklmnpqrcgi He pushed her down onto the bed and covered her head with a pillow. Katji kicked and struggled with him but he was too heavy for her. He sat on her and held her down tighter with the pillow until she was silent. Shimmy walked out of the room ten minutes later hiding his face to make sure no one saw him. It was around 8 p.m. and Ame had told him that her roommate would be back from the Library around midnight. Luckily the roommate had never seen him. He drove slowly through the University towards the entrance to avoid calling any attention to himself. He listened to the radio all night that night for any news on the girl. The news broke out the next day on the 6 a.m. news bulletin. They said that a girl had been found at the University on the wee hours of the morning, asphyxiated with a pillow and there were still no suspects. There were allegations that it was a passion killing therefore the police were looking for any ex- boyfriends who might have been disgruntled. The 12 p.m. news said that a boy who was friends with the girl had reported that she was seeing a middle aged man who drove a charcoal black Mazda. Shimmy shivered when he heard the news. He drove straight home and parked his car at the back of the house and covered it with a large silver weather protector. That whole afternoon he ran through his options: Run back to the village – no one would ever know it was him; Ditch the car and hope the gay boy had no clear description of him; or kill the gay boy. When his wife asked why the car was covered he told her that the fan—belt was malfunctioning so he was waiting for parts to be imported from India. She didn’t think much into it so 229 biklmnpqrcgi she just shrugged him off. Makhelio came by the house on a Wednesday and found Shimmy basking in the sunlight, his big belly hanging out of his small T-shirt. “Get in the car”, a deep voice startled him. “Oh, boss, hello. What a pleasure-surprise”. Shimmy panicked seeing his boss parked right in front of his gate for the very first time. “I won’t ask again. Get in the car” “OK, OK, let me take some proper shoes”, he kicked off his muddy sandals and grabbed a pair of Adidas sneakers on the porch, went to the car and got into the backseat. “I know what you did” “Huh?” “You figure me a fool huh?” Makhelio drove silently to the office while Shimmy fidgeted around wondering how in the hell the boss-man had found out. They got to the office and Makhelio commanded Shimmy to get out of the car. “Let’s go inside. We need to talk’’ As soon as Shimmy entered the building he felt a hard, large object land on his lower back and he hit the ground like a bag of onions. Three goons beat the lights out of him while his boss watched on. He cried and pleaded for mercy but his plea fell on deaf ears. They beat him for about four hours before they let him go around 10 p.m. “Never come back here”. Makhelio told him, kicking him on the nuts. “If I ever see you again I’m going to kill you. Bet on that” Chapter 25

fter months of sobbing and contemplating to quit and go back to Zimbabwe, the cancer in her heart began to peel off. For months since the incidence she had carried a malignant mass of contempt with her. No amount of sex or genitals in her mouth could eradicate from Maleka’s heart the deep burning hatred she harboured towards Athis animal that now lied helpless in front of her. Rage cannot be hidden, it can only be suppressed and dissembled. This dissembling deludes the thoughtlessness and strengthens rage and adds, to rage. In contrast to revenge, which is the natural, automatic reaction to transgression and which, because of the irreversibility of the action process can be expected and even calculated, Maleka wanted to punish Shimmy for herself and the rest of the girls he had violated. She relished at the thought of revenge on her taste buds but understood that revenge is not nourishing. Nevertheless, the beast was banging at her lungs and left her out of breath. She was not ready for what she was about to do. Her anger afforded no explanation, not in the human state; it could be traced back sentimentally to its remote and secret source in the animal kingdom. A seething ill temper rose 231 biklmnpqrcgi with her genetics and it grew out of her calm nature through the association of ideas. At that moment revenge became a virtue, it became equivalent to decoration; nourished by vanity, which proceeded from her childhood love for fairness, and that from the desire to see anyone who crossed her fall the same. Karma took too long to process. As a precaution against the poisonous wind and the sandy air she covered her head with a scarf like Islamic women. The night seemed tangible, yet calm and silent, as if watching her intentions and the scene about to unfold. A bony silhouette kneeling under the luminance of the dim streets light was the only breathing thing in sight. Maleka recognized its slow back and forth movements, Fifi, one of the local girls who had ran away from home a few years ago with dreams of becoming a house wife to some rich married man who had promised her a ring and a wedding with confetti and unicorns. Sigh. The same old dream that had been sold to many girls who ended up on these same street. She checked again to ensure nobody else was in sight. Relief sedating the surging adrenaline she approached Shimmy, who still did not recognize her and offered to help him stand up which he obligingly did half conscious. Staggering together like dysfunctional wheels on a go—cart they walked past Fifi who had her mouth filled-in by a silhouette in a suit which held onto her weave, groaning and trying to suppress the noises. A cat jumped out of nowhere and startled them.

232 biklmnpqrcgi “Bitch you bit me!” the silhouette in a suit exclaimed. The dark figure in a suit was jumping up and down and kicking trash cans. Suddenly the night woke up. Dogs started barking, crickets and other nocturnal insects vociferously went into an outburst of protest. Maleka stood there like a statue, feeling like a thief caught red-handed. Suddenly she wasn’t tipsy anymore. Her hands were steady and she was cool. Her cigarette craving was gone. She felt like somebody making funeral arrangements for a murder in writing. Cursing silently under her breath she told Shimmy to keep his groaning down. “I can’t understand people who do this here. I get that I have no right to judge anyone but it’s down—right filthy that these whores see nothing wrong with their customers out here in the open”, she whispered. “Hmm?” Shimmy groaned a little louder “Shut up they will hear us” They started walking again towards the traffic lights far ahead and all the while Shimmy was in protest trying to ask where she was taking him. It was dark and Shimmy couldn’t see where he was but he knew it was nowhere near home. “I’m taking you to my house baby, you have to cleanup. I don’t know what you ran up into but it or they messed you up really bad. What were you doing in Trench—town anyway?” Shimmy just groaned in submission and let her lead him past some tall buildings into a stretch of dirt road with tall grass and broken bottles. They saw flames ahead. The flames were nasty, smelly and toxic. The burning of trash was not so illegal in Maleka’s residency. They burnt them to make room for even more hazardous waste. 233 biklmnpqrcgi The smoke could be seen at all times but especially at night, when the criminals who light the fires can slip away unnoticed. It was almost dawn when they reached her one room shack in Ginger, a low class economy urban area with an arena of shanty crude houses lined up in cavalier fashion. Compartmentalization was a myth on this part of town. There was no barrier, be it a screen wall or a fence to separate the shacks. Often when government poverty eradication schemes are devised, they are crafted to suit the needs of citizens who dwell at the rural areas, what the Government chooses to call “remote area dwellers” while in fact there is more poverty in the city than at those areas. Philosophers have said poverty is comparative, and lack of food and of the necessities of life is not necessarily a hardship and it is true. Spiritual and social Coventry, the invasion of your privacy, is what constitutes the pain of poverty. Many Zimbabwean women who had crossed the border during the collapse of the economy felt this pain than any other. They were forced to work tough jobs in South Africa or Botswana for as low a wage as 20 Pula or Rands. To them, the poverty of our century became unlike any other. It is not, as poverty was before. They were part of a million victims of a set of priorities imposed upon them by a dysfunctional government and a world that condemned them for the sins of one man. Consequently, Zimbabwean women were not pitied — but written off as trash. Two school kids were getting ready for school at the back of their one room shack which they shared with their mother and alcoholic father. They were both naked, covered with soap and splashing their tiny bodies with steamy 234 biklmnpqrcgi water from an old plastic paint bucket and seemed oblivious to the two as they staggered past them, through a maze of shacks to a tiny brick room in the middle of the disarray. She felt pity for the kids and on many occasions she’d found herself quarrelling with their mother over their welfare. Maleka had experienced a decent upbringing on her earlier years. Her mother had made sure that she was comfortable and despite the tough times they had encountered, Maleka knew that her mother would have done any and everything to ensure her daughter was safe and comfortable. Every time Maleka fought with the mother of those kids she did so circuitously with the guilt she carried for her absence in her own child’s life. She wished for a chance to provide safety for her child, to provide the chance to be pure; room to grow and breathe in; the sacred privacy of the home circle — all those things that are the birth-right of every child.

* * *

Shimmy was tired, hungry and dehydrated. The dirty old T—shirt that covered the wound on his shoulder had done only so much to stop the bleeding. Everything from yesterday was a blur. For years he prayed for death to find him. That was an unkind plan that never came, so instead one day he had gone out to search for death at the cliff of a small hill, but shame and fear had prevented him from tying that noose around his neck; he had tried getting hit by a fast-moving car on the A1 road that leads to where he came from but the car had swerved and missed him. Suicide had been a failed mission and as time passed his soul decayed further. 235 biklmnpqrcgi The soul of a man is not an organ, but it animates and exercises all the organs; it is not a function, like the power of memory, of calculation, of comparison, but uses theses as hands and feet; it is not a faculty, but a light — a light that had gotten dim and dimmer since Shimmy said “I Do” that rainy day on the summer of 1999. His soul had lost its intellect and its will and become an ugly backdrop shadow of immense pain and suffering. The slum got a lot quieter just before noon, the kids were all at school except a few who were too young to go to school and those whose parents were too poor to send them to private day— care centres, those who played on the front yards of the suburb of Maruapula across the sewage—filled stream that separated the two domiciles. The distant radio noise pollution from the depot at the periphery of the assembly of shacks was something the residents had gotten accustomed to. Maleka remembered how tranquil her earlier years had been, the days she had spent at the ploughing fields surrounded by a breeze of hushed noises from the green leaves and frogs from the distant ponds and the chipping birds. In antiquity there was only silence but since she moved to this place, noise was born. Today noise triumphs and reigns supreme over the sensibility of all those who lived here.

