my current circumstances. Lesego, whose whole world is urban and upwardly driven, would have been appalled.
“You are out of the mainstream,” she likes to say when she is in one of her fault-finding moods.
I don’t know what she means by this. The shallow alien stream transplanted from another continent? Or the stream of people who carry the old ways with them? Whichever she means, I had a feeling that this time she was right.
Lesego Senatla is a beautiful pilot of her own personal mainstream which she navigates with admirable skill as an independent property developer.
For some years she worked in different positions for a large multinational construction company. She knew her bricks and cement, but her last boss had begun making clumsy amorous advances. He had spiced these with hints of unlimited travel to foreign ports of exquisite pleasures. And him being a married man too, with pictures scattered around his office to prove it. Pictures of people Lesego did not know. Although their real-life counterparts sometimes dropped in at the office and stared through her with glassy smiles fixed on their faces. People she often had to buy last-minute birthday cards for.
So she walked away. Part of being free is having the right to walk away from a demeaning and exploitative situation, she often declared
She had gone on to form her own small construction company, and her first major project had been to build additional classrooms at the high school in which I broke chalk and my spirit for birdseed pay.
And here I was, at it again. The only good thing was that I was not stuck here, and this time I could leave whenever I wanted to.
* * *
Principal Mokoka finally left after I got the name of the old woman out of him. He told me that she was old Mme Molefe, the mother of the Molefe I was supposed to seek assistance from.
After Mokoka had left I suddenly felt very tired and set about getting myself into bed. After unsuccessfully trying to use my cellphone to contact the broader world, and Lesego who was in it, I turned off the lights.
That night I dreamt of the food I had left untouched – the milk was achingly sweet but always just out of reach.
Tuesday
TUESDAY
Chapter 4
Chapter 4
There were two paths going to the school from the village above my cottage. The first came into the little valley and then rose again to the level ground on which the school stood. The second was much longer and skirted the hollow in a semicircle, approaching the school from the opposite direction after joining the road from Mafikeng.
Apparently the school children preferred the longer route. I had been up early, heated up old Ma Molefe’s food and made it my breakfast. I was sure that no one had passed my door, but they were all already in the school yard by the time I got there.
I had planned on arriving early, before eight, but the children had beaten me to it. And on a winter’s morning too. Incredible! My intention of poking around the school unsupervised was undone. I couldn’t do anything with so many little eyes recording my every step.
So I did what any new arrival would do. I headed for a familiar door. I had not even touched the Principal’s door knob when someone giggled behind me. I turned around to find a small boy standing there. A tiny shadow of a boy – and apparently also able to move just as silently as a shadow as well – he had the delicate features of the Khoisan.
He had a key in his hand and, extremely shyly, he gave it to me. He pointed at a door at the end of the row of prefabricated classrooms. I gave him a friendly pat on his head and what I hope was my best smile. He only thrust his finger at the door vigorously in reply and trotted towards it.
I followed him. “My name is . . .” I began as I reached him.
“You are Tichere Maje,” he said firmly, interrupting me.
This was not due to my all-conquering fame, or the boy’s supernatural powers. I should have known that by now everyone who had anything to do with the school would be in possession of my vital statistics. An invisible file had been opened on me. It would only be closed the day I left, and perhaps not even then if I did or said something amazingly novel during my stay.
“What’s your name?” I asked as he led me into the classroom.
“Jan-Jan Mothibi.”
As I watched him float away and join his friends in a scuffle about a ragged football, it came to me that he was possessed of that terrible fragility of a people staring into the abyss, with cold shadows gathering around their kind as their numbers diminished with every turning of the earth. I have seen that haunted, far-away look before and I was sure that I would see the same look again in the eyes of others before I left Marakong-a-Badimo. The look of a people who sensed that when humanity finally gathered around the last fire, they may be absent, their tongues long stilled and their last prayers unheard.
* * *
The classroom was very clean. In fact, I had never seen a cleaner classroom that was in regular use. The desks were arranged in precise rows. The best drilled soldiers could not have marched in a more orderly fashion. I sensed Mokoka’s influence.
A tall, athletic-looking girl of about twelve or thirteen entered while I stood, amazed, before the teacher’s cupboard. It was beyond my experience, this spinsterish neatness, in any classroom, especially one Mamorena had taught in. The reformation must have come after her disappearance. Unless . . . unless she herself had changed.
“Tichere Maje! The Principal wants you to come to the office,” the girl said in a clear Setswana voice.
Mokoka and his entourage had obviously arrived.
“Who looks after the classroom?” I asked, still slightly dazed.
“We all do, but I’m responsible.”
“And, you are . . .?”
“Pono Molefe. I am in your class, grade five.”
The Molefe’s were multiplying.
“The Principal . . .” she began, with an impatient shake of her tightly-braided hair.
“Yes, yes, the Principal.”
I followed her out of the classroom and turned towards Mokoka’s office.
He was with his two assistants, and the belated introductions were made with the briefest of ceremonies. One was Pitso Mogae. The other was Tankie Motaung.
Motaung looked hunted. He was about thirty-five – my sinful age – but his eyes were narrowed with old, atrophied grievances. His dark clothes were stiff and seemed too heavy even for the season.
Mogae was the direct opposite, almost as if on purpose. A large, multicoloured tie was the first thing that caught the eye. This was complemented with a faded pink shirt and a green suit. His mouth was always working too – cracking stale jokes and overflowing with good wishes and advice – while the silent Motaung’s face hung in the background like a misplaced planet.
Tankie Motaung was the grade one and two master, while Pitso Mogae held sway over the grade threes and fours. My dominion was grade five, but we were supposed to be able to teach those subjects we were good at any level (Mokoka himself took care of geography, history and religion across all grades). As the one at the end of the production line, I was supposed to iron out all the remaining kinks before sending the scrubbed and polished children to the schools in the nearest town.
“Let’s introduce you to the children,” Mokoka said as soon as the formalities were complete.
We went out to where sixty or so children – some of them wearing thin-looking clothes and shoes that were falling apart – were gathered in close, regular lines. They stood ranged before us – the shortest in front, the tallest at the back – their faces drifting from the unmistakably Khoisan to the decidedly Tswana without any marked break or transition, just as the arid