Intimate Strangers [1 ed.] 9789956616183, 9789956616060

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Francis B. Nyamnjoh has taught Sociology, Anthropology and Communication Studies at universities in Cameroon, Botswana and South Africa, and served as Head of Publications with the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), Dakar, Senegal. He is currently Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Cover: Abidemi Olowonira Langaa Research & Publishing Common Initiative Group P.O. Box 902 Mankon Bamenda North West Region Cameroon

Francis B. Nyamnjoh

Intimate Strangers tells the story of the everyday tensions of maids and madams in ways that bring together different worlds and explore various dimensions of servitude and mobility. Immaculate travels to a foreign land only to find her fiancé refusing to marry her. Operating from the margins of society, through her own ingenuity and an encounter with researcher Dr Winter-Bottom Nanny, she is able to earn some money. Will she remain at the margins or graduate into DUST – Diamond University of Science and Technology? Immaculate learns how maids struggle to make ends meet and madams wrestle to keep them in their employ. Resolved to make her disappointments blessings, she perseveres until she can take no more.

Copyright © 2010. Langaa RPCIG. All rights reserved.

“Intimate Strangers is both an engaging story of a stranger in a strange land, and a feast of revealing observations that link matters such as xenophobia and race relations to the intimacies of sex, romance, friendship, and betrayal. Brimming with humour, humanity, and cross-cultural curiosity, this book leads the reader through a fascinating set of encounters that provide a vivid and convincing portrait of contemporary life in a modern southern African society.” James Ferguson, Professor of Anthropology, Stanford University, USA

INTIMATE STRANGERS

“Don’t be deceived by Immaculate, a key voice in Francis Nyamnjoh’s Intimate Strangers. At first glance, her observations about the country in which she’s called makwerekwere are open-eyed, light-hearted, going with the flow. Beneath the flow of her experiences, Nyamnjoh has created a darkly hilarious, incisive, and brilliant commentary on what it means to be known – and unknown – in contemporary Southern Africa. The novel is crafted with precision, wit, and a delicacy that exposes your own heart even as it suggests – with simplicity and elegance –- new ways of seeing the familiar.” Jane Bennett, Director, African Gender Institute, University of Cape Town, South Africa

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Other Titles by Langaa RPCIG Francis B. Nyamnjoh Stories from Abakwa Mind Searching The Disillusioned African The Convert Souls Forgotten Married But Available Intimate Strangers Dibussi Tande No Turning Back. Poems of Freedom 1990-1993 Scribbles from the Den: Essays on Politics and Collective Memory in Cameroon Kangsen Feka Wakai Fragmented Melodies Ntemfac Ofege Namondo. Child of the Water Spirits Hot Water for the Famous Seven Emmanuel Fru Doh Not Yet Damascus The Fire Within Africa‘s Political Wastelands: The Bastardization of Cameroon Oriki’badan Wading the Tide Stereotyping Africa: Surprising Answers to Surprising Questions Thomas Jing Tale of an African Woman Peter Wuteh Vakunta Grassfields Stories from Cameroon Green Rape: Poetry for the Environment Majunga Tok: Poems in Pidgin English Cry, My Beloved Africa No Love Lost Straddling The Mungo: A Book of Poems in English & French Ba’bila Mutia Coils of Mortal Flesh Kehbuma Langmia Titabet and the Takumbeng An Evil Meal of Evil

Copyright © 2010. Langaa RPCIG. All rights reserved.

Victor Elame Musinga The Barn The Tragedy of Mr. No Balance

John Percival The 1961 Cameroon Plebiscite: Choice or Betrayal Albert Azeyeh Réussite scolaire, faillite sociale : généalogie mentale de la crise de l’Afrique noire francophone Aloysius Ajab Amin & Jean-Luc Dubois Croissance et développement au Cameroun : d‘une croissance équilibrée à un développement équitable Carlson Anyangwe Imperialistic Politics in Cameroun: Resistance & the Inception of the Restoration of the Statehood of Southern Cameroons Betrayal of Too Trusting a People: The UN, the UK and the Trust Territory of the Southen Cameroons Bill F. Ndi K‘Cracy, Trees in the Storm and Other Poems Map: Musings On Ars Poetica Thomas Lurting: The Fighting Sailor Turn’d Peaceable /Le marin combattant devenu paisible Kathryn Toure, Therese Mungah Shalo Tchombe & Thierry Karsenti ICT and Changing Mindsets in Education Charles Alobwed’Epie The Day God Blinked The Bad Samaritan G. D. Nyamndi Babi Yar Symphony Whether losing, Whether winning Tussles: Collected Plays Dogs in the Sun Samuel Ebelle Kingue Si Dieu était tout un chacun de nous ? Ignasio Malizani Jimu Urban Appropriation and Transformation: bicycle, taxi and handcart operators in Mzuzu, Malawi Justice Nyo’ Wakai Under the Broken Scale of Justice: The Law and My Times John Eyong Mengot A Pact of Ages

Ngessimo Mathe Mutaka Building Capacity: Using TEFL and African Languages as Developmentoriented Literacy Tools

Ignasio Malizani Jimu Urban Appropriation and Transformation: Bicycle Taxi and Handcart Operators

Milton Krieger Cameroon’s Social Democratic Front: Its History and Prospects as an Opposition Political Party, 1990-2011

Joyce B. Ashuntantang Landscaping and Coloniality: The Dissemination of Cameroon Anglophone Literature

Sammy Oke Akombi The Raped Amulet The Woman Who Ate Python Beware the Drives: Book of Verse The Wages of Corruption

Jude Fokwang Mediating Legitimacy: Chieftaincy and Democratisation in Two African Chiefdoms

Susan Nkwentie Nde Precipice Second Engagement Francis B. Nyamnjoh & Richard Fonteh Akum The Cameroon GCE Crisis: A Test of Anglophone Solidarity Joyce Ashuntantang & Dibussi Tande Their Champagne Party Will End! Poems in Honor of Bate Besong Emmanuel Achu Disturbing the Peace Rosemary Ekosso The House of Falling Women Peterkins Manyong God the Politician George Ngwane The Power in the Writer: Collected Essays on Culture, Democracy & Development in Africa

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Michael A. Yanou Dispossession and Access to Land in South Africa: an African Perspevctive Tikum Mbah Azonga Cup Man and Other Stories The Wooden Bicycle and Other Stories John Nkemngong Nkengasong Letters to Marions (And the Coming Generations) Amady Aly Dieng Les étudiants africains et la littérature négro-africaine d’expression française Tah Asongwed Born to Rule: Autobiography of a life President Child of Earth Frida Menkan Mbunda Shadows From The Abyss Bongasu Tanla Kishani A Basket of Kola Nuts Konglanjo (Spears of Love without Ill-fortune) and Letters to Ethiopia with some Random Poems

Fo Angwafo III S.A.N of Mankon Royalty and Politics: The Story of My Life

Roselyne M. Jua & Bate Besong To the Budding Creative Writer: A Handbook

Basil Diki The Lord of Anomy Shrouded Blessings

Albert Mukong Prisonner without a Crime: Disciplining Dissent in Ahidjo’s Cameroon

Churchill Ewumbue-Monono Youth and Nation-Building in Cameroon: A Study of National Youth Day Messages and Leadership Discourse (1949-2009) Emmanuel N. Chia, Joseph C. Suh & Alexandre Ndeffo Tene Perspectives on Translation and Interpretation in Cameroon Linus T. Asong The Crown of Thorns No Way to Die A Legend of the Dead: Sequel of The Crown of Thorns The Akroma File Salvation Colony: Sequel to No Way to Die Vivian Sihshu Yenika Imitation Whiteman Press Lake Varsity Girls: The Freshman Year Beatrice Fri Bime Someplace, Somewhere Mystique: A Collection of Lake Myths Shadrach A. Ambanasom Son of the Native Soil The Cameroonian Novel of English Expression: An Introduction Tangie Nsoh Fonchingong and Gemandze John Bobuin Cameroon: The Stakes and Challenges of Governance and Development

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Tatah Mentan Democratizing or Reconfiguring Predatory Autocracy? Myths and Realities in Africa Today

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Mbuh Tennu Mbuh In the Shadow of my Country Bernard Nsokika Fonlon Genuine Intellectuals: Academic and Social Responsibilities of Universities in Africa Lilian Lem Atanga Gender, Discourse and Power in the Cameroonian Parliament Cornelius Mbifung Lambi & Emmanuel Neba Ndenecho Ecology and Natural Resource Development in the Western Highlands of Cameroon: Issues in Natural Resource Managment Gideon F. For-mukwai Facing Adversity with Audacity Peter W. Vakunta & Bill F. Ndi Nul n’a le monopole du français : deux poètes du Cameroon anglophone Emmanuel Matateyou Les murmures de l’harmattan Ekpe Inyang The Hill Barbers JK Bannavti Rock of God (Kilán ke Nyùy)

Intimate Strangers

Copyright © 2010. Langaa RPCIG. All rights reserved.

Francis B. Nyamnjoh

Langaa Research & Publishing CIG Mankon,Bamenda

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Publisher: Langaa RPCIG Langaa Research & Publishing Common Initiative Group P.O. Box 902 Mankon Bamenda North West Region Cameroon [email protected] www.langaa-rpcig.net

Distributed outside N. America by African Books Collective [email protected] www.africanbookscollective.com Distributed in N. America by Michigan State University Press [email protected] www.msupress.msu.edu

ISBN: 9956-616-06-0

Copyright © 2010. Langaa RPCIG. All rights reserved.

© Francis B. Nyamnjoh 2010

DISCLAIMER All views expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Langaa RPCIG.

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Content

Chapter One ..................................................................................................... 1 Chapter Two ..................................................................................................... 7 Chapter Three .................................................................................................. 9 Chapter Four ................................................................................................... 13 Chapter Five ................................................................................................... 19 Chapter Six ..................................................................................................... 27 Chapter Seven ................................................................................................ 37 Chapter Eight ................................................................................................. 43 Chapter Nine .................................................................................................. 55 Chapter Ten .................................................................................................... 61 Chapter Eleven .............................................................................................. 63 Chapter Twelve .............................................................................................. 73 Chapter Thirteen............................................................................................ 81 Chapter Fourteen ........................................................................................... 93 Chapter Fifteen ............................................................................................ 105 Chapter Sixteen ............................................................................................ 113 Copyright © 2010. Langaa RPCIG. All rights reserved.

Chapter Seventeen ...................................................................................... 117 Chapter Eighteen ......................................................................................... 129 Chapter Nineteen ........................................................................................ 137 Chapter Twenty............................................................................................ 147 Chapter Twenty One .................................................................................. 161 Chapter Twenty Two .................................................................................. 171 Chapter Twenty Three ................................................................................ 179 Chapter Twenty Four .................................................................................. 189

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Francis B. Nyamnjoh

Chapter Twenty Five .................................................................................. 201 Chapter Twenty Six ..................................................................................... 207 Chapter Twenty Seven ................................................................................ 219 Chapter Twenty Eight ................................................................................ 227 Chapter Twenty Nine .................................................................................. 235 Chapter Thirty .............................................................................................. 243 Chapter Thirty One ..................................................................................... 257 Chapter Thirty Two ..................................................................................... 267 Chapter Thirty Three .................................................................................. 275 Chapter Thirty Four .................................................................................... 283 Chapter Thirty Five ..................................................................................... 293 Chapter Thirty Six ....................................................................................... 305

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Chapter Thirty Seven .................................................................................. 315

vi

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Chapter One

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T

oday I am thirteen years in Botswana. I left Mimboland on Thursday, June 10, 1997. It was probably 8 o’clock in the evening when I arrived at Gaborone by Air Botswana, but I couldn’t tell exactly because I didn’t know there were time differences between Botswana and Mimboland. The person who was supposed to pick me up at the Sir Seretse Khama International Airport never turned up. By God’s grace, some kind officials gave me their phone – the first time ever I was seeing or using a cell phone – to make a call. Luckily I had the phone number, so I called this person. He was not at home. His stepmother came and collected me from the airport. It was winter and I didn’t know there was winter in Botswana. No one had told me there could be winter in Africa, so I had not prepared for anything other than the rain and sun as we knew them in the tropical forests and savannahs of Mimboland. When I was coming, I knew I was going to a foreign land, but I didn’t know much about Botswana. I didn’t have winter clothes, so I had a very bitter experience because winter in ‘97 was very severe. There was one of my homeboys who made fun of me, saying I was dressing like a nightwatchman, because of the way I used to pile clothes upon clothes on me to keep warm. When I came to Botswana, I came with the intention of doing business, the reason I gave to obtain my visa. While preparing papers for the business, I had a piece job with Sun Power, the biggest horticulturalist in Botswana. Planting plants is a lucrative business in this country, which is mostly desert extremely hot in summer and where people always need shade trees in their yards and plants in their gardens. Until I joined Sun Power, I didn’t know that an African could be different from another African. But I soon realised I was seen and treated as different. The Batswana would come and ask me, ‘Why do you speak like this?’ ‘Where did you study?’ And the first word I learnt was ‘She’s a Mokwerekwere.’ When I asked, ‘What do you mean?’ I was told, ‘You speak Makwerekwere-like.’

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Francis B. Nyamnjoh

During lunchtime no Batswana would sit with me. I had two friends, boys, Zimbabweans. One was 22 years old, the other 23 and a half and I was 24. These were the only people I could talk with. The only people I could share food with. If I tried to greet Batswana, they would speak to me in Setswana. I didn’t know there was any African who could not at least speak and understand a bit of English. At 10 o’clock, teatime, the tea girls would say, ‘Ah! Let that Mokwerekwere come and make her own tea.’ I would say, ‘No problem. Ok. I’ll come and make my own tea.’ When I got there to make tea, they would say, ‘Don’t put too much sugar.’ I was like, ‘Are you the one buying the sugar?’ We had this conflict because of my being a foreigner. I worked there for a couple of months, after which I left. Mr Quitdoqu, the person who brought me here was staying in G-North, where life wasn’t at all easy for us. He wasn’t yet married, and we were staying three of us, with the would-be-wife’s sister. His house was a very funny house, like a camp, and at the same time a dumping ground for Sun Power, which mostly recruited hyper-cheap labour directly from Zimbabwe and Zambia through him, and for which he was paid a commission. He made us work hard and there was a day I even said, ‘I think my home is better than to be in Botswana.’ The sister-in-law and me cleaned the house, did the plastering, did the painting, built the bathroom, and carried the burden of life in the house from day-to-day entirely on our shoulders, unassisted. When Quitdoqu finally got married, his wife did not realise that we were the ones who had constructed the house where she was coming to stay. She would say, ‘I don’t want noise as long as you are staying under my roof.’ I’d cry. The cousin and I had more similarities than with this girl he married, who grew up in the United States, and who lived her life like someone on TV. There was a great difference with us. The two of us reasoned differently from her. She would say, ‘You people from Africa, you are just so dull. You say you have A Levels. What is A Levels? It’s nothing! In America, from 11th Grade, we go to university, which means we are cleverer than Africans.’ There was always an argument in the house, even though she was the youngest. She was really like a bitter African slave master. The treatment she used to give us I always attributed to the treatment of the African slaves in America in the olden days. She would remove her underwear and demand we wash it. If we were at table, she would say we should not take meat until she had had enough. ‘It’s my food and my money.’ If you 2

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Intimate Strangers

are going out, she would ask, ‘Immaculate, what business are you going for?’ But when we asked her, ‘Kathleen, where are you going?’ she would retort, ‘It’s my business.’ When I think of Batswana having negative attitudes towards other Africans on the other hand I think, no matter where you come from, what God has created you to be is what you are. This girl who was not a Motswana was treating me like the Batswana of Sun Power did. So a good person is a good person, and a bad person is a bad person, no matter where you come from. I was engaged while staying with them, as I was making my visa to meet my fiancé, George Tsenchwaka, in the United States. But he changed his mind for no good reason. This was a bitter experience. I went through difficulties, not because my parents were not able to feed me back home, not because they were not able to further my education, but because they knew I was heading for somebody I knew well, somebody who had convinced them he wanted their daughter in marriage. When I informed him that I didn’t manage to obtain a visa, he said we should call off the engagement. Just like that. There was no conflict and no misunderstanding, just failure to get the visa. I don’t know whether or not he was economical with the truth of his real circumstances out there in the USA, but I was really hurt. How could George Tsenchwaka ever have claimed he loved me? To crumble without effort at the first hurdle is hardly a sign of love, is it? I thought Batswana would say, ‘Don’t mind, or don’t worry.’ But everybody said they would kill themselves if they got the same experience. I remember asking one girl, ‘What do you mean kill yourself ?’ She said, ‘If my parents know about a guy I am going to marry and he disappointed me like that, then I would kill myself.’ I said, ‘No, I know it’s very hurtful. I think it’s the bitterest experience I have had in my life. I have suffered. I have touched nasty things and borne insults in a foreign land because I was struggling to make it to meet this guy who sang love hymns from a distance like a canary. But when he said, ‘Let’s call it off,’ because my application for a visa was turned down, I couldn’t kill myself. I always think a disappointment is a blessing. It may take long but I know it will come to pass. The sun will shine on me someday. I told her, ‘I can’t kill myself. If I kill myself, I’ve abused my God, I’ve abused my mum, I’ve abused the world and all the good people who love me. I don’t think life is always successful in the presence of men. We could have married but divorced early. I could have married him and been widowed young. I’ll not kill myself or die with him. I’ll continue my life.’ That’s what I told her and others who came prescribing suicide. 3

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Francis B. Nyamnjoh

I was just out of school and easy to persuade, but I thank my God I didn’t listen to the advice about killing myself. As if the disappointment by my fiancé was not enough, the people I stayed with had another surprise coming. ‘Do you want to go back home or what would you want to do?’ they asked. I said, ‘No, I do not want to go back home because I will not be able to stand it. I know the society where I come from. People back home will look at me in a negative way. Whether I was wrong or not, they will just draw their own conclusions. I thought without this guy, my life would still go ahead. But how would I convince people, and show myself ?’ It was 1998, Easter week. Kathleen, the wife of Quitdoqu, told me, ‘Today is Thursday. Since you don’t want to go back home, you should be out of my house before next Thursday. If not, I will throw your things out.’ I felt the sharpness of her words like a stab in my back. I called a friend of Quitdoqu’s and sought his intervention He said, ‘Why can’t you talk to Quitdoqu so that they let you stay and I appeal to the embassy to grant your visa to go to the United States and try your life out there? As it seems difficult for you to get a job here in Botswana, since most of the jobs are being localised, it makes sense to fish for opportunities in other shores.’ This Kathleen girl said, ‘No,’ she wanted her house to herself and her husband alone, and didn’t care where I went as long as I left. Stranded, I went to the mission at St. Veronica’s Sisters of Calvary. There was one Sister in this community I knew through another Sister in my home parish back in Mimboland. They had studied together in Italy. When I explained my situation to this Sister, she went around with me looking for a house. At the end we found none. I went back with her to the mission, where I slept and still could not find a house the next day. Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, still nothing. I felt terrible and could not bring myself to face the Sisters who were so generous to me. I decided to pack my things out, even though I had nowhere to go. ‘God provides for the birds of the skies,’ I told myself, watching a weaverbird return with something in its mouth for its little ones in a nest on the branch of a big palm tree in front of the mission house. I put my things in the bush, covered them with branches and went to call for the two Zimbabwean male friends of mine I first met at Sun Power. I told them I had a problem, as I had been asked to check out of a house and had no place to go. These guys said they were also depending on somebody for shelter and could not offer me accommodation. But they said if I had papers for legal stay in Botswana, they could plead with one kind lady they knew from way back to take me in. Fortunately or unfortunately, this lady was an immigration officer. 4

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Intimate Strangers

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I said I didn’t mind. A drowning person would cling even to a deathly snake. They took me to that lady. Angel was her name, and she was no serpent. She didn’t ask me whether I had papers or what my business was in her country. She only asked me where I came from. I told her I was from the land of Mimbo and that I had no place to stay, and asked her if she would mind taking me in. She accepted just like that, a smile on her face, one that penetrated my entire being, calming the uncertainty that inhabited me like water on a dusty floor. My two Zimbabwean friends stole the company car and went and picked up my things and brought them to Angel’s place. She welcomed me without reservation, and it didn’t take long for me to know that God had given her a good and generous heart.

