Authors: Norman Rush
Mating (14 page)
DENOON:
Back to the village—
MBAAKE:
So but you will not tell us what is
vernacular development
and nor will you tell us what is
your
great scheme, even in some some some short terms.
Mbaake was excited, which showed up not as a stutter but as a word repetition syndrome. I sensed he had something up his sleeve en route.
Nor about our ancestors as to if they they were socialists or whatnot.
DENOON:
My brief, as I said, is to talk about some few things that can be done right now, today, in the villages, in particular some low
tillage schemes I can describe, some specialty crops that makhoa in Europe want and will pay for very handsomely, some—
MBAAKE:
Ehé. Oh, all about how we can grow some some flowers in the sandveld and such things, yah.
Well, these are things we like to know, as well.
But but you see it is just the same as always with whitemen because once again a lakhoa is saying what we must hear and whatnot. So it is just the same.
You say comrade, yet you take us as small boys.
DENOON:
Comrade, I am under the instructions of your government in this, as you well know.
I would love nothing better than to stay long into the night to talk about all these matters.
But, Rra, I am a guest in this country. I—
MBAAKE:
Ah, my comrade, but what can you say at all as to your your holy of holies, your your New Jerusalem, not can we raise up some flowers in the sandveld?
What is … what is, what is, if you can say … what is this
very slyly
solar democracy?
Or must whitemen just time and again produce more secrets that we in our own country must beg to know in our own country?
DENOON:
If you suppose there is anything sinister in—
MBAAKE:
No, my comrade, because when have whitemen done ill to us or made schemes behind our backs? Can you think when?
Some kind of transgression had occurred involving mentioning solar democracy. Denoon was steely for a change.
MBAAKE:
So what can you say is this this
city of the sun,
yah?
DENOON:
After a long pause.
There is no such thing.
Another pause.
Solar democracy is … is still …
He trailed off. He drank some water.
The peculiar passivity of the white presence was patently determined by their interest in seeing if Boso’s heckling was going to jab Denoon into revealing something about his project that they were interested in knowing. But under the passivity was a palpable intensity. We were all excited.
The permsec of Local Government and Lands, I noticed, had left. This meant something.
It was even more exciting when the permsec came back leading his boss, the minister himself, Kgosetlemang. This raised the stakes immensely. Kgosetlemang was new as minister. He was very tough. He had worked his way up through the ranks of the Botswana National Party on the strength of his performance as an enforcer for the reigning BNP faction, the Serowe faction. The Botswana National Party hated the Botswana Social Front, who were upstart marxists who had astoundingly won two seats in the parliament at the last election. Moreover, Kgosetlemang hated Mbaake on a personal level. Mbaake was reputed to have seduced, if that’s the word, one of Kgosetlemang’s mistresses, which I had heard from Z.
The tension accompanying the positioning of the various antagonists was almost sexual. Would Kgosetlemang bring everything to a stop, or, more likely, make a speech of some kind? At the moment he was trying to get his permsec to do or say something. Everyone there had his or her own mosaic of what Denoon was up to in the Kalahari, made up of true and false tessarae. Solar democracy was new and sounded overweening and interesting, so would Denoon say more or not? Memcons would be written tonight. Would there be enough substance for a cable, maybe?
Something fleeting passed across Denoon’s face that I loved. It was subtle, like a cloud shadow passing over something in a landscape you’re contemplating. Overall and considering, I thought Denoon so far had done fairly well, my cavils notwithstanding. But a change of state was coming. Heraldically speaking, he went from sedent to rampant, but all inwardly. He was, you could see if you were me, going from play to work. I loved it. It was so male.
Of course now I know Nelson was responding to yet one more proof that he had enemies in high places, because the solar democracy barb pointed to a document supposed to be genuinely secret and speculative and something
only two people in the cabinet were supposed to have seen. Mostly he had been speaking ex cathedra, but now he got up and went around behind his armchair and faced the audience, gripping the finials or whatever they are that stood up from the back. Grace was missing this. Kgosetlemang was starting for the front. Denoon loves the line For the night is gone and the sword is drawn and the scabbard is thrown away, which is something his father, who was a sot, liked to quote—and this is what I associate with the next moment.
DENOON:
What could that mean, solar democracy?
To my colleagues and good friends at LG and L, I apologize for what I see I am about to do. I ask forgiveness.
But suppose that we imagine a country the size of France, its borders not in danger because it is beloved of the white West for its prudence and uprightness and its parliament, with only a million inhabitants, and millions of hectares in public lands, mostly empty and unused. Imagine also that this country enjoys averagely two hundred and twenty days a year of pure sun pouring down, streaming down, a downpour of gold that no one stops to hold a bucket to.
There are some whites in this country, in fact too many. Whites who are in the wrong skin for Africa. The sun is poison to us and we should probably say so and depart. Many of these whites are experts and advisers, who leave the iron skies of the north to come here with a lump of coal in their hands for you to worship, or petrol to sell. They think the sun is pretty, no more.
Now suppose the Batswana, or rather the inhabitants of this country, for any reason, wanted to base
every mechanical process without exception
on the free energy of the sun. Heating, cooling, cooking, transport, water pumping, any process you might name, could be run directly or indirectly from this great tireless source. Industry as well, should they choose to, since there is space to run collectors of energy many times exceeding the demand of any industry one million people might need.
The sun is wasted on these people unless they one day see it and use it. They could, you could, be rich,
but only if you choose something better than being rich.
Now as philosopher king of the country described, with only one million citizens—what would I tell these people?
I would say to them that it could be done in a generation. Your children, if you train them, could be masters of the power of the sun. They could be a better thing than rich: they could be free.
