Of course now I know Nelson was responding to yet one more proof that he had enemies in high places, because the solar democracy barb pointed to a document supposed to be genuinely secret and speculative and somethingonly two people in the cabinet were supposed to have seen. Mostly he had been speaking ex cathedra, but now he got up and went around behind his armchair and faced the audience, gripping the finials or whatever they are that stood up from the back. Grace was missing this. Kgosetlemang was starting for the front. Denoon loves the line For the night is gone and the sword is drawn and the scabbard is thrown away, which is something his father, who was a sot, liked to quote — and this is what I associate with the next moment.
DENOON:
What could that mean, solar democracy?
To my colleagues and good friends at LG and L, I apologize for what I see I am about to do. I ask forgiveness.
But suppose that we imagine a country the size of France, its borders not in danger because it is beloved of the white West for its prudence and uprightness and its parliament, with only a million inhabitants, and millions of hectares in public lands, mostly empty and unused. Imagine also that this country enjoys averagely two hundred and twenty days a year of pure sun pouring down, streaming down, a downpour of gold that no one stops to hold a bucket to.
There are some whites in this country, in fact too many. Whites who are in the wrong skin for Africa. The sun is poison to us and we should probably say so and depart. Many of these whites are experts and advisers, who leave the iron skies of the north to come here with a lump of coal in their hands for you to worship, or petrol to sell. They think the sun is pretty, no more.
Now suppose the Batswana, or rather the inhabitants of this country, for any reason, wanted to base every mechanical process without exception on the free energy of the sun. Heating, cooling, cooking, transport, water pumping, any process you might name, could be run directly or indirectly from this great tireless source. Industry as well, should they choose to, since there is space to run collectors of energy many times exceeding the demand of any industry one million people might need.
The sun is wasted on these people unless they one day see it and use it. They could, you could, be rich, but only if you choose something better than being rich.
Now as philosopher king of the country described, with only one million citizens — what would I tell these people?
I would say to them that it could be done in a generation. Your children, if you train them, could be masters of the power of the sun. They could be a better thing than rich: they could be free.
Expats here and there were rolling their eyes notably. He seemed not to care.
You could be the first nation to give its people lives of freedom to devote to art, science, scholarship, sport if you like that. Work could be as you liked, by agreement: half a day, a week at a time, one year on and one off, different times and kinds of work in different towns, different regions, however you wanted. You could be the first nation to make self-directed individual development the first goal of your political economy.
Your villages could be like the great universities of Europe during the dark ages, and there is now a dark age of its own kind: your villages could be like suns or stars shining, because you could teach the use of the sun to the rest of Africa and beyond. Botswana — this country, rather — could be a garden of beautiful villages, each one different. You could be the first nation to tell your children to ask themselves what work in the world would most become their souls and to prepare to do it.
Of course I am a lakhoa telling you this, of the race that brought you the hut tax to drive you into money slavery and is even today telling you that the point of life is to get rich, how the best use of your mortal life is to perfect a system in which a fraction of you can get rich, only a fraction, but never mind.
But I am saying that you could make villages that are engines of rest. The ratios are there, if you control your numbers, if you seize your schools by the neck and change them. You can be the first whose women can say I work at what I please, the same as men, and as I determine. You can be the first whose children say We shall do this or that because it pleases us and not because the makhoa or the church say you must, or your father or the state or the iron hand of hunger or the itch to be richer than your neighbor and live behind walls protected by dogs and Waygards.
Of course, these people could only build such a democracy, should they choose to, if they saved and redeemed their villages instead of emptying them into the swamps of Old Naledi, where all you hear all day is I have no money, I’m begging for money, Ga ke na madi, Ga ke na madi, Kopa madi. Day laborers, beggars, small boys besieging you in your money fortresses crying madi, madi, madi. Old Naledi, where you grow thieves. While over your heads every day a great machine goes back and forth and pours out treasure that nobody takes in his hands. Or her hands.
Here he made a slightly sacerdotal gesture with cupped hands and I thought the excursion was over. It had been choppy and maybe a little counterfeit in places, but I forgave it because it had been impromptu. The pastoral tonus bothered me, but given what he was aiming for, I had to admit it was probably not inappropriate. This seemed to be the end. I wondered where things would go, because now left and right both, if they came back at him, would have to either admit or deny that they were blind to the sun, this deus ex machina that certainly deserved more attention than it was getting in either of their literatures. He had changed the terrain.
But that wasn’t all.
Amazingly he swung into perfect Setswana and did the whole cri de coeur again. And he was excellent. I said to myself You are in the presence of the extraordinary. He was as good as I was at the time. His tenses were impeccable.
In Setswana his spiel came over as an aria. In English the intoned quality bothered me, but not in Setswana. I was moved.
I had heard that the Batswana called him Rra Puleng, meaning Rain-like Man or Man as Good as Rain, the highest praise the Batswana can give. Rain also means wealth, as in the unit of currency, the pula. Mbaake was upset. In Africa the people who are involved in telling you what to do rarely speak your language. Denoon had shown him personal respect. My one complaint with the Setswana version was that Denoon stood with his eyes closed a beat longer than was absolutely necessary when he came to the end.
Later in talking to him about this moment I found out it had been a relief for Denoon that the solar democracy leak had occurred and led to his aria.What he was afraid was lying in wait for him was the litany No Dams, No Roads, No Tourists, which represented a vulgarization of his early work on vernacular development. There was a defense for each element in the litany, but it was always strenuous. Meanwhile his thought had moved on. He did have a more general theory, even one more difficult to capsulize. There was a suigenerism.
I found this erotic. Is it erotic or not to be in the ambience of someone who offhandedly confutes the two systems that are dividing the world, is fairly convincing about it, and has in reserve something entirely his own and superior? Is it erotic or not that he is even diffident about going into it, not all hot-eyed to catch people by the lapels to make them listen, which is the usual accompaniment of such convictions?