5

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Chapter Two

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A

fter sometime, I got a job in G-Textiles where I was the only foreigner, apart from the Chinese joint-venture partners in senior management. I was so timid during my first week because everybody was like, ‘Oh! This is a foreigner. Why are they employing a foreigner?’ When I talked, they came around me. Yet I didn’t think my English was better than theirs. I thought there was something wrong with me. I would be depressed overnight wondering. ‘Why are these people so fond of me in a queer way? When I try to communicate with them, they don’t get my words.’ I was perplexed, ‘Aha! I thought we were learning Standard English back home, so why their curiosity? Is it that my English is incomprehensible, all of a sudden?’ With time, I gradually realised they didn’t know English. Despite the fact that the other people didn’t love me, there was one who went out of her way to take care of me. ‘The problem with my brothers and sisters is that they don’t know English. For that reason they don’t want your presence because they know communication will always be a problem,’ she told me. So I understood. It would be like I am exposing their ignorance. This made me sympathetic. While working there at G-Textiles, I was assisting the supervisor, but little did I know she was very worried by me. I didn’t have much working experience from home. But I remembered what my grandfather told me. ‘Whatever you are doing, do it with all your heart. Put your mind into it, no matter how well or badly you are treated.’ So I gave the job my best because I knew I had no previous work experience. I tried to learn by putting in more effort, and praying my God to help me through. Instead, it created a bad relationship between my supervisor and me. She must have thought, ‘These foreigners know too much… She knows more than me. I might lose my job.’ She would talk about this to the other Batswana, who would keep their distance from me in solidarity with her. The one who loved me would come and tell me about what the supervisor said behind my back.

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Francis B. Nyamnjoh

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It became so bad when people from the head office came for a conference and recommended me, and suggested I should take the place of my supervisor and let her step down because many things were going wrong. From that day, things went from bad to worse, and I found myself from the frying pan into the fire. The next day she didn’t talk to me. The third day she took sick leave and went home. When she came back, they told me to go to a Sangoma if I knew one, because she was just going to fortify herself to finish me off. I said, ‘No. I’m a foreigner here from a staunch Christian family. I grew up with my grandfather who is a staunch Christian too. My mother is a Christian and deacon of our village church. I don’t believe in Sangomas, and in any case, for how long am I going to visit Sangomas? Many have been doing that, but I don’t know anyone who has lived forever in this world because of consulting Sangomas. Whatever God decides is ok for me.’ When she came back, she phoned the head office and talked to them. The girl who sympathised with me overheard them and told me. ‘Immaculate, Yolinda has been saying you are not competent and the job is for the locals and they will have to replace you because the government doesn’t want foreigners to do computer and supervisory work, which is for the locals. The job has been localised.’ The third day they told me, ‘You are fired from this job.’ It was so painful.

8

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Chapter Three

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I

don’t know how it started, but a few days after losing my job, I was talking with Angel, when the word Makwerekwere became the centre of our talk. “The term Makwerekwere leaves a bitter taste in my mouth,” I told her, adding how often I had been reduced to tears by Batswana who called me this. “Could you tell me why Batswana tend to use this word in ways that stab and hurt?” “One is Mokwerekwere, two or more Makwerekwere,” Angel started in her soothing voice. She spoke like a Reverend Sister leading the Prayers of the Faithful. She continued, “It is a shame we use the word the way we do, to refer to a particular type of foreigner from distant parts of Africa. Our neighbours from South Africa, Lesotho, Swaziland, they are not Batswana, but they are not called Makwerekwere either.” “Why not,” I asked, bubbling with curiosity. “Batswana seem to feel more comfortable with them than with other people from farther north – Zambia, Malawi, central, east or West Africa,” Angel replied, searching the floor with her eyes. “And so, if ever there’s a Nigerian and someone from Lesotho, I’ll find a Mosotho to be more like a cousin, more like family than I would the Nigerian,” she went on. “I think the whole thing goes back to this issue where we think you are here to take our jobs. We just tell ourselves, ‘Oh! They are here to take our jobs.’ We think these people are here because where they come from, things are bad. They came here because of our money, the Pula, and now they live more comfortable lives than we do, and so that’s why conflicts erupt.” Angel had an apologetic look. “What about Zimbabweans, your immediate neighbours to the north? Are they Makwerekwere too?” I pretended not to notice the guilt in her eyes. “With Zimbabweans, it touches my heart because I thought Zimbabweans are more of our sisters and brothers,” confessed Angel. “But Batswana, the way they treat them is like they are outcasts,” she sighed. “It touches my heart because Zimbabweans, we know why they come here illegally. They come here because of the situation in Zimbabwe.

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You can’t stay in a place where there is no food while you know on the other side you could find food.” I nodded. “The way I look at our border with Zimbabwe and other neighbours, there is something we can do about that because borders are man-made.” I again nodded, repeatedly, like a lizard. “Take a look at the water sources for example. They used to unite us. But now, we say that side of the river is Zimbabwe, this side is Botswana, and so we shouldn’t even share food and the water we drink,” Angel shook her head in shame. “Yet most of them come here not because they want to stay. They come here to do piece jobs and go back home. So why can’t we allow them to do odd jobs that we often think are beneath us as locals?” I could see her face glowing with compassion. “You tell me,” I said, “Why can’t you Batswana?” I wanted her to go on, as I found her words soothing, peaceful and promising of the world without borders I have always dreamt about. ‘Borders are our greatest killer,’ my uncle used to say, going down memory lane and detailing example after example of border conflicts that had eaten up sons and daughters of the soil. Angel threw up her hands in resignation, before adding, “Normally in June, I think it’s twice a year – June and December –, the Immigration Police do what they call ‘Clean-Up-Campaign.’” She could see I was surprised by the expression. Telling me with her eyes that this was not what I thought, she proceeded to explain. “This does not mean they collect litter like plastic bags, papers and tins. Oh no. They move from house-to-house, from workplace to workplace, to check all these Zimbabweans whom they see as litter. They deport them back to their country the way a person disposes of litter blown over the fence by wind.” Angel covered her face with her hands, as if she was even then hearing the sound of human litter drop at the Zimbabwean side of the border. I encouraged her to continue. It wasn’t often to come across a local who was sympathetic and supportive, and when she told me she too was Catholic, I felt proud of my religion. “Last year, the person who was supposed to supervise the teams doing the cleanup campaign was not in and my boss, the deputy director, called me in and said, ‘Madam, the person who is supposed to do this and this is not in.’ I said, ‘What is this and this?’ He replied, ‘You know there is a cleanup campaign, we send all Zimbabweans back to Zimbabwe.’ “I said, ‘What do you clean up?’ I knew what he was talking about but I just said, ‘What do you do? Am I to understand that all the litter we see in the streets is because of Zimbabweans, so we should dispose of it?’ 10

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“He explained, ‘No, we move from house to house collecting all Zimbabweans everywhere – maids, garden boys and the like –, and sending them back where they belong.’ “I said, ‘I don’t think I’ll be able to do that.’ “He said, ‘Why?’ “I said, ‘It’s not because I want them to be here illegally. It’s the way you people are handling this issue. And the people I’m supposed to go and supervise and work with, I’m going to have problems with them before I have conflicts with the law itself.’ “He said, ‘Why?’ “I said, ‘You can’t talk of these people as if they are trash. We know they are here illegally and we know why. Maybe the best thing is just to say let’s go out there and not clean up. Let’s just check people who are here illegally and try to send them back home, and those who we know it’s possible for them to have jobs here, we advice their employers to help them obtain papers to stay legally.’ “And the guy said, ‘Are you Zimbabwean?’ “I said, ‘Why do you ask? If I look at myself and you, you are more of a Zimbabwean than me.’ “He said, ‘Why?’ “I said, ‘Because you are a Kalanga.’ “He said, ‘What are you talking about?’ “I said, ‘I’m not going to lead this operation.’ “He said, ‘You are going to do this job today. When you leave this office, you are going out into the field to supervise those people.’ “I didn’t like the menacing tone of his voice. I told him, ‘I’m not going. I’m going back to my office to do my day-to-day job. I can’t imagine pushing people around and piling them into one congested lorry as if they are water melons.’ “He threatened sanctions, but I didn’t budge. He could sanction me to hell. I didn’t care. I just didn’t care…” After her moving story, I stayed with the good Angel for a year. She taught me Setswana and initiated me to the ways and values of her land. She made me feel proud to be human, and living with her was like a yearlong schooling in the dream that being different was no cause to be treated differently. I saw in her the embodiment of the gospel I had drunk all my life, of how we, regardless of race, place, creed or sex, are all children of the world, called upon to reflect the goodness of the Lord in the ways we live our lives. If we had more people like Angel, I think the world would be a better place for us all. 11

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Chapter Four

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A

ngel and I became friends, real friends. She refused to take me on as a maid, even though I needed the money badly. I had to go out and do piece jobs or work in the shops, or as a maid. “You can stay with me as long as you want, Immaculate. You don’t have to pay rent. Take it as my gesture of friendship. Feel free to go and come. And bring your boyfriend to stay the night, as long as you let me know in advance. I have said I am not going to employ you as a maid, and that is final. I need someone to talk to in the evenings, and you are a good and sympathetic person,” Angel insisted. I was grateful, and for a year we lived together without problems. Gabriel, her boyfriend from work, came and went, but sparingly, almost as if he had a main relationship elsewhere. I never asked to know beyond what my eyes brought me, and Angel never dwelled on the relationship with Gabriel either. As for me, I was too shocked from having been jilted to fall in love with another man, so the issue of a boyfriend never arose. I concentrated my efforts on working hard on anything I could lay my hands on, with the idea of earning enough money, getting my visa and going to the USA, to prove to George Tsenchwaka that he wasn’t the only person who could succeed to go to America. There, I hoped to give it back to him by succeeding tenfold. I was in terrible emotional pain, which I hoped to bury in total commitment to work, even if this meant slavery. Most of what I got was little to write home about, but when have beggars been choosers? People love their maids. But they don’t love paying their maids. The shops are no different. Proprietors suck you dry for little more than nothing, and when you complain, they know what strings to pull to have you running for refuge. It is survival of the most powerful, not the fittest. Angel was such a support, and I didn’t want anything to come between us. But her limited circles and convent-style living, compressed my outgoing nature. Apart from the occasional, mostly weekend visits of Gabriel, her activities were confined to work, church, and shopping. At 5:30pm she was back from work. She left the house and went to church or the shops, and back to the house, we would spend most of the time

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reminiscing on our daily experiences. When her church, like mine, used to be Catholic, we went to mass together. But when she broke away and joined the born-again Ultimate Church of Christ, her churchgoing became a daily event. Together we discovered the giant shopping malls that had sprung up all over the city to crown the country’s success as the economic giant of the neighbourhood. Like the diamonds and cattle that had made the country a leading economy, River Walk and Game City had, overnight, become the diamonds glittering on the crown of consumer opportunities. When the shops and employers failed to smile on me, I fell back on my own creative talents. I knew how to plait hair and had a sense of saving. Friends helped me get customers and this kept me going until a Sierra Leonean who knew me at my first residence, approached me to say she had found a school where I could do part time teaching. I started teaching there. Happy though I was living with Angel, I was missing something. I felt I would be more comfortable living with people from Mimboland, whose population in Gaborone is a sizeable one. There was something irresistible about getting together every now and again to quench the thirst of being far from home. That I couldn’t do as freely as I wished living with Angel. Although Angel tried to talk me out of moving, I was determined. I thought I would feel more at home if I stayed with people from home, because I was also homesick. So I went to the home of Dr Marius Kaba, a Mimbolander and Professor of Medicine at the Diamond University of Science and Technology – DUST –, and told his wife, Mama Comfort, ‘I would like to stay with you at your cottage. I am able to pay rents, light and water. I just want to stay with you to be close to people from home. I’m so stressed up.’ She told me to ask her maid and if the maid accepted then fine. The maid was always on and off, but she accepted. Mama Comfort was pregnant with her second child, when I moved in to stay with them. Belinda, her first daughter, loved me so much and would always run to me, but the mother didn’t seem to like it, and would come and pull her away. Back in Mimboland we run away from caterpillars, but I learnt to eat them here when I saw the maid eating them. Belinda used to like eating them as well. They call them Mophane Worms. Mama Comfort hated them, and would express her disgust often. ‘Those things you eat in that cottage, I don’t want you to give them to my daughter.’ She used that as a pretext for keeping Belinda from me. But the child always cried to come to me, and the mother wouldn’t let her. I got the message I wasn’t wanted. 14

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I stayed there for three months and towards the end of the third month, she asked me to look for my own place. At 25 one is considered grown up. There are times one needs to be with one’s family. Even living in the cottage does not cancel the fact that one is still in the yard. I knew staying with one’s compatriot is different, rewarding even when the relationship is not the best. So when she asked me to look for my own place, I said, ‘I got money to pay for staying with you, if that is what you want.’ They refused that I pay while I was staying with them, but the mood kept changing. I insisted on paying something – water or lights –, but she refused. She asked me to look for my own place around the same time I lost the job at the school where I was teaching. Around the 25th of March or April, I can’t quite remember, they informed me they were letting me go. The first person I called was Professor Marius Kaba, and he asked me why I didn’t tell him earlier. It was my first experience and I didn’t know anything, having come from Mimboland where things are done differently. Despite my stress, Mama Comfort said I should pack out of her house. She gave me a deadline of 4:30pm on the 27th of the month, ‘before it comes to the point where I throw your things out.’ I told them that I’d even asked them to help me look for a house and that I got money to pay. I could afford a house for P500. Cottages at that time were P150 and I could not find one, as it was really difficult to get accommodation. I asked Professor Marius Kaba why he couldn’t talk to Mama Comfort to allow me to get a house before throwing me out. But he said, ‘No, what she has said she has said.’ Later, much later, he would compose a song – bushfalling nobi every mbutuku – that was a thinly disguised mockery of me, for he was also a musician by hobby. The song would make it to the top of the charts on the popular local FM radio. He knew how to imitate the music of famous Mimbo musicians little known in Botswana. I only wished he acknowledged them more. It was exactly 4 o’clock when I left that house. I went to Bakwena Bottle Store, where they sell hot drinks and begged for cardboard boxes. I divided my things up and gave some to the Zimbabwean lady who was their maid and then I packed the rest and phoned Dr John-Strong LongBottom. He was a Mimbolander also at DUST as Professor of Environmental Sciences. I told him I had a problem. He came along with three other Mimboland men and collected me. We went around looking for a house that evening, but we couldn’t get a house. We had gone even to YCWA, but they asked us to pay P300 a night, which was just too expensive. Dr Long-Bottom told me, ‘My wife 15

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is a difficult person. We have a cottage but I can’t say come and sleep there. She will not let you. I’ll take you to Evodia Skatta, my student at the university, so you can stay the night with her.’ So we went to Evodia Skatta, who was Mimbolander, and she accepted to sleep with me. I put my blanket and bedspread and slept and the next day I told her I should continue searching for a house. I went around, during which I met Titi, who unfortunately recently passed away. I told her I was looking for a house and asked if they had a room to share with me. She said no, adding, ‘From your accent I can tell you are not a Motswana or a Zimbabwean.’ I said, ‘Yes, I’m from Mimboland, but I have a problem with accommodation.’ She said they sincerely had none and encouraged me to continue looking, but if I found none, I should come back and she would take me to her mum, where I could stay until when I felt like leaving. Another Angel…? Not long after separating from her, somebody came with a car and stopped. I asked myself, ‘Whose care in Botswana could stop for me?’ Then I looked inside and it was a woman, a lady I knew, one of the customers at G-Textiles, where I worked briefly before I was thrown out for being a foreigner. ‘Ah! Auntie Jane!’ I screamed with joy. ‘It is you! I was wondering who is this person stopping for me.’ ‘Yes, I saw you,’ she said. And that was my first day since I knew her to meet her in town. ‘Where are you going?’ ‘I’m looking for a house. I’m really desperate.’ ‘Come inside my car.’ And I went inside. ‘What!’ she exclaimed when I told her I was evicted by Mama Comfort. She knew Professor Marius Kaba through her husband, who too was teaching at DUST. Not wanting to paint the Kabas dark, I just said, ‘They say I should go out because she will be giving birth and they’ll need a maid to stay in the cottage.’ ‘Why can’t they let you stay there till you get a house? Even if the maid comes, why can’t you people share?’ ‘I don’t know,’ was all I could say. ‘Would you mind going to Tlokweng?’ ‘I don’t even know Tlokweng, but I don’t mind.’ 16

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She drove to Tlokweng. They used to own a really big house there, a house with a cottage behind it. We went there. The cottage was previously used by her brother. Some of his belongings such as books, etc. were still in it. ‘Do you mind this room?’ she asked. ‘I don’t mind. How can I mind?’ I swept the room that afternoon. ‘I will bring my things tomorrow,’ I told her, hardly able to contain my excitement. I went back and slept with Evodia Skatta, although I didn’t sleep much because Dr Long-Bottom was there with her in the parlour noisily playing scrabble and drinking red wine until the early hours of the morning. I couldn’t blame Dr Long-Bottom for sticking around. Evodia Skatta exuded raw sexual energy that crackled and commanded. I didn’t know his family much, having met his wife only once in church at St. Theresa, before she decided to join the Pentecostal Ultimate Church of Christ in protest when Father Mark Landless failed to act on her request to bar her husband from communion for adultery. The next day I took my things to Tlokweng. That’s how I started staying there. I stayed with those people for one year plus, until the landlord said he wanted to sell the house. Then the people said they were looking for a house to move to. ‘Could you look for your own place?’ she told me politely. I thanked them for their generosity. I didn’t pay a Thebe for almost two years of living there with them. If I say I did, I’d be lying. These were Zambians, and that is why I earlier said a good person is a good person no matter where he or she comes from. When I left them, I got a place. This place was not a good place, but I was looking for something I could afford. I wasn’t working. I was doing some sort of retailing that one could hardly call a job – buying and selling little items around the city, going from door to door with bags in my hands like a madwoman. I would move from one neighbourhood or mall to sell in another. At that time, the Chinese, they were not too many like now, and sellable goods were not as plentiful.

