Mating (2 page)

People get avid. This takes different forms in different people, but it shows up in some form in everybody who stays there any length of time. It can be sudden. I include myself.

Obviously I mean whites in Africa and not black Africans. The average black African has the opposite problem: he or she doesn’t want enough. A whole profession called Rural Animation exists devoted to making villagers want more and work harder to get it. Africans are pretty ungreedy—elites excepted, naturally. Elites are elites.

But in Africa you see middleclass white people you know for a fact are highly normal turn overnight into chainsmokers or heavy drinkers or gourmets. Suddenly you find otherwise serious people wedged in among the maids of the truly rich in the throng at the Chinese butchery, their faces clenched, determined to come away with one of the nine or ten half pints of crème fraîche that arrive from Mafikeng on Wednesdays at three. You see people fixate on eating wonderfully despite the derisory palette Botswana offers. Or they may get into quantity sex. Or you can see it strike them there’s no reason they shouldn’t take a stab at getting rich before they have to leave Africa. Most expatriates only stay for a few years. And like clockwork when they get toward the end they start buying up karosses or carvings to resell, or they decide to buy real estate through Batswana proxies or in one case to found the first peewee golf course south of the Sahara. I knew someone who was an echt mama’s boy in real life who took insane risks smuggling wristwatches into Zimbabwe on weekends. He was at the very end of his contract. He was teaching law at the University of Botswana.

In my case, disappointment was behind it. I got disgusting. I was typical—avid, and frantic. It was fall 1980, meaning spring in Africa. Africa had disappointed me. I had just spent eighteen months in the bush, all by myself basically. My thesis was in nutritional anthropology, and what I had been supposed to show was that fertility in what are called remote-dwelling populations fluctuates according to the season,
because a large part of what remote dwellers eat depends on what they can find when they go out gathering, which should affect fertility. Or so I had been led to believe. It was unso. I had to hunt for gatherers. Gathering was a dead issue in my part of the bush. Normal-type food seems to have percolated everywhere, even into the heart of the Tswapong Hills. One way or another, people were getting regular canned food and cornflakes, or getting relief food, sorghum and maize, from the World Food Program. So nobody bothered with gathering much, and I had an exploded thesis on my hands.

On top of which I had been a bystander during something interpersonally very nasty in Keteng, the main village in my research zone. A Dutch cooperant had been hounded to death by the local power structure—old Boer settler families who’d become Botswana citizens when independence came. It still bothers me. Then on top of that I was having irregular periods, which turned out to be due to physical stress and my monochrome diet, which was as I suspected but which I needed to do something about, not be worried about. It intersected my turning thirty-two. I gave up and retreated to the capital, Gaborone, ostensibly to regroup but in fact to regress.

When I find myself in a homogeneous phase of my life, I like to have a caption for it. Guilty Repose is what I came up with for my caesura in Gaborone, which softens it: I went slightly decadent. It only lasted a couple of months.

I had no real excuse for not going back to the U.S. I told myself it was the prospect of another birthday at the hands of my mother. The more birthdays with her I missed, the more grandiose and excruciating the catch-up birthday always was, and I was years overdue. I had de facto promised to spend my thirty-second with her if I was back in the States. I knew it was her guilt—over being poor when she raised me, over being gigantic—that drove her to be so Wagnerian about my birthdays, but that wasn’t enough. I was enervated.

Wanting company entered into it. I was tired of my own company and there was no one I had left behind or even on the horizon in the States. I was feeling sexually alert. There’s no place like Gaborone for a detached white woman with a few social graces, even someone feeling very one-down. In fact for a disappointee Gaborone was perfect, because you circulate in a medium of other whites who are disappointed too. Nobody uses the word.