* * *

“Please, please I’m sorry for whatever I did to you please let me go, please---” “Maleka... Maleka Tjilume. Say it! You don’t even know my name do you? You fat bastard and here I’m having 236 biklmnpqrcgi nightmares about what you did to me every single night. Ground rules, you scream, I drive this scissor into your eye, got that?” she held the scissor up so he could see it. “---and I just so you know, no one would hear you if you did scream anyway” “What di---“ She stopped him before he could complete the sentence with a hard slap across the mouth “Don’t even insult my intelligence. You think you can just crawl up into my life like a maggot, walk all over me and walk scot-free? You play with our minds and use us as cash cows for your macho perversity. I my friend am not a fucking ATM machine” “What did I do to you? I’m sorry if I ever hurt you because it wasn’t my intention” “I know you are sorry alright but I’m damn sure you had all the intentions to do what you did to me.” “Whaat?!” He shouted “What did I do to you, what the fuck do you want from me. Please let me go, this is all a huge mistake” “What do I want? From you? Nothing darling. But you are going to learn something today from me. Respect. Respect for all the women out there whom you think are your toys to fiddle with whenever your perverted desires boil over your head. I’m going to teach you that one lesson. Respect. Do you even remember me?” She slapped him hard across the face with her wet hands and left skid-marks of water all over his face then shouted, “Maleka, Maleka jou-shit, you better remember this name when you are in hell because it might be the last you’ll ever hear” 237 biklmnpqrcgi “You won’t get away with this. You won’t”, Shimmy tried to speak through the tears and humiliation. “Let me go and I swear on my mother’s grave I will forget everything that has happened here. I will forget everything!” “Aa iyi auitiki wena ehe?. You think I give a fuck about whether you forget or not!?, I don’t want you to forget, I want you to remember every single spike of pain I’m going to put you through, the same way I remember what you did to me. The simple fact that you can’t even remember me tells me that you have done what you did to me to many other women out there you pig. “ “The police will find you. My friends will find you, you whore. Do you know Makhelio? Makhelias? The man who owns everything in this fucking city? He is my brother. You are fucking with the brother of the most feared gangster in this city and he will find you and he will kill you and everything you hold dear” “Iyi...? Threats huh?... that’s all you got?” “They will find you. If you dare lay a hand on me my friends won’t rest until you are in a grave next to all your family members. You Makwerekwere think you can just come here, take our jobs, fuck up our country, leave your filthy stench all over our streets and not get touched?”, He realized he shouldn’t have said that and could have swallowed back those words if he could but it was late. She stood above him with a scissor in her hands, “That’s more like it. Get angry, I want to see the same rage in your eyes as when you treated me like a piece of meat.” She knelt before him and examined something between his legs while silently whistling then abruptly she pulled off his boxer shorts and placed them on top of her hair dressing table. 238 biklmnpqrcgi She used the scissor to cut off the elastic from the underwear. “What the fuck are you doing?” He was breathing heavily scared out of his skin. He didn’t know what she was about to do next but he knew from her expression it was bad-shit-crazy. “Oh no... Oh no no no no, please don’t do this. I’ll pay you, please don’t. I have 15 grand in my account, please do—o— o—nt”, he begged her and tried to fight her off with his legs. She stopped and looked at him grinning. “I’m listening”, she said “Look, untie me and lets go to the ATM by the filling station, I will give you the money and then we can go separate ways like nothing happened” “You must really think you are very smart don’t you? Or maybe you just think I’m a really dumb bimbo. You saying I’m a dumb bimbo Shimmy?” He shook his head. “Ha ha ha listen, tell me where the card is, give me the pin and I will go the bank, withdraw the cash and come back to set you free, how’s that sound Mr. Smart?” Shimmy shook his head frenetically in disagreement “How can I be sure that you will come back or if you do come back how can I be sure you won’t go ahead and do whatever it is you are intending to do me now?” “You don’t have the right to any of those guarantees, but I guess you don’t have a choice either do you?”. Threateningly she took a coiled five-centimetre diameter iron rod and placed it horizontally on a two burner stove at the corner of the one roomed shack and knavishly looked at Shimmy.

239 biklmnpqrcgi “Fuck! Alright, alright, my bank card is in the wallet on the right back pocket of my trousers” She took the trousers and opened the pocket to retrieve the thick, bludgeoning wallet. It was thick with business cards and receipts and as she searched through it for the bank card, she threw every single piece of paper on the ground. “Which one is it? She held two bank cards on one hand and the other firmly clenching the hot iron rod. “The Barclays Card, the blue one”, he said “I know what a Barclay’s card looks like fatty” She threw away the other card onto the ground among the scattered business cards and receipts and approached him. “Hmm where can I find a piece of paper in this dump?”, then she grabbed the church pamphlet from her bedside wooden bench. She walked out of the room and came back half a minute later holding a black shiny piece of charcoal “What is the pin?” She asked He hesitated momentarily and when he saw her expressions change he told her the pin, “Four four three nine”, he replied sorely. She grabbed his torn underwear from the bed and shoved them into his mouth “It better be correct for the sake of your balls” “It is”, he mumbled with an alluvium of tears taking over his eyes. The door creaked and closed with a bang and she was gone. The ropes were tight. He looked around for the scissor he had seen her tear up his underwear with but could not find it. His wrists were tied together so tight he could not shift to look back on the bed. Slightly he began to attempt to push his hands 240 biklmnpqrcgi apart to loosen the tight laces around his hands. All he needed was a knife, a scissor, broken glass or any sharp object to cut through the ropes and escape through the window which did not have any burglar doors. But he could not stand up against the bed. Shimmy sat there defeated. His mind chained to anger and the rage that manifested like a flock of locusts in his chest. His thoughts ran around possibilities of who his captor was. He could not remember her or imagine why she would go to such lengths to punish him. Over a period of one year Shimmy had crossed paths with well over three hundred prostitutes. Some he slept with and some he simply just cornered them into being his sex slaves by monetary means. The establishment of the loan scheme had made his job a whole lot easier. University girls were easily lured into this loan trap and when they failed to pay the loan back they were offered some twisted form of redemption and given no choice but to prostitute themselves to pay the debts or lose their teeth. Half an hour later when Shimmy had given up fighting the ropes she came back clutching a brown paper—bag under her arm and two rolls of transparent sellotape. “You cheap ass piece of shit, why didn’t you tell me the card limit is P2000.” Maleka got really angry when she realized that the ropes tying Shimmy to the bed had been loosened a little and a broken piece of plastic from her comb lying next to his right hand. “You going learn. You disrespected me for the very last time and I’m going teach you a lesson you will never forget”, Shimmy was moving his head trying to talk to her so she grabbed the cloth from his mouth angrily. “Wait, wait, wait, the card limit is P2000 per withdrawal but you can withdraw again immediately” “You are lying’’ Her rage was futile, fierce and yet her face remained fluffy. She tightened the ropes then took the now cold rod which she had put aside and placed it back on the stove. Shimmy fearing for his life tripped her and when she almost fell, face—first he fought hard, kicking his legs trying to strangle her between his legs. She broke free from his clutch panting and cursing Shimmy’s ancestors. She went behind him, put her hand around his throat. “Open your mouth! Open up or I will fucking put this iron rod into your mouth” “Please don’t do this, Please!” “Don’t do what?” She shouted back at him angrily “Don’t do what huh? Don’t put my penis into your ass? Oh wait I don’t have a penis do I? Do you have a daughter Shimmy?” He shook his head. “No?, OK imagine if you did, how would you feel if a fat bastard like this one right before me begging for its life were to put all his dirty junk into your little girl’s anus forcefully the way you did me. How would that make you feel? Huh?!” He froze. Instantly he remembered her. The memories of that night rushed at him like a bolt. He knew exactly what he did to her. In a quick micro—second flashback the memories of that night and the aftermath of it, the laughs he shared with his brethren about the girl who could not walk the morning after, all flashed right before his him. He knew right there and then that there was no way he was walking out of there alive. “Oh my God, please forgive me ple—a—se” He begged for mercy screaming at the top of the lungs through the underwear stuffed into his mouth, hoping one of the residents of the shacks nearby would come and save him, she approached him quickly a look of fury lodged between her eyes and hit him so hard with the hot tip of the red hot rod that the cloth which insulated her hands from the heat slipped off and the rod gyrated quickly off her hands and made a deafening noise as it crashed on a metallic bathtub on one corner of the room. Shimmy was down on the floor bleeding slightly on the temple where the rod had hit him. He was still. Maleka froze. She had just killed him. Fear and panic came crashing above her bravery which she had mastered for almost twenty—four hours since she had him captive. She got closer to him cautiously and put a hand on his throat. She had seen it in a couple of movies she watched at Tracy’s place but she really had no idea what to check for in order to confirm whether he was still alive or dead. She felt asilent thump on his throat. A vein. He was alive. She breathed heavily, a sigh of relief. Shimmy had fainted from the blow but was still breathing. She took a tiny clear plastic bag from her worn—out leopard—print handbag, looked at it hesitantly and smiled. Inside it was a drug she got from Tracy a few months ago but had never used it. Many prostitutes in Gaborone used it to rob their customers but none of them knew its name even the dealer who sold it to them. They called it ‘‘Bloom’’ and some called it “Kit Kat”. Ketamine. That was the name of the drug which was manufactured in South Africa and smuggled across the border by the dealers. Ketamine is manufactured to be used as an animal tranquilizer and an anaesthetic. In the 1970s when it was developed it was strictly meant to be used for medical and surgical purposes and as only human nature would allow, the drug weltered its towing line and became a hot commodity for peddlers of hard drugs such as cocaine and heroin; they mixed it with their products to create date rape drugs. Even used alone without being mixed with others Ketamine proved to be very dangerous. Ketamine hydrochloride is a dissociative anaesthetic that impacts the central nervous system by separating perception and sensation. The drug came in the form of a powder, liquid and sometimes a tablet which was rather expensive. Maleka had witnessed some of her friends load it up into cigarettes to give to their clients. When taken orally Ketamine effects begin ten to twenty minutes and five to ten when snorted. The effects can last up to forty-eight hours depending on the dose. Maleka filled the syringe with water, diluted the powder into the syringe and shook the syringe. She injected half of the mixture into Shimmy’s left arm aiming for the vein but unsure which vein to target and then waited. He woke up abruptly and looked like he had just seen a ghost. Maleka smiled coyly, sat back and watched him struggle with the ropes and the boxer shorts in his mouth. Fifteen minutes later Shimmy passed out again and she smiled and began working on him. She slightly lifted the curtain of the sixty—by— thirty centimetre window and sneaked a peek to see if there was anyone around her tiny brick shack. There was no one. Nature had allowed her to be abused. With its murderous laws, nature allowed incest, rape, theft and parricide, all sodomy’s sins; all that destroyed and sent mankind to the grave. These crimes often went unpunished. Not this time! She hesitated for a micro-second, peeped through the window for the second time to ensure none of her nosy neighbours were anywhere near her hut. Then she slowly began to carve out the skin from Shimmy’s testicles. Like a hell bent thunderbolt he spiralled as if from a dream and roared at the top of his lungs like the boom of a thunderclap, only the noise was smothered by the torn cloth strapped to his mouth with a converse shoelace. He panicked, swept the room frantically through the sweat gathering around his eyes for his captor; he couldn’t see properly. She was crouching between his legs with a thin razor blade on her hand, he tasted blood and urine and dirt trickle down his throat from the cloth that covered his mouth. She watched him tussle with the dirty sack around his feet as he realized wat was happening. The stench in the room was as toxic as the pain that ran a marathon through his body. Like a bull he fought hard to loosen the noose that held him to the bed, the barbed wires that tied his feet to the bed dug into his skin the more he fought and he felt his veins swell up in his eyes and it felt like they were going to pop. Shimmy realized that fighting harder was only causing him more agony. For an half an hour she had slowly been carving the skin out from below the penis down towards the anus. It was exactly as she had imagined it - the apparent pain in his eyes was a crystal reflection of her imagination since he shoved his penis down her rectum. She yanked out a chunk of his scrotum with her hands and watched him quiver like a paper on fire. The pleasure that traversed her senses was something beyond all the echelon furrow of feelings she had ever experienced. With tears rolling down her eyes she smiled at the outcome, at the fact that karma had charmingly taken her side and served up an adversary. She had over a span of two years lost her northern tribes gentility, the elegance with which she once walked the gleaming nights of Gaborone in short skirts, stomach outs and no panties. She had adapted to the brutality of the city, the streets indoctrinated a savagery sense into her. She carried a knife and had started stealing from clients. She would have walked with the devil to church and sat next to him and felt no shame nor remorse about it. Her instincts were tailored for survival and self—preservation since she met this animal that now lay wounded on her bed.