17

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Chapter Five

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I

remember September some five or six years ago particularly well. Dr Winter-Bottom Nanny, a middle-aged African-American woman who had traced her descent to the Tikar of Mimboland through DNA, came from the USA to do research on the relationship between maids and their employers in Africa. She was a world expert in the matter, and needed the African reality to complete her understanding. Her options had been South Africa or Botswana, ‘the two islands of prosperity in a continent of deafening misery,’ but she had opted for Botswana when a US-based exiled Tikar scholar at risk introduced her to a cousin of hers, Dr JohnStrong Long-Bottom, professor here at DUST. Dr Winter-Bottom Nanny needed a research assistant urgently, someone good who could help with appointments for interviews, and especially with transcription of tapes. Dr Long-Bottom, who was out of the country on a conference when Dr Nanny arrived, instructed his student and girlfriend, Evodia Skatta – the one who helped me when I was desperately seeking accommodation after Mama Comfort asked me to leave –, to talk to Dr Winter-Bottom Nanny about me. ‘There is one of our home girls here, a Tikar. She is facing difficulties. She knows much about maids and about getting by from the margins. Most of her friends are maids.’ Dr Nanny gave Evodia Skatta her number for me to call. I phoned. A meeting was arranged at the Urban Village Complex in the River Walk neighbourhood, where Dr Winter-Bottom Nanny was renting an apartment. When the interview began, it seemed as if it would never end. Her questions were on everything, ranging from my life as I had lived it in Mimboland and in Botswana, to my thoughts, beliefs and views on all and nothing, including what it meant to be Tikar. At times, I felt like thanking her and walking away, but recalled her introductory statement about how the work was so important and the pay good, that she absolutely wanted the best woman for the job. I had to show proof of the right credentials. The fact of my being from the land of her ancestors, which she had visited in pilgrimage several times (alone and with her family), was just secondary, she insisted. So I did my best to stick in there, and answer her questions as best I could.

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I told her my story as I have told it thus far, but her appetite seemed to grow with the telling. I told her in detail about how my fiancé disappointed me. And when her hunger persisted, I foraged in my past for many more details on many more aspects of my life, and on the highs and lows of the Tikar community of which she was so proud. She was like a lake that wouldn’t fill. And the Tikar region is full of such lakes. I told her of the part time job I did at Sun Power, and of how I registered for a computer course, following my shabby treatment at G-Textiles. The fee was P 2.200. I didn’t know where I was going to get the money. I was trying to teach and go to school at the same time, and trying to sell bric-abrac to raise my school fees. I was disappointed, and jilted, and thinking about my parents. Everybody asked me to come home. But I thought, ‘Do I want to show them I failed?’ That’s what came into my mind. Going home is like going to tell my parents I cannot face the world. Going home is like going to tell my uncle who brought me up, ‘You didn’t do anything for me.’ Tough as the going was, I was determined to stick in there and hope for the best. Like a proud hunter, I refused to go home until there was game to show and share. I was tortured with thought of going home and resistance to the thoughts. These tensions came alive in my dreams. For weeks one dream visited me each night. I was Juliet and Botswana was my Romeo. Desperate to maintain the flame uniting us, I found myself telling Romeo as I was being pulled away, ‘Botswana my love, I’m thinking of you and thinking how sorely I’ll miss you, even as we both know how inseparable we truly are. Missing you gets written on my face without consent, as we get pulled apart. I can’t imagine how the inside of me will feel without you, yet I carry you inside wherever I go. So why should geography matter? If I shed tears, it’s not out of sadness. They come from a place of profound happiness that knows no boundaries, like our love without confines. The tears can be wiped away with that look of yours that brings out the smile of hope. Let these tears manure the love that is ours and that warms all those nearby…’ With this recurrent dream, I was all the more determined to prove wrong calls for us to dream with our feet firmly on the ground. I decided, ‘Ah! Instead of going back home as a failure, I’ll try and go to the university. I had been warned it was tough gaining admission into DUST. But I am not giving up without a fight.’ This resolve pushed me to go for a computer training course at a school in the city centre. Mama Comfort was doing the same course. She had not managed to find a job with her BA in History obtained from the University of Mimbo. We met at the computer school from time to time. 20

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There were moments when I just couldn’t help crying, especially when I remembered the way she and her husband had treated me, in addition to the bitterness I felt towards my fiancé. She would see me crying and say, ‘What?’ as if she couldn’t guess. All I would tell her was, ‘I want to go home.’ Then she would ask, rather callously, ‘Why do you want to go home? Why can’t you persevere? Try again.’ Right advice, wrong person. All the same, I’d say, ‘It’s not easy. I can’t raise my school fees. I try too hard.’ I struggled and paid P1200. The Reverend Sister at St. Veronica, she went and talked to Father Mark Landless at St. Theresa, about my problem, and he helped me with P500. I struggled and eventually paid the remaining P500, just before I lost my part time teaching job when the school, operated by an Indian, was closed abruptly by government for its irregular status. This happened when I was still staying in Tlokweng. I thought hard. I remembered everyone back in Mimboland trying to make ends meet by selling second-hand clothes from Europe. But in Botswana, quite strangely, this was not a popular line of survival. There were virtually no second-hand clothes. There were hardly any second-hand cars either. Batswana were mostly first-hand consumers. The few second-hand cars imported mostly from Japan, were good enough to pass for new. There was only one man who used to come from South Africa, Mondays only. I saw this man at the Central Station selling second-hand clothes. I was inspired and decided to venture to Zambia to buy clothes to sell here. First, I had to accumulate enough money, which meant I couldn’t eat as freely as I liked. I ate sparingly and didn’t bother about buying clothes for myself. All the money I got as profit, I added to my capital. Then I left. There was a girl I used to work with, the secretary at Sun Power. She gave me her sister’s address and everything. She said, ‘Go to my sister. She will help you buy. She will help you cross the borders.’ I thanked her for the help and set out. Unfortunately for me, when I was going, I forgot my residence permit with the people who were housing me in Tlokweng. In Kasane, they were supposed to check my papers as I had to cross the border into Zambia. I arrived around 12 noon and was supposed to cross at 1 o’clock. The passport officers said, ‘We cannot let you cross, because if you cross, we won’t let you come back in.’ They needed my residence permit. There was another Mimbolander where I stayed in Tlokweng. His name was Paul Mufon, but I teasingly called him ‘Greatness Belittled’ because he was a prince back in his home village. Not only had he been forced 21

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abroad by poverty and unemployment, in Botswana he couldn’t find better than raising chickens and keeping a garden, both of which he did near my place in Tlokweng. He also tried his hand at running a church, but it didn’t work for him, because those who mattered in born-gain churches in Botswana were mostly from Kenya, Ghana and Nigeria. Paul Mufon was familiar with my room, and a trusted friend. Desperate and urgently needing to trace my residence permit, I phoned Paul, to go to where I stayed, look through my things, get the paper and fax it to me. As his phone wasn’t going through, I tried phoning several other numbers. In the course of that delay, the Chief Immigration Officer came in, and I can say he took the law into his hands, because he suspected me of lying. He probably grew up lying himself, and thought everybody was a lair. I couldn’t lie. ‘What are you going to do in Zambia?’ he asked. ‘I’m going to buy second-hand clothes.’ ‘You are from which country?’ I said Mimboland. ‘Why did you come here?’ ‘I came here because I wanted to do business with a Motswana – a horticulture business.’ ‘Why are you going to Zambia to buy second-handed clothes?’ ‘I’m just going there for a visit. I thought of buying that to come and try doing business.’ I explained that I like to try my hand at several different businesses, since I can’t say beforehand which one will be a success. ‘You leave all the way from Mimboland to come and do horticulture here? You think there is no Motswana who can do that business? Is there nothing for you to plant in Mimboland? And now that you have decided to come and plant in Botswana, you going to Zambia to buy clothes? That business is for locals.’ He was hostile. ‘But this is my permit. I went to the ministry of commerce and I got my permit. Here is my permit,’ I showed him my permit for the business. ‘Ok, you have to wait. We are going to see what to do with you.’ He stopped me from crossing. And then, it was too late for me to cross. They made a photocopy of my passport, then gave me to one Customs Officer to take me to a lodge to show me where to sleep. I had to pay this guy P10 or P15 to take me to the lodge. On our way, he said, ‘I have to phone Gaborone or Francistown, to see what the officers there will say, so we can know what to do with you.’ He sounded menacing. I phoned Sun Power, the people who brought me here, to tell them the problem facing me. 22

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‘Do you have your passport?’ they asked. ‘Yes,’ I told them. ‘What about your permit?’ ‘The copies are with them,’ I said, because by that time, the copies had arrived by fax. ‘Just take your passport but don’t go to Zambia, come back.’ That was the advice they gave me. I went and slept in the lodge. Noway, who was eventually to become my boyfriend, was doing a job there. When he showed interest, I explained to him what had happened to me. He offered to take me where I could call Paul Mufon and others, to explain to them what had happened to me and what I was going through. We tried to call several times without luck. I got them eventually and related my experience. Later that evening, I called the owner of Sun Power, and explained everything. He said, ‘No, don’t go. Sleep and get back here.’ The next day, they said I should return to the office at 8 o’clock. Noway advised me, ‘Don’t go to the office, because those people there are going to give you hell, so you better avoid them. Just go back the way your boss advised you to go back.’ When they didn’t see me at 8 o’clock, they came looking for me. I had been tipped off and was hiding in the bush by the roadside, because I had been told, ‘If you stay in that lodge, they will come and get you.’ From the bush, I could see Immigration Officers in the car looking for me. I tried to hide myself behind a tree. At one point I felt strongly they saw me, because I could see one pointing at me. But I don’t know why they didn’t stop. Noway finished the job he was doing. That time he was with Engine Exchange. He took me. We came to where he stayed and he prepared a braai, knowing I was hungry. But I was too tired and worried to eat. He said I shouldn’t leave the next day because the Immigration might be waiting for me on the way. So the next day I didn’t leave Kasane. On the third day I left back for Gaborone. However, I was concerned about what else I could do to get by. With Noway’s assistance, I decided to go to Zimbabwe and buy shoes for sale in Botswana. But I didn’t know what shoes to buy. I remember I bought high-heeled shoes. Women complained they were too high. Others said they were too low. I also had problems with sizes. Hei! Batswana, they don’t have big sizes. I ended up just giving away some of the shoes to my friends. Life is a struggle and I think in Botswana I’ve had it. However, there is a silver lining in every dark cloud. In the beginning, things were rough, but with effort, determination and focus, I finally got my diploma in 23

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computers. I have mastered word-processing, excel, PowerPoint and other software, but I risk losing my skills because I lack a computer of my own to practice. I have worked with other people, knowing what they are and how difficult it is to associate with other humans. With Batswana, they treat you well if you are at their level. But if you are trying to progress, that’s where the problems come in. They may not really have problems with people, but the problem comes from material things. When you are progressing more than they are, they really become bitter. Whatever my hardships, I’ve got something to prove to those who have been working here before I came. And I told myself, I’m not going to leave Botswana, not as a loser anyway. The house people have been chasing me out of, I’m going to build it here and the day I have it, I’ll decide whether I should leave Botswana or I should stay. I think I’ve made a step forward because I got my diploma. I went home and came back. I’ve had the opportunity to visit Zimbabwe, Kasane and other places. Even attempting to go to Zambia was also a big experience for me. I learnt how to be hard in facing certain things. I also have my plot of land, which I think is good for me, as I am determined to build a house here to prove myself. I can say I’m really achieving something. This is why I tell myself, ‘Why worry when the Kabas chase you out of their house? One day I shall prove to them I can build a house, which is better than what they do – rent.’ I see myself succeeding. If I own a plot already, what is to stop me from building on it? I can’t tell how the money is going to come. But I’m going to work for it. I can’t wait for somebody to give it. I’m not a beggar. I’m not going to wait for somebody to support me. I’m determined to do it by myself and I’m going to do it. I’m Tikar, and we are known for our burning determination to succeed. Botswana is not a bad place. Politically, it’s peaceful. Since I came here, I have not faced an experience like the one I had when I was doing my A Levels in my own homeland. Friends lost their parents, like El Hadj Tata Kongmukong, who was burnt to death in political riots. I have friends who do not have their arms like Mabila, another Tikar, because the government would rather kill and maim than give silence a voice. These individuals are frustrated today, because our leaders go round and round in circles like headless cocks seeking to avoid the cooking pot. People lost their houses to arson because they dared ask for a little more freedom. But I haven’t had such an experience in Botswana. I think politically it’s ok. There is democracy in Botswana, which is what we are praying for and I wish it could also happen in my sterile country. 24

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Socially, it’s bad here. AIDS is everywhere. This bothers me about Botswana. The rate I see people dying and the way I see people suffering, affects me. I get scared. It scares me. Batswana men, they are not responsible. They are not responsible in the sense that if their women are bad, they have made their women be bad. If a woman tries to persevere in a relationship and she realises she is not happy, there is no love, there is no relationship, how will she stay faithful? We foreigners always say Batswana women like to be single. I believe men have made them single because they don’t want to take responsibility. When a woman tries by herself and she doesn’t make it, she looks for a man to assist her economically. In many instances, she has been left with a child. On the surface, it seems like women are bad people. The majority of men do not want to take responsibility, and when it comes to sex, they want to be in control, even when they know there is a deadly infection about. AIDS is new. Our parents did not have it or anything close. These days, if you play the fool, it takes your life. You thing you are looking love in the eye but death invades you. People are dying, but we who are still alive, take living for granted. A man says, ‘I want to marry you. Why are you refusing to have sex with me flesh to flesh?’ ‘Ok,’ you say. ‘Let’s go for a test.’ He says, ‘It means you don’t love me.’ A woman who wants a little excitement in her love life or who wants to also say, ‘I am Mrs So and So’ might accept, and then after a couple of years, she is terminally ill. I’m not saying this theoretically. I live and work in an environment where I see these things happen to people every day and some who have become friends. I even sacrifice my time to go and help them, because I realise it’s so bad. So I think social life here is not good. It’s not. Economically, I think Botswana is ok. I can see it’s growing, compared with other places. I talk with people every day, so I see these things.

25

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Chapter Six

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D

r Winter-Bottom Nanny listened to my story with keen attention, interjecting only now and again to seek clarification and satisfy her Tikar curiosities. She took notes copiously. Whenever I stopped or hesitated, she would keep me flowing with additional questions, as if afraid my story might dry up, and so her mission. She had come with a boxful of questions and was clearly bent on emptying her box on me. “Rich experiences,” she said when I stopped talking, believing I had given her enough. But Dr Nanny was indefatigable. She took me quite by surprise with her next question. “Do Batswana women make a distinction between Batswana and foreign men?” she asked, staring at me with her goggled eyes, and fidgeting with her thick, long Rastafarian dreadlocks that gave her the look of Kuogh, the dreaded Tikar masked dancer. Yes, it’s all in who offers the best TLC – Tender Loving Care. “Tell me more.” Without quite knowing why Dr Nanny wanted to know this or how related it was to her interests in maids, I shared with her my personal experiences and all I knew on the matter. Since I came to Botswana, I’ve gone out with a foreigner but not a Motswana. But there are many Batswana who have approached me. Their approach is flat. Back home, there are some guys who will talk to you and you don’t accept that guy because of the approach, even when the guy is handsome and rich. Approach is important. Back home, the way some guys talk to women, guys who know, is to try to create the image that they have a longstanding interest in a particular woman but do not know how to contact her. They argue that they face hindrances such as the woman not smiling or not having contact details to talk to the woman. Here in Botswana, I feel like… I always have a sense of foreboding about long term relations with a Motswana. Would the relationship last? I recall once at the Main Mall, a guy I used to meet in the Kombi came by. Our conversation was monosyllabic greetings, ‘Dumela – Dumela’ – ‘Hi – Hi.’ Then he surprised me with, ‘I love you, let’s go and have sex.’