There are more whites in Africa than you might expect, and more in Botswana than most places in Africa. Whites accumulate in Botswana. Parliament works and the courts are decent, so the West is hot to help with development projects: so white experts pile in. Botswana has almost the last hunter-gatherers anywhere, so you have anthropologists and anthropologists manque like me underfoot. From South Africa you get fugitive white and black politicals, the whites mostly passing through, except for the bravest and hardiest. The Boers can reach out and touch anyone they want in Gaborone. Spies of all kinds are profuse, since everybody wants to know when the Republic of South Africa is going to combust and Gaborone is only five hours by road from Pretoria and Johannesburg. The Russian embassy is huge. And then Botswana is a geographical receptacle for civil service Brits excessed as decolonization moved ever southward. These are people who are forever structurally maladapted to living in England. This is their last perch in Africa. Tories from the Black Lagoon, or Paleo-Tories, Nelson Denoon called them, their politics are so primitive-right. They’re interesting from the anthropological standpoint, but there are too many of them. Then you have white cooperants and volunteers, a hundred in the Peace Corps alone. You have droves of white game hunters and viewers heading north. Botswana has the last places in Africa wild animals have never seen a white face. There are only a million Batswana. And there are the missionaries.

I think I tend to exploit missionaries, which I really have to not do if I’m going to be negative toward them behind their backs. The Carmelite sisters in Keteng were unfailingly nice to me when I dropped in on them for a place to stay where I could get a hot bath and some fresh vegetables when I couldn’t take it anymore in the bush. That happened periodically. A Seventh-Day Adventist couple put me up for two weeks when I decided to malinger in Gaborone instead of going back to the U.S. I don’t know if I should omit missionaries from my globalizing about disappointment or not. I don’t think so, although their absolutely seamless cheerfulness
is designed to keep you from even conceiving the possibility. On the face of it they seem to get what they want. They do entrench their sects and denominations and keep Africans flowing into them. But they’ve got to be at least queasy over the tremendous and steady defections to the Spiritualist churches, which are syncretist Christian enterprises created and run by Africans and distinguished by certain doctrinal novelties, like drinking seawater for your ulcers. All the missionaries I stayed with showed a certain interest in my, shall we say, spiritual orientation. I don’t think I teased them. I didn’t misrepresent myself, but I didn’t give them the full frontal, either. I used to think of myself as anticlerical but not antireligious, but that was before I met Nelson Denoon, who was both, and violently. He worked on my attitudes, directly and otherwise. It was an interest of his. I think I’m being fair. It was automatic with him to try to get people he, shall we say, loved, to agree with him on such matters. I still need to concentrate on how much of where I am now is Denoon’s influence and how much is normal personal evolution. Denoon is pushing into this before he’s historically due, naturally.

So I stayed with my Adventists, in a reclusive way initially. First of all I had to confront a resurgence of the conviction that I was academically accursed. Was I really so marginal? Why had I had to wait a week before hearing whether I’d passed my orals when the norm was to be told the next day? I felt intelligent: what was wrong? Why was everything so protracted and grudging with me? Why was I unable ever to figure out how you get to be someone’s protégé? It happened all around me at Stanford, but never to me. After a few days in Gaborone I was able to reconvince myself, again, that everything was in essence bad luck or the aftereffects of the genteel poverty I grew up in. I got under control.

In those days the people at Immigration were more than easygoing. It took me less than an hour to get my visa extended for a year. Then I was ready to circulate.

I remember when greed struck. It was at the first party I went to that spring, a garden party.

I was eavesdropping on a vehement argument between two Brits over whether Zambia or Botswana has the world’s greatest climate. This during a killer drought. I respond to sun, but then I come from Minnesota and had years of being disappointed by northern California with its indeterminate weather and freezing surf. I’m overdetermined for life in Africa. I love the sun bursting up every day of your life like some broken mechanism. Even during the socalled rainy season you have sun until two or three in the afternoon and then again after your trivial little five-minute dusting of rain. Even in high summer in Botswana you barely sweat. It’s hot but so dry you can feel your sweat actually cooling the surface of your skin as it flashes into nothing. You’re in a desert three thousand feet above sea level, after all, although it doesn’t look like the usual desert. Denoon’s theory was that people get biologically adapted to the stupendously regular southern African climate, which he called “metronomic.”

