This is intellectual loneliness showing, I thought. It was evident he had a kind of hysteria to talk that was getting worse the more he was interrupted. He was veering all over. Who was Clausewitz to Mbaake? Denoon was supposed to be aiming himself at youth and he was talking about Clausewitz! The man was too lonely. I had no idea who he had with him out in the bush, but this scene suggested that they left something to be desired as discussants. The same sort of hysteria was familiar to me. I had experienced the same thing coming in from the Tswapong Hills to Keteng. I could be useful to this man. I love to talk, needless to say. Also I was pleased at how much of his rap I was getting, even if it was slightly outside my academic bailiwick. I love to talk. For a woman, I’m even considered a raconteuse. I remember jokes, for example. But then I also remember everything.
Also he was doing something else I considered compulsive, saying things that might constitute laugh lines in other settings, but not here. Who cared if he was willing to say of himself that he was wellknown to be gung ho for half measures and that if he had been in the October Revolution he would have been saying some power to the soviets?
And it was also compulsive and part of the same thing to recommend books in passing like Soil and Civilization and Evolutionary Socialism that no one in Botswana could get if they had a million dollars. They were hard to find in London and New York. He fought me on this. He had onlymentioned Soil and Civilization because it contained the key phrase Man is a parasite on soils, which had been a strobelike experience for him the first time he read it. I agree that man is a parasite, but I made the point that mentioning books when he was proselytizing that people could never hope to get their hands on just drives mankind crazy. This is the third world, I told him. Mention books you have copies of or offprints of the main passages of.
DENOON:
Making the point that the feelings that abound at the onset of insurrection fade away. The moment is artificial and based on adrenaline and so forth. The prisons refill. Look, if you look nowhere else, at Algeria. Of course there is much more to say on this, and I see my colleague from Local Government and Lands not smiling.
So as much as I appreciate the opportunity you have all given me to spontificate he was doing it again, I should return, I mean rather I must return, to my topic — which is how we can, all of us, of all persuasions — join to redeem and preserve Botswana’s villages. We must get back to the village.
BOSO VOICES:
Yes, back to the village! Back to the village! Yes, go back to the village! Go back to the village! won out as the predominant cry. Denoon was patient until that stopped.
DENOON:
Back to the village—
MBAAKE:
So but you will not tell us what is vernacular development and nor will you tell us what is your great scheme, even in some some some short terms. Mbaake was excited, which showed up not as a stutter but as a word repetition syndrome. I sensed he had something up his sleeve en route.
Nor about our ancestors as to if they they were socialists or whatnot.
DENOON:
My brief, as I said, is to talk about some few things that can be done right now, today, in the villages, in particular some low tillage schemes I can describe, some specialty crops that makhoa in Europe want and will pay for very handsomely, some—
MBAAKE:
Ehé. Oh, all about how we can grow some some flowers in the sandveld and such things, yah.
Well, these are things we like to know, as well.
But but you see it is just the same as always with whitemen because once again a lakhoa is saying what we must hear and whatnot. So it is just the same.
You say comrade, yet you take us as small boys.
DENOON:
Comrade, I am under the instructions of your government in this, as you well know.
I would love nothing better than to stay long into the night to talk about all these matters.
But, Rra, I am a guest in this country. I—
MBAAKE:
Ah, my comrade, but what can you say at all as to your your holy of holies, your your New Jerusalem, not can we raise up some flowers in the sandveld?
What is … what is, what is, if you can say … what is this very slyly solar democracy?
Or must whitemen just time and again produce more secrets that we in our own country must beg to know in our own country?
DENOON:
If you suppose there is anything sinister in—
MBAAKE:
No, my comrade, because when have whitemen done ill to us or made schemes behind our backs? Can you think when?
Some kind of transgression had occurred involving mentioning solar democracy. Denoon was steely for a change.
MBAAKE:
So what can you say is this this city of the sun, yah?
DENOON:
After a long pause. There is no such thing. Another pause. Solar democracy is … is still … He trailed off. He drank some water.
The peculiar passivity of the white presence was patently determined by their interest in seeing if Boso’s heckling was going to jab Denoon into revealing something about his project that they were interested in knowing. But under the passivity was a palpable intensity. We were all excited.
The permsec of Local Government and Lands, I noticed, had left. This meant something.
It was even more exciting when the permsec came back leading his boss, the minister himself, Kgosetlemang. This raised the stakes immensely. Kgosetlemang was new as minister. He was very tough. He had worked his way up through the ranks of the Botswana National Party on the strength of his performance as an enforcer for the reigning BNP faction, the Serowe faction. The Botswana National Party hated the Botswana Social Front, who were upstart marxists who had astoundingly won two seats in the parliament at the last election. Moreover, Kgosetlemang hated Mbaake on a personal level. Mbaake was reputed to have seduced, if that’s the word, one of Kgosetlemang’s mistresses, which I had heard from Z.
The tension accompanying the positioning of the various antagonists was almost sexual. Would Kgosetlemang bring everything to a stop, or, more likely, make a speech of some kind? At the moment he was trying to get his permsec to do or say something. Everyone there had his or her own mosaic of what Denoon was up to in the Kalahari, made up of true and false tessarae. Solar democracy was new and sounded overweening and interesting, so would Denoon say more or not? Memcons would be written tonight. Would there be enough substance for a cable, maybe?
Something fleeting passed across Denoon’s face that I loved. It was subtle, like a cloud shadow passing over something in a landscape you’re contemplating. Overall and considering, I thought Denoon so far had done fairly well, my cavils notwithstanding. But a change of state was coming. Heraldically speaking, he went from sedent to rampant, but all inwardly. He was, you could see if you were me, going from play to work. I loved it. It was so male.