Mating (60 page)

I arrived as Denoon was reminding us that parlamente was not intended to raise one idea or belief up to oppress others but for all views to show in the light. Now for a time we would proceed in English. I was relieved at this. The idea of exerting the concentration necessary to follow closely in Setswana, with my head hurting the way it was, was painful.

There was a statement before us, to wit, that it was wrong that in only one village in all Botswana was it true that believers of god could not raise up a building, this village of Tsau. There it was. The very issue I had been told endlessly was under control, not an issue, was plainly on the table.

No, someone said, this rule was correct because in the religion of the people before the coming of the makhoa there were no churches required. But also the rule was correct because not even BNP or Boso could raise buildings, which was best because such buildings would be signs and proofs of division amongst the people. Mma Isang’s contribution
was that if Tsau was a village for women, then why should a church be raised if no church could be seen in any corner of Botswana where a woman could be seen to be the priest or pastor. She repeated this in the form of a rhetorical question to the crowd, asking for the name of any church of which this was not true. It was a fusillade, highly organized, and there was more. The stalwart Dirang Motsidisi pointed out that we know from scripture that the Lord Jesus was very much rude to his own mother, Mary. This could be proven time and again, so why must we rush to raise churches in such cases? She followed this with We must always remember that whole tribes were at one time given by chiefs to be under one church, such as the Bakgatla given by Chief Lentswe to be under Ned Geref Church, whose name we know today from crushing down African people and in South Africa saying all the while apartheid is from the Bible. Where were the seconds for the pro edifice view? This seemed to be a true rout. I was certain Nelson and Dirang had orchestrated it. There was no question it had been artful.

My pal King James piped up with Until it comes when god speaks the same rules to every church there should be no churches of differing kinds raised up. Because churches disagreed very much, yet all said they were the churches closest the lips of god. Nelson glowed at this, and at Even there are churches found who say you must talk as poultry or dogs, just senselessly, to show you are of god. I gathered that this was a thrust at some pentecostal tendency in Tsau not known to me.

That wasn’t quite all on the subject, though. One group, which was, I noted, referring to itself as the Friends of God, contended variously that god deliberately made false creeds abound in order to force people to find which was the true one, the implication being that Zionist Christianity was the true creed. A few of the Friends of God were carrying mini New Testaments and using them rather than twigs to signal when they wanted to be heard.

A majority laughed politely at this contention of the Friends of God, and out of this laughter the voice of the Ox, Dirang, rose at its most clarion. We must not waste gum poles and mud blocks to raise any church at all, because really there is too much disagreement, she said. If you stay to Kenya the Israel Church Nineveh will tell you you must speak in any words of nonsense god sends to you, as even small boys in Tsau can see. If you stay to Zimbabwe you can be told by followers of Maranke that to pray you must kneel but with your eyes held open and your hands raised up and not closed together and you must turn to the east whence Christ will return from and you must make a loud sound in
your nose like Zulus finding out witches. This produced a ripple of grumbling. There were some Zulus among us. Then she said In Malagasy there is a church of vomiters who teach out that we best worship god by vomiting, so you must practice to vomit, because in your vomit will be found sins and devils your eyes cannot see, so thus you must ask your moruti, who can see everything. Then she repeated that she was not disrespecting any view but surely everyone could see that if one church tells you a man can have only one wife and another says he can have many, and each have buildings to gather and plot in, there would soon be trouble. Her final point was a hit: she reminded us that there were many villages in Botswana with more churches than fleas and yet in those villages also would be found thieving and too many prostitutes to look at.

I realized I was thinking of the pro-Denoon people as loyalists and everyone else as the opposition, whether their differences sprang from ultratraditionalism or genre marxism à la Boso or reflexive centrism. This is interesting of you, I thought. I realized how natural it felt to be dividing the women—sisters—into winners and losers when I heard myself inwardly ranking the loyalists, with myself included, the winners so far.