Out came our hostess, in chartreuse, pleased with the day. The drought had something for the festive classes. Outdoor functions are easier because of the multitudes to be fed and managed. The median party in Gaborone is very large. If you can count on fair weather, it’s a relief. And partygivers could afford to keep their landscapes green by hiring day labor on the cheap to do handwatering so as to get around the ban on watering by hosepipe. On the cheap and hosepipe are relics of how Briticized my speech became. I have either a talent or a weakness for mimicry, depending on how you look at it. I knew I was sounding half British. It didn’t bother me. It related to my being able to pick up languages easily, which I can, and which was one reason I’d thought anthropology was such a natural for me. I blend in, if I want to. A core fantasy of mine from before high school was that members of the most puzzling cultures were going to divulge secrets to me out of hardly noticing my intrusion, or thinking I was almost one of them.

There was an opulent sunset. I was standing under an acacia in bloom and the words “shower of gold” came into my mind, followed by a surge of feeling. I call it greed, but it was more a feeling of wanting a surplus in my life, wanting to have too much of something, for a change. I didn’t want to be a candidate anymore, not for a doctorate or anything else: I wanted to be at the next level, where things would come to me, accrue to me. It was acute. I looked at the people around me. The woman giving the party was extremely ordinary physically. She may have been with the British Council. She was plain. Not that I’m so beautiful, unless hair volume determines beauty. I’m robust, shall we say, but my waist is good. I apparently look Irish. I was glad I’d kept my hair long all through my fieldwork, an ordeal in itself and against the advice of the entire world. It is a feature. And I do look good when I’m as thin as I was then. This woman could afford to feed fifty people. The starters were miniature sandwiches made with genuine Parma ham. I had been living on cabbage and mealie porridge for eighteen months. She was serving cashews as big as shrimps. I remember pearl onions and white asparagus. Little perfect fillet steaks were coming. She lived in a two-bedroom house and had a cook and a groundsman. The grounds were the usual impeccable. She never had to iron. She was at most five years older than I. I know how this sounds and don’t defend it. It was depletion speaking.

I was attracting male attention already. It was premature. Braais and cream teas are given by women. Invitations were going to be my bread and butter. I had to avoid being typed as someone out to browse the local male flora. There could be attachments, but not yet. Somehow I was going to expropriate the expropriators so softly they would never notice, but how? I needed a métier, but the right métier. Then I knew.

I would be a docent, presenting Botswana as an institution with obscure holdings. It was clear I was perfect for addressing a true need. Whites in Botswana needed to feel they had come to an exotic place. After all, they were in Africa. But Botswana is frustrating. Gaborone was built from the ground up in the nineteen sixties, and except for the squatter section along the Lobatse road, it looks more like a college town in the American Southwest than anything else. There’s no national costume. In the villages cement block structures with metal roofs are driving out the mud and thatch rondavels. English is an official language, along with Setswana. For entertainment in the towns you have churchgoing, disco, karate exhibitions, ballroom dancing competitions, beauty contests, and soccer. The interesting fauna are in the far north, unless an
occasional ostrich or baboon excites you. Except for the fantasy castles of the rich and the diplomatic corps in Section Sixteen, housing in Gaborone looks either modular or pitiful. The culture looks familiar but feels alien. The Batswana are not what you would call forthcoming. They murmur when they talk to whites. They have a right to be sick of whites and to show it a little. They want to be opaque at the same time that they’re working on their English and ordering platform shoes from South African mail order houses. The Batswana won’t invite you to dinner, so another avenue to enlightenment is closed to whites. Batswana will without fail accept your invitations to dinner, although they frequently won’t show up. Meal reciprocation is not in the culture. This puts whites off, and they regard the general assertion that Batswana would be delighted to see you if you just dropped by at mealtime as a canard. Weddings and funerals are big deals but very crowded, and even when whites are invited nobody talks to them or bothers to explain that, for example, the reason the bride is staring at the ground in misery the whole time is as an expression of sadness at leaving her parents. There are barriers. Americans suffer the most. They come to Botswana wanting to be lovely to Africans. A wall confounds them. Behind it is something they sense is interesting. I could help them.