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On entering the graveyard on the outskirts of the village of Gabane, twenty-five miles north of Gaborone, the capital of Botswana, it is easy to assume that the people here are very healthy. The old graves, which are surrounded by elaborate wrought-iron fences to keep out the goats, have rusted in the summer rains. Many people lived into their eighties and nineties. It is not uncommon to find the resting places of those who lived full centuries.
Walking over the rich red earth, you notice a few headstones for infants and youngsters, and then the predictable range of ages and stages when death visits a rural community blessed with good nutrition, little crime, and no war, but limited access to first world medicine. You note, as you walk deeper into the graveyard, an increase in the deaths of thirty- and forty-year-olds during the early 1980s.
When you lift your eyes on a Saturday morning to the far end of the graveyard, you might feel the need to hold onto somebody, to steady yourself. You gasp when you stare at the new section, which looks like a fairground. Your eyes do not deceive you. Makeshift canopies in reds and blues, brightly colored umbrellas, flowers, and ribbons adorn the area. As you approach the apparent festivities, you hear slow singing in SeTswana to the familiar tune of "Abide with Me". You cannot help notice the dramatic increase in tiny grave mounds. Your tears rise as you watch a widow covered in a blanket swoon with grief.
If you miss a funeral because you were delayed at the border, you can glean from the number of other funerals in progress the sort of event to which you would have been party. Priests commit the souls of the departed. Clods of earth fall onto coffins in clouds of red dust. You see the ancients and crones in their eighties and nineties, supported by walking sticks or the strong arms of great-grandchildren. You see their milky eyes wet with the question: Who will be left to bury my old bones?
And when you arrive at the graveside of the one you knew, it is acceptable to fall to the ground in front of a mound covered with synthetic chrysanthemums and plastic daisies. As sobs emerge from a place of horror and extreme despair, curlicues of satin ribbon flutter in the breeze. Hold on to the earth. Clutch it in your hands. Allow yourself to be engulfed in the arms of those who have become used to this sight.
* * *
Leapetswe Monggae was the second son of Ma go Molefe. Literally translated, his mother's name means Mother of Molefe. In traditional Tswana culture, a woman is given a new name acknowledging her new status when her first child is born.
Like his mother, Leapetswe was tall, carrying his lean height with the same deliberate gait. He had her high cheek and brow bones, the same proud nose. Also, like his mother, he spoke little in my company. My desperate attempts to make conversation were met with bemused looks, as if I were a child prattling in an imaginary language—an endearing habit to be indulged with kindly nods, but not to be acknowledged with real speech. I never knew whether it was the lack of a common tongue that yielded the silences I found so hard to bear, or whether it was a display of respect for my "superior" white status. Sometimes I think their reticence was a well-concealed contempt for my great ignorance of the social niceties of their subtle culture.
Ma go Molefe was our hired helper. She cleaned our home and watched my children. She stayed in a small "maid's" room behind the garage. This was a common practice in South Africa in 1997—and still is—where hired help is affordable to the largely white middle class.
In her late fifties, after serving white families for nearly forty years, Ma go Molefe wanted to go home to Gabane.
"I want see sons of mine married," she said. "I want be mother-in-law, be real nkoko (grandmother)."
Her work was cut out for her. Those boys were gorgeous. Both had steady jobs. The matter of finding suitable brides and keeping price negotiations for brides on the boil would engage her for months. She was not to be robbed of the status afforded a matriarch because her sons dithered from girl to girl. That second great achievement of womanhood should be hers, and Ma go Molefe would be thorough in its pursuit.
Just before she retired, Leapetswe arrived in Johannesburg. He had leave from his job in a remote village. Nothing much ever happened there. Before the weekly kgotla—the gathering of the chiefs—there was plentiful drinking and copious copulating. After the affairs of the tribe were settled, more of the same pleasurable activities occurred. Leapetswe wanted to see Egoli (the city of gold) before his mother left it. He also wanted to register for an accountancy diploma. With just a school leaver's certificate, he qualified only for a lowly pen pusher's job. No computer existed in the village.
"My work is boring," he said in a rare flourish of unsolicited speech. We were driving to the offices of Technisa, the distance-learning college that offered business skills courses via correspondence. "Writing forms is dull. I want promotion."
The next day, after returning from a sewing class where I had learned to make men's neckties, I showed him one I made. He asked me to teach him. The design was simple, the fabric requirements minimal. He could start a small business with such a skill and it would keep him busy after work. It was also an activity suited to mutual silence. Beyond, "Stitch along this line," and "Snip the seam here," there was not much to say.
That evening he had a brand new tie in paisley swirls of burgundy, gold, and turquoise with a lining of royal blue satin. Leapetswe returned to Botswana with the pattern, some suitable fabric, and a box of fine pins.
"It will be a good tie to get married in," I jested before saying goodbye.
"Boy nearly thirty," his mother grumbled affectionately.
"A marriageable age?" I asked.
Leapetswe nodded shyly.
* * *
A year later, I was delayed at the Tlokweng border post on the morning of Leapetswe’s funeral, and I did not see him in his coffin. His aunt told me he wore the tie he made with me. Eight years later, I have been to many funerals where AIDS, the disease that killed my brief friend, is never mentioned.
Leapetswe's name means protection—and indeed, had he used protection, he probably still would be alive today.
* * *
Read Liesl Jobson's poem, dedicated to Leapetswe: www.geocities.com/joopbersee/lj8.html
BIO: LIESL JOBSON is a musician living in Johannesburg, South Africa. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in South African literary journals Timbila, New Coin, Green Dragon, Carapace and Botsotso, as well as in Wild Strawberries, Oasis, Bonfire, Gator Springs Gazette and Ink Pot (USA), lichen literary journal (Canada), The Journal and Aesthetica (UK). Online publications include Mississippi Review, Exquisite Corpse, Swank and The Hiss Quarterly. She is currently a student in the M.A. in Creative Writing program at the University of the Witwatersrand.
Contact Liesl at: jobson@telkomsa.net
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Photo credit: Janene Steenkamp |
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