Working on it

Here is the next episode of the African memoir.

October and November, 1992

The actors and I built trust, respect, and a kind of dependence on each other. Listening to reasons why this or that actor missed a rehearsal or was late, I saw the matrix from which each performer emerged. Sick children, wayward sheep, abusive husbands, a goat in the vegetable garden. An uncle blamed for a missing cow. A sister gone missing. Devastating, but not unusual, a child raped: there was a popular rumor that AIDS could be cured by having sex with a virgin. Temporarily we were a functional family, each of us doing what we could to serve the whole, and for a good cause: prevention of AIDS.

I was given the name Limakatso, which means Bringer-of-Surprises. The children of the village became accustomed to my visits and if on a Sunday I had not wandered up to visit their grandmothers, some of them would come to my little flat on the University grounds to check on me. I’d offer them bread, peanut butter, and milk, and in return they would fill my house with laughter. Little Palesa was always among my visitors and came to be known as my “thatohatsi” (favorite). I had grown to love her, and I worried about her as she wandered the village alone and vulnerable.

The villagers were curious about me. “Where is your husband?” 
“Do you know Michael Jackson? No? But why not?” 
“What kind of house do you live in?” 
The fact that I had no house and no job to return to was cause for dismay. 
“You have no house? How can it be? Where will you live when you go home?” And then the inevitable kindness: “Agh, shame. You can stay here with me and my children. We will take care of you when you are an old woman and walk with a stick.” 

When a father, a grandmother, or an auntie is stricken with TB, or loses a limb in an accident, or develops intractable diarrhea, the patient may be taken to the clinic in Roma or the hospital in Maseru where, if the family has a little money, minimal medical care will be provided. But the family then has to make their way daily, on foot or by minibus taxi, to the sickbed, to provide food for the sick person. That often means there is no food for the family left at home. “It’s only hunger,” an adult will say dismissively. Survival can never be taken for granted; the lives of the poor are always just about to fail.

Wendy, a kindly white South African woman who ran a small charity in Lesotho, invited me to visit her family’s vacation home on the Vaal River. Lesotho is surrounded on all sides by South Africa, but I had never set foot in the country where Apartheid was created. We left the University in Roma before dawn, drove for nine hours in her Toyota SUV, and were there in time for lunch. As she chatted with her brother, an emergency room doctor, I stepped through wide glass doors onto a beautiful patio shaded by a roof overhung with blossoming lavender wisteria. The broad, well-clipped, lush lawn rolled gently down a hundred yards, past the swimming pool, the children’s tree house, and a rose garden, to the river. At the river’s edge I could see a boat house in which a large pleasure boat was suspended above water in an electrically-powered harness.

A Black woman about my age, wearing a white uniform and a hair-net covered by a scarf, wheeled out a small serving table on which was arranged a whole smoked trout surrounded by radiants of fennel and red and yellow peppers. Around the edges of the dish were cauliflower florets, cucumbers cut to resemble lilies, and tomatoes carved into roses. Next to the trout and vegetable plate was a great loaf of Italian bread, still hot. I stared, dumbstruck. The woman, looking down, respectfully avoiding eye contact, whispered, “Help yourself, Madam.” My eyes filled with tears. I tried to say thank you, but I couldn’t speak. I hurried down to the river’s edge.

The Vaal River is broad, brown, and deep. It was the natural boundary of the area where Basotho lived for over thousand years, but the Boers and English arrived with guns and farming methods in the eighteenth century, fought each other for all the arable land, and pushed the peaceful Basotho up into the mountains where they created a country called Lesotho in 1848. On the banks of the Vaal, willows still hang gracefully over the water, there is an occasional palm tree, and between the boat houses and the summer homes are fruit trees and deciduous trees in beautifully-sculptured gardens tended by Black gardeners supervised by white owners. Water hyacinths, some in bloom, float peacefully on the water. Coots, herons, and cormorants dip, rise, stretch their necks. Boats pass, full of white people. There are skiers, sky-divers, paragliders, yachts, and power boats whipping brown water into white foam. 

Gripped by convulsive sobs, I lay on the grass and looked up through fronds of willow till I drifted into semi-dream in which images of Basotho people I loved floated above me like ghosts. I sat up as a red motor boat streaked by, driven by a very tan white-haired man in white linen shirt and bermuda shorts. Next to him, a pale woman in a pink bikini laughed uproariously, her blonde hair blowing in the wind. 

“I was afraid the disparity would be a shock for you.” Wendy said gently. She had quietly walked up behind me. “You see, this is the situation we are born into.” She handed me a tissue. “We would like it to be different, and perhaps it will be, one day. We do what we can. We treat our servants well. My father saw to it that they all had flush toilets and showers in their quarters, long before anyone else did that. We pay their children's school fees. But of course, it’s hard to know where to start.”