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I was like, ‘Oh! Do you think I am out here at the Mall looking for a man to have sex with me?’ Despite my furious shouting, he was insensitive and defensive and came back with, ‘What is wrong with what I’ve said? Don’t you want somebody to love you?’ I was fuming and explained, ‘I want somebody to respect me and I want to have sex with somebody I respect. You think I’ll go for you because you stand on the street and shout vulgarities, showing how badly you want sex?’ He looked baffled. And I was not letting him go. ‘Maybe a male dog approaches a female dog the way you just approached me. But even dogs have their own language of communication. The way you act, I don’t even see you as a human being. And under such circumstances, how could you expect to spark off desire in me?’ or any other woman, I thought to myself. He left with his tail between his legs, but probably no smarter. In that small argument, I realised this man was incorrigible in his style. And that is the style of many Batswana. That was not the first time. There was this guy where I used to teach, he was also a teacher. He would be talking to me but I noticed our conversation was not flowing. Then I heard, ‘Do you want to marry me? I want to marry you.’ In a fury of a reply, I said, ‘Do you see me like somebody who wants marriage? Do you see me like a lady who cannot survive without a man? Does it make sense when you talk to me like that? When you sit and you look at yourself and you reason, who is the fool – you or me?’ He was stunned. I told him I was not interested in a man with such a crude and unpolished approach. I don’t like ruffians. I’ve been with other ladies. They are not averse to marriage. These ladies like marriage. But to like marriage does not mean to allow yourself to be enslaved by men. When I compare Batswana and foreign guys or with my own home people, I see there is a big problem in Botswana. If I were to have a voice to talk in public, I’d say there is a problem. I think if government cares about the social life of this country, they must go after men. AIDS is spread more by men. Men here, have a problem. I think from the food they eat, their upbringing. Men may have erectile dysfunction. They do not find it easy telling women about these problems. When they are with their female partners they expect satisfaction. When they do not get it they move on to the next woman in futile search for satisfaction. 28

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You may ask how I know these things. I learned them when I worked part time in a clinic as a kind of social work assistant. Erectile dysfunction was common. I dare not conjecture about the causes, but alcohol is a likely contributor. I used to think we drink a lot in Mimboland, until I came here! When they drink, they are hungry for sex, but when they find a woman, their equipment falls asleep flat on its face. And then they blame the woman. I remember one case. He came with his wife to the clinic. Because she was there, he didn’t want to explain his problem. He said, ‘We are going to the mall, we are coming.’ When they went, he left his wife there and came back to me. He was trying to explain his problem. When his wife came back, he stopped explaining to me and it ended like that. When I met him on the road, I told him, ‘I want you back in my clinic.’ After two weeks he came and I said, ‘Why are you hiding yourself from your wife? Being secretive to her, you are being more secretive to yourself. When you have problems and you come out, people may criticise you, they may talk about you, but there are going to be good people out there who will help you. Some of us have died because of keeping things to ourselves. As long as you say it and you don’t hurt anyone, it’s ok. It’s your life, you want help. You are a person because of another person.’ So he explained to me that he does not sustain an erection when with his wife. I said, ‘Come and look at the record I have here.’ I opened my logbook to show him. ‘These are men who are suffering from the same problem like you. And all of them when they come here, they ask me, ‘Is there no man here whom I can talk to?’ I always tell them, ‘I’m a woman; I’m not a kid. If you go to the hospital, you meet a doctor, a male or female, you tell your doctor your problem. Why are you not telling this particular one to me? I’m not a reverend sister; I’m a woman, which means maybe I got a man. So when you come with this problem, tell me. Before you come here, you are aware we are treating this problem. When you come now and are looking for a man, where from is the man going to come and help you?’ He tells me, ‘You know, I always meet women, they’re not satisfying me…’ I don’t let him finish, because I don’t want him blaming women for his lack of erections. So I interject, ‘No, it is not that women are not satisfying you, the problem is with you. You have this problem, and you don’t know that this is a big problem. So come out.’ 29

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I ask the people I meet on a daily basis things most women will not even ask. They may just feel shy and maybe go and rumour, ‘Ah! It was boring, we made love but it was boring. Ah! I just didn’t like this guy. He didn’t even bother to ask how I felt. Or he was as flat as a stale glass of beer…’ Instead of solving the problem, they just runaway to the next person, and it’s the same, and they runaway again. Soon, life becomes running away. And for them, it’s like women here have a problem. Women here don’t have any problem. Of that, I am convinced. The problem is with the men because they don’t want to come out. And they don’t want responsibility. When a boy is with a girl, when the girl is financially viable, if the girl doesn’t have a kid that needs responsibility, fine, the relationship is ok. Things are ok between the man and that woman. Once the man sets eyes on another lady, who maybe has got more money than the one he is with – she can drive him around nicely in her car –, he leaves this one and goes to that one. Sooner or later, the new woman realises he is not supporting her and she chases him away. Then he goes looking again, going round and round like a vulture. The fact of too much alcohol only makes matters worse. That’s how AIDS affects the whole society. I even have students from DUST who come with the same erectile dysfunction problem. You ask yourself, why are these young guys at this young age having this problem? One other cause of this thing is what they eat. When I think about men back home and even of student conversations, there are things we simply won’t say where I come from. It must be the food they eat down here in southern Africa that makes them talk and act sex as freely as they do. In Mimboland we don’t eat packaged food that much, the way they do here. My old mum is not at all educated, but she knows tinned food brings cancer and other toxins to the body. So when I carried that mentality here, I was embarrassed to see even beans, mushrooms and fruits coming from tins. People think they can cook when all they do is use a can opener. I said, ‘No, I know whites eat food from tins. I don’t eat tinned food.’ So I was starving, until I was able to start cooking for myself the good old way we do in Mimboland. The food they eat here is affecting them so much. They don’t get the nutrients that build their muscles. Some are weak and some do not even know how to start the act with a woman. What they eat is affecting society. Why did God create man and food? He knows the body needs food the way a car needs fuel and if you don’t put the right fuel in the car, it’s not going to work. It doesn’t move. It is not because you like beer that 30

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Intimate Strangers

you should give the car beer in place of fuel. If you don’t eat right, you are going to grow weak. They don’t do hard work to tune up the body, just as they don’t eat well to build the body. So they tend to have this problem of being weak physically, mentally and everything. This is the way I see it – what they eat and what they drink, is to blame, not the women. Dr Nanny asked, “You also mentioned something in relation to the Kombi, the urban transport bus. I’ve heard that in the Kombi, Batswana comment a lot on other people – is that true?” Exactly. “Would you share your experiences of the Kombi with me?” I was seriously wondering what sort of interview this was turning out to be. I’d never witnessed someone so focused and single-minded. All the same, I answered her question. When I first came here, I didn’t know the Pula. I didn’t know how to count this money. I entered a Kombi from G-West to Industrial – that time the Kombi was 95 Thebe. To pay, I usually had small coins adding up to more than even P2, but they were different and confusing. In my hometown, there are no Kombi or taxi stops. When I entered a Kombi and reached the place I wanted to stop, I would insist to be dropped there, whether it was a Kombi stop or not. I would say, ‘Put me down here.’ And the whole Kombi would turn and boo at me with their eyes. I could hear them saying in silence, ‘Which bushman woman is this?’ These days they talk, but at that time they just turned and looked and I looked at them, and they turned their faces away in judgement and condemnation. I used to put on lipstick so red when I came here. In those days, you’d hardly find Batswana making up their lips, especially with very attractive colours the way we love them in Central and West Africa. They go for cool colours. So when I used to put on these hot colours, they would look at me with their hot looks, and some would say, ‘She’s Makwerekwere.’ ‘What does Makwerekwere mean?’ I asked a lady sitting next to me in the Kombi one day. ‘It means you are a foreigner. They are looking at this thing on your lips, and asking themselves, where could she be from?’ No wonder, when I wanted to stop from the Kombi and I said, ‘Stop me here,’ they just turned and looked at me in mocking condescension. I came to my friend and said, ‘Rahim, the way the people are looking at me in the Kombi, I’m so angry. How can people here be looking at other people with such disdain?’ He said, ‘Immaculate, the way you speak is not like them. You are a fast speaker. Your appearance tells people you are not from here. So whatever you do, they turn and look at you.’ 31

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When I would go forward to the Kombi driver, he would say in Setswana, ‘Pay the fare.’ Although I didn’t understand a word, I knew he wanted the money. So all the coins I had in my hand, I would just give them to this guy, which would sometimes annoy him, as he would have to spend time counting the money to find the right amount. What really impressed me about Batswana was, this guy didn’t say, ‘Oh, she is a foreigner! She doesn’t know anything.’ Even when annoyed, he would count the money patiently, take his and hand back my balance. I was so impressed. Back at home, there are situations where they will not bother about change. They will just take your money and go. But here, they have done like the bus driver to me in several cases. If I give too much money, they’ll say, ‘No, take your change.’ They will not just keep quiet the way people would most likely do back home. It was in a Kombi at that time that I met this girl from Zimbabwe. We used to work in Sun Power. We used to visit each other. We’d enter a Kombi and she’d be talking to me. The Batswana are familiar with the Zimbabwean accent. But when I spoke, everybody would turn and look at me. She understood them talking Setswana. ‘Ah! This Nigerian, the way she speaks.’ I remember in one instance they said, ‘Ah! Foreigners are coming from all angles to Botswana now!’ Another would say, ‘Where did this lady go to school? She speaks like she studied in…’ I remember there was one guy who said, ‘Ha! You speak like you studied at University of Oxford.’ I didn’t even know at that time what Oxford was. This Zimbabwean girl was telling me, ‘Immaculate, these people think you graduated from University of Oxford.’ I said, ‘What! Why?’ She said, ‘The way you speak. They admire the way you speak. Some say you are from Nigeria and that Nigerian people like business and they go to school too much.’ That’s how she used to interpret these things to me. It was she who made me realise that in a Kombi, people’s accent attract people’s attention. They turn and look at the speaker, especially when she has a different accent. Kombi drivers, they are fond of rushing to pick somebody there, but if you say, ‘Ok drop me here,’ they don’t want to. They will insist there is no stop here, but if they want to pick you, they stop anywhere. I sometimes find myself telling them, ‘Hei you drivers, you are just being full of shit. When you meet me, you pick me, but when it’s time for you to drop me, you don’t, why?’ 32

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Instead of reasoning with me, they say, ‘Ah! These Batswakwa! –that’s another word for Makwerekwere, those who come from far. When I talk like that, all the people in the Kombi will turn and be looking at me. I’ll say, ‘Ah! I’m sick and tired. What is wrong? Why are you people looking at me as if I’m wrong? This guy is dropping me at the wrong place.’ A lady told me once, ‘They are not looking at you that you are wrong. They look at the way you speak.’ I kept on complaining to Rahim, ‘I don’t want to travel by Kombi. Fellow passengers tend to look at me too much.’ He said, ‘Immaculate, the way you speak attracts a lot of attention. If you watch, you’ll see that people here speak in a low tone, being so reserved. You, you speak freely. You greet everybody freely. These people, they are big adults, but they don’t talk to you freely the way you do to them. Some are even more educated, but they are slow in their communication. So don’t feel bad.’ Rahim advised me eventually, ‘When you go to the world, you follow the world, you don’t expect the world to follow you. So try to learn to speak like them so they get what you are saying. It will be difficult for them to understand you otherwise. It’s easy for you to make yourself understood. If you don’t want them to look at you, you must stay quiet or speak like them.’ Life in the Kombi, I think it just depends where you come from, who you meet, what makes them look at you, and how you take it all in. The more I said, the more it seemed to whet Dr Winter-Bottom Nanny’s appetite. “What do you think are the attitudes of Batswana towards different Makwerekwere?” Let me start with myself. When I first set foot here, I was regularly confronted with, ‘Wow! You come from Mimboland. What do you people eat in Mimboland?’ At that time I was looking smooth, nice, ebony dark and strong. They would say, ‘What do you eat? Ha! You look nice. What language do you people speak in Mimboland? Are you going to take me to Mimboland? What made you come here?’ Things like that. Some would say, ‘Which place? Where is Mimboland? I thought Mimboland was in Europe.’ They don’t know the place, but they like the place. They picture Mimboland in Europe. They didn’t know it’s somewhere in Africa. Patiently, I would tell them, ‘Mimboland has one foot in West Africa and another in Central Africa.’ Others, more informed, would say, ‘Oh! I like Mimboland. You people play football, right?’ I’d say, ‘Yes.’ ‘And you love alcohol just like we do, right?’ For those who knew, there was no stopping them from showing off their knowledge. 33

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About Nigerians, they would say, ‘Ha! These Nigerians! Ah! Those people! They are crooks.’ And some would add, ‘Are you people crooks like Nigerians?’ I would say, ‘No. We are just neighbours like you and South Africa. South Africans have high rates of murder and other violent crimes, but Batswana don’t behave like South Africans. So I can’t say I’m like a Nigerian simply because my country is the same region like Nigeria.’ They have a very negative view of Nigerians. People who present passports from Nigeria are not treated well. Really, what I’ve noticed about Batswana is this. If you are from a country they are not so familiar with, they will like you so much – they look at you the way they will look at a white person. So we from Mimboland are better liked not necessarily because we are good, but because of limited knowledge about our country. Take Zimbabweans, they don’t like Zimbabweans. No matter how educated a Zimbabwean is, no matter how good a Zimbabwean might be upstairs, Batswana have a certain derogatory impression about Zimbabweans. When people say they are Zimbabwean, they get mean looks. They think Zimbabweans are below the level of the floor mat. They are not willing to recognise that Zimbabweans are not the same. The only Zimbabwean they like is the popular musician, Oliver Mtukudzi, whom they invite regularly to cross the border and entertain them at parties and concerts with his Tuku music, delightfully stringing together the painful wounds of political disaster in a land of enormous potentials and hopes, which they do not understand in all likelihood. Some individual Batswana who have travelled outside their country treat foreigners well. But the ones who hardly travel outside, they have their own feelings and their own impressions about those of us they term Makwerekwere. “What about Ghanaians who have contributed much in strengthening the institutions of state here since independence?” They talk about Ghanaians too! They always mistake the accent to say that Nigerians and Ghanaians are the same people. So they do not readily differentiate between them. Ghanaians are routinely mistaken for Nigerians. But in Zimbabwe, they can differentiate between Ghanaians and Nigerians. The reason being that their former First Lady was from Ghana and they had very good relations with Ghana because of that lady who was a mother figure. No sooner did I answer one question than Dr Winter-Bottom Nanny came with another. It was raining questions. “Ok, what about the Lekgoa? What is their attitude towards whites?” she asked. 34

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One thing about Batswana, they respect whites. Their women like whites because socially whites treat them well. Most of them prefer whites in almost everything. They will treat a white man nicer than a black person. That is only true at the social level, however. At another level, Botswana has put a white person at the same level as a black person. Before I came here, I used to know that for a white person, you must answer sir. A white person calls you, you must come running. Even in the church, like in the Catholic Church, priests who are white, kids adore them. This is the way kids see their parents treating white priests. But in Botswana, whites may try to be up there, suppressing, but when a Batswana are angry, they routinely insult white people the same way they do black people. But in social life they will prefer a white. This is what I have seen. At Sun Power, I was working for an old white man, Peter, who was 67 years old. I was uncomfortable calling him by name because of his age. But girls who are younger than me called him his name. They flirted with him and what not. I have seen his elder brother Mike, whom I called Uncle Mike, playing with girls who called him by his first name. I am uncomfortable with calling an old person like that by his first name, without feeling I was stripping him of dignity and respect. At Spurs, there was a white supervisor, who got angry because this girl didn’t put on an apron and he kept on shouting at her. And this girl just turned around and told him, ‘Talk to me like a human being. What is so special about you? Even if you fire me from here, you think I’ll die of hunger? Life still continues.’ The guy said, ‘What are you talking about? What I’ve said is final.’ He was speaking in English. I said to myself, ‘Ah look, Batswana are really something, you know. Listen to the way this girl is talking to this white.’ There is a white guy that Noway my boyfriend trained at the workplace. The guy would bring whites and give them better salaries. But there was this girl who refused to accept such discrimination. She would tell this guy, ‘When I come late you reprimand me. I make up for lost time by skipping lunch, but you still shout at me. What can I do to make you happy? When your fellow Portuguese come here, you give them better salaries because you fear them. I have made you rich in Botswana and you dare talk to me the way you do? Do you know that you are what you are today because of me?’ So you can see some of them really know they are also humans like whites. That thing that a white has to be respected by a black person is there, but only to a limited extent. There are times in the bank. You would see a white who wants to be served first. But tellers say, ‘No, wait! First come, first served.’ There was a case at Diamond Bank where this guy came. Other customers were 35

