Ladies' Detective Agency 01 - The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency (3 page)

Some people think of God as a white man, which is an
idea which the missionaries brought with them all those years ago and which
seems to have stuck in people’s mind. I do not think this is so, because
there is no difference between white men and black men; we are all the same; we
are just people. And God was here anyway, before the missionaries came. We
called him by a different name, then, and he did not live over at the
Jews’ place; he lived here in Africa, in the rocks, in the sky, in places
where we knew he liked to be. When you died, you went somewhere else, and God
would have been there too, but you would not be able to get specially close to
him. Why should he want that?

We have a story in Botswana about two
children, a brother and sister, who are taken up to heaven by a whirlwind and
find that heaven is full of beautiful white cattle. That is how I like to think
of it, and I hope that it is true. I hope that when I die I find myself in a
place where there are cattle like that, who have sweet breath, and who are all
about me. If that is what awaits me, then I am happy to go tomorrow, or even
now, right at this moment. I should like to say goodbye to Precious, though,
and to hold my daughter’s hand as I went. That would be a happy way to
go.

I LOVE our country, and I am proud to be a
Motswana. There’s no other country in Africa that can hold its head up as
we can. We have no political prisoners, and never have had any. We have
democracy. We have been careful. The Bank of Botswana is full of money, from
our diamonds. We owe nothing.

But things were bad in the past. Before
we built our country we had to go off to South Africa to work. We went to the
mines, just as people did from Lesotho and Mozambique and Malawi and all those
countries. The mines sucked our men in and left the old men and the children at
home. We dug for gold and diamonds and made those white men rich. They built
their big houses, with their walls and their cars. And we dug down below them
and brought out the rock on which they built it all.

I went to the
mines when I was eighteen. We were the Bechuanaland Protectorate then, and the
British ran our country, to protect us from the Boers (or that is what they
said). There was a Commissioner down in Mafikeng, over the border into South
Africa, and he would come up the road and speak to the chiefs. He would say:
“You do this thing; you do that thing.” And the chiefs all obeyed
him because they knew that if they did not he would have them deposed. But some
of them were clever, and while the British said “You do this,” they
would say “Yes, yes, sir, I will do that” and all the time, behind
their backs, they did the other thing or they just pretended to do something.
So for many years, nothing at all happened. It was a good system of government,
because most people want nothing to happen. That is the problem with
governments these days. They want to do things all the time; they are always
very busy thinking of what things they can do next. That is not what people
want. People want to be left alone to look after their cattle.

We had
left Mahalapye by then, and gone to live in Mochudi, where my mother’s
people lived. I liked Mochudi, and would have been happy to stay there, but my
father said I should go to the mines, as his lands were not good enough to
support me and a wife. We did not have many cattle, and we grew just enough
crops to keep us through the year. So when the recruiting truck came from over
the border I went to them and they put me on a scale and listened to my chest
and made me run up and down a ladder for ten minutes. Then a man said that I
would be a good miner and they made me write my name on a piece of paper. They
asked me the name of my chief and asked me whether I had ever been in any
trouble with the police. That was all.

I went off on the truck the next
day. I had one trunk, which my father had bought for me at the Indian Store. I
only had one pair of shoes, but I had a spare shirt and some spare trousers.
These were all the things I had, apart from some biltong which my mother had
made for me. I loaded my trunk on top of the truck and then all the families
who had come to say goodbye started to sing. The women cried and we waved
goodbye. Young men always try not to cry or look sad, but I knew that within us
all our hearts were cold.

It took twelve hours to reach Johannesburg,
as the roads were rough in those days and if the truck went too fast it could
break an axle. We travelled through the Western Transvaal, through the heat,
cooped up in the truck like cattle. Every hour, the driver would stop and come
round to the back and pass out canteens of water which they filled at each town
we went through. You were allowed the canteen for a few seconds only, and in
that time you had to take as much water as you could. Men who were on their
second or third contract knew all about this, and they had bottles of water
which they would share if you were desperate. We were all Batswana together,
and a man would not see a fellow Motswana suffer.

The older men were
about the younger ones. They told them that now that they had signed on for the
mines, they were no longer boys. They told us that we would see things in
Johannesburg which we could never have imagined existing, and that if we were
weak, or stupid, or if we did not work hard enough, our life from now on would
be nothing but suffering. They told us that we would see cruelty and
wickedness, but that if we stuck with other Batswana and did what we were told
by the older men, we would survive. I thought that perhaps they were
exaggerating. I remembered the older boys telling us about the initiation
school that we all had to go to and warning us of what lay ahead of us. They
said all this to frighten us, and the reality was quite different. But these
men spoke the absolute truth. What lay ahead of us was exactly what they had
predicted, and even worse.

In Johannesburg they spent two weeks
training us. We were all quite fit and strong, but nobody could be sent down
the mines until he had been made even stronger. So they took us to a building
which they had heated with steam and they made us jump up and down onto benches
for four hours each day. This was too much for some men, who collapsed, and had
to be hauled back to their feet, but somehow I survived it and passed on to the
next part of our training. They told us how we would be taken down into the
mines and about the work we would be expected to do. They talked to us about
safety, and how the rock could fall and crush us if we were careless. They
carried in a man with no legs and put him down on a table and made us listen to
him as he told us what had happened to him.

They taught us Funagalo,
which is the language used for giving orders underground. It is a strange
language. The Zulus laugh when they hear it, because there are so many Zulu
words in it but it is not Zulu. It is a language which is good for telling
people what to do. There are many words for push, take, shove, carry, load, and
no words for love, or happiness, or the sounds which birds make in the
morning.