* * * The pain was severe. It felt like an army of knives had been driven into his groin. The intensity of his sensory faculties was remorseless as it teleported through lymph nodes one at a time through his sensory nerves from his lower abdomen in descent through his bleeding legs to the tiny barbed wire splinters lodged into his wrists. He felt every inch and fibre of the razor blade dig in and sculpt the skin off of his scrotum. Screaming became painful and Shimmy had resigned himself to biting the dirty boxer shorts in his mouth. He gritted his teeth and clenched his fists in agony as he listened to her hum a distant familiar Trompies song. Blood was slowly oozing from the tiny network of veins on his lower genitalia. He choked on saliva and dirt when she discarded his scrotum into the black plastic trash bag. “How did you love your breakfast in bed Shim?” Maleka asked with a splinter of laughter and coyness in her voice. Shimmy groaned a plea, his eyes red as the autumn sunset. His eyes were watery with a thick mirage of beseeching tears. He wanted to tell her how sorry he was; how regretful he was and that if he could take it all back he would have done so. He felt a great hunger crawl up his stomach, a pang elevated by the fists and kicks to the gut by the men hehad grown to call his ‘brothers’ earlier before he was kidnapped by this psycho. “How rude... You really are going to give me the silent treatment after all we have been through?” she inquired with quiescence, and casually stood up and walked towards the two burner paraffin stove at the corner of the room and used pieces of paper to lift a burnt-out tin of Fanta, with its top scraped off. She carried the tin can towards Shimmy who was looking at her at an angle with crashing anxiety. He hoped it was a beverage. “We are going to play a little game Shimmy. Do you like playing games?” He shook his head abruptly in disagreement at the realization that consenting to the question only translated to more pain. “I have often been downcast, but never in despair: I used to be innocent, naive and sometimes forgetful of how much of animals human beings can be, compared to those animals that live in the bushes. But you, Shimmy, you made me realize that at the end of the day we can all be savages. Now I regard my life as a dangerous adventure, not so romantic but interesting at the same time. I have made up my mind now, to lead a different life from other girls and later on, different from ordinary sex workers...” she held the burnt Fanta tin full of melted wax on her hand with a cloth. “My start has been so very full of interest, and that is the sole reason why I have to laugh at the humorous side of the most dangerous moment of my life’’. She laughed a little and licked the back of the rusty razor blade seductively. A tiny radio sat at the window undisturbed, playing one of the local radio stations and occasionally losing its frequency. “The bad is on my outside. I am a good person really and I keep trying and trying to find a way of becoming what I always wanted to be, and could be, if... there weren’t any other people living in the world. You changed me Shimmy”. She poured the melted wax down on his genitals and watched it solidify as he shrieked and tried to scream. “Our ape—like ancestors were not unlike the existing gorillas, chimpanzees or the baboons that terrorize our ploughing fields. They lived in large herds and were prolific; polygamy was in vogue and at the courting season love—duels were fought among the males...’’, she poured more wax on his testicles and he wiggled and fought but it was no use. “But they were respectful to their females. Easy Shimmy, easy. You are only going to hurt yourself. The wax will numb away the pain. I am going to carve out your balls so that next time... Next time you won’t feel so manly. Do you know how it felt when you shoved fat penis into my ass, do you?” Her expression suddenly engrossed on his face, her eyes engorged with a tonne of hate. “Imagine if I took this rod right here and shoved it down on you the same way you did me. Or down your throat the way you came inside my mouth” A look of terror spread on Shimmy’s face as he pleaded both with his eyes and breath. He could see the coiled iron rod she was referring to. “I always draw a parallel between oppression by the police or the politicians and oppression by men like you. I came here in Botswana running away from a massacre against my people in Zimbabwe, only to find worse terrorists than those I ran from. To me it is just the same. I always wonder why men react to oppression by the government by hurting us women and children. You whine all the time about the Government raping you and yet you rape us.” She grabbed the iron rod from the two burner stove and approached him. He fainted. Chapter 26

“Shimmy wake up. Wake up. Oh lord what has this idiot done now?” “Ma’am let him rest; he’s been through an ordeal.” “Where did he come, from?” “The nurses say they found him lying in a culvert somewhere in Broadhurst. They thought he was dead from the amount of blood at the scene” “What happened to him?” “I’m not sure but it seems like he is another victim of ritual killings that have been occurring a lot lately. He is very fortunate.” “Ritual killings? Fortunate? Look at him---” The door opened and the police came into the room. The young Orderly quickly approached the police officers and they quietly talked as he pointed out some things from his file and occasionally glanced at Shimmy and his wife. The female police officer gasped in shock and disbelief as she paged through the pictures. It was the most grotesque thing they both had ever witnessed. The male police officer placed his hands inside his pocket and prudently held his genitals in both hands.

251 biklmnpqrcgi The thought of losing his jewels sent a thousand crochet needles across his backbone. He knew the man who lay on the hospital bed; he was one of the rich snobs from the suburbs who thought police officers were their personal security guards. He hated the type but nevertheless felt pity for him. “Good afternoon ma’am, my name is Constable Mo...” “Constable? Constable? They sent a fucking constable to investigate the case. Why am I not surprised? You think a fucking Constable can go and do anything to Makhelio?” “Makhelio, Makhelio the gangster?” “He did this. He did this I tell you” She walked away disgusted. “I wish that pig dies where it lies” “What?!” Colleen jumped a little, startled by a man who had come from behind her. He was wearing a white coat and had a stethoscope around his neck. “Well. I... uh... well, I suppose you’d like to know who I am, or why I’m here”. “That was harsh. The man is lying on his death—bed to say the least’’ “I’m not an evil woman as it might seem; I want you to know that right off, although why you’d think I was, I mean automatically think I was, I don’t know, though I am a trifle... theatrical, I suppose, and no apologies there. I was a princess when I grew up. He gave me a ten minutes fairytale and then Poof! He crushed it all. But I guess it’s not too late to get my happy ending after all” she chuckled. “You might become a suspect if you continue talking like this, wishing for his death. The last case of a ritual killing 252 biklmnpqrcgi I remember, the wife was convicted of hiring the organ harvesters” “Ritual killing? Fuck that. The men who did this came by my house and took him into their black cars. This is no ritual killing. Oh, how I wish they would have finished him. Tell me something Doctor, are you married?” “No. Divorced” “Oh, I am a very good cook, among other things”, she winked at him. “I became that to please my husband; my husband, who is in the habit of eating out, by which he meant... alone... without me, with young girls Doctor; young girls, who are the same age as his daughter. It occurred to me that if I... well, it was no good. Alone, to him, meant specifically not with me, though with others, with lots of others. And the great feasts I’d prepare... would be for me. Alone. I became quite heavy, which I no longer am, and unmarried, which I am this day. I trust after this day if he doesn’t kick it, he will be eating alone... all by himself... facing a wall in a hospital bed”, they both paused for a minute, none of them speaking. “That’s cold” “I know but you know what? I don’t care. It doesn’t matter really. I lost so many years whining over that pig you feel pity for. From the very first week, come dinner time, he would put the paper under his arm, say “Bye, bye,” or whatever, and... no matter how I tried to beg with him, I would always end up looking pathetic eating at a table alone”. “I don’t know what to say, but a little sympathy towards the man won’t hurt” 253 biklmnpqrcgi “Never! He is a stray dog let him fend for himself. He told me that he didn’t love me, and that his sole relationship to me was simply a marital one. What he means is that I am to keep this house, and he is to provide for it”. “He did?” “That’s what he said. That explains why he treats me the way he treats me. I never understood why he did, but now it’s clear. He doesn’t love me. I thought he loved me and that he stayed with me because he loved me and that’s why I didn’t understand his behavior. But now I know, because he told me that he sees me as a person who runs the house I never understood that because I would have never— if he had said, ‘Would you marry me to run my house even if I don’t love you.’ I would have never— I would have never believed what I was hearing. I would have never believed that these words were coming out of his mouth. Because I loved him”. “You shouldn’t have stayed in the marriage then” “I stayed for my lil girl”. “Tragedy changes people. Give him another chance maybe he will change after this” “Chance? Change Doctor? No way in hell. I’m done with him” “Did you ever try marriage counselling?” “There was no marriage to counsel in the first place” “I’m sorry. I’m also sorry to tell you this. There isn’t enough space in the hospital for patients in his condition therefore he will be released for home—based care which I do not recommend since his wounds are still terribly raw. Take him to a private hospital” 254 biklmnpqrcgi “Release him. He will go to his whores, they will care for him”. She stood up and left.

* * *

It was four days later when Shimmy regained his consciousness. He felt naked. He felt more shame than pain and tears stampeded his eyes when he saw his daughter snuggled up on a couch facing the tiny television up on the wall. In his deep slumber he had heard the young nurse attending him tell his wife that his penis and testicle had been taken away for ritual purposes. He decided that’s the story he was going to fabricate his demise around. The real truth would not only crumble his already fallen family it would destroy him. Even worse he could not remember the bitch’s name. Malaka Melaka Monika Fuck it! What puzzled everyone was the burnt hole on his anus. It was as if someone had inserted a hot coiled rod inside him. The thought of her riveted his lungs into a knot and his breathing got faster and faster and the heart monitor began to make a louder beeping sound. She fried his testicles and fed them to the dogs. Dogs. He silently cried and went back to sleep just as the police officers were coming into the room and the heart monitor sound got less loud.

255 biklmnpqrcgi The story of the attempted ritual murder hit the papers on the third day and began to spool out relentlessly over the next few weeks, horrific detail upon horrific detail. The story caught fire in the public imagination more than any other. There was, most of all the unfathomably brutal violence involved. The police questioned Makhelio and his crew but came up with nothing. There was a lot that didn’t make sense about this whole thing, but many other things coalesced: the location of the crime, in the city centre away from the hills where most of the related crimes had occurred; the impunity of the attack; the fact that he had gone missing for weeks and no one had reported him missing; that his wife had only seemed fazed when she found out he was in hospital; that there were no complex caste or feudal hierarchies at play; that this might have been just a random urban ritual crime. That the media painted him as a ‘‘wholesome’’ man making a living for his family. Men across the country felt, “but for the grace of God, that could have been me”. Then there was the tinder for the fire: the chronic inefficiencies of the system, the habitual callousness ofthe Botswana Police Service; the dull apathy of the political class, the new hyper-connectivity of the young through new means to organize themselves. And something deeper and more inchoate, too: a seething restlessness that underlay the residents of Gaborone. A desire for better governance not marred by shortage of water, electricity, employment and no corruption. This desire shot through with a fear of dead ends. As the comatose establishment failed to swing into action, young men across the strata poured 256 biklmnpqrcgi into the streets. They used this crime to demonstrate against the police and the government. Shimmy’s own composure also alchemized the air. Within seventy two hours the story was breaking news in all the radio stations in the country and a few other stations across the border. Every newspaper stand was decorated with Shimmy’s face and the bold letters suggesting he was a near—victim of a brutal ritual killing. The past ritual murders echoed through the new burning story of a well-known man who was reported to have been stripped of all his genitalia. Human rights non—governmental organizations were not left out, they organized a few demonstrations all across the country lobbying the government to do something about the on—going ritual murders sweeping across the nation. Regulate the traditional doctors, they said. Some went a step further and threw bricks at some politicians alleging that the greedy bastards were killing their children for their own benefit to amass power and influence within their political circles. The press converged at the hospital entrance like vultures on a carcass. They waited and waited, the hospital security had the entire Male Ward under lockdown, allowing only close relatives into the wing and hospital employees were given strict warnings to respect the confidentiality of their patients. The abyss created by this lack of information only elevated the situation — rumour became common business. Shimmy watched the world outside unfold into a frenzy of madness, the hungry hyenas waiting outside the thin walls he hid behind to tear him apart, waiting for exclusive interviews. 257 biklmnpqrcgi Now more than ever he truly wished she had killed him and saved him from what his life was about to become but then he remembered what she told him before she dumped him at the culvert, “I want you to live to remember it all”, and there was not a single detail of the ordeal he could ever forget except her name. The door opened and the devil entered the room. “So...the cattle post huh?” Shimmy did not respond. He just starred at her disdain consuming his mind, wanting to cuss her out but he lacked the strength to even say a word to her. She continued to pester him in passive aggression. “Was it one of your hoes who did this? Did you not pay her enough? Or maybe you were just too small for her wide old AIDS infested man—thieving cunt? Tell me Shimmy, tell me you didn’t see this coming.” She continued for an hour, badgering him and calling him unspeakable names. “I regret the day I met you. You sonofabitch, God knows if it wasn’t for that baby girl we brought into this world I would have left a long time ago. Now you lie here with no fucking testicles and expect me to pay all these bills and act the concerned wifey to these media mongrels” The truth stung him. He shifted his position to face the window and look away from her but she followed him, looking down on him as if he were a thick disgusting lump of spit. He could not move again to face away from her — the pain between his legs was unimaginable even under heavy medication.