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Francis B. Nyamnjoh

sitting there. ‘Please, I want to see the Managing Director,’ he began. ‘Did you book an appointment to meet him?’ was the response he got. He said, ‘No!’ So he was told, ‘Then you sit there. Those people are waiting for him.’ He said, ‘Please, I am rushing.’ The receptionist said, ‘Those people are also rushing, and there is a queue there waiting for you. Get in line.’ Those instances make me feel they see white people as similar to blacks. The Batswana are trying to deal with age old oppression through day-today practices. “And what do you think are attitudes towards Indians, Chinese and other Asians?” When it comes to Indians, I don’t think it’s only Batswana. They may suffer in their country the way we Africans are suffering, but they don’t treat us like human beings. You may work for a Boer or a black and they pay you P1000, but an Indian will want to give you P200. These are inhuman acts. Even if you are educated, even if you are capable of doing the job, he makes you feel you are nothing. It’s like he is managing you. You could be selling something for P10000. But if you sell it to an Indian, he will give you P500 without shame. Indians don’t treat people well. Whether it’s because they come from a place which is densely populated, I don’t know. They are suffering, so when they come here, that hardness, they try putting it on everybody. Indians don’t show their goodness enough. “And the Chinese?” The Chinese are too smart. They are clever. I lived with a Chinese, briefly, shortly after G-Textiles threw me out. The Chinese live in a country where the economy is really growing and they have good knowledge of business. They know it’s difficult to control people in business and they know there is cheap labour in China. So wherever they are going, they forget to know that they are out of China. In China, you can see something which will be like P1, but it’s a very nice thing, which you will see and say, ‘Ah! Labour in this place is cheap.’ So wherever they are going, they are going with that spirit – ‘I’m looking for cheap labour.’ Haggling is good, but the Chinese overdo it. If a Chinese man is to pave this place and he subcontracts you and you say 1 square metre is P6, he will want to give P2. How much are you going to pay the workers you have employed? What about the daily running of the business? They don’t think about that. Chinese are good people, but when it comes to business, the only thing that matters is the Pula. Their desire is to make themselves rich, and they don’t care if that means everyone around them dying in poverty. That’s what I know about Chinese, an otherwise lovely people. 36

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Chapter Seven

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‘‘I

’m sorry the interview is taking so long,” Dr Nanny apologised. “But I absolutely must be sure that the woman I end up recruiting as research assistant is the right person. I don’t want to regret the appointment soon after the contract has been signed. So bear with me for a little longer,” she explained before asking her next question. “Do you know anything about Zimbabwean maids and their experiences in Botswana?” she asked. I know many Zimbabwean maids. I’ve also compared their lives here and in Zimbabwe. I love them as fellow strugglers. But there is one thing I hate. I’m somebody who likes to call a spade a spade. When it comes to the truth, it may be bitter, but say it, so when you are dying, you know you are dying for truth. I hate those of them who steal. When they take, you say, ‘Did you take?’ They say no, but when it’s in their pocket. Besides stealing, Zimbabweans are good people. When you meet them, the way they treat you, it’s nice. You really feel you have met people. They don’t make you feel you are not welcome. They will not ask you where you come from. What you want. If at all they ask, the way they ask makes it clear they are just trying to know how life is in another part of the world. Their ‘Where do you really come from?’ is not one that seeks to exclude. ‘Oh! I’ve never seen somebody from Mimboland. I’m really happy I’ve met somebody from there. How is the football?’ That’s how a Zimbabwean will relate to me when I tell them where I come from. The way they put their questions, it does not make you feel like you made a mistake to go to their country. Unlike here where a Motswana will embarrass you with questions such as, ‘Why did you leave your country? Is there no food there?’ Zimbabwean maids, I know are hardworking. They are friendly. They are caring. But they love material things and think little of stealing to get them. They don’t know that life demands we struggle in a positive way. They don’t know the importance of a reputation. If they knew, I don’t think they would leave their country, go to another one and try to create the impression that they are thieves. Stealing aside, I think Zimbabwean maids are very good maids. And they are clean people. They may look shabby, but they are clean. For them, being shabby could be a way for people here to identify them easily.

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Being shabby is a way of saying, ‘Look, I’m a worker,’ and showing somebody is looking for a job! If they dress smartly, you’ll say, ‘Ah! This is a Motswana or this is somebody from the office who will refuse to do a dirty job.’ But when you follow them back to their homes, you can put food on the floor and eat. They are very clean people. “Why do you think they steal?” The conditions in Zimbabwe may permit them to steal. But I don’t think stealing is something they’ve merely cultivated today. Hard life in Zimbabwe is a recent thing, but the way they steal doesn’t show that stealing is a recent thing to them. One of the factors that could contribute to their stealing could be the crisis in Zimbabwe. But stealing has always been part of them. They don’t steal like somebody who is learning to steal. They steal like somebody who is born and bred with it. They steal because they grew up in an environment that didn’t really make it known to them that stealing is a bad thing. Where I come from, if you steal and you are caught, you are a dead person. The church has also done good to preach that stealing is a sin, which we have embraced. But with Zimbabweans, even if they go to church, coming out they will still steal. “You say they steal like people who have grown up stealing. How exactly do they steal to give that impression?” The reason is I’ve never met a Zimbabwean maid that I can say, ‘Ah! This one is not stealing.’ She may not steal, but on the last day something will go missing, even if it is a small thing. I don’t think their parents emphasise enough that stealing is bad. It is better you beg than steal. When you beg and you are given, there is no fighting after that. When you steal and you are caught, you are in trouble. If a child steals this thing and comes with it to the house, and you welcome that thing, it means you yourself, you can steal. That’s the way I look at it. And if you can steal as an adult today, and you were there before the crisis, it means you knew stealing before crisis. “Maids and their boyfriends are a contentious issue as far as employers are concerned. A maid is working with you, and suddenly they want to bring the boyfriend to stay in the house. What do you know on this issue?” It’s not only Zimbabweans. Even Batswana are implicated. You could have a Motswana maid who is good, who can work hard, but the issue of boyfriend is going to separate you and the maid. Since I left high school, my mum has never seen my boyfriend. Except for George Tsenchwaka who came for marriage, my mother has never heard or seen me with a boy. Even when I started dating Noway, it wasn’t easy for me to acknowledge him within my circles, let alone accept elders from the Mimboland community to see us together. 38

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Even when my close friend Paul tried to push me, I said, ‘No, Paul, what are they going to say about me? I don’t know if this Noway guy is going to marry me. I don’t want them to see him. What if he is not serious? They’ll say I left Mimboland to come and have men here.’ This is the way I used to look at it. This thing which I grew up with, I’m still carrying with me, forgetting that I’m already a big person, a grown up. Paul thought otherwise. ‘No, they are not going to say anything,’ he said. ‘You are a mature girl and I don’t think they would like to see you marking time on the same spot. They’ll only criticise you if like Evodia Skatta, you are trying to break their marriage by going out with their men.’ I was still uptight, whereas here it’s routine to hear a child of 15 years say, ‘Ah my mum is jealous of me because I’m going out with my boyfriend.’ Where I come from, how would I dare to say that in front of my mum? She would ask me to wash my tongue with soap and clean it with a broomstick. Yet here, you can’t even hit the child or ask, ‘Who are you talking to like that?’ They don’t beat them, because of children’s rights. Girls grow up knowing that they have the right to go out with a man at any age. It’s something common in Botswana. I don’t know much about Zimbabwe, Zambia and South Africa, but here that attitude is rampant. When Zimbabwean maids have boyfriends, one of the reasons is because they think the boyfriend will be helping them, because their lives are not stable. What if the boss chases them? What if the immigration is chasing them? They will rush to the boyfriend. It could be some boyfriends give them more money, which boosts their savings when they go back home. For them, they always feel that staying together is some sort of being economical. They are economising their lives. The boyfriend will say, ‘Come and stay with me. If you are not coming to stay with me, I am coming to stay with you.’ “You say you had a maid of your own?” Yeah there was somebody who used to help me here when I was doing work here and there. “Were you not afraid that that maid would go out with your boyfriend, Noway?” I think because I was hurt, it has made me to be too strong a woman now. Besides, I always trust. I don’t always like to judge people from appearances. Shakespeare says appearance belies reality, but I don’t judge people from appearance. I judge people from what you do and what you say. If I have a partner, I don’t put in my mind that he can cheat. Though 39

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I know they cheat. But I don’t put it in my mind. The last thing I want to do now is hurt myself. Even though marriage is seen as necessary where I come from, at the same time I don’t want to hurt myself. So why should I be afraid of these maids cheating with my boyfriend? If he cheats, automatically I know the love is not there and that is my principle. I love myself first and I will simply tell you, ‘Rra, the going is no more going, let’s we pull apart. If you love me, you wouldn’t be attracted to this girl. If you are doing anything with this girl, it means you are double crossing the two of us, and I’ll not contribute to somebody using me for his selfish ends.’ But I don’t worry myself with, ‘No, he is going to cheat, I can’t let him go there alone.’ I’m not like that. I always say, ‘Feel free to go wherever you want. I know if you love me, you will always take care of yourself. And if you take care of yourself, you are taking care of me.’ So I don’t get scared of maids or anyone. “Zimbabwean maids, apparently they work in networks?” Like? “Like often you find people coming round, saying they want piece jobs. Or you have a maid going and she says, ‘Oh, I’ve got somebody who can help you. So they seem to always be in a string – one replacing the other, and so on. Do they live together? Form unions? Work together? Why are they always coming and going with such regularity?” Actually, they don’t form unions or live together, but I think they are people who cooperate, perhaps to protect what little they’ve got, given the hostility they face. It’s like when they meet in the buses, once I know you are a Zimbabwean, wouldn’t I start talking to you? Wouldn’t I start sharing real information and contact details with you? They share with newcomers what is happening to them here and what they should do. In Pink City where you see a group of them standing every time you drive past, that’s where they go to seek and give information. It is like an information market where people gather news from home and share titbits. It is also the place they go for gossip. “Oh! There is a place called Pink City? Where is that?” Just opposite The Blue Diamond. “Can you describe it to me? I might know without knowing.” From the Central Station, going down to the Main Mall, opposite National Opportunity Bank, that’s Pink City. The Kombis stop at that place when you are coming from the Main Mall. There is a road going inside. Not up to 500 metres, they are there, so too is the currency exchange rate in the black market. What is the exchange rate today? How is the exchange rate in Bulawayo? The one in Central Station? Who is coming and going from Zimbabwe? 40

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When you go there you know the latest information around. Let’s say if the checking is so serious that the police, army, and immigration are out, they will discuss what is happening, and how best to neutralise the efforts. If you’ve just arrived from Zimbabwe and need a job, that’s where you go for tips. If you are temporarily out of a job and you want something to do while looking for something more permanent or well paying, you call on Pink City. That is where they discuss these things. They talk about things happening and how to keep going. They are so cooperative. They don’t hide from one another, they hide one another. At the end of the lengthy interview which lasted for two long days, Dr Winter-Bottom Nanny was impressed. I was hired. My contract was for the first two months she was around, to serve as research assistant, helping arrange and assist at interviews. It was then extended for three more months to enable me to transcribe her interviews. It was agreed in the contract that I would send her the transcribed interviews as electronic documents. This meant providing in the contract not only for additional money for emailing, but more excitingly, for access to a desktop computer which Dr Nanny had brought along. I was thrilled to practice my computer skills. She paid well, but the job was difficult. I didn’t mind the role of assisting with interviews, from which I learnt a great deal, but the word for word transcription on which she insisted was more than painful. I can’t remember how many times I thought, ‘If this is what doing research entails, being a maid may well be paradise!’ But with what by every standard was generous pay, I stuck in there.

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*** Every now and again, to the sound of music filtered through the speakers of the Compaq desktop of which I am so proud, I open an electronic file and read on screen a transcription from amongst the 100 or so I made for her. At these moments I think about my five months’ exposure to the tedious world of what Dr Winter-Bottom Nanny kept referring to as ‘Ethnographic Research.’ Some interviews are real favourites, either because they are interesting, or because the transcription took weeks, gave me blisters, and convinced Dr Nanny I was worth keeping. Every now and again, I remember an interview and find my hand on my mouse clicking to bring it back.

41

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Chapter Eight

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T

he very first interview I transcribed is one of my favourites. It was between Dr Nanny and her maid, a Zimbabwean named Amalion. I realised that Amalion must have competed for the job I finally got, as somewhere in the interview Dr Nanny is asking her to do interviews with fellow Zimbabwean maids. The interview took place in a relaxed atmosphere, as if the two were sitting in Dr Nanny’s rented apartment at the Urban Village Complex, having tea or something. “I came to Botswana in January 1997 to look for work,” Amalion began. “Why here?” asked Dr Nanny. “I came here because back in Zimbabwe there was nothing. There was drought and no food. There was no work. And the government was a mother hen who had abandoned her chicks. I decided to come and look for a job this side.” “Did you have a friend here? Or did you just come? Tell me the story.” Amalion coughed with a laugh. “I just came. My first job was at Phakalane, driving from Mochudi to Phakalane. I worked there three years with whites, and then they moved. They went back to Jo’burg, and then I came to work in Broadhurst, where I was doing my part time jobs.” “For how long did you stay in Broadhurst?” “I was based there.” “In Broadhurst where were you staying?” “I was staying in Mopane II.” “The whites that you worked for, what were they doing?” “The man worked at Exquisite Vehicles. The wife at New Dimensions Furniture.” “How do you compare working for a white person and working for a non-white person?” “It depends on individuals,” Amalion coughed again, laughing. “Some blacks are ok, and some whites are not good. But it’s the person’s heart that matters. There’s no difference between a black and a white heart, either can be good or bad.” “Let’s talk about the whites. How did they treat you?”

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“The whites, I lived in the Servants’ Quarters and the wage was good. I was open with them. They understood how we Zimbabweans are suffering. So they were good to me.” “And have you been able to go back to Zimbabwe?” “Yes, I go on major holidays such as Christmas, and Easter, usually in April. Sometimes if I didn’t go in April, I go in September – maybe twice or three times a year.” “You’ve got family in Zimbabwe?” “Yes, two kids.” “And a husband?” “My husband works here at Phakalane, near Phakalane Medium, as a gardener.” “Do you stay together?” “Yes, in Mopane, in my husband’s own house.” “He’s built his own house. That’s a serious person.” “Yes, but those who gave him the job don’t take him seriously. They treat him like a kid.” “In what way?” “Indians, they are good at making you feel like a kid. Sometimes if you ask to go home, they can say you can go at Easter, but there is no pay when you come back. They say there is no pay for no work. So you are not supposed to go home, if you want pay,” she coughed another laugh. “They are saying that.” “Do they give you too much work, Indians?” “Yeah. Sometimes they say work inside and out. You have to be a gardener outside and a maid inside. There is no lunch break. One can say that they overwork us. They do not allow us to rest. Living in the Servants’ Quarters means they can call you anytime to come and work. Evening, come and make me coffee. You have to come inside and do whatever they say. That’s how bad they are. That’s why most of the maids, they don’t want to stay inside. They want to stay out and be able to knock off at 5 o’clock. If you stay there, at 10, at any time, they come asking you to come do this and that.” “Most of the maids who work for Indians, they don’t like to stay?” “They don’t like to stay inside.” “And at the end they don’t pay well?” “No, you agree and afterwards they disagree.” “Normally, what would you agree on? Staying in?” “Indian, it’s better if you stay out. If you stay with them, you have to buy your own food and eat there in the Servants’ Quarters alone. They don’t want you sharing with them. You are just coming for work. For lunch, 1 o’clock, you are dismissed and go to your room and rest for 1 to 44

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2 o’clock. And then you come back to work. Five o’clock you knock off, but if there’s something to do, they come calling, Monday to Saturday. Sunday you have to go to church, but don’t be too sure. There just might be something more urgent for you to do for them.” “That’s what they do?” “Yes.” “And they pay how much?” “It depends on the house – the bigger the house the more the work.” “But approximately?” “It’s P400, because most of the houses are big. And the washing, you have to wash every day. Those white clothes, they…” “Usually they have a lot of washing?” “Yes, the washing is too much and the ironing.” “And they have mostly white clothes?” “They have lots of white, and lots of other colours too. Just too many clothes.” “Why is that so?” “I don’t know, maybe it’s their culture,” she laughed. “It’s their culture to have lots of clothes.” “Have you ever worked for a Motswana?” “I once worked for a Motswana but I didn’t last that side.” “How long was that?” “I went there in September last year, October, November, and then December when I went for Christmas, I said no, I can’t work for her anymore, because when I cleaned, she would always complain. She found out things from her children, including one as young as six. ‘Did you eat?’ she would ask the girl. She did not trust me. “I never said a thing because if the kid tells her one thing and if I say something that seems different, she would take me for a liar. She spent the whole day at work. She worked at National Opportunity Bank. Every day when she came home she complained. Then on Saturday when I’m supposed to dismiss, she’ll say thorough cleaning,” she coughed, and I could imagine her shaking her head as she reminisced about this Motswana. “I said no, come and tell me during the week you have this, this, this to do during the week. Saturday is just touch-ups and then I go. But she complained every day. Saturday she used to do thorough cleaning when she was not at work. I said, ‘I can’t do the whole house on Saturday only. No, I can’t. Your money is little, and the work is too much. It’s better for me to leave.’ So I left.” “What do your friends who are also maids say about Batswana and how they treat maids?” 45

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“I think foreigners are better than Batswana.” “Really?” “Yes.” “How?” “For us Zimbabweans working for Batswana, when they engage us for work, at the end of the month, some of them call the Police. They say they want us out of their property. ‘This Mokwerekwere, she’s making trouble in my house, I want her to go.’ The Police don’t ask anything. They just say ‘Papers!’ Whether or not you have papers, then they want a work permit or domestic work permit, and if you don’t have one, they just take you and you leave your money, and you go. They don’t ask you any question.” “And they do that often?” “No.” “Sometimes?” “Sometimes, it depends which Police it is. Sometimes they are good. You might say, ‘I’ve worked for this person for so many months and she was not treating me well. Now she is not giving me the money.’ They might say, ‘You pay her because you are firing her without notice.’ When this happens, one might get paid. “But sometimes the Police come and they don’t do their work well. They just take you.” “So you think that Batswana employers, they think that Zimbabweans are worthless and illegal, so they can treat them as they like?” “They know that here there is nothing you can do. Even if you go to the Police, the first thing they’ll ask you is to produce your ID. They are asking for Tswana ID. You don’t have.” “Could the fact that Zimbabweans know the risk of being reported to the Police when they insist on being paid and paid well be the reason why some of them steal from their employers?” “Yeah, it’s like that. Some of the people we work for don’t care how we live or feel. At the end of the month they postpone payment for reasons best known to themselves. Often there is no explanation why payment is postponed. She just keeps quiet. Then you start telling yourself, maybe she doesn’t need me. Someone can prefer to just take something that costs the amount of her pay and leave and go, because you wouldn’t know if you are getting paid. That would be the end of the job.” “Is that common?” “As madams misbehave, so do maids avenge the abuse.” “Another thing I hear they do is some will take little things now and again, here and there, children’s clothes, this and that…What other reasons do you think people would have for stealing?” 46

