I was having the berserk and faintly triumphant feeling of having cornered Denoon, just because we both happened to be in Botswana. This was not absolutely stupid, because for the white presence Botswana is like one big very dispersed small town. There are only a million people all told, black and white together, in a country the size of Texas or France, as the intro paragraph of every project proposal on Botswana reads. But Denoon’s being there felt like providence. I was certain I could get his attention this time. A king can look at a cat for a change, I thought. This shooting star had apparently been sedentarized in my bailiwick — so, good. I wanted to see him in the flesh, see how he was holding up. Was he the same black Irish kindly Satan persona with hair like a Sioux, black as night, dispensing piercing glances left and right, or not?
People felt so strongly about him. When he was the topic of conversation you got sick of hearing the cliché that either you hated his positions or you loved them, there was no middle ground with him. Friendships had broken up over his book. The development business is full of suppressed hatred between schools of thought, and the passion arises because money is involved. Developmentalists are competing tooth and nail for project money to enact their theories someplace. This is the only way to know you’re on top. It isn’t like English History, say, where the prize is getting into every bibliography until the end of time because what you figured out about Tudor statecraft subsumes and overturns everything anybody else wrote, up until you. Development is more like research medicine, where you rise and fall according to the grants you rack up. In regular scholarship what you get is the joy of subsuming your predecessors and peers: they thought they were rivers but you turn them into creeks, tributaries to your majestic seaward flow. And Denoon not only pierced competitive theories on paper, he did live projects, lots of them one after another.
Anthropologists were particularly conflicted about Denoon because of his celebrated scorn for the field as a whole. But anthropology needs development and gets dragged perforce into taking sides on schools of thought or on projects. There is hiring involved. You need feasibility studies, you need sensitivity monitoring, you need impact evaluation, you need retrospectives of various kinds and degrees of thoroughness. For some reason he had basically a left academic constituency, which was odd because he was notorious for taking the position that marxists had no development theory worth the name: from Lenin onward development was just whatever took place after the spokesmen for the proletariat took power. But still they loved him. How did they like his famous Capitalism is strangling black Africa: Socialism will bury her! I wondered. He was the theorist you hate to love. I had to know how he was doing. Was he still the equivalent in development terms of Orson Welles in the movie world when he was at his zenith between Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons? Had he slipped at all, since we all slip? I wanted to see him in the flesh.
Tell me at least if he’s married, I said to Z. He had been, the last I’d heard. I couldn’t help it. Eminence is not the best medium for marriages, is what I was thinking.
I can tell you something about that another time, Z said. It’s an interesting question. I would say yes and no. It’s an interesting story. But there was the question of our um prognosis.
I was slightly unforthcoming.
Well, there was more he could tell me, possibly. Denoon kept his movements in Botswana, when he was offsite, very private. But he thought Denoon was about to be in town for a short while. Z might be able to find out more about that too.
He had me and knew it.
Could we not just go on seeing each other for a time, at a pace of say once a week, since I had gotten him well over the hump with his back? It’s your hands I’m going to miss eternally when you leave, he said, your marvelous hands, your great gift.
Another choppy night ensued after he left me alone with my new fixation. I slept minimally, then got up and cleaned the premises and wrote another lying letter to my mother.
THE SOLAR DEMOCRAT
A Fête Worse Than Death
I was wound up when I met Denoon. The night was muggy, with freak intermittent blasts and lurches of hot wind, which was fine somehow when I was walking over to the reception with Z but nerve-wracking during the aeon we had to wait in a mob outside the locked gates of the house we were invited to. The hosts who were keeping us in the street were the USAID mission director Arthur Bemis and his wife, Ariel. Apparently we were waiting for the receiving line to complete itself.
Just getting into the AID director’s house was considered a coup, because of the decor. People said it was like being in Asia. From the street the place looked Moorish: there were high pink perimeter walls, polychrome tiles outlining the arch around the locked gates, palm fronds visible lashing back and forth above the walls. There was a huge attendance, half of it Batswana out of the state bourgeoisie. We were very dressy. Z was wearing an actual cummerbund, my first. I was wearing a black skirt with kick pleats and a tank top, also black. I needed a full skirt at that point in time. Cursing was going on in several languages as women hunched and swiveled in the wind while their coiffures came to pieces. We couldn’t see Denoon in the line, which prompted Z to tell me again that it was only a rumor that he would be there at all.
We were let into the grounds but not yet into the house. The walls were no help when it came to the wind. The grounds had a very lunar feeling. Floodlights cast a bleaching glare over everything, and the estate lights dotted about the grounds were so fierce they left afterimages. You had to watch where you looked. Wife Ariel was the leading malcontent in the American community. The watering restrictions that came with the drought had been the last straw for her, and she had had all her lawns scraped up and replaced with beds of white pebbles imported from South Africa. I have removed the brownsward, she is supposed to have announced. There was a paucity of chairs, and the ones there were were metal and forbidding, unpadded. Ariel was identified with Asia, where they had been posted repeatedly. In the receiving line she was easily your most unforgettable character. She was perfect for the electric-blue Chinese silk sheath she was wearing, being anorectic. She was sharp-featured and made you feel she had been shanghaied to Africa but was making the best of it. When he got up to Ariel, Z looked as though he feared he had gotten it wrong and this was perhaps a costume party.
Bemis was a big soft bankerly man reputed to be very shrewd, which was possibly true because his eyes were everywhere. He and Ariel were in their early sixties. There was some jagged non-Western music coming over the public address system, maybe from a field recording of a gamelan orchestra. Anyway it was vintage and scratchy. Z said there was feeling against Ariel across the board for underentertaining. She would put off entertaining for long intervals and then try to catch up, with mammoth and unsatisfactory events like the one we were at. Word came that we would be outside awhile longer because they were running late with the buffet, which was going to be authentic oriental treats that all had to be done at the same time. We were starving. Wife Ariel was also, Z said, renowned for small portions. He predicted what we were likely to get: jellyfish entrails — a joculism for cellophane noodles — in tiny bowls of acrid broth with leaf shreds floating, and pebbles of meat called saté, in a searing sauce. The saté would get between your teeth. He had toothpicks with him and handed me some proleptically. Z had a fixed bridge of not the greatest quality. There was plenty to drink. The occasion was in honor of the corps of district commissioners, who were in town for a pep talk on the Tribal Grazing Lands Policy. Z said Denoon had been ordered not to say anything on TGLP under any circumstances in public. It figured that he would be against it since it was only the single most important ingredient in the whole land tenure reform exercise the government was committed to.