258 biklmnpqrcgi The room temperature steadily began to rise, fury ascending above his pain, he felt his insides rise above the altitude of normality and breathing became a harsh struggle. The heart rate machine beeped louder and louder, the infrared faster and faster until the door was kicked open by four male nurses with a stretcher and shouted at his wife to leave the room immediately. They stabilized him and loaded him up with more morphine. He slept like a babe. The hospital area got quieter at midday, the press usually dispersed around this time when more minor stories broke before lunch, after all this particular story did not seem to be bearing fruits.

* * *

The building consisted of several wings and a huge clock at the main entrance. When Maleka entered the hospital through a big hall she found that there were large numbers of rooms on the left and the right. The rooms were neat and tidy and there was a board indicating the separate arrangements for out—door and in—door patients. In the corridors of the hospital there was a great bustle of activity; doctors rushing to the many wards scattered all over the stretch of the hospital; nurses pushing patients in wheeled beds and visitors lost and seeking directions from hospital security guards. At a short distance she saw a hanging board labelled “Operation Theatre” fitted to the steel rails lining the corridor roof, she followed the sign and it led to more signs but she did not want to ask anyone for directions. 259 biklmnpqrcgi She was not supposed to be there and she knew it. There were stretchers and wheeled chairs some broken evidently but some relatively new at the entrance of the operation theatre. She saw a patient outside the main hall holding a cigarette and frantically searching his pockets for what she assumed was a lighter and she approached him and handed him her matchbox. “Is this the male surgical ward?’ She asked him “It is ma’am, are you looking for someone?” He lit his cigarette and looked her right in the eyes like a madman. “Matter of fact I am. The survivor of that ritual thing, do you know him?”, She whispered. “He is my uncle and I don’t want the media following me with questions when I leave here so I really want to see him discreetly” “Yea, yea... ooh maan, that’s some really sad shit. He is in here. But they keep him in his own room all, alone. And — it’s past visiting hours. Good luck with the dumb nurses who work here, they are so rude.” He glanced back to see if no one was looking at him as he lit his cigarette and took a long puff, his eyes closed as if he were kissing a beautiful girl for the very first time. When he opened his eyes, she was gone. Shimmy was on bed forty eight in a tiny secluded corner room and when she reached him she found a small gauze box and a temperature chart by his side. He was recovering slowly from his wounds. She sat by his side stroking his hand hoping he would wake up. She slowly moved her fingers along the faint letters on his arms, they was once a beautiful tattoo that he used to boast about when he was with his peers and he used it to impress University girls because it was always his pathway to conversations with 260 biklmnpqrcgi them, conversations that led to sexcapades that led to the poor souls being used as money—generating genital machines for sex—hungry men. She heard laughter coming from the corridor and as she hurriedly took her bags to walk away she saw , ‘MALAKA CH’LUME’ scribbled inelegantly on a torn piece of paper tissue. A rush of frisson shot through her. She took it, examined it, her surname was misspelt and fear overwhelmed her. Did Shimmy give her name to the police? Was she a wanted suspect? Panic. She took the piece of paper and quickly rushed away, seeing hospital menial workers at the far end of the corridor, sitting, chatting and laughing their lungs out. Shimmy woke up in the afternoon feeling light—headed.

* * *

The Doctor came to see him after he was bathed and told him that due to lack of space in the hospital he was going to be released to home-based care. He tried to object but at the end it was useless since the decision had already been made. He called his daughter to come and pick him up around 7p.m. and she said she will. Still heavily bandaged he made several attempts to take a few steps out of his bed to prepare himself so that his daughter did not have to see him weak and helpless and on all occasions he almost fell and injured his groin so eventually he stopped trying, lied on his bed and waited for 7p.m. Several hours after the time he had agreed upon with his daughter had passed he painfully swallowed his pride and called his former boss. “Makhelio, I need help. Please come pick me up from the hospital”. “Hospital? What the hell are you doing in hospital? More importantly where the fuck did you find the nerve to pick up the phone and call me after betraying me like that? You are lucky you are not dead yet you motherfucker.” He hung up the phone to a dumbstruck Shimmy who sat in his bed, lost out of wits scrolling through his phonebook looking for any friends to call to come and pick him up from the hospital. He was flat broke. His wallet and bank cards were all fried up somewhere in Ginger and the thought of them brought back memories of the torturing he went through. He remembered how she had forced him to give up his bank card pin numbers, gone to the ATMs to withdraw all the savings he had and then he had watched as she melted his identity card, credit cards and bank card with a candle. He was in tears when the nurse came to him with a paper—bag and told him it was time to leave. He pleaded with the old sleepy woman to let him sleep in the hospital for one more night so he could sort himself out but she told him she had been ordered to evict him. “Should I call you a cab to take you home?”, He nodded angrily avoiding eye contact with her and took a worn—out jacket under the pillow. The taxi ride home was unbearable. The taxi driver careered around corners, the wheels screeching with every turn. Shimmy’s big, fat fingers held onto his seat. It was a half an hour drive, a long time to hold onto his fear and so he gradually relinquished his grip on the seat, looking outside the small Nissan at the bright city lights move backward past him at high speed through the misty windows that separated him from the outside world. He could sense the hunger it had for him. The media waiting. His wife waiting. The questions he did not have answers to and endless inquiries from his so—called friends. He told the taxi driver he’d changed his mind about going home and asked to be dropped off at The Black Marina Hotel. After he paid the man he stood there for about five minutes as if he was loading some kind of software into his bones, re— configuring himself, and learning how to put up one foot in front of the other. He staggered for a few steps; his legs spread apart as he walked slowly past a bright street lamp and fought off a swarm of beetles and crickets that descended upon his face. He passed the brightness and the insects immediately left him alone and went back to the street lamp. He was walking to the hotel where he first met the devil who took away his manhood. He hoped to find Makhelio there with his usual band of misfits paraded around a table like dirty money on a stripper’s underwear lining. He wanted to look him in the eye and tell him how sorry he was for not being a loyal friend. Okay maybe friend was an overstretch but he wanted to beg Shimmy to forgive him and help him back on his feet again. He entered the lobby of the hotel almost an hour later after the taxi dropped him off at the Bus Stop just fifty meters away from the hotel entrance. He was tired and hungry. When the automatic sliding doors closed behind him he saw a female hotel employee approach him slowly, concern scribbled all over her face but before she could say anything he pointed a warning finger at her and walked past her. He was slightly bleeding onto his clothes and a huge stain was slowly soaking up his tracksuit as he walked straight past the reception desk into the bar area. Shimmy stopped for a while, he was almost dismayed, there was no usual noise in the bar and the table where the ‘conglomerate’ usually sat was empty. He looked around as if waiting for them to give him a “SUPRISE” shout but saw no one. He went to the bar—man. “Maxwell, where is everyone Shamwari?” “WHOA! Shimmy, what happened man? You are a mess. The newspapers wer right err?” “Look man, where the fuck is everybody?” “Did you guys have anything planned for today? I haven’t seen you in a while” “Look quit asking me dumb questions and give me a straight answer. Where the fuck is everyone” “It’s Monday Shimmy”. He stopped for a minute. Realizing he had lost his time cardinals. Everyday had become a weekend since the day he got abducted. Time perception is a learned behaviour and generally coincides with certain “markers”. Our conscious mind doesn’t have any perception of time. This is why a dream that may only last a matter of minutes can feel like an eternity. Certain drugs alter the perception of time passing as well. The days Shimmy had spent in the hospital all seemed like a mirage, they blurred into each other and cascaded into non existence. Most of it seemed like an illusion. He did not want them to exist so his mind forced itself to forget them. “I’m going to kill that bitch.” “What are you talking about Shimmy? Don’t do anything crazy man.” He walked away. Chapter 27