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“Maybe they are from a poor family. If they see something, they want that thing they can’t afford. You need a shirt… this one is nice but you can’t afford to buy it. You say, let me take this one, the owner will not notice, but that is stealing.” “You mean some of them who steal are good people who are simply hard up?” “Yeah, but it’s becoming a habit because if you steal here, you will go somewhere to steal again. If you are used to taking small things, there is no stopping. There is always a reason or the impulse to keep going.” “I also hear that Zimbabwean maids are much more hardworking than Batswana maids, is that true?” “Yeah, we don’t want to go here today, there tomorrow, and so on. I don’t want the job for two or three months, then say I can’t do the job. But Batswana maids, that’s how they work, quite unlike us. They go for one month here, two months there, get the money, and leave. And they only come looking again when they are stranded. That’s what they do. If they get drunk over the weekend, on Monday they don’t go to work. They treat their hangovers as an illness and tell their employers they have a headache. I was having problems, I was…” “So they come up with all those excuses?” “Yes.” “And do you like working for Batswana employers?” “Batswana, only if I’m stranded. Even then, I work till month end, get my pay and I go and find somewhere else. If I have money, I don’t go to work for Batswana, until that money is finished and there is nowhere else to go.” “Why do you think things are so different between Zimbabwean and Batswana maids?” Amalion laughed, and then tried to cover it up with her cough. “Batswana, they are in their own comfortable country. They do what they want. They say their President says they have to do what they want in their country – and if she says she doesn’t want the job, don’t force her. Just leave her to rest and then she is going to come at her own time, don’t chase her. If you chase a Motswana, of course they will report you and then the Police will come and visit you and say don’t take this one out of where she used to work.” “You think that Zimbabweans don’t feel the same?” “How can they when they are not in their own country? When they can easily be frightened into silence with threats of working illegally in Botswana? We are invisible even when we are hired to serve in broad daylight.” 47

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“Do you carry your passport on you to show the Police if asked?” “It is at home.” “In Zimbabwe?” “Yes. I sent it back because it didn’t make sense keeping it with me, as I was given only three days at the border post. This meant that on my fourth day here, I was already illegal. What’s the point keeping a passport that can give me away to the Police immediately they take a look at it?” “So the best thing is to send the passport back home?” “Yeah. I’m safer without it.” “In what way is it safer to stay here without a passport?” “It’s better because if they catch you with that passport overstayed you have to pay for those days. Each day is P10. If you stay for two years, it’s P10 times two years. You go and pay the fine, and then they can stamp for you to go out. They just give you one day to go out, but you have to pay for those alleged days you overstayed your welcome.” “What happens if they catch you and you have no passport?” “They deport you free. Free transport, you go home.” “So it’s better not to have a passport?” “It’s better because sometimes with the passport you go to Mahalapye Prison for one month or two. You work there as a slave in Mahalapye prison, but if you don’t have, there is a big Gumbakumba truck. You go straight home to Plumtree. They deport you. If I don’t have, and I see them, they say Outswakai? I say I don’t have a passport. I go inside, only two days here at Broadhurst Police Station. I get deported. For free.” “So towards Christmas, many people seek to be deported so they can go and enjoy Christmas and then come back?” “Sometimes it is possible to go home without much fanfare. On other occasions they put roadblocks after Francistown. Kombis, buses, they search passports, Omang… so if Zimbabweans hear that there is a roadblock after Francistown, they don’t travel.” “The other option is to jump the border?” “Yes, it’s the only way as you go in that direction. Otherwise, when there is a roadblock and your papers are not in order, insisting on travel means spending your Christmas in prison somewhere in Francistown. Sometimes it is best to go after Christmas, because travel between 22 to 25 December is risky. Once imprisoned, they release people after Christmas. “And when there’s a roadblock, what do they do? They take your things?” “No, they don’t take anything from the travellers. They just imprison those with irregular travel documents. Their possessions, including money are listed somewhere and returned on release. They store bags securely 48

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and well labelled with your names. On release, individuals are allowed to crosscheck that their belongings are intact. When things go missing, they prefer that the items are looked for and found for fear that such losses when published give them a bad reputation. If injured or sick, they provide treatment, so that deportees are fit to travel. If unwell, most would-be deportees stay at a Francistown clinic, until they are well enough to be discharged.” “Those border checkpoints happen only from time to time?” “Checkpoints are not only for illegal people like us. They are also for dangerous robbers who steal cars and attempt running away with them to Zimbabwe and other countries. They also put roadblocks to stop the spread of veterinary diseases like foot-and-mouth.” “Do you think there are some Zimbabweans who have got Omang?” “Yes, plenty.” “How did they get them?” “Some came long back as refugees during Zimbabwe’s civil unrest in the 1980s, and before that, during the war of liberation. Others jumped the border as economic refugees in more recent years. Some they have relations who are here who are married to Batswana. For instance, siblings can help each other if one of them has papers by claiming that the younger one is a child born in Zimbabwe, so I want the papers to be done. Then they get their Omang.” “I’ve heard that when they catch you around Francistown they say show your Omang, and they look at your left arm to see where you were vaccinated. If it’s down here on your lower arm, it’s a Motswana. If it’s up there on your upper arm, it’s a Zimbabwean.” “Yes …they know. Right up for Zimbabweans. Left up is for South Africans, and for Batswana it’s left down.” “Most of you from Zimbabwe are educated, what are your qualifications?” “Like typing, computers, accounting.” “You’ve done all of that?” “Yes.” “So you were working because things got bad?” “No, I just left college, and started a job search. There was no work. I went through people. You don’t go straight with your certificate. You go through people. If no one knows you in the office, you don’t go in. So I thought it better for me to come and try this side. It was hard also because you need a work permit before recruitment and many years of experience. It was too much.” “Does your husband also have some vocational qualifications?” “Yes, he is qualified in panel beating.” 49

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“But he’s not working as a panel beater?” “No. He had to accept whatever work was available. Currently he is doing part time panel beating weekends and full time gardener the rest of the week. Panel beating is a very good qualification here in Botswana – lots of accidents. The panel beater is the most important person in town because of too many accidents.” “And how did you people meet?” “We met here.” “Here in Botswana in ‘97?” “Ninety Four. I came here to visit ‘94. It was then I saw him. I went back home, and we stayed in touch while I was home. When I finished my course, I came here looking for a job, we stayed together. Things moved fast and I had two kids with him, one in ‘99 and the other in ‘2004.” “Did you have kids right here or you had them in Zimbabwe?” “Here. I had both of them here.” “Really? So they have Omang?” “No, I only managed to get the birth certificates from the clinic, and I went to take all the IDs at home.” “You both come from the same village?” “No, I come from Bulawayo, he comes from Plumtree.” “So who’s taking care of the children now?” “The kids are with my mother in Bulawayo.” “Another thing, do you think that there are some Zimbabweans who come here, especially the men, just to cause trouble? They don’t work, they don’t do anything, just foment trouble… Do you think so?” “Yeah. Plenty of men. Us women, even if we go on the street, we are not always stopped by the Police unlike men. The Police don’t let them pass.” “The Police stop them?” “Yeah. They don’t pass. They know from the 28th that some people are getting paid. They go straight to Central Station for shoplifting, pickpocketing or stealing much sought after items like cell phones. If you are slightly careless, they just snatch things from you and run away. They also snatch ladies’ handbags. Around Christmas, it is not advisable to carry a handbag at Central Station.” “Really?” “Yeah, they just take it. They go straight for it.” “They are in gangs?” “Others go to the border and ambush border jumpers with toy guns. During Christmas they just wait there because you are going through the bush. If they see you are now far from the houses, they just pop out from 50

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their hideouts. They take everything. If you don’t have anything, you remove your shoes or something. They take something nice which they like, then they leave you to go. But some men who attempted to fight back ended up dead just for money.” “I hear there are places here where people stay when they first come, like Pink City?” “Yes.” “What sorts of people go to Pink City?” “Some of the people come from home. They come to Central Station in buses but have nowhere to go, no relatives, no friends. There are some people who pay P10 a day, just to sleep there. They go and sell their legumes and beans and stuff, then return to sleep. The period of stay is usually 10 days. They start on the 22nd and go maybe until the 30th, then they collect their money and go.” “I hear there is another hostel in Phase 1?” “Yeah, and many in Broadhurst and Old Naledi. There are plenty.” “Could we come back to Batswana and how they see Zimbabweans? How do Batswana see Zimbabweans generally? You used the word Makwerekwere a while back.” “They see Zimbabweans as different from them. What I’m wearing, if you just wear this on the street, they’ll say that is a Zimbabwean or even if you are a Motswana, they’ll say that one she is Zimbabwean,” she laughed and continued. “Yes, they say those are Zimbabwean shoes, us we don’t wear that. We don’t wear those shoes. And then some they say Zimbabweans they are dark in complexion, yeah. They say the darkest one is the Zimbabwean, while Batswana they are lighter in complexion. Some are fat, Zimbabweans they are black and seen to be thin even when fat because they are from that hungry place.” “You think that this outlook affects how they treat Zimbabweans when they employ them like maids or gardeners?” “Yes, very much because some, the gardeners who work outdoors, they work the whole day without food. They say we are paying that man to work outside, so he should just work outside and not step in my house,” she said with a voice growing haughty. “You will work outside. If she feels pity she will just give him one cup of tea, if she feels like. One o’clock we can go and buy Magwinya outside, and then you come and work at 2 o’clock. But as maids inside, it’s better. While doing the dishes, it is possible to pack leftovers to eat later. But that one who is outside, you’ll be working there without food, just to be given your pay at the end of the month.” “Do you have lots of friends who are also maids?” 51

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“Yes, I’ve got lots of relatives and friends.” “They are in Botswana?” “Yes.” “Could you interview them for me when you are free? Or better still, could you take me to interview them?” “Yeah. No matata.” “Maybe you start, and I could come in later. You write down their experiences of life here in Botswana – what they have gone through, where they work, what they think of their work, etc.” Dr Nanny explained to Amalion how to help with interviews. “I also see you put on a Zionist Christian Church badge. What is the importance of that?” “It’s like we have to be known. We don’t have to hide ourselves. Even when on the street, we have to recognise each other regardless of country of origin. The badge helps us to be known. When we recognise the badge, we greet each other. Zimbabwe, Botswana or South Africa. All the ZCC are the same.” “The ZCC is like your Omang?” “Yes,” she laughed. “Some church members wear it, others don’t, there are two sections. Those who wear the badge say they are really, really interested to be in the church. Those who just wait to be healed and leave, they don’t get the badge.” “I notice, each time I’m passing by the bypass in G-West, around the television station, lots of people at the ZCC prayer ground doing a lot of exercise. They sing, dance and jump. It’s very good exercise. It can cure anything, can’t it?” Amalion struggled to laugh with her cough. “Yeah, they call it Makuku, the ZCC dance. When they dance like that, it’s how the angels dance when they come to embrace them with…” “The Holy Spirit?” “The Holy Spirit. We sing and jump. Us women, we have our own style, and the men theirs. When you sing and jump and make noise like that, the angels come, the prophet heals, people are helped.” “Do you think if Police see you with that ZCC badge, they are likely not to bother you?” “It’s like that badge. If you are wearing it, it’s for safety. When I’m going on the way, it is praise, like God is with me. If I leave it, some Policemen will catch me. I have to wear it on every dress. When I change my dress, I’m not supposed to put it in my pocket, but to put it on my new dress. It is always with me.” “How much does it cost?” 52

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“We buy it there at Mura in South Africa, for R5.99. It’s the only place where we buy it.” “Nobody can sell it here?” “No, they come with them from Pietermaritzburg. That’s where the big person in charge of the church is.” “Ok. Thank you very much for the interview… Now, could you serve me my Amarula drink?” “Yes, Madam.” Dr Nanny must have forgotten to turn the tape off, when she answered a phone call from the USA, as I could hear her complaining into the phone: ‘The excitement of a few days of having a maid has given way to irritation and annoyance at a stranger trying to take over my life in the guise of wanting to do my cooking and laundry – from washing and ironing to arranging my clothes for me – and clean my bedroom as if I am sick.’

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Chapter Nine

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D

r Winter-Bottom Nanny also interviewed Praises – ‘Soldier of Zion’ –, another Zimbabwean, introduced to her by the maid of a friend, as indicated on the tape I transcribed. Praises’ voice sounded deep, determined, and torrentially combative, almost as if she spoke in defiance of something or someone – perhaps a security agent – monitoring her every word. I liked the name Praises, which evoked appreciation and pride. “For how long have you have been in Botswana?” Dr Nanny began. “I am one year!!!!” Praises thundered. It occurred to me that she might be half deaf. “How did you know about Botswana before coming?” Dr Nanny raised her voice slightly, as if to match Praises. “Friends!! I had a friend – a Motswana, and she used to tell me that I could come to Botswana, it’s a better place than Zimbabwe.” “She was based in Zimbabwe?” “She visited Zimbabwe and I met her there.” “And where have you worked since you came here?” “I worked with another lady at Pink City, a Motswana who employed me to work for her as a house care.” “For how long?” “Two months, October and November.” “Why did you leave her?” “She didn’t pay me.” “How much was she supposed to pay you?” “P300 a month… one month and a half, it’s P450.” “And why did she not pay?” “Ah! I don’t know why. In the morning she just said, ‘You can get into the room and take out your bag and go.’ ‘How can you say I must go,’ I asked, surprised. ‘I am telling you that you must go,’ she repeated.” “Why?” “Ah! I don’t know. There was no reason. ‘Bring my money,’ I insisted. She asked, ‘Are you a Motswana? You are working here, where are your residence and work permits to live and work in Botswana? Go wherever

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you are going, or you are going to the Police to tell them what you are doing in my country without papers.’ Then I just took my bag and left. I went to the Police to complain. The Police told me they would follow her.” “And did they follow her?” “No, they didn’t. They were supposed to follow her on the 12th of the month, but they didn’t. Then they put another date and said I must come to them on the 11th of February. They said they would follow her, me I must come to the Police. They are the ones who will go to her. They will catch her and bring her to the court, they assured me.” “You went to the Police? You were not afraid to go to the Police?” “No, I was not even afraid. I just went because my heart was painful. It just took me to the Police.” “Did you have your papers?” “I had my passport.” “How long did they give you to stay here?” “The period they gave me first was short. I extended the days. I am allowed to be in the country until tomorrow. Maybe I will go and extend again.” “Is it easy to extend?” “It’s very difficult to extend visits, very difficult.” “And the Police looked at your passport when you went to report and didn’t ask you why you were working in Botswana?” “No they didn’t ask me. They said that she is the one who was wrong. She employed me. She knew that I didn’t have a residence permit, so why did she employ me? She should pay me, the Police said.” “Where does that Motswana work?” “The woman is not working, no employment. But her husband is working at Jwaneng Mine.” “How old is she?” “Born in 1967.” “Is that the only place you have worked in Botswana?” “Yeah, that is the only place.” “Apart from that, what other experiences have you had with Batswana? How do they treat you?” “Others are good, but others they are not good. They are not the same.” “What do you mean? Who are those ones who are good and who are those ones who are not?” “When you are doing piece jobs, you find people treating you well.” “Do you do many piece jobs?” “I do two.” “A day?” “Yes.” 56

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“And how much do they pay?” “It varies with the job. Payment ranges between P30 and P50.” “Is it better to do piece jobs than work for somebody for a month?” Praises laughed!! “We do piece jobs because we can’t find work, and because these people don’t pay when we work for them. That is what makes me to do piece jobs, because that lady treated me in a bad way. She made me think that all Batswana are just like that, but I know they are not all the same. I still want that woman to pay me first before I look for another permanent job. I will look for a permanent job because piece jobs won’t help.” “Why not? With piece jobs you can get lots of money for one day, can’t you? P30 for one day times 10 days is P300, which means P900 per month.” “With piece jobs, the work is not available every day. So you can’t get that. We spend a lot of time loitering in the hope of getting something to do. What you see you do, what you don’t see you can’t do.” “What sorts of things do you do when you get a piece job?” “We do anything, washing, weeding. Some people want us to sweep and scrub floors, weed their yards and plant. We do anything.” “When you have only piece jobs, if you are not having any regular jobs for payment, does your boyfriend here help you with money?” “My boyfriend?!!! Me I don’t have a boyfriend.” “Why not?” “I do not have time to meet with men. The only time and place for meeting men is at the bar. If you stay at home, there is nobody who will come to you. So I don’t have a boyfriend.” “So why don’t you go to the bar?” “I go to church.” “Your bar is in church?” “No, I don’t want to go to the bar, because I do not drink beer.” “Can a woman get by without a boyfriend?” “No, it is impossible, but if you don’t get them, then it is possible.” “Do boyfriends help, well like give you money when you don’t have money?” “I don’t know about here, because here I don’t have boyfriend.” “In Zimbabwe you have?” “Yes I had. We broke up… I didn’t like him. He treated me badly.” “He and Mugabe, who is worse?” “He is the same as Mugabe,” she laughed heartily. “No difference, so I had to leave. I left him alone. I left them and their madness.” “Do you like it here? Do you like to live in this country?” 57