There was a fairy ding from the chair and everyone got up to stretch. The signal to rise had come somewhat after the fact, I thought, since Raboupi’s men had been getting up even as Dineo was concluding a homily to the effect that if god was our author he would expect us to make use of our brains without restriction, even as touching views as to god himself. She was her usual oddly splendid self, in a purple sheath split fairly high along each side seam—which permitted her to maneuver on the ground comfortably—and a coarsely knit white cardigan and a black turban whose broadened tails could be arranged around her neck scarfwise. It was intriguing. Denoon was dressed in a way I believe he felt made him look more non-Western. He was back to his headband, which was actually functionless now that I was keeping his hair short. He had on his pasha pants, and he was wearing a boxy plain light blue dashiki over a black turtleneck sweater. I looked closer. On the right breast of his dashiki was a large food or drink spot. My reaction was weirdly strong: I was ashamed! I was guilty of letting him come to appear at a function wearing dirty clothes. Of course I had been lying with a cloth over my eyes when he left, but still. Then I was doubly ashamed, the second wave being over the extent of my identifying with Nelson. I had long ago seen the archetype of pathetic identification and sworn to learn something from it at the time. It had been in a crowded coffee
shop in a Greyhound terminal in Yreka in the redwoods in northern California. I was sharing a table with a young local working-class couple. They had ordered omelets or scrambled eggs cooked so incompetently they looked like omelets. The husband must have been ravenous, because he managed somehow to furl an egg mass the size of a potholder onto his fork and swing the entire thing into his mouth. Obviously my horror showed. His wife turned red at my shock. Then she furled her own egg up defiantly and neatly in exactly the same way as her husband, intending, I’m certain, to suggest to me that this was merely a regional way to eat eggs and not something boorish and particular to him. She had done it instinctually. What this is is servility. I told myself Never forget it. And there I was, flushed, wanting to go up and somehow block people from seeing the spot on Nelson’s shirt.

I stayed sitting, afraid that if I got up and started walking around I might jar my headache back to its heights. A new hors d’oeuvre had come out, which somebody brought me. It was smoked bream cut into chunks, with thorns stuck into the pieces to facilitate neatness. It was decent. I’d heard that Herero herdsmen were detouring to Tsau and bringing sacks of smoked bream down from Lake Ngami. If we could get this with any regularity it was good news. Animal protein was a fixation for me in those days. I noted that people seemed less gingerly about the bream than I would have expected, the prejudice against fish-eating being what it is among the Tswana.

When things resumed, the new chair was Mma Keridile. After a vote we went into Setswana. Even chewing too hard seemed to set my head off, so I had to concentrate on masticating my bream ultratenderly. I drifted during a rather diffuse rally by the believers, consisting of set answers to the one question of why churches were in fact needed, answers like To prevent us from evildoing and To say where we shall be once we are dead. The constituency for this was sparse and, I thought, about out of gas, when Denoon felt called upon to add something that was being left out. His point, which he pursued prometheanly in Setswana, was that a better way to look at a religion than through the particular beliefs that compose it was to see how much repetition it expected of its most faithful adherents. By this he meant the sheer numbers of times per day or week a particular text would have to be repeated or service attended. Every church was there to see if you were doing enough repeating to be satisfactory. Built-up churches were engines to enforce repetition. Repetition is what we use to put a child to sleep. This was all too spun out, but on it went. Whenever there is a church edifice
it is in fact there to give you a place to come and repeat something, and you will repeat as you are told because every church says it is your father’s house and we are used to obeying our fathers. The reason for repetition was to make our minds sleep. And it would be good to remember that the big competition between churches was not only over doctrines but also over seeing which one could be foremost in the number and kinds of repetition it could impose on its faithful. I felt for Denoon. All this was heartfelt but indigestible. I knew this theme. It went deep with him. I had heard priests described as superintendents of repetition before. Repetition was a problem everywhere. American television, or irrelevision, as he slightly annoyingly wouldn’t stop calling it, was based on it. Genre was a covert form of it and genre was overrunning literature. And so on.