hen man was composed he was ever contending with the forces of nature, with the wild beasts of the forest, and with the members of his own species outside his clan. In that long and varied struggle his intelligence was developed. His first invention, as might be supposed, was an improvement in the art Wof murder. Makhelio was a master at it. All Shimmy he had to do now was find Makhelio, apologize and have him escort him to that dangerous Ginger neighbourhood where the ratchet girl lived. Surely they knew and feared Makhelio as everybody else he thought to himself. Makhelio was not at the hotel bar so it only meant there was one other place where he could be. He limped past the lobby and ignored the starring employees of the hotel and walked out of the hotel into the glistening starry night. Gaborone was awfully quite during the week; it was like the city was in mourning as it silently propagated its negative energy around. 266 biklmnpqrcgi He was all alone in the darkness and headed towards the brothel headquarters at the Main Mall. The bleeding in his pants was slow now. He stopped under a street lamp unzipped his jeans and looked closer to see what was causing the bleeding then he looked around and fixed the loose bandages before he continued limping towards HQ as they called it. He arrived an hour later tired and drained but determined. The bouncers at main entrance recognized him and tried to assist but he sent them away hurling insults of proportions at them. He went straight to Makhelio’s office but found no one. It hit him then, that of all this years he had never bothered to find out where Makhelio stayed. The pain was getting austere, he was hungry and sleepy but he was not going to leave until he got what he wanted. He crouched down on the floor by the office door and waited. He fell asleep and dreamt that he was drowning in a mud puddle, he fought hard to get off but it swallowed him like a quicksand and fireflies flew above his head whispering a hymn he heard at the last funeral he attended. He was slowly running out of air and desperately fighting then he saw a dark figure approach him, he shouted out loud for help. Something hit him on the head and he woke up abruptly panting and cursing realizing he’d been dreaming and Makhelio’s muddy boot was firmly on his face. “What the fuck are you doing here traitor?” Makhelio asked him angrily. “Makhelio please hear me out”, Shimmy did not stand up. He pleaded with the boss-man on his knees. “Please hear me out; I’m sorry for what I did. I was blinded by fantasies and temptation but I truly never meant to 267 biklmnpqrcgi disrespect you” “No you didn’t ‘cos if you did you would be dead right now. But you know what Shimmy, I knew you were an animal when I got you off the streets, I just didn’t know you were a fucking child-murderer and a snitch. The Police have been all over my business the past few weeks, asking me if I had anything to do with you injuries. I run a business here man. Did you mention me? Did you?” he says this opening an Okapi knife threateningly. “My wife. Colleen, boss, it was Colleen. She saw you when you picked me up that day so she told the police. The girl... It was all a misunderstanding; if I did not kill her she was going to expose us all to the police” “You ungrateful sonofabitch”, he kicked Shimmy’s legs. “You fell in love with her and you are never supposed to tell anyone about me or this place, you hear me?” “Let me make amends, I owe you my life and I betrayed that. There is another girl who wants to expose us. The reason I ended up in hospital was because I was trying to stop her. She is talking to the Police” “What!?” “Her name is Malaka or something. Tracy’s friend. After your boys beat the lights out of me I ran onto her and she did this to me” he points at his groin “You see what you have done now, you see?, If I go down just remember this one thing, you are a dead man. You hear me? Dead”, he made a gesture using his right thumb showing that he was going to cut Shimmy’s throat. “Take me to her right now. Where is Tracy? Is she part of this?” 268 biklmnpqrcgi “No, I doubt she even knew what her friend is planning. We tried to recruit the girl a few months back but she has resisted all the time”. “Maleka! I know her. She called me a dog without a kernel last time— “Shut the fuck up and lets go”, he stopped Shimmy who was about to talk. They left the building, got into Makhelio’s black Honda and revved out of the parking lot leaving people looking at the car in amazement. Shimmy wasn’t sure about the directions to Maleka’s house but he knew the neighbourhood. Makhelio never imagined in his saddest of dreams that one day he would come across a place so filthy until that day he found himself in Ginger. He didn’t know much Setswana, but he knew they had just entered the Ditakaneng. The towering heaps of trash seemed to stretch to the sky. And the stench was overpowering. Makhelio was reluctant about coming to this place. He’d wanted to wait for Maleka to come to them. “Are you sure this is where she brought you Shimmy?” “Just wait a few minutes boss; I’m sure this is it.” They turned left and drove another five minutes. Turned right and drove a few hundred meters, then another left. His heart was breaking. In his head he remembered the place like the back of his hand but now that he was here he couldn’t recognize a single place or spot in this messy pile. On the corner of the street was what one can only describe as a lean-to, made of garbage. A refrigerator door turned on its side formed the base of one wall, with various boxes and trash heaped on 269 biklmnpqrcgi top. A large cardboard box formed the roof, on the other wall was just junk. There was no door. A woman, probably sixty years old, was shuffling along the road with a deep limp. When she saw their car, she smiled, baring a toothless grin and sped up her hobbling. She yelled something in Setswana down the road, initially it seemed to nobody. Then out of nowhere a brick hit the windshield of the Honda like a bomb. Three men jumped in front of the car and two fought with the two locked car doors “Msunu open the door, else we are going to burn you alive in there”, one of the boys shouted at Makhelio who immediately revved the car and sped right at the three men in front of the vehicle. He saw a light thought his rear-view mirror and realized that the car was blazing with fire. The thugs had spilled paraffin on the roof of the car and set it ablaze. Paralyzed by fear the two men shouted back insults at the pursuing trio; the car drove away so fast they left a cloud of dust swallowing up the road behind and the fire on the roof died out. “Sonofabitch, look at what you have got me into. Look at my car. Fuck this, get out now, get out of my car” “B...b...bu” “Get the fuck out” “I‘ll pay for the damage” “With what? You piece of shit” Makhelio stopped the car and gave Shimmy an impatient stern look. Shit’d just got real and Shimmy knew it. In all the years he had worked for this man he had never seen his boss so angry so he quickly got out of the car. The wound was still excruciating. His impulse for 270 biklmnpqrcgi revenge had shut down all his senses and for a while he managed to block away the pain. Makhelio drove away and left Shimmy on the side of the road and did not say a word to him. The fat burly man limped alongside the road with a large drained blood stain at the back of his pants. It was a sad sight, people in kombis starred at him, some in pity and some in amazement. He even thought he heard someone say, ‘that’s the man who lost his testicles’. He went back to The Black Marina Hotel and got the same stares from the hotel guests but he really did not care. He went straight to the bar and ordered six Springbok shots which he gulped down in less than a minute. “What’s that smell?’’, the bartender asked him “What smell?” he replied angrily “I think you should go home and get cleaned up man” “What about you mind your own damn business” “Look, Shimmy, you don’t have to be a dick all the time. I‘m just trying to help you here. Go clean-up and come back if you want” “You are beginning to piss me off” “You will get banned from the hotel you know. Listen to me, I’m trying to help you. White people own this place and they care deeply for its image. Go home. Or even better, go to the hospital” “Fuck you”, Shimmy leaned over the counter, snatched a half-empty bottle of Jameson Irish Whiskey and limped away sorely. “You are going to pay for that” “Eat your mother”, he snorted back. Shimmy was not sure where he was going. He wanted 271 biklmnpqrcgi to go back to the brothel to beg for his job back. The last time he met his boss before he pissed him off he did not bring up the issue because all he wanted was revenge. He really needed the job. A police car sped past him as he sat at the kombi stop outside the hotel lost in thought, clutching the bottle of Jameson. He panicked and hid the bottle under his T—shirt. The police car was now hundreds of meters away and there was no way they were coming back for him so he breathed a sigh of relief and discreetly took gulps and emptied the bottle and threw it away. It burnt like hell and he felt his liver and most of his insides seethe within him. The pain between his thighs was distant. He closed his eyes and bowed his head. A car stopped a few meters away from him but he did not even bother to look up. He heard the window roll down. “Let’s go”, someone summoned him and he looked up abruptly to see Makhelio starring down at him. He stood up and quickly opened the backdoor of the car. “No, come and seat up here”. Shimmy obliged and went around the car to the front seat. “Do you see what has happened here?” “I’m sorry about earlier” “No, I’m not talking about that. Do you see what has happened to you?” There was a long silence in the car as they turned left at the roundabout. “You are exactly where I first met you. People go forward and you my friend have decided to go back to square zero” “I made a couple of mistakes” “Couple? You betrayed me. I took you in and treated 272 biklmnpqrcgi you like family and you repay me how? By jeopardizing my business. Your first mistake was to fall in love with my employees, then you thought you could swindle me off my money and give it to those whores? Big mistakes Shimmy. Big mistakes. Not a couple of mistakes” “I just thought...” “What? That I would never find out?” “I thought I would be able to pay back the money before you noticed” “And look where it has gotten you” Shimmy just sighed and looked down. “This girl who did this to you, where else can we find her besides that dump where you allege she stays at?” “She works at Maibe street corner. That’s where I first saw her when I went there to pick Tracy, and then I met her at the hotel lobby waiting for someone who didn’t show up. I fucked her, didn’t pay up and that’s why she did this to me. You do remember her don’t you? She kept talking about God at our party in June” “The same girl who kept talking about me being an atheist asshole?” “The same girl” “How did she get to do this to you?” “It’s a long story” “We got the whole day” “She basically implied that I raped her. I did not. I was just trying to show her who the boss is. We have been trying to recruit her for months so I thought force would work better”. Makhelio just shook his head looking at Shimmy and laughed quietly. 273 biklmnpqrcgi * * *

The more men are sunk in brutality the less frequently they sin against their conscience; and as men become more virtuous, they also become more sinful. With Makhelio the conscience was instinct; it is never disobeyed. He has refined sentiments and a cultivated intellect; he has built an empire and no longer does the dirt himself. He has soldiers for that. Nowadays scarcely a day passes in which he does not offend against his conscience. His life is passed in self— reproach. He censures himself for an hour that he has wasted; for an unkind word that he has said; for an impure thought which he has allowed to settle for a moment on his mind. Such lighter sins do not indeed trouble ordinary men, and there are few at present whose conscience reproaches them for sins against the intellect. But the lives of all modern men are tormented with desires which may not be satisfied; with propensities which must be quelled. The virtues of man have originated in necessity; but necessity developed the vices as well. It was essential for the preservation of his business that his soldiers obey the rule of law as much as necessary. But it was also essential for the existence of the business that his goons should be murderers and thieves, crafty and ferocious; fraudulent and cruel. These qualities, he transmitted through fear. But as the circle of the business widens, these qualities were rarely useful to him, and quite often they are stigmatised as criminal propensities. But because their origin was natural and necessary, their guilt is not lessened an iota. All men are 274 biklmnpqrcgi born with these propensities; all know that they are evil; all can suppress them if they please. There are some, indeed, who appear to be criminals by nature; who do not feel it wrong to prey upon mankind. He could have easily sent his soldiers to handle this. Kingdom would have relished the opportunity to kill some whore – but Makhelio wanted to do this himself. There was something about the girl. He wanted to save her. If he could not save her he wanted her to die by his hand. .“You smell like shit” “I know. I just got chased from the hotel bar because of it” “Look, go get cleaned up, rest and tomorrow, we are going to find that bitch and she’s got two choices, either she works for me or she will die” “Can I use one of the bathrooms at the office?” “Why? I said go home” “I can’t. She put me out. When I got released from the hospital I called her to come pick me up, she didn’t pick-up, I called my daughter and she hung up on me, then I called a cab and when I got to the house my stuff was littered outside the house so I just passed and came straight to the hotel” “You just have a knack for pissing everyone off don’t you” “It’s been a long time coming. That marriage failed the day I said ‘I do” “It’s because you are an idiot. I told you not to marry that whore. Okay look then, go to the office and get cleaned up. You will sleep on that room you first slept in when you joined us. Now go. Because tomorrow, we going hunting” 275 biklmnpqrcgi “Thank you boss” “Get that wound looked at. Its nasty and I can’t afford to have you as a liability and smelling like a pit latrine in my baby” That’s his car – the only thing the man truly cares about. A fucking car. “I will boss” Chapter 28

he sun went down slowly like a pile of dung being pushed against the dunes of the Kalahari sands - slowly but persistently dominant in its descent. It went down lazily, its rays simmering through the afternoon mirages. There was a breeze to it. A thin air that whispered alongside the blurry fluorescent lines from millions of miles away. And a warmth too. Eating at Tthe brutally hot remnants of a day so hot day, a day so cruel and condescending. She was restless. Her cigarettes stash had ran out a few hours ago and she felt her senses swell up with every minute that passed. Her nicotine intake had drastically escalated since her last victim and now she felt the consistent need to have something in her mouth. Her mind was infested with vile images of blood, muffled screams and pain in the eyes of the three men who fell victim to her un-sanitized razor blades. She stood under the dull street lights thinking about their families and the headlines in the papers ‘Serial Organ Harvester on the Loose’.