Expats here and there were rolling their eyes notably. He seemed not to care.
You could be the first nation to give its people lives of freedom to devote to art, science, scholarship, sport if you like that. Work could be as you liked, by agreement: half a day, a week at a time, one year on and one off, different times and kinds of work in different towns, different regions, however you wanted. You could be the first nation to make self-directed individual development the first goal of your political economy.
Your villages could be like the great universities of Europe during the dark ages, and there is now a dark age of its own kind: your villages could be like suns or stars shining, because you could teach the use of the sun to the rest of Africa and beyond. Botswana—this country, rather—could be a garden of beautiful villages, each one different. You could be the first nation to tell your children to ask themselves what work in the world would most become their souls and to prepare to do it.
Of course I am a lakhoa telling you this, of the race that brought you the hut tax to drive you into money slavery and is even today telling you that the point of life is to get rich, how the best use of your mortal life is to perfect a system in which a fraction of you can get rich, only a fraction, but never mind.
But I am saying that you could make villages that are
engines of rest.
The ratios are there, if you control your numbers, if you seize your schools by the neck and change them. You can be the first whose women can say I work at what I please, the same as men, and as I determine. You can be the first whose children say We shall do this or that because it pleases us and not because the makhoa or the church say you must, or your father or the state or the iron hand of hunger or the itch to be richer than your neighbor and live behind walls protected by dogs and Waygards.
Of course, these people could only build such a democracy, should they choose to, if they saved and redeemed their villages instead of emptying them into the swamps of Old Naledi, where all you hear all day is I have no money, I’m begging for money, Ga ke na madi, Ga ke na madi, Kopa madi. Day laborers, beggars, small boys besieging you in your money fortresses crying madi, madi, madi. Old Naledi, where you grow thieves. While over your heads every day a great machine goes back and forth and pours out treasure that nobody takes in his hands. Or her hands.
Here he made a slightly sacerdotal gesture with cupped hands and I thought the excursion was over. It had been choppy and maybe a little counterfeit in places, but I forgave it because it had been impromptu. The pastoral tonus bothered me, but given what he was aiming for, I had to admit it was probably not inappropriate. This seemed to be the end. I wondered where things would go, because now left and right both, if they came back at him, would have to either admit or deny that they were blind to the sun, this deus ex machina that certainly deserved more attention than it was getting in either of their literatures. He had changed the terrain.
But that wasn’t all.
Amazingly he swung into perfect Setswana and did the whole cri de coeur again. And
he was excellent.
I said to myself You are in the presence of the extraordinary. He was as good as I was at the time. His tenses were impeccable.
In Setswana his spiel came over as an aria. In English the intoned quality bothered me, but not in Setswana. I was moved.
I had heard that the Batswana called him Rra Puleng, meaning Rain-like Man or Man as Good as Rain, the highest praise the Batswana can give. Rain also means wealth, as in the unit of currency, the pula. Mbaake was upset. In Africa the people who are involved in telling you what to do rarely speak your language. Denoon had shown him personal respect. My one complaint with the Setswana version was that Denoon stood with his eyes closed a beat longer than was absolutely necessary when he came to the end.
Later in talking to him about this moment I found out it had been a relief for Denoon that the solar democracy leak had occurred and led to his aria.
What he was afraid was lying in wait for him was the litany No Dams, No Roads, No Tourists, which represented a vulgarization of his early work on vernacular development. There was a defense for each element in the litany, but it was always strenuous. Meanwhile his thought had moved on. He did have a more general theory, even one more difficult to capsulize. There was a suigenerism.
I found this erotic. Is it erotic or not to be in the ambience of someone who offhandedly confutes the two systems that are dividing the world, is fairly convincing about it, and has in reserve something entirely his own and superior? Is it erotic or not that he is even diffident about going into it, not all hot-eyed to catch people by the lapels to make them listen, which is the usual accompaniment of such convictions?
Of course when I reflect back I realize I never got a full frontal of mature Denoonism, partly because we were so busy the whole time we were together, I think. Sometimes he would say he had a complete system and other times he would deny it, or half deny it. Or he would take the position that his strategy was to develop and propagate individual pieces of his system and induce the world to figure out how they could cohere beautifully in some transcendent new whole. I always had a rough idea of his provenance: it was visible even in his little aria about solar democracy. He was a radical decentralist the elements of whose system were composed of the odd amalgam of collective and microcapitalist institutions he had come up with at Tsau. I was after him a few times to get things down in a more extended way on paper, for example re what seemed to me his hubris about solar technology, but this ran up against the extreme position he had arrived at vis-à-vis literary-academic propagation of the faith, which was that it was a waste of time, or rather that everything was so exigent there was no time for that.
One thing was his inordinate fear of vulgarization. He was willing to be cursory or epigrammatic about other peoples systems, but when it came to laying Denoonism out, you would need a seminar atmosphere, lots of time, la la la. He called certain people genre marxists, some of whom didn’t actually deserve it. Partly his fear of being vulgarized came from the caricature people turned vernacular development into after the book came out. And he was cornucopious with examples of good ideas coming into ludicrous incarnations, like Positivism turning into a spiritualist religion in Brazil, one of whose saints was August Comte’s mistress. There were other examples. His favorite thing to call himself in front of the
Student left in Botswana was scientific Utopian: I am a scientific Utopian. This was a calculated oxymoron built on Marx’s famous loathing of the Utopian socialists he thought he was so superior to and the absolutely unbreakable conviction among the students that socialism is one of the sciences. I should have pressed him more, I suppose. It would be nice if there were some great classic text. Of course now there never will be. Unless I’m wrong. I may be wrong.