I was clearly not alone in having missed the signaling that was supposed to precede Denoon’s being allowed to declaim for so long. There was a shouted protest from Leta, the worst batlodi.

She continued with This is lies! She herself was violating the rules by plunging straight into English without getting assent, which drew comment.

Why are you speaking so long with saying we must not have beliefs whilst you are thrusting beliefs upon these people from long before when we first came here? she asked.

People said Shame! but she went on. Always you are giving forth beliefs, yet you are a lakhoa and we say why is he not giving forth beliefs to makhoa rather than Batswana?

I was amazed. She was very junior to be putting herself forward so aggressively, and her status in Tsau was interim and dubious to say the least. And there was ingratitude. By accepting the batlodi Nelson had saved them from jail time.

All this came out in the partial chorus that rose against her: She is impudent, She is a new person who is soon gone, Where is her mother to see this?

She said You see because when whitemen come amongst the people it is always for lying, as we know from when they came with New Testament put down in Xhosa and Pedi that was saying it must be one man one wife as you can see written. And then in time they could no longer keep hidden Old Testament with proof of many kings with many wives at that time. And you must make that woman stop with writing, as I am not on for examinations, I am speaking my heart.

She was pointing at me. It was like a blow. I had taken my notebook
out and was getting a few things down. I had done this publicly often enough, without anyone objecting, although I suppose that usually people assumed I was under the rubric of recording something about birds. Before anybody had to defend me I stopped, ostentatiously.

Leta stopped then. Denoon was silent, feeling chastened, no doubt. He looked worried.

I sensed a larger attack gathering. Dorcas Raboupi seemed to be creeping between several groups. When I perceived the attack forming, my headache vanished completely, occultly.

The rest is sketchier than it should be, because I was stopped from noting things down in situ and it was a fair while before I could get back to reconstructing the event. And then the event itself took such a swerve toward furor.

First there was an ineffectual flurry of dinging. In a way I experienced that as a tolling for something lost. I had never seen anything in Tsau as uncivil as what Leta had done. I was full of clear energy. I wanted to fight, not that I had any special right to and not that doing it would have been anything but counterproductive, granted my status, meaning my link with Nelson and my race too, I suppose. But still I wanted to fight. I was tremendously galvanized. And my head was perfect.

What had been in preparation was a potpourri of falsely spontaneous grievances ostensibly brought into being by Leta’s salvo. Nothing had anything to do with the subject of the parlamente. The attempt was to inflate the churchbuilding issue into an umbrella unrelated issues could shelter under. Say how he has interfered amongst our underclothing, was a facetious reference to Denoon and the brassiere imbroglio I overheard. I think this was humorous and probably not meant to be part of the developing potpourri, but one of the batlodi also overheard it and brazenly shouted it out, even though that issue long predated her arrival in Tsau and everyone knew it. There were four or five foci of objections spread throughout the crowd, the most active one being among the people around Hector and Dorcas. Everything critiqued Nelson in one way or another, but the protest was always directed to Dineo, with Nelson referred to in the third person, which was an insulting strategy in itself.

He has made us to eat from a wheel, someone said. This had been mentioned to me. At an early point Nelson had tried to introduce the lazy susan into household mealtime protocol as a delicate way of promoting a more equalized access to food, protein in particular. Nelson was well aware of the statistics on household males, senior males, getting
the first pick and the lion’s share, then the women, then the male children, then the female children. He was perfectly right, because the statistics about men hogging the food in the third world, and I don’t mean only in Africa, are horrifying. I could understand Nelson’s feeling that here they were, engaged in wringing food and drink from bare rock, in a sense, and he was seeing it reticulated directly into a stratified consumption pattern which anyone seeing it from the outside would want to do something about. I don’t know how sensitively he’d promoted these lazy susans, but they had fallen out of general use, although we did encounter them on occasion when we went out for corso, where they might be in use for serving sweets. It was an elderly gentleman who had raised this complaint, so presumably he had personally undergone the wheel and it had clearly left a mark on his soul. I was pleased that there was at least a little negative trilling by the loyalist women after he spoke.