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“I like Gaborone but…” “Why do you say but?” “Accommodation is too difficult to find.” “Where do you stay?” “Tlokweng.” “With a friend?” “No, with a grandmother.” “And the grandmother has a place free for you?” “Yes.” “You knew her before?” “No! I just found her there in Tlokweng and she called me and said I could have accommodation.” “She stays alone?” “Yes. She doesn’t have any children. She doesn’t have a husband either.” “And you help her at home?” “When I’m around I help her.” “How do you help her?” “I sweep the house and I wash the clothes. She cooks for herself.” “She just lets you stay like that without paying?” “Yes, without paying.” “How did you find her?” “I was just loitering about looking for jobs. I was holding my bag and then she called to me, ‘Come in.’ Then she said, ‘Have you got accommodation?’ I said, ‘No.’ She said, ‘You can stay here.’” “She has a big place?” “Yes, a big house. She was working in South Africa when she was young and now she is a grown up lady full of age, very old.” “So do you think she can give you that house eventually?” “No, she can’t.” “Why not?” “She has got relatives that can take over that house. Me I am just a visitor. I just stay and then I go. I don’t plan to stay with her for a long time. Just for as long as Mugabe’s madness lasts, then I go home.” “But she gave you the place. She asked you to come and stay with her. Maybe she can give you more.” “She can’t. She was just helping me to sleep and feel at home.” “Back to the question, what do Batswana say about Zimbabweans when they see them in public? I know they say Makwerekwere and other things. What do they say to you when they see you?” “Batswakwa!!! They say we are Batswakwa, we are…” “Suffering a lot?” 58

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“Yes.” “How?” “That we go loitering around looking for piece jobs. We are suffering, loitering about.” “I see you are grinning. Isn’t it something to cry about?” “What can you do?” “What does your grandmother in Tlokweng say about Zimbabweans?” “She doesn’t talk anything. She’s not saying anything bad about Zimbabweans.” “When you are amongst yourselves, Zimbabweans, no Motswana around, and you are talking and laughing. What do you say about Batswana?” “We don’t talk about Batswana.” “No, you do. Everybody does. I do. We all talk. So how can you claim you don’t talk? You talk and you laugh and you say oh these Batswana… just as they talk and laugh and say these Batswakwa… So what do you say about Batswana?” “We can just say they are not treating us well.” “What do you mean?” “As I said, I worked for one and a half months with no pay. So they are not treating us well.” “Are Zimbabweans more hardworking than Batswana?” “Of course.” “How do you know?” “Because Batswana, they are very lazy. Their houses are dirty. They like to sit too much. They don’t want to do much.” “Why do you think they don’t want to work?” “Too much money. They’ve got too much money. You find a married woman, she’s at home, she’s not working, but she can employ somebody to work for her. Why is she doing like that? It shows she is lazy.” “I see. Normally if you are not working, you should not employ somebody to work for you. Is that the idea?” “When you are a woman.” “It is said that you Zimbabweans, when you come to their houses you take over their men. You take their boyfriends and you take their husbands. Is that true?” “I don’t think so. Akiri Motswana knows that she is lazy, her house is dirty, everything is dirty. When she sees that a Zimbabwean is a hard worker cleaning everything, she thinks that the Zimbabwean is going to take her husband. The man notices the difference between the Zimbabwean’s cleaning and that of his wife. So you might think that girl 59

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is going to take over the husband. But the girls are not taking their husbands. None would come all the way from Zimbabwe to take somebody’s husband.” “Why not?” “I’ve heard of a man finding a hardworking maid attractive, but actually giving up his wife for her? That’s rare. Plus why would we want to come here and put ourselves in the middle of others’ marital problems, don’t we have problems enough?” “Were you staying with that woman in Pink City?” “Yeah.” “It is said that when people live with those who employ them, they bring their boyfriends to live with them. Is that true?” “They are lying. You can’t take a boyfriend to somebody’s place. I don’t think that is true…” The tape ended abruptly, and I couldn’t explain why. So I wrote to Dr Nanny. She replied to say Praises abandoned the interview because she was rushing for a job interview with an Indian.

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Chapter Ten

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T

here was Bookie, a Motswana maid. She came from the north east, had worked with several white families since 1993, and had acquired broad experience. Hers was a very short interview, but she was particularly charming in the way she told her story. She must have meant something special to Dr Winter-Bottom Nanny, who labelled the tape: ‘Bookie: Strong Memories of the Nanny women.’ Bookie felt strongly that whites are better employers than blacks, and that Batswana are the worst. Not only do whites have more TLC – Tender Loving Care –, they are more honest and frank. She liked the fact that with her white employers her boyfriend could visit, which was not the same tolerance with her black and particularly Batswana employers. But there was an experience she had with her British employer – the husband of the Madam –, which she didn’t like. I still remember her words when Dr Nanny asked her if any of her employers was ever attracted to her sexually. “Yes, I once met such kind of a thing and it made me not to be comfortable with my work. It was with my British employer. At that time I was still young and didn’t know anything – the surroundings, life and so forth. The British family, I took them as my parents because the wife had told me, ‘Bookie, you are my first daughter.’ They had two kids. The husband, oh! He was big matata. “They lived in Phakalane. They transported me from Phakalane up to my place, everyday. They gave me money to board the buses in the morning, because the lady was working. The lady would sometimes say, ‘Oh Bookie, today I’m tired. Maybe Mr Shacks will take you home.’ Ok, then Shacks would take me home. On the way, ah! He would talk and talk. ‘Bookie, I like you.’ What! What! He was the same age with my father and it was my first time to be near these white people. And they were very white. “I was afraid. I didn’t know what to tell him. I just told him, ‘No Mr Shacks, you are my boss, why should I do this?’ And later, what he was doing, he would come maybe at 2, ‘Bookie, ok leave the job, today, Ma Shacks, I think she is tired. Come let’s go together.’ I’d say, ‘No Mr Shacks,

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I’m still doing a lot.’ By the time they moved to South Africa, Mr Shacks wanted me to come with them. Yeah, he’s the one who wanted me to come with them. “Ma Shacks trusted me in such a way that one day I even told Mr Shacks, ‘You better stop or else I tell Mrs Shacks.’ That’s when he said, ‘No Bookie, I’ll give you money.’ Because he was the one who was paying, he would lend me any money I wanted. Month end if I said, ‘This is your money,’ he’d say, ‘No, no, Bookie, keep it.’ Then tomorrow he would say, ‘Bookie, I love you, I’ll give you money, anything you want I can give.’ “When Mrs Shacks wasn’t there, because the kids were having school at Mmabatho and she would go visiting them, then I’d be at home with Mr Shacks. In the morning when I came in, I’d find him naked! Then I’d just ignore him. I’d go into the kitchen, and wash my dishes. “‘Ho! Bookie, come to my bedroom,’ I remember him inviting me one day. ‘Come to my bedroom, come and see my new girlfriend.’ I was afraid. I shivered. He was naked. ‘Did you bring a girlfriend, I’ll tell Mrs Shacks,’ I told him. He said, ‘No, don’t tell.’ ‘Come here, come Bookie,’ he told me. But I knew if he had sex with me, I’d report to Mrs Shacks. Then I went, eventually. I found pictures of naked people having sex and so forth. ‘Yeah, this is my girlfriend if Ma Shacks is not here,’ he told me, pointing at the naked woman in the magazine in front of him. I said, ‘Oh Mr Shacks, you are useless.’ I told him one day, ‘You are hopeless.’ “I don’t have that desire. But most of the people, what they do, they sleep with these people. Mr Shacks was promising he would build me a flat, and I know it was true. He made another promises: ‘If you agree with me, I’m going to divorce Ma Shacks.’ Ah! Eih I didn’t like that, because Ma Shacks loved me very much. Gana Ma Shacks would come to me, ‘Bookie take P100, don’t tell Mr Shacks.’ Tomorrow Mr Shacks would come to me, ‘Here’s P50, don’t tell Mrs Shacks.’ I kept everyone’s secret.

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Chapter Eleven

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M

rs Mirabelle Wangui was a secondary school teacher of Kenyan origin also studying part time at the university. The interview with her had to be re-run a few days after an earlier one was not recorded, the recorder having stopped shortly after the interview began. Dr Winter-Bottom Nanny only realised after the interview what had happened. Her batteries had worn down. She was livid. She had relied entirely on her recording machine, only to regret being too trusting. She must have felt like giving herself three deadly blows in the face. After that incident, she resolved always to take notes, even when she was sure the tape was working 200 per cent. For me, it was an early initiation to the frustrations of ‘Ethnographic Research’. It was also an opportunity to follow an exceptionally rich interview I otherwise would have missed, not having been present at the first. “Thanks for giving me a second chance,” Dr Nanny began, after introducing me and seeking permission to record yet again. Mrs Wangui smiled knowingly. Dr Nanny took out her notebook at the same time as she ordered me with her eyes to press record. I had clear instructions not to take my eyes off the little machine. Once beaten, twice shy. “You can share your experiences as well as the experiences of other people, just as you did the other day,” said Dr Nanny. “Could we start again where we did last time? I’m sorry we had that problem with the tape recorder. Let’s just start again. Could you share with us your experiences with maids?” “As I said last time, when I came here in early 1998, we hired a maid, an elderly woman who was very viable and fast and good, but she had her limits. She gave me her conditions, saying I had to buy a washing machine. I found it strange because that is not how I see it, to insist on things which you do not necessarily need. “I didn’t need a washing machine. She was hired to do laundry for two people only. I couldn’t afford a washing machine at that time, and since I thought it was not necessary, I told her, ‘Do what you can. If you feel you cannot do the washing without a washing machine, you are free to leave.’

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“One day it rained and the clothes were quite dirty and she told me, ‘The jeans, they have to be taken to the laundry, if we cannot afford to buy a washing machine.’ I found it strange, but as it was her first two months, I decided to stay with her. By the third month, she became too much. She told me if it rains I have to get an extra hand because her work is just to dust the house and maybe mop a bit, not to clean the bath. “So I told her, ‘No, that is not how it works. If you cannot do it, then we can do it together.’ And she agreed we clean the house, but she was a problem from day one. She expected me to have more maybe than I had or to lead a better life, considering maybe she was looking at me as an expatriate on a big salary. I thought it was too much. So I requested her to leave after that month and she said because I didn’t give her notice, she was going to report me to Labour.” Dr Nanny laughed, loud. To Mrs Wangui, it was no laughing matter, clearly. “Because I did not want a long tussle, I just paid her extra on top of what I was paying her. She left me alone. “After that, I took another young girl from Mochudi. She was good, jolly and, in one way or another I thought, she was better than the old woman. But her problem was an obsession with TV and boyfriends. “As soon as we left the house, she’d also use my phone, and those men, they would come into the house as if it was the weekend. If I was home, they would tell me they were her cousins, whichever cousins I didn’t know. “At first I tolerated it, but it became too much when they would come, sit, and watch TV almost the whole day. “So I thought about it, then I told her that, if somebody steals from us, we wouldn’t even know who did it. There were so many people coming in and out, so I asked her to leave. “Then I stayed for three months without a maid. Ah! I think I thought I was getting tired.” I remember Mrs Wangui shifting on her seat, uneasily, at that point. “So I decided to employ a Zimbabwean lady who was actually very good, very hardworking, and I don’t remember ever catching her even once with a boyfriend. Her problem was, things would disappear from the house, things like spoons, soap, lipstick, fingernail polish. For several months I didn’t notice. “One time she made a mistake, she washed the clothes and she picked one, a dress I quite liked and often wore. So I realised it quickly. And when I asked her about it, she said she knew nothing. I told her, ‘If you are the one who has the dress, just return it, no questions asked.’ She insisted she was not the one who had taken it. 64

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“So I decided aha! Why don’t I go through my things and try to find out other things missing. Many things were gone – shirts, t-shirts, blouses –, all gone. And since she denied her involvement, I told her, ‘No, my dear, I’m even risking my life employing you,’ because I didn’t even ask her whether she had papers or not. I just wanted relief from the problems of juggling domestic work and office work. So I paid her and I told her to go. This one was very good because she never even mentioned Labour or the Police, she just went. “After that, I stayed for a long time without a maid, a long, long time. Then I thought, let them just come over the weekend, clean the house, clean the compound and maybe wash my clothes. “So I started using part-timers, and I think I’ve been very happy with that kind of arrangement. I cannot complain. I am sometimes present when they do the laundry. When they finish, if I have something old, I give it to them rather than burning it, and they really appreciate it. Like I said, that is quite a good arrangement. But it has worked because there are no children in my house. If there were children, I’d be forced to have a maid all the time.” “Interesting. You mentioned earlier in the previous interview that the woman who was talking about jeans and washing machines used to compare you with where she had worked before? Could you…” “Yes, by all means.” “And the person was white or something?” “She was white, but they had just left the country, so the maid came to work for me. She led me to believe the machine was doing the washing, and that there was a gardener as well. She hated the fact that I had neither a washing machine nor a gardener. It really used to eat her up. She could not stand it, and I couldn’t stand her, so it was mutual.” “And she didn’t have any problems with boyfriends?” “Eh, she used to have a boyfriend, but it was not a major issue. There was a time she wanted the boyfriend to come and live with her, but I made her understand this was not the right arrangement.” “I remember I asked you if in choosing a maid you considered the looks or the age. Could you go through what you said again?” “Personally, I’ve always preferred older women, especially if they are staying with me in the house, because it is better to be on the safe side than to be sorry. “There are also other experiences, as I was telling you. I’ve listened to so many stories. This one wife, she employed a maid and this maid, inadvertently or knowingly, had a crush on this lady’s husband. As I told you, men get ideas when they realise women are interested in them. So he did not mind it. There was an incident whereby this man gave this maid a 65

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shirt to iron. The maid said she was not feeling well, and the man decided, ‘Ah! Let me just iron my shirt.’ The wife came and found the man ironing the shirt. And when the maid was asked, ‘Why is my husband ironing the shirt?’, she said she wasn’t feeling well. “When the husband defended instead of condemning the maid, the wife started having ideas. One time she went to work and I think she forgot something and she went back home only to find the husband’s car parked outside and they were in the room – in the bedroom, he and the maid! She sacked the maid there and then. It’s unfortunate that she just decided to sack the maid and never reprimanded the man.” Mrs Wangui shook her head in disagreement. “It is a little bit unfair, because it takes two to tango and I think maids, they are also human beings.” “Last time I tried to find out about men, how they view maids.” “They view maids the way women view them, especially in catering for small children. I think they also have a lot of time to observe what the maid is doing, because some feel that sometimes when a woman gets a maid, she transfers her work to the maid. The maid is the one who is cooking, cleaning the house, making the bed and washing the husband’s clothes. So, despite the fact that she is a maid, the man looks at her as a woman. That is why sometimes you find that in the long run, if his maid stays there for long, he tends to get attracted to her. “There is also the factor that some women really mistreat maids. Men often tend to be sympathetic to the maid who is treated by the wife as a donkey. How can a man not warm to the fact that the maid is the one who cooks the food he eats? And how can he not be revolted by his wife making the maid feel she does not qualify to sit at the same dining table with her when it is the maid who cooks the food and keeps the table clean?” “Good point.” “Yeah, the maid takes the food to the dining table and is supposed to eat in the kitchen. Believe you me, some men feel that is too much. In such circumstances, women become more conscious of the maid as a knife sharpened on both edges. “Men tend also to look at these maids, maybe as their mothers. The see in them the ways their mothers used to work so hard to keep getting them ready for school, preparing food for their fathers, cleaning the home and keeping the family going. So there is an attachment that grows with these maids and that is why sometimes men tend to get attracted to them. “There is another side whereby the maid goes to a lovely home with one agenda – to get the man. Maids can also be naughty. She doesn’t necessarily respect the lady of the house. She wants to equate herself with her employer. That is a serious problem here, especially when you 66

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are a foreigner and you have employed a local person. She will always want to see herself better than you. She will say you are in her country, wherever you come from. They tend to equate themselves with employers. “For example, I’m married to a foreign man and I’m a foreigner. I definitely have a problem here in Botswana, because of this interest locals have towards foreigners. She would want full attention from my husband, and these foreign men, as I’ve observed, they tend to get attracted to these local women. So there’ll be an ongoing tug of war. “Sometimes they put on very short clothes when cleaning the house and they don’t find anything wrong with it, since it seems their culture allows such things. They do it even when the woman of the house is present with her husband. They are not shy. It’s not the maids we know back home in Kenya. In the sitting room, she starts bending over and pretending she’s polishing. But she is enticing the man,” Mrs Wangui smiled. She continued, “It goes both ways. While men actually get attracted to these maids because of the work they are doing, sometimes the maids tend to equate themselves with the madams of the house and that is why you find a lot of friction.” “You mentioned that foreign men get attracted to local women. What is there that makes them attracted?” “I want to believe sometimes, just to explore and if you compare, for example Batswana ladies with foreign women, the Batswana seem to be very free and outgoing, whereas the foreign women are rather reserved. As we know, men are not serious. They want to explore. And also, comparatively, Batswana women, they are very attractive. That is true. Some of them, they are very pretty, and as we said the other time, their complexion also, especially the light skin ones, they are very attractive, very good looking. And also their shapes! So they tend to have some characteristics men are not used to from where they are coming. They have quite good qualities, beauty outside. And also that kind of freeness that men fantasize about.” “It’s attractive,” Dr Nanny agreed. “It’s really attractive to men. Men want to have reserved wives, but they also want to have somebody who can be unreserved where it matters, which I want to believe is why they are attracted.” Mrs Wangui sounded very knowledgeable. “I have heard Batswana compare foreign men to their own local men and often they claim that foreign men have what they call TLC – Tender Love and Care…,” said Dr Nanny. Mrs Mirabelle Wangui laughed luxuriously. “… that the local people don’t have,” she completed. “Have you encountered any experiences to share?” 67