Then we went down to the shafts and were shown what to do.
They put us in cages, beneath great wheels, and these cages shot down as fast
as hawks falling upon their prey. They had trains down there—small
trains—and they put us on these and took us to the end of long, dark
tunnels, which were filled with green rock and dust. My job was to load rock
after it had been blasted, and I did this for seven hours a day. I grew strong,
but all the time there was dust, dust, dust.

Some of the mines were
more dangerous than others, and we all knew which these were. In a safe mine
you hardly ever see the stretchers underground. In a dangerous one, though, the
stretchers are often out, and you see men being carried up in the cages, crying
with pain, or, worse still, silent under the heavy red blankets. We all knew
that the only way to survive was to get into a crew where the men had what
everybody called rock sense. This was something which every good miner had. He
had to be able to see what the rock was doing—what it was
feeling—and to know when new supports were needed. If one or two men in a
crew did not know this, then it did not matter how good the others were. The
rock would come down and it fell on good miners and bad.

There was
another thing which affected your chances of survival, and this was the sort of
white miner you had. The white miners were put in charge of the teams, but many
of them had very little to do. If a team was good, then the boss boy knew
exactly what to do and how to do it. The white miner would pretend to give the
orders, but he knew that it would be the boss boy who really got the work done.
But a stupid white miner—and there were plenty of those—would drive
his team too hard. He would shout and hit the men if he thought they were not
working quickly enough and this could be very dangerous. Yet when the rock came
down, the white miner would never be there; he would be back down the tunnel
with the other white miners, waiting for us to report that the work had been
finished.

It was not unusual for a white miner to beat his men if he
got into a temper. They were not meant to, but the shift bosses always turned a
blind eye and let them get on with it. Yet we were never allowed to hit back,
no matter how undeserved the blows. If you hit a white miner, you were
finished. The mine police would be waiting for you at the top of the shaft and
you could spend a year or two in prison.

They kept us apart, because
that is how they worked, these white men. The Swazis were all in one gang, and
the Zulus in another, and the Malawians in another. And so on. Everybody was
with his people, and had to obey the boss boy. If you didn’t, and the
boss boy said that a man was making trouble, they would send him home or
arrange for the police to beat him until he started to be reasonable
again.

We were all afraid of the Zulus, although I had that friend who
was a kind Zulu. The Zulus thought they were better than any of us and
sometimes they called us women. If there was a fight, it was almost always the
Zulus or the Basotho, but never the Batswana. We did not like fighting. Once a
drunk Motswana wandered into a Zulu hostel by mistake on a Saturday night. They
beat him with sjamboks and left him lying on the road to be run over.
Fortunately a police van saw him and rescued him, or he would have been killed.
All for wandering into the wrong hostel.

I worked for years in those
mines, and I saved all my money. Other men spent it on town women, and drink,
and on fancy clothes. I bought nothing, not even a gramophone. I sent the money
home to the Standard Bank and then I bought cattle with it. Each year I bought
a few cows, and gave them to my cousin to look after. They had calves, and
slowly my herd got bigger.

I would have stayed in the mines, I suppose,
had I not witnessed a terrible thing. It happened after I had been there for
fifteen years. I had then been given a much better job, as an assistant to a
blaster. They would not give us blasting tickets, as that was a job that the
white men kept for themselves, but I was given the job of carrying explosives
for a blaster and helping him with the fuses. This was a good job, and I liked
the man I worked for.

He had left something in a tunnel once—his
tin can in which he carried his sandwiches—and he had asked me to fetch
it. So I went off down the tunnel where he had been working and looked for this
can. The tunnel was lit by bulbs which were attached to the roof all the way
along, so it was quite safe to walk along it. But you still had to be careful,
because here and there were great galleries which had been blasted out of the
rock. These could be two hundred feet deep, and they opened out from the sides
of the tunnel to drop down to another working level, like underground quarries.
Men fell into these galleries from time to time, and it was always their fault.
They were not looking where they were walking, or were walking along an unlit
tunnel when the batteries in their helmet lights were weak. Sometimes a man
just walked over the edge for no reason at all, or because he was unhappy and
did not want to live anymore. You could never tell; there are many sadnesses in
the hearts of men who are far away from their countries.

I turned a
corner in this tunnel and found myself in a round chamber. There was a gallery
at the end of this, and there was a warning sign. Four men were standing at the
edge of this, and they were holding another man by his arms and legs. As I came
round the corner, they lifted him and threw him forwards, over the edge and
into the dark. The man screamed, in Xhosa, and I heard what he said. He said
something about a child, but I did not catch it all as I am not very good at
Xhosa. Then he was gone.

I stood where I was. The men had not seen me
yet, but one turned round and shouted out in Zulu. Then they began to run
towards me. I turned round and ran back along the tunnel. I knew that if they
caught me I would follow their victim into the gallery. It was not a race I
could let myself lose.

Although I got away, I knew that those men had
seen me and that I would be killed. I had seen their murder and could be a
witness, and so I knew that I could not stay in the mines.

I spoke to
the blaster. He was a good man and he listened to me carefully when I told him
that I would have to go. There was no other white man I could have spoken to
like that, but he understood.

Still, he tried to persuade me to go to
the police.

“Tell them what you saw,” he said in Afrikaans.
“Tell them. They can catch these Zulus and hang them.”

“I don’t know who these men are. They’ll catch me first.
I am going home to my place.”

He looked at me and nodded. Then he
took my hand and shook it, which is the first time a white man had done that to
me. So I called him my brother, which is the first time I had done that to a
white man.