277 biklmnpqrcgi A part of her felt sorry for them but it eased her conscience to know that she had done the wives of those bastards a favour. Finally a car approached slowly like one of those mafia cars in Italian films when there is about to be a shoot—out. The headlights slowly receded into their sockets as the car got closer to Maleka’s spot. His arm was hanging outside the window. His fat chin raised high into the breeze of the chilly night. She hesitated, for a moment and saw Tracy coming towards her and signalling her to let the car pass. “What was that?” “That was Rocko, trust me you don’t want any part of that guy’s money” “Why? What’s wrong with him?” “There was this guy that kept beatin’ me in my head every time he seen me, telling me I was his, and every time he’d see me he’d smack the shit out of me, if I didn’t give him some money, he’d punch me in my forehead. He works for that Rocko you almost stopped. He ended up getting mad at me one day and punched me in my chest and cracked my rib. That was cracked, and all I could remember is that I couldn’t breathe. I mean, I passed out”. “Whoa” “I was knocked out all day. I was unconscious. The last time I had an encounter with them, Rocko had a knife on my throat, and he made me do things that I didn’t want to do.... I ran to a gas station and called the police. The guy who worked at the gas station gave me his jacket to wear. All I had on was a shirt. I called the police and told them”. “Did the police come?” 278 biklmnpqrcgi “They came. I described the guy to the police and showed them the spot. I told them what kind of car he had, what we was wearing, what he said, what he did, everything. They never even wrote anything down. They ran me for warrants and solicitation instead”. “Whoa, and you are just telling me that now?” “I’m sorry my love. At some point I gave up and they owned me. I was forced to spend many nights at Rocko’s home satisfying his friends while they paid him and not me and he stayed with the girl that he has kids by, she is a seasoned hooker, Martha or something. She hated me from the jump. Since they were in that life, he made her deal with me. She wanted to fight me every time she would see me and we did. She hit me in the head with a beer glass, and I had stitches in my head”. “What the fuck is wrong with him?” “He would just snap. Like his whole expression would change. One day, he came to my house to beat my ass. And made it clear that he came over to beat on me. He said he had some extra time on his hands that he didn’t have anything to do, so he wanted me to know that he knew I was thinking about doing something stupid. And I was too. I was thinking about escaping. I left him once and ended up in hiding at Getty’s place for weeks. He found me and beat me until I blacked out. He was like that. He could be so much fun one time, silly and playing around, and the next minute, he could be something else, somebody you don’t want to fuck with” “How did you get out of there?” “He left me with his whore on a Saturday night to get some ‘fresh meat’ for his boys”, she started a fight with me as usual and when he returned he found me on top of his baby 279 biklmnpqrcgi mama with a pan and he flipped out. I ran away that day and since then I sought protection from Makhelio”. “And that’s how you ended up a slave’’ “Slave? no... no, I found my salvation. Makhelio protects me. He protects us from animals like Rocko and quite honestly I never understand your stubbornness towards him” “Protection?” “Yes protection Leka. A few months ago Rocko caught me, he was like “I got you now,” and he jumped out of his tiny ugly car. We were in White City just a few blocks from my house. Me and Franscinah were high as fuck off crack. He had a baseball bat, and Franscinah ran away and left me. So, yes, I got the baseball bat, he beat me in my legs and told me ‘If you fall, bitch, I’m going hit you in you on the head until you die nyaa.’ So I didn’t fall, I just stood there and screamed and took it” “Oh my God” “Makhelio came with two of his boys and they messed him up really bad, broke his car windows and told them if they ever saw him anywhere near me they were going to kill him, his dogs and all his kids. My face was swelling, I looked liked a cabbage patch, I was horrible” “Let me tell you the reason I would never work for those pigs. That Mongol called Shimmy, who works for your boss is a rapist. He raped me” “What?! No way. Shimmy? Are you sure? He is the sweetest guy I know. I heard he is in hospital as we speak” “I put him there” “What?! Oh my God, what have you done?” “I could not sleep Tracy. I still can’t sleep. Every time I close my eyes I see him, I see him panting and sweating above 280 biklmnpqrcgi me forcing himself into my anus” “You are lying’’ “On my mother’s grave”, she crossed her fingers. “I’m so sorry my friend. It makes sense now. You are one of them” “What makes sense? One of who?” “The targeted ones. You are one of the targeted ones. Shimmy is a recruiter. He lures women with money, they give girls loans and when they are unable to pay—up the loan they are forced to work indefinitely for the brothel if that doesn’t work they force you to work for them” “When I first met him. The night he raped me, I didn’t even know he worked for Makhelio. Even that day at the hotel party when Makhelio was trying to hustle me I still had no idea Shimmy was working for him?” “He wasn’t there I think. You know when I was going through that Rocko situation I only managed to stay sane because of this other support group I used to go to. They are called the ‘Harmonic Sisters’. You should visit them” “I’m not sure I need that. I almost killed a man and I don’t need to talk about that with strangers” “You don’t have to. Here, let me give you the directions”, she scrolled down her phonebook and gave Maleka the address.

281 biklmnpqrcgi Chapter 29

“Yes” the moderator pointed at one of the girls. “Jessica”, the moderator said. “Let’s all follow in a line. If you have a comment please do speak up and remember, no one is judging you here”, she explained to the girls who were seating around a circle. “I‘ve listened to a lot of stories every night here from rape victims, drug addicts and runaway girls. Not to compare your story with any of theirs’ but I haven’t heard anything as horrific as what happened to you, Maleka. I feel so sad for what you went through. I feel so saddened because after talking about my own experiences with my close friends, I learned I’m not even the only one who’s gone through this kind of abuse and coercion”, the girl sitting next to Jessica spoke softly and timidly. “I’m shaking in rage and feel my pulse rushing. I feel strongly for you and any other woman, man and child having gone through anything like this. I’m so full of emotions I can’t even express myself. I deeply admire you for telling your story. Thank you”

282 biklmnpqrcgi The next girl patted the other girl who had just spoke on the back before she commented. “A cock does not accidentally rip through a woman’s anus. It is a deliberate, wilful act, so demonic. It is terrorism in its worst form against a woman and her body”, she wiped off a tear and looked at the girl next to her. “I’m heartbroken by your tragedy really, and wish you the very best in healing and I’m so proud of your courage. As you spoke the name of the man who abused you I kept hearing ‘Nkuli’ the name of my rapist. Each detail matched my attack verbatim. Men know how painful anal intercourse is for woman, which give these sick fucks some kind of perv high.” “Men will never disclose raping a woman even with their buddies who know their violent nature because rape is the most hideous of crimes, even another rapist would look at him in total vile disgust and repugnance. Your bravery has likely healed so many traumatized survivors here. Thank you Melaka” “Maleka”, she corrected her. “Oh, sorry, I apologize. Maleka”, they smiled at each other and the comment baton was passed on to the moderator who’d formed the support group a few years ago from what Maleka got from the introductions. She clapped her hands slowly and loudly and the girls joined in. They all stood up to hug Maleka. To them she was a pillar of strength out of the abyss of loss of hope. Her story was inspirational and she stood before them a goddess of survival, a symbol of conquer against the demons each and every girl was battling every time they closed their eyes to go to sleep. They crowded around her exchanging cellphone numbers and offering her their sympathy but clearly 283 biklmnpqrcgi she had no interest in any of their pity. The truth is she’d told them total fiction. She told them she was raped on her way from church by a man she knows. She said that she’d exposed him to his wife and his children and he is currently in jail. Total fiction and they swallowed it. The support group was established by a rape survivors - the moderator – a tall, slim woman with the complexion of someone who grew up in too much sunlight. She walks with a slight limp and wears huge earrings made of dried pressed Oak leaves. She is a counsellor by profession having worked at a mental hospital before but to the girls she did not want to be a counsellor, she was their fellow survivor. She was excellent with them; she spoke to them like a mother and listened to them like a girlfriend. “That was truly nothing short of heart-warming”, the moderator pulled Maleka aside from the group of girls who were all busy chatting with each other. “Hi, my name is Kenya, you said you are Maleka right?” “Yes, sorry I came late’’ “No need for apologies Leka, can I call you that?” “Yes please my friends call me that” “You are not from here are you? I’m from Mozambique myself. My parents always wanted to relocate to Kenya to escape the poverty in my village in Mozambique and the pirates but they never got the chance” “I‘m sorry. And no I am not a local. I’m from Zimbabwe”

284 biklmnpqrcgi “Oh sista, shame. I know you guys have it bad out there” “We do hey, we definitely do and it gets worse by the day. So did you ever make it to Kenya if you don’t mind me asking?” “Never, Kenya was my father’s dream really. As soon as my parents got killed I left for the South. I really wanted to go to South Africa but it was difficult to get a work permit over there if you know what I mean. I left immediately after the funeral and I have never been back there again” “Killed?” Maleka asked with a raised eyebrow but immediately apologized. “I am sorry, I ‘m prying” “No not really, It’s been decades now, thieves broke into our home one Tuesday night while we were watching some soapie I can’t really remember whether it was Days of Our Lives or Sunset Beach. They tied us all down in the living room, raped me and my mother while my dad watched helplessly then they shot both my parents in the head and left me there tied down”. “No—ooo” “Sometimes I smell their blood you know”. “That’s terrible”, Maleka said regretting why she had asked “Until last month I wished they had killed me too. But these stories like yours and the many girls who come here having gone through so much in their lives are really heart-breaking and yet hortatory, I apologize for my vanity” “No not at all. My friend Tracy sent me here” “Oh yes, Trace. Where is she and how is she?” “Busy, but she says the group has healed her soul and 285 biklmnpqrcgi scars immensely. I came here not for my soul nor my scars but for my spirit. The anger in my heart still consumes me even after I sought retribution, I feel it rise above me, above my common sense, my normally level head and whenever I see a man walk past me I almost throw up” “Any drugs” “Yes. I don’t know its name but it helps me sleep, and sometimes even forget for a minute what he did to me and cigarettes. Lots of cigarettes” “Those will kill you faster and painfully. You should seek medical assistance. Living on the brink of collapse like this is only killing you Leka. Unlike most of the girls here you have taken the first stride to heal yourself” “It’s not the memories that haunt me. It’s the desire I carry inside me to see him burn. I was never a vengeful person by nature but nowadays it seems as if vendetta is my second nature. It is my only terminal”. The counsellor’s phone rang and as she moved a few feet away from Maleka to answer it Maleka disappeared into the night. When Kenya got off the phone and turned around to continue her conversation with her intriguing new ‘sista’ there was no one in sight except for the other girls who were busy chatting and enjoying scones and biscuits by a tiny round table at the corner of the underground parking lot where they held their night counselling sessions.

