In my case I was going to find him and offer myself as a volunteer, for a while, in his project. I had more to offer than he knew yet. When I was in the bush I had learned a few words of Saherero out of boredom. In fact it had occurred to me to greet him with a hearty Wapenduka! the night before, which I had rejected as a totally artificial thing to do, rightly. In any case the only way you can speak perfect Saherero is to have your two front teeth taken out the way they do, which is asking too much. But I knew there were Herero in his project, some anyway.
By seven in the evening I was brazening it out in Old Naledi. He was staying with a family called Tutwane. There are two parts to the squatter settlement in Gaborone, Old Naledi and new Old Naledi. New Old Naledi is where the World Bank has been razing shacks and putting up site and service shells for their inhabitants. Each shell has a standpipe and electricity. House shells are just that — walls awaiting ceilings, windows, doors.
But naturally Denoon would be staying in Old Naledi, where the mud shacks are falling apart, where holes in the house walls are plugged with wadded rags and the tin roofs are held down with cobbles. I was jumping over ditches and getting hoarse shouting Footsek! at the terrifying roaming ridgeback hounds. Footsek is Afrikaans and is the only thing that gives them pause, somehow. A peaches and blood sunset was over. It was getting dark. Nobody I asked about the Tutwanes would tell me anything. I couldn’t blame them: I could have been anybody.
I was fairly desperate because I had a plan that required getting to the Tutwane house circa dinnertime to exploit the provision in Tswana culture that if you happen around dinnertime you’ll be invited in. To whites, there is a slight element of scam in this provision as regards them, since it cannot have failed to be noted by their Batswana dinner guests that no white family has ever felt free to utilize it. Besides, the Batswana eat their main meal at noon and dinner is fairly catch as catch can. Nevertheless.
I was near defeat. There is a pool of woodsmoke from yard fires that hangs over Old Naledi and makes you weep. Any nostalgia you might have about woodsmoke you can say goodbye to after an hour of this.
Maybe the way I was dressed struck people the wrong way, as semiofficial. I had decided it would be a smart idea to look bush ready, so I was wearing a new khaki blouse and skirt outfit. I would have worn jeans except that the further down you get in the Botswana pecking order, the worse people think it is for women to be seen in trousers. And Old Naledi is traditionopolis, because the squatters are the freshest and rawest refugees from the bush. I think also that the deeper I went into Old Naledi, the more official I acted, out of fear. I realized I was using my skin color more and more, but I couldn’t help it. It was like a horror ride in an amusement park, where you proceed along okay in the dark and then a thing springs up in front of you to terrify you — a snarling ridgeback or an ancient guy trying to get you to buy something he has in a sack but talking in a dialect you don’t understand. People go into their hovels and sit there in the dark and take care of business in the dark, which makes them seem like a different order of being, despite all your training.
I was in danger of clutching. I was deep in the maze of the bleakest section of Old Naledi, the part closest to Kgale Hill, where quarrying is going on and fine grit floats out over everything until it looks like a painting of bedlam in the sfumato style, where there are no real edges or outlines to things. I had fine grit in the corners of my mouth and in my lashes. I wanted to look decent above all and now this was happening.
No way can you overstate Old Naledi, which you enter by leaping across a ditch flowing with something black and viscous, probably dumped crankcase oil from the Central Transport Organisation work-yard nearby. No one had heard of the Tutwanes, let alone Rra Puleng. I tried virtually everybody — not excluding a gaunt character hurrying along with a netbag full of bloody cowbones over his shoulder, with blood incidentally soaking into his shirt and with a ball-peen hammer stuck in his belt. Three women were sitting in a dooryard behind a plot fence entirely made out of rusted auto brake-spring leaves sticking up like fangs. I approached them. They did in fact answer me but not without continuing what they were doing, which was simultaneously conversing a blue streak and masticating mouthfuls of sweet reed, id est chewing the strips into pulp and spewing the white waste out onto the ground, as if they were pieces of agricultural machinery. The directions they gave me were internally contradictory: I should be going both bophiri-matsatsi and botlhabats-atsi, west and east. The fact that I spoke Setswana was seemingly not wowing anyone. It only seemed to be making them more suspicious of me. Some even seemed to hate me for it.
I saw something ahead that looked from a distance like a play yard with blue and white blocks scattered over a wide area. I made for it, until I realized it was a shebeen and the blocks were empty chibuku cartons by the hundred. A couple of the nonrecumbent partakers were showing an interest in me. I would have to detour. A top homily about Botswana is that white women never get raped by Batswana men. This is pure embassy folklore.
Slips of the tongue are rare with me. When I make them I can be sure I’m under strain. So I was horrified when I was describing to Denoon my odyssey through Old Naledi and heard myself say that when I saw the shebeen I decided to give the guys at it a wide breast. It was performance anxiety. Needless to say, what I did was mix up “give a wide berth to” with “making a clean breast of.” It was a true sign of delicacy in him that he pretended not to notice my gaffe. Neither of us mentioned it, although I was suffering inwardly. At Tsau at one point I thanked him, in effect, for having let it pass and never teasing me about it. In fact that turned out to be like releasing a spring allowing him to tease me forever after with various permutations of the gaffe, à la Would you mind giving me a clean berth, or Let’s have a wide breast, and so on. But it was a proof of gentility that he overlooked my first parapraxis in his presence and is probably even one of the reasons I was moved to persist despite an otherwise not-auspicious encounter at Tutwane’s.
I was at the farthest edge of Old Naledi, where the shanties stop and the bush begins. A footpath led straight into the bush and along it a kids’ game was in progress. There were six or eight bana arrayed on either side of the path so that each one was facing a clear space. A kid from the foot of the left hand row would go to the head of the path, where it disappeared into the bush where his mission was to roll a paint can lid down between the opposing ranks for them to hurl rocks at. Somebody was keeping score. Everybody would move down a notch after each hit, as in volleyball. These were little kids, between six and ten or so, all male naturally, in ragged school shorts, with three little girls spectating. I had arrived at a key moment. It would soon be too dark to play and they were trying to speed things up so that the championship could be settled before they had to quit.
Well, I said to myself. And with no ado whatsoever I stepped into their game and like a genius snatched up the paint can lid as it was rolling, before a single rock could be fired, and held it behind my back, thusly amazing them.
They had an adult reaction. They stood up like soldiers and began to consult. I thought they might scatter at the intervention of this giant white woman. I told them all I wanted was to be told how I could find the Tutwane place. Then I would return their toy.