286 biklmnpqrcgi Chapter 30

n a hot summer day like this it was easy to get lost in the parade of dust and the 43 degrees Celsius heat. The village was reeling from episodes of robbery that paralysed the businesses and left fear masking the hearts of the security guards. The village had only one police officer and investigations were slower than a snail on top of a turtle. OZimbabweans. It always had to be Zimbabweans. Rumour around the village was that the robberies were orchestrated by a syndicate from across the border. Zimbabweans were constantly getting blamed for these crimes since the collapse of their country’s economy. Many of them had been caught in this village, some for stock theft, some for rape and stealing harvest at the fields. No one imagined it could be two small boys right before their eyes. The Lucky Seven was broken into four times, other small shops and kiosks were not spared from the break-ins and the last break-in was at the post office where the robbers left with more than five hundred pula and hundreds of sealed envelopes 287 biklmnpqrcgi with letters belonging to the villagers. “We have to stop before we get caught” “One last job” “No really. We have to stop” “Coward. What do you have to show for all the hard work we been putting on? P500 and a couple of Jet Magazines?” “So what’s your big plan?” “The Lucky Seven owner’s home” “You are a mad” “Mad serious yes. Just think about it. She leaves the shop everyday with thousands of Pula and only goes to Francistown once in a week, on Saturdays to make deposits at the bank. Where does she keep the money for the rest of the week?” “But to rob her at her place?” “No. Not her place. She has vicious dogs and it would be impractical to even enter her home at night so my suggestion is this. Nails on the road on Saturday” “Nails?” “Yes, we give her a puncture just a few kilometres away from the village then we hijack her, wearing masks” “What if she is travelling with someone else or what if someone arrives before we get the money?” “Our village has a minimum of three cars coming here on a daily basis and you know it. The bakery car, the ambulance and that Mr Maswabi old fool’s car” “Where are we going to get the masks?” “Leave that to me”. Taboka had given a lot of thought to this plan. It seemed more fool proof than any of their previous robberies. Only one of their jobs had been botched and it was really not that thought 288 biklmnpqrcgi out anyway. They almost got caught that night by the security guard who had been hiding in the darkness. He sprung out of nowhere and startled them before they could break into the store and they managed to run away unscathed and unidentified. Taboka’s stash room was his paradise. Since they started robbing stores, him and his little brother did not go a night without a meal. He still kept his job during the day, selling sweets and some of the smaller things he stole from the stores and kiosks they robbed and when night came he wore his thief’s mask and became the Black Robin Hood as he called himself. His brother never suspected a thing. He was told that all these items were a result of hard work and that he should focus on his school work. Every tin of beef or fish they ate and every wrapping or container was disposed off in small shallow ‘graves’ in the yard. He was getting better at it. Hungry even. He had thought of leaving the village to pursue this path further in Tutume, a bigger village a few kilometres away from Nswazwi with many shops, bigger stores and many opportunities to explore. But before that he had one final score he wanted to do. He watched her every day, drive by the tree stump where he sat selling sweets and small packets of chilly corn-chips. She drove past him every day and it was as if he was non-existent in her world – not even a glance. She never said a word to him and he hated her for it. He wanted to punish her insolence and teach her a lesson to stop being so cheeky. He studied her movements, the pattern was not difficult to establish. Her road—map was repetitive and in less than a week of intensive observation he knew her movements like he 289 biklmnpqrcgi knew his own dick. He masturbated to images inside his head of her sobbing when she found out she’d been robbed. He knew the exact time at which she left the house to open the shop, when she closed the shop up just before the sun went down, when she went to re—stock and most importantly when she left on Saturdays to go and deposit her money at the bank in Francistown. On Thursday afternoon Taboka did not put up his stall. He stayed at home the whole day sewing together old, worn— out clothes, tearing up some of his old school uniform jerseys. His grandmother taught him how to sew when he was just a little boy and he had never forgotten the craft. By lunch—time he had only managed to make one mask from the cloths and was working on the second. He finished making the second mask just before sunset. His little brother found him on top of the roof when he arrived from school. He had a hammer on his hand. He was yanking out nails from the rafters that supported the thatch “What are you doing?” “I was fixing a hole on our roof. The rains will be coming soon” “Oh, okay”. Taboka climbed down from the roof, clutching his pocket. He did not want Mmula to know what he was really doing up on the roof of the mud hut. The nails in his pocket would be enough to puncture that store owner’s car. The next day, on Friday, when Mmula left for school he spent the morning straightening the nails and later before noon he met up with Sello and they went over their plan again and again and again until it was all they could think of. 290 biklmnpqrcgi “This is our last’’ “Our last’’, Taboka agreed. “The money we get tomorrow will be enough to start my own business” “I’m getting out of here tomorrow as soon as I get my money” “I can’t leave. I’m all my brother has. I want to go to Tutume but I can’t leave him” “I understand. He is lucky. I’m all I ever had” “I promised my grandmother I would take care of him” “Let’s roll some up. It might be our last together” “I don’t have any. Kudzani was caught last week remember?” “Now you see why I told you we should grow our own? Stupid boneheads like Nkudzi always get caught. Thank your gods that you didn’t get caught along with him” “I know man. That’s going to be part of my business” “Ha ha ha I knew it. Once a criminal, always a criminal’’. They laughed and went over their plan one more final time and went separate ways around 7p.m. When Taboka got home he found a plate of pap and tinned fish and beans waiting for him. His brother had gone to bed so he ate alone by the fireplace. A tingling sense of reverence wore his mind. Like stage fright the anxiety came like madness, it came out of the blue without warning and he felt like he was being heckled mercilessly by a gang of sinister rapists in prison. Prison. That’s what he feared the most. Not just because it meant loss of freedom or because he would be cut off from his brother 291 biklmnpqrcgi but the simple fact that he would be living in a tiny, cold room, surrounded by hardened criminals; murderers, child molesters, rapists and all the filth of the this earth. He justified his crimes in his head. He stole from the rich in order to survive. He stole from those who deserved it and he didn’t steal unnecessarily. He sat in the darkness by the warm ashes until midnight. It was getting colder when he finally stood up and went to bed leaving the unwashed plates by the fireplace. Saturday morning came like a bride. Bright, glorious and full of anxiety. Morning dew covered the entire village like a blanket and as Taboka prepared himself for the most challenging day he has ever had, he noticed a fleet of cars come up slowly from a distance with their lights blaring. The fleet was led by a black Wagon carrying a casket and draped in silky linens. “A funeral?... A fucken funeral?” Sello came running into Taboka’s room. “Don’t panic. I know that lady, she can’t go to the funeral. She doesn’t attend people’s events” “That’s not the problem. A funeral means one thing — there are many cars in the village and that means after the funeral they will be leaving and they will be using that very route we are going to execute our plan” “We‘ll be done with her by the time the casket drops. Here take your mask and let’s go”, he threw the ugly mask at Sello who caught it angrily “What an ugly thing this is” They laughed uneasily, each one feeling the pressure of what they were about to do.

292 biklmnpqrcgi * * *

They left the yard and got digested by the milky morning condensate. They walked for seven kilometres towards Makuta village and set out their trap just a few hundred meters away from Mashawe River - the river towards the Makuta village Junction which is 9 kilometers away from Nswazwi, where the road from Nswazwi joins the main road from Tutume to Francistown. The nails set three centimetres apart were wedged hard onto the tarred road with a small hammer with their sharp edges facing upwards. It took them less than ten minutes to lay out their tedious trap then they hid behind some tall grasses on the side of the road and waited for their target. “You hear that?” “Yes, she is coming” “What if it’s not her?” “It has to be her” The dew had cleared up and the sun was rising up from below the hills on the horizon. A beautiful sight. Like a flurry ball of fire, the sun’s grin was intrepid and fierce. With it came their lottery. They saw the car approach almost five kilometres away. It was her.

293 biklmnpqrcgi Chapter 31

“Shimmy wake up. We got a whore to trap” Makhelio kicked Shimmy on the hand slightly and walked past him to the cupboard in the room where Shimmy was curled up like a dog. He took a gun from behind the shelf and handed it to the stunned-looking Shimmy. “Remember this?”. Shimmy nodded. “I found it at the table at one of our parties. I gave it to you when you first got here and a few weeks later you lost it, you dumbass. But today... Today you better not let it out of your site. You are going to need it” Shimmy recognized the gun. He’d received a lot of flak from Makhelio about it when he lost it and he never got it back. “What time is it?” “Just before 6 p.m. You have slept most of the day away” “I’m hungry as fuck” “You must be. There is takeaway in my office, go freshen up, eat and let’s go hunting”. Makhelio left the cabin and

294 biklmnpqrcgi headed to his office. An hour later they left the building and got into the black Honda. “Where is your car Shimmy?” “At my house, if I can still call it my house” “We need it so today when we are done with that Maleka chic of yours we are going to get it alright?” “Cool” They drove slowly out of the mall area. “Call Tracy and ask her if she has seen or heard from our friend today” Shimmy took Makhelio’s phone and opened the phone— book, scrolled down and dialled Tracy. She answered after a few rings, “Hey teddy-bear, I just saw you leave the building”, she replied “This is not Makhelio” “Oh Shimmy. Hi” “Hello Tracy. Look, we need information. Have you seen or spoken to Maleka lately?” “No, why? What do you want from her?” “Makhelio wanted to know” “No I haven’t seen or spoken to her. How are you? I thought you were still in hospital. I heard what happened to you and I’m sorry” “I’m okay. Look if you hear from her or see her call us alright?” “Sure”. Shimmy hung up and told Makhelio that Tracy hadn’t seen Maleka

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295 biklmnpqrcgi “Pig”, Tracy said putting away her phone and immediately she rang Maleka. “They are looking for you. Where are you?” “My office. Who is looking for me”, Maleka asks nervously looking around. She walks away from the lamp post she was standing under into the darkness so that no one could see her. “Makhelio and Shimmy” “He is out of the hospital?” “Yes he is, and he sounds angry. Get out of there now. Just leave this place and never come back okay. This is not all worth it. Go to Francistown, Jwaneng or something. They can’t find you there because they barely leave town” “Thank you for looking out for me my friend”. Maleka hangs up and starts hurrying towards the traffic lights, heading straight home. She is going to pack her clothes and leave this place for good. It had been years since she last saw her son and the past four months she had not sent any money back home. The money she got from Shimmy when she tortured him would be enough to get her started back at home and she would not have to do this dirty business anymore. Just as she turned right to join the main road leading towards Broadhurst she saw a black Honda which she recognized immediately. She turned back, took off her heels and started running as fast as she could. The Honda’s headlights suddenly came alive and blinded her. She tripped and fell hard on her face. Two men got out of the car and came running towards her, one limping more than running and they found her lying there on the ground sobbing. 296 biklmnpqrcgi * * *

A few meters away a lone figure that’d been hiding out in the dark starts dialling – nine-one-one. The call gets rejected, so she dials again, nine-nine-nine: “Botswana Police Hello?” “Hello, hello, is this the police?” “Yes ma’am, how can we help you?” “Two men... two men are raping a woman here. Come quick, please send the police quick”, she whispered on the phone. “Ma’am, calm down, where are you?” “By the traffic lights just before The Black Marina hotel, coming from Maibe Corner Street” “Okay just stay where you are, a patrol car is two minutes away. Stay where you are. What’s your name ma’am?” “Kenya” “Sorry?” “Kenya, that’s my name” “Okay Keny..” blee—eeeeep, she had hung up.

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“Maleka, Maleka, Maleka!” Makhelio said tauntingly as he approached her. He jumped on her and stepped on her throat. “Please leave me alone. What do you want from me?”

297 biklmnpqrcgi “You must think you are invincible don’t you? Do you know who I am?” Makhelio asked her, his foot on her throat while Shimmy held her feet down like a cow about to be slaughtered. She nodded frightened, tears soaking up in her eyes. “Good, then you know what I’m capable of don’t you?”, Again she nodded. “I’m going to take my foot off your throat and if you even breathe out wrong I’m going to crush out your larynx you hear me?”, She nodded again. Makhelio released his foot from her throat and pulled her up with her hands. “Do you know who this is?” “Yes I know him. His name is Shimmy” “Wrong. He is one of mine and you fucked with one of mine. There is a price people pay for fucking with my business” “He raped me!” She reacted angrily “And why didn’t you go to the police?” “I couldn’t. I don’t have papers” “Zimbabweans. Fucking Zimbabweans. Why do you have to make everything so damn complicated? All we asked for from you was to come work for us and look where your impertinence has led to” “To be a slave?’’. He hit her with a fist and broke her nose. “No... no baby girl you don’t talk back at me like that, you hear me? You don’t fucking talk back at me like that” He slapped her again and Shimmy got closer to slap her too. When she was picked off the ground he had stood aside to let his boss handle her and he knew better than to interfere. They slapped her around and kicked her towards the black Honda. 298 biklmnpqrcgi Out of nowhere blue flashing lights suddenly beamed all over the place. The Helicopter spotlight was right above and on them and they were surrounded by three Police Subaru’s. “You are surrounded. Put your hands behind your back and lie down on the ground now”, someone shouted from behind the police car. Shimmy terrified, he let go of Maleka’s hand and fell down to the ground on his knees. He had watched enough movies to know that the police could shoot you for not obliging. He put his hands behind his head and lied down face— down on the ground. Maleka was flung to the ground when the blue flashlights suddenly blinded them. Shimmy looked up slightly and saw Makhelio still standing his hand inside his left pocket. “No man, don’t do this”, Shimmy pleaded with his boss realizing what he was about to do. “I don’t have a choice brother. I can’t go to jail and I can’t go back to Congo” “Congo? That’s where you come from? Congo? I thought you are from Angola” “Congo boy” “We can work this out. We haven’t killed anyone” “But I’m here illegally. I’m a refugee that escaped from the camp Shimmy, they can’t just let me go. They will deport me just as they are going to deport this bitch”, he said angrily looking at Maleka, his left hand slowly coming from his pocket holding a SIG Sauer P225 Pistol and just as he pointed it at Maleka a bullet shattered through the night’s tranquil, tore through Makhelio’s head and he fell right on the face of Shimmy, blood gushing from his chest. Maleka was screaming and cursing as the police 299 biklmnpqrcgi officers rushed towards them shouting, “Don’t move, don’t move” They put cuffs on both of them and they were forced into police cars while Makhelio cold on the ground. “You have the right to remain silent, anything you say can and will be used against you in the court of law’’. The cuffs were so tight on Shimmy’s hands he could not move. A skinny woman with dreadlocks emerged from behind the waste bins on the side of the road and went to the police officer in charge. Maleka saw Kenya and realized what had just happened. She was however surprised, and wondering what Kenya was doing out here. “Hi, my name is Kenya, I called the station to report the two men who were about to rape the woman you just arrested” “Oh hello, Kenya, Sergeant Maoka” he offered a hand and she shook it “Thank you very much for calling the station. The young woman is not under arrest, we just need her statement at the station plus we suspect she was soliciting” “Can I speak to her?” “You know her?” “Yes, I know her. She was coming to visit me across the road” “Okay then. Constable Modise, take the cuffs off that woman and let her speak to her friend here. She saved her life’’, the Sergeant instructed his junior. “Leka...” “Kenya, what are you doing here?” “I followed you here. Wanted to see what you do”, she whispered so the officers could not hear them. The officers were 300 biklmnpqrcgi busy with the coroners loading up Makhelio’s body into the coroner’s truck. “I saw those two men attack you and I called the Police” “I should be angry that you followed me but you just saved my life you know that?. Thank you” “Where are you going from here?” “I can’t go to the police station. They will deport me and I will leave all my savings behind. I can’t go to the station” “This is your chance then. They are all busy so go”, Kenya grabbed Maleka’s had and they ran off into the darkness. The police realized she was gone five minutes later and they searched the area but she was nowhere to be found. They didn’t care. They’d finally gotten the man they’d always wanted – Makhelio. The drug-lord had met his end and there was going to be a big celebration at the station. Shimmy was taken to jail and charged with attempted rape, possession of a firearm and racketeering. A media storm brewed at the whiff that the man who had been a victim of an attempted ritual killing was caught racketeering with the same group of people who were suspected to have been behind the ritual crime. The Police discovered from Makhelio’s house that he was actually Kwezi – a boy who’d escaped from the Dukwi refugee camp eighteen years ago. They also discovered five million Pula stashed in different compartments of the house. Further investigations led the police to Shimmy’s home where they found a charcoal black Mazda 3 covered at the back of the house. It was the same car that the police had been looking for in connection with the murder of a young University girl. 301 biklmnpqrcgi Forensic evidence confirmed that indeed the girl had been in the car. The gay boy was brought forward to identify him from a group of men and he pointed at him. Shimmy realized the hole he’d dug himself into so he didn’t waste anyone’s time – he pleaded guilty to all charges. His life was over. The judge sentenced him to life imprisonment on first degree murder and other charges. The media storm quickly and quietly died off as fast as it had died the first time. He was transferred from Gaborone to Mahalapye maximum prison and life became a living hell for him. Maleka left Gaborone the day after Kenya had saved her life. She hitched a ride from one of the truckers who was famous amongst illegal immigrants for transporting them from Gaborone across the South African, Zimbabwean and Zambian border. She was going home and never coming back to this place.

302 biklmnpqrcgi Chapter 32

he prison was cold. Hard walls and hard floors. It was everything he had imagined and much more. There was so much violence, every minute was a death trap. The prison hospital was always littered with bruised, stabbed and bleeding criminals. Factions were rampant and uncontrollable. Either you belonged to one of the factions or became a ‘bitch’ to Tall the factions. The place smelled like shit. Worse than shit even. No one flushes the toilets. Ever. But the walls are squeaky clean, the corridors too damn clean and cold because the offenders are always mopping and scrubbing. But then there were some inmates who’d just basically shit on the cleaned corridors for a laugh. Taboka and Sello joined the Zokoloshe crew on the second day of their arrival. The members were mostly Zimbabweans and most of them spoke Kalanga fluently hence Taboka and Sello found it a more fitting crew to join. It was their third month since they got arrested trying to rob the Lucky Seven store owner at Nswazwi village. Taboka still bore scars from that day and he remembered it every day. 303 biklmnpqrcgi The nails had worked. The car had stopped. The masks were on their faces and they had been ready to make a fortune. Sello had a knife on the woman’s throat while Taboka searched the car for the had—bag. The money was inside a grey old trunk beneath the seat and Taboka found it after about five minutes of searching. Sello was arguing with him to hurry up and in the event they did not hear the approaching car from the other direction which parked on the side of the road and six men came running towards the car after realizing what was happening. The mob gave the two boys a beat—down of their life before they handed them over to the police. Taboka and Sello were both given five lashes on their bare buttocks and sentenced to five years in prison. When the police went to the boy’s place and searched for evidence from other robberies they discovered large amounts of stolen goods buried in the house at Taboka’s place and empty tins of tinned staff littered all over Sello’s yard. Mmula was taken to an SOS children’s home. Prison was a difficult place to be familiar to. Every night brought its own danger, every day brought its own hazards and no matter how much you tried to stay in your lane the dangers and hazards always found you. Rape was a common thing. New inmates, still unaffiliated to any gang were the most susceptible. Inside everyone was just universally a cunt. The gangs had a big presence here and they were bad enough to kind of make you wish your mother had aborted you. There are the Zokoloshes which is essentially 304 biklmnpqrcgi a brotherhood of Zimbabwean prisoners. The word Zokoloshe was coined from “Zimbabwe” and “Thokoloshi” – a dwarf-like mythical creature that torments those who live with it. Prison is hell in its true form, and that’s before you met the bosses. The prison guards came in all flavours but Kalanga guards were the worst. Tswana speaking guards, you could tell were just poor black men trying to get in a shitty-job’s salary. Kalanga guards took this job to the chest. They relished in the pain of prisoners. Rape, despite the rumours, is not a big deal inside. It happens almost every day so eventually it becomes normal if you stay-in long enough. It happened mostly to the new inmates. There is no gym equipment in prison. That whole, ‘bunch of guys sitting around pumping iron’ image that the boys had before they entered the prison disappeared immediately. Gym equipment is a weapon and weapons are forbidden. New inmates came every weekend on Saturdays from all corners of the country.

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Shimmy arrived at Mahalapye Maximum Prison on the last Saturday of the fourth month anniversary for Taboka and Sello. He looked frail, like an injured animal he moved reluctantly as he was paraded before the other inmates upon arrival. “Man you won’t believe this shit”, Taboka elbowed Sello “What?” “That old swine over there...” he pointed at Shimmy. 305 biklmnpqrcgi “Yes?” “That’s my father”, he whispered “Get out of here” “It’s him” “Are you sure? It’s been years since you last saw him” “It’s him alright” “What’s he doing here?” “Who knows...” “We‘ll find out soon” Taboka watched his father like a black hawk widow. Sizing him and anticipating their confrontation. Never letting his eyes off him, he waited his chance to knock out all his father’s front teeth. He blamed him for everything. But for now all he could do was watch him from a distance. He was terrified of solitary confinement. “I—I know you can’t wo—w—wait but just be patient my frien-n—n—nd”, stammered one of the boys from the Zokoloshes. “We‘ll get him. Just don’t do anything hasty, ‘cos trust me... Solitary is a bitch”, added the leader of the Zokoloshes. “The hole changes you”, Sello said sadly, “I was fucking scared of solitary confinement when I first got here and heard all the stories about it. I behaved myself, kissed a lot of ass and bowed down to everything” “I remember, you looked like shit when you came down from there” Taboka said looking at his friend sadly. “You been to the hole?’’, One of the crew members asked. “Twice”, Taboka said laughingly. “Eventually I realized that solitary isn’t something you 306 biklmnpqrcgi can hold off by just not being a dick. It’s a reality of life and you will, at some point, be put in solitary for no fucking reason. Do what you got to do my boy. I got you”, Sello said looking at Taboka sliding him a sharpened toothbrush. There isn’t a convict alive who over time doesn’t become aware of just how badass they seem by virtue of being inside. There wasn’t a guy inside who didn’t allow himself that exaggerated swagger because ‘he is a convict’ and doesn’t take shit from no one. A part of that swagger is silent intimidation. Taboka had witnessed that transformation on his friend Sello; the boy had turned into one of the fiercest prisoners and most respected. He also learnt that if you want to intimidate someone you say nothing to them. Just stare at him and say a word. News broke out amongst the other inmates that one of the new ones was a father to one of the Zokoloshes members. The stammering guy was blamed and a day later he was found lying face-down in bed, he’d been suffocated. Shimmy became a target to all the crews and a reject to the Zokoloshes who resented him for the stories Taboka had told them about him. The Zokoloshes started spreading word around the prison yards that whoever raped the new inmate with a big round belly would earn protection from the Zokoloshes. Shimmy was raped by thirteen men on his first week in prison. The following days became darker and darker for him. He was raped repeatedly by many other inmates and no one could help him. The guards just didn’t care. He needed protection and he was ready to join one of the gangs. To his dismay and shock they all rejected him. It was two weeks later when he learnt that one of the inmates was his eldest son. 307 biklmnpqrcgi Shock imbued him. His own son had watched as he was getting violated. His pride swollen he approached him to ask for protection. He found Taboka playing a tennis ball with some of his friends and he tapped his shoulder to grab his attention. Taboka turned around and saw his father standing right there before him. Before Shimmy could even speak, his son drove a long pointed sharp toothbrush onto his throat. He fell down immediately, bleeding and kicking while everybody else silently walked away into the compound. By the time the paramedics arrived he was dead. Brief investigations were done but like in many prisons snitching was held abhorrently in the prison wards. No one saw what had happened; no one knew who had stabbed Shimmy. Inquiries were made to contact his family but no one came forward to claim the body. He was buried at the prison’s burial grounds and his grave lies marked with a simple brick from the old prison’s building. He has no identity, no one knows his full name and no one cares Taboka was released from prison on his thirty seventh birthday after his sentence was extended twice for misdemeanours inside the prison, he returned to Nswazwi village and found a three bedroom mansion standing where their small hut had once stood. His brother was on the rise – the District Commissioner in Francistown.

308 biklmnpqrcgi About Author

Thabo Katlholo grew up in the small village of Nswazwi located in the North East, Botswana. Thabo currently resides in Botswana’s Capital City, Gaborone, and is mostly at home weaving the melancholy and macabre into settings and scenes, twisting the expected into the unexpected. The author of The Mud Hut I Grew Upon and a poetry anthology, Beyond the Tropic of Capricorn is establishing himself as one of the most creative writers to come out of Africa in the New Millennium.

For the latest news about Thabo’s works, be sure to visit Website: www.thabokatlholo.com Facebook: https://web.facebook.com/thabopkatlholo Twitter: https://twitter.com/Prinzeville

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