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“Yes, as I said, Batswana ladies, they are so much attracted to foreign men because definitely they see their men as useless. They say local men just give them babies they cannot support. Foreign men are seen as responsible, which is not how Batswana women look at their own men.” She was interrupted by a call on her cell phone, from, as she told us, her little sister who was busy with preparations for her forthcoming wedding to a fellow Kenyan, a successful businessman. He was the head of the Ultimate Church of Christ, one of the most prosperous Pentecostal churches in Gaborone, with a membership of over 1200 fervent followers who regularly and dutifully pay their tithes. “As I told you the other time,” she resumed, “it is very rare for a Motswana man to marry a foreign woman. But when you look for the reverse whereby foreign men marry Batswana girls, you see that kind of combination. You find that Batswana ladies when they have foreigners, they appreciate it. They feel wonderful, and even their own parents tend to encourage them to get foreign men, because they seem more responsible. They do not just give them babies and leave. “Sometimes it is for papers that foreign men marry Batswana women and behave responsibly. So you have marriages resulting from attraction, while others are put together out of necessity. It is easy to have papers if you marry a local woman. True, according to most African traditions, you should move from the woman’s place and go to the man’s place after marriage. But these foreign men tend to stay when they marry Batswana ladies. And conveniently they get the papers, why not?” “Do you have friends who have been approached by Batswana men? And is their approach in declaring sentiments similar to what people would say or do in Kenya?” She took a deep breath. “No! Oh no! The approach here is so open. Strange indeed! You can meet a man today and he decides he is in love with you. Sure, sure, sure, sure! They are so clumsy. Instead of somebody telling you, ‘I love you,’ they tell you ‘I’m proposing love to you.’ The whole issue is just so bad!” she laughed delightfully with disgust. “That is not the way we are used to being approached. When a man is interested in you, he can at least call you, take you out for dinner and that kind of thing. But here, they are impatient and in a hurry. If I tell one no, he will go to the next person, and actually, men here, especially Batswana, have that kind of mentality – that a woman cannot turn them down. “They believe they’ve got a wide selection. So it is like, if they propose to you and you refuse, he moves to somebody else. They don’t take time to digest a ‘no’, let alone invest in a relationship. No digestion, no investment, just instant ejaculation – that’s all they seek. How can there be any real connection?” 68

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“They must be reading too much into the fast food outfits they’ve grown used to!” volunteered Dr Nanny. “It’s interesting the point you make,” she continued. “Another foreign African woman fending for herself at the margins of Gaborone made exactly the same point. She’s found herself asking many a Motswana suitor, ‘Do you take me for a dog? Don’t you have any respect? Even if there was interest, I cannot show that interest anymore because your approach is totally inapt…’” I remembered smiling my confirmation of this story, slightly uncomfortable at being cited, but not directly. I was yet to get used to Dr Nanny and her ways of doing ‘Ethnographic Research’. I didn’t understand why she refused to identify this story with me, as I remembered quite clearly telling her the story. Could she have been confused? Maybe she didn’t know anymore what to attribute to whom, given the bulk of material she had collected left, right and centre. I never asked her about this incident. There wasn’t much to ask. It was no big deal. The experience is important. Who actually experienced it is a detail. Mrs Wangui responded, “I think that is why Batswana men don’t get far with foreign women. Even if you are interested in somebody, the instant approach closes instead of opens the door. They are not convincing at all. It is like they just want you for that day, to satisfy immediate hunger, then it is finished. If you are really in love with me, you would want to get to know me. But here, they want you the same minute. Maybe that is the culture, meaning they propose in however clumsy a manner and real love starts from there. Interesting you never ask me how Batswana women approach men. “I used to work with a girl. She was around 18, and the fact that she did not have a boyfriend was a problem to her. She kept on crying. She was worried she was ugly. But she was pretty and I would tell her. Then it dawned on me that boyfriends here are an issue. A woman without a boyfriend has a problem. While for us it is something normal and to be encouraged, if a girl does not have a boyfriend at 18.” “Where do you think the difference comes from?” “I think it’s the way people are brought up and also pressure from parents. Here I understand when you reach 18, if you don’t have a boyfriend, you don’t have a baby, even men they don’t approach you, especially if you are a local person. They want somebody they know can have babies and also somebody who is already going out with somebody. “So another man feels better when he is coming into that particular scenario, while in other countries, when you have a baby, it becomes so difficult to have a boyfriend. There, a man knows the responsibilities he 69

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is assuming becoming the boyfriend of someone who already has a baby. Here, the boyfriend abandons his responsibilities to the girl and her parents, his role reduced to a midnight harvester of honey, a fair-weather lover.” “Another issue we discussed last time, if I remember clearly, was opinions of foreigners and Batswana towards one another. What have been your personal experiences of Batswana attitudes to foreigners?” “Immediately they hear you are a foreigner, they suspect you are Zimbabwean, especially when you are black. And they do not want to know anything beyond that. To them an African is a poor person by definition. But when you are from Zimbabwe especially, it is worse. The only Africans they respect are from South Africa. “So when you tell them you are from Kenya or another country, they start appreciating you. ‘Ouh! We have a friend who is Kenyan,’ and that kind of thing. The next thing is, ‘What are you doing here!?’” Mrs Mirabelle Wangui exclaimed, to create the startling effect of the question. “Ah! When they feel you are doing a job somebody local can do, they criticise you, in particular those who are up to the Form 3 level and above. “There are so many things they don’t understand. It is like even when you are working somewhere like the university, they feel there are graduates who will not have a job because of you. “Their position is formed by emotions, when comparing locals out of work with foreigners indiscriminately. Personally, I think an individual is an individual, and diversity is a blessing. There are some who do not like you, who feel you are not supposed to be here, just as there are some who will really appreciate what you are doing. So, I think we got to take them as they come.” “Do you think the attitudes towards Asians are different?” “It’s very different, Asians. Nowadays Asians are being grouped with difongkong. They call them difongkong, pertaining to cheap goods, perceived as fake from Hong Kong, despised along with those who consume them. There is that mentality that you have to buy things either from Game City or River Walk, shops owned by South Africans, and when you deviate from that it’s like you are second-hand and rate. “But the fongkong thing is just playing to appearances, as most of those who are critical also buy things – and they may be of good quality – from Chinese shops. You even find that those supposedly high class South African shops are buying wholesale from the Chinese and retailing in their shops. So you find that the kind of attitudes they have towards Africans and Chinese is very different from the attitudes they have towards whites. “For the Motswana, a white person is by definition money. When they look at them they see money, and they respect them very much. Just go with a white person into a shop, and you’ll find you’re followed. The man 70

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will not be followed, which is so bad! Every shop you go to, it’s like the employees have been told, ‘Don’t trust any African who enters here.’ They’ll keep on following you in the super market, but the white person takes his time to check what he needs without disturbance. Even the cameras seem not to focus on them! “You find these attitudes engrained into people and engineered into technologies. Even when you employ a person, like I said about the maid, you find they’ll compare you with a white person – with the white person being seen as the better person. It’s a serious problem when even in Africa we are so belittled and belittling!” “Do you know of any Kenyans married to Batswana?” “Yeah, many men! There are quite a number. It’s very interesting that they come here single. By the time they go home, they have wives.” “Really?” “I’ve attended weddings.” “They go home with the wives?” “Once in a while they take their wives home.” “But mostly they stay here?” “Eheh! They work here, they stay here. But I think I’ve not heard of a Motswana man marrying a Kenyan lady. No. It’s difficult, it’s really difficult. I wish something could be done.” “Maybe you have to set up a school for teaching the Batswana men how to approach women,” Dr Nanny said, laughing at her own suggestion. Joining in the Laughter, Mrs Mirabelle Wangui said, “They’ll never learn. They’ll keep proposing on the streets.” “I want to propose love to you,” Dr Nanny recalled, chuckling. “Yes, that’s how they go about it.” “I think it’s the only way they know because the other person who told me a similar story said sometimes they are surprised and frightened if you talk back.” “Poor things! Maybe one day they will learn.” “Again, let me thank you very much for giving me a second chance,” said Dr Nanny, assembling her things. “Not to worry. These things happen. What would life be without second chances?”

71

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Chapter Twelve

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A

s I went through the tapes I was transcribing, I discovered an unlabelled account which I was sure must have been Mrs Mirabelle Wangui. The voice sounded so much like hers. She was giving examples of friends of hers and their experiences with maids, which led me to believe she must have been commissioned to interview them in the same way Amalion was. Not knowing whom to credit with the words on the unlabelled tape, I decided to append them to the account by Mrs Wangui, leaving Dr Nanny to determine their source for sure. Even today, as I re-read her interviews, I can’t help feeling that Mrs Wangui could have beaten me to the job of research assistant, had she been available. But, as the saying goes, what is yours is yours. This is how the unlabelled account went: “These are other experiences which my friends have gone through with their maids. “Nametso employed a maid from Kgalagadi district thinking she would be better behaved and obedient because she did not know anybody in Gaborone. But after two weeks the maid had found quite a number of friends and she had started to bring them home. This maid loved drinking the traditional sorghum beer, Chibuku, and most of the times when Nametso was at work she would be drinking then sleeping. One day when Nametso forgot her identity card and she went back home for, she found the maid with a man who had brought her three packets of Chibuku and they were drinking in the house. “Ketsile had four maids in one year alone. The first one, a young girl, was dressing provocatively in front of her husband and the husband demanded Ketsile to sack her. Then she got an elderly woman who was so domineering, she took over the running of the house. “She determined what was eaten and she also took full advantage of her age and every day carried some food to her house. Most Fridays she never turned up for work and would not even explain the reason. She started referring to Ketsile and her husband as ‘my daughter and my son,’ till one day she didn’t turn up and Ketsile had to look for a replacement. Ketsile looks back and says the whole scenario had become like a family affair rather than an employer-employee relationship.

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“Mrs Kiya told me one day, upon hearing of my problems with maids, the story of her sister’s maid. I prefer to repeat it in her own words. She said, ‘I always wondered why some madams treated their maids so badly. Maybe it’s because I had not experienced properly the wrath of maids. Thank God if you haven’t had a bad encounter with your maid. Pray what happened to me doesn’t happen to you.’ “She was dramatic but truthful. Her face told the story as much as her words did. ‘The 12th of July 2001 started with great vigour. The sun was shining and brightening the cold winter morning. My business on that particular day was based at Maruapula. It was not until 10 am that I left the house and headed there. I attended to my clients and while I was just about to meet my last client at around 12 noon my phone rang. “Hallo, how are you?” I heard an urgent voice. “Please come home for your maid has left your little niece and gone,” my neighbour insisted. At first I did not understand, especially knowing this girl was such an angel. “She can’t do that,” I told myself. How wrong I was!’ She looked up to assure herself I was interested in her story. Then she continued. “‘When I got home I was mesmerized at the sight of our sitting room. Oh! Oh! It was empty – VCR, Multichoice Decoder, radio, TV, all gone!! What next? I rushed to the bedroom. My sweet little niece was lying on her bed, so innocent. Thank God she was fine. My brother-in-law and sister’s clothes, shoes, and bags, were all gone. I went to my bedroom, where I was greeted with empty closets. Tears ran down my face when I thought of how much I had invested in my wardrobe. All my handbags, gone, all my shoes, gone. Not to mention my jewellery. I called my brother and the Police. We then reported the matter at the Station and went home. My brother, sister and I decided to check by the Central Station to see if we could get her. This was after we found out she was lying to us about her nationality and even about her name. Everything about her was a lie. Except that our house was empty, that was not a lie. “‘We began the search. At around 3 pm we went by the Central Station but didn’t see her. We went back in the evening at 8 o’clock. She wasn’t by the bus, so we went to the railway station. Just when we were about to give up, when what looked like the last passenger had boarded the train, came the maid walking majestically in one of my smart outfits.’ Mrs Kiya was bitter. I empathised with her. “‘We captured her and took her to the Police. At first she was stubborn but after a night in detention she became cooperative. She said the things were with the boyfriend at Metsimotlhabe. “‘There we were with the Police, in the back of their van headed towards Metsimotlhabe. We got there at about 11 am on 13th of July, but he wasn’t there. After a little jogging of her memory she said we should 74

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check for him at Pink City. He wasn’t there either. We went back to the Station, and this time the Police were harsh on her. She admitted the boyfriend had gone to Francistown. What next! I wondered. Then a decision by the Station commander was made we go by train. The boyfriend turned out to be a wanted gangster by the Francistown Police. “‘We arrived the following day at 6 am, together with the Francistown Police, who led us to the boyfriend’s place. He was still sleeping when we arrived. He was commanded to remove the items. But he had already sold some, especially the clothing. As for the electronics he had mistakenly picked the wrong bag from the bus. Somebody later delivered it to the Police. We went from place to place in search of the other items. We managed to recover some but not all. The girl was then remanded in custody and so was the boyfriend. We attended court hearings after coming back to Gaborone. Thank God she was sentenced to four years imprisonment.’ “‘Maids, are they worth it?’ I asked myself. After this encounter, plus what I will tell you next, I understood why some madams treat their maids the way they do. “I approached Mr Ngwao, a foreigner married to a Motswana, and asked him about maids in his house as a man and at first he said that department belongs to the wife. But after assuring him that all I needed was to hear his side of the story, he opened up and actually, had had his share of problems with maids. “He told me how one time they employed a Motswana maid from the wife’s home locality, but still this did not help much. Immediately they went off to work, the maid would lock the two children in the house and go to the shopping centre where she used to meet her boyfriends. On Saturday afternoons, she used to be off duty till Monday. When she reported on Monday, she used to tell the employer she was not going to wash dishes she found dirty, same for clothes. The maid was suggesting the employer get a Zimbabwean over the weekend, such that there was no pending work when she reported on Monday morning. So they got rid of her and employed a new one. “Maids can be very inconsiderate. No matter how you are nice to them, they will still pull a major trick on you. Grace used the word ‘tricky’ quite often when describing her experiences with maids. She hired Sisi about three years ago. Sisi served the family well and actually gained the status of a family member. Grace became the envy of her friends, because of such a dedicated and hardworking maid. Sisi was highly trusted even with the family gossip. She loved Grace’s two year old daughter very much. Grace never worried even if she was out late because she knew her children were indeed safe. But one day the honeymoon ended. 75

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“Grace was late in paying Sisi and for sure Sisi behaved in a way that shocked Grace and her husband. Sisi took Grace’s VCR, Multichoice decoder and small electrical gadgets. She picked up the children from school and left a note for Grace, telling her she had decided to pay herself and she was off to Zimbabwe. She added, ‘Don’t ever fail to pay a maid. The next one might be worse. Goodbye.’ “Emma is a middle aged lady who got married recently. She had given up on getting a husband and a baby, so for her marriage was a great surprise and a gift. Emma works as a nurse in one of the private hospitals. When she got her baby she was ‘the happiest mum.’ In her words, ‘nothing else mattered in the world.’ She got a mature lady from Molepolole to look after her son. “When she resumed duty she was confident that her son was safe in the hands of a mature lady caretaker. After one month Emma realised the son was always crying of hunger. And for sure Emma used to buy every type of child’s food. But the maid used to take the food to her own child. This problem they managed to sort out. What sent her mad was to come from work one day and find the maid and her four month old son in the same bathtub naked. Astounded, she took her child, went straight to the hospital and resigned on the spot. Now she is running a childcare centre for working parents, so they don’t have to leave their children ‘in the lunatic hands of maids.’ “Mary, a lady who lives in a suburb of Gaborone, has also experienced the terror of maids. When she gave birth to her first child, she got a maid who, according to her reference was very experienced and who for the first few months worked out fine. But Mary fell pregnant when the other child was four months old and the maid had to deal with the work of the house and look after the baby. “Mary hired a second maid, so she could have one for the baby and the other to do the housework. This brought a lot of problems, as instead of working they spent their day chatting. Taking care of the baby was a problem, and the house was not well cleaned. Mary decided to sack both of them. Then she got a Zimbabwean who was quite hardworking. Mary gave birth to her second son when the other one was barely one year. “Mary described her ordeal as hell on earth. No maid stayed in her house for more than two months. She stopped working to look after the children but still the work was too much. She kept on hiring and the maids kept on fleeing. “The last Zimbabwean she hired was a good woman in her mid-30s and she was responsible. Her problem was she kept on stealing Mary’s clothes, and when she was caught she would deny it and lick her nose 76

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with her tongue. One day Mary met the maid at the Main Mall together with her boyfriend in Mary’s clothes, from shoes to earrings and the boyfriend wore Mary’s husband’s shirt. When the woman next showed up to work, Mary sent her packing before she could wink. “She calls Zimbabwean maids ‘thieves’ and Batswana maids ‘lazy and arrogant.’ When she could not stand it anymore, she sacrificed about P6000 to get a maid from Kenya to look after her children. She shivers when she sees somebody pregnant, as she imagines the hell awaiting her. Bringing up children and being a working woman is no easy dance. “Jennifer is a foreign lady working in Gaborone. When she came to Botswana she employed a hardworking maid from Zimbabwe. To her amazement this maid was being dropped off by her boyfriend in a sleek car every morning and being picked up in the evening. The maid had gone far in school. She even used to assist the children with their school work. She stayed with her for six months and she left to be employed by another person, a white lady. “The next maid Jennifer employed was a Motswana who from day one complained about the amount of work she had to do. She was also very particular about time, such that even if the kids were late to be dropped by the school bus, she would leave the gate open for them and the kitchen door also open, and she would knock off. “She also had an attitude problem and rebelled when advised on how to use detergents. She explained that she had worked for many families, some richer than Jennifer’s, and that she did not see the reason for instructions. She also had a problem dealing with an employer who was a foreigner in her country, where she expected to be treated as somebody superior. “Diana narrates her story about one maid she employed from Gabane village who was exceptionally good and cooperative, always going to church. But one day when Diana went to the Servants’ Quarters on a Sunday when the maid had left for church, she discovered something astonishing – her husband’s photo and one of his undergarments under the maid’s pillow. Even the husband became very worried when he learned about this. When Diana confronted the maid, she confessed to liking Diana’s husband, and said she had been praying for him to like her in turn. Diana found all that too twisted and knew she didn’t want that kind of intrigue in her household. Nowadays she makes sure she does not employ a full time maid. “Mma Toshi lives in G-South, with her husband and two school age kids. She has been employing maids for the last ten years and as she says, some just leave without any reason, and some complain about the amount 77

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of work they have to do, but the one who offended her totally was one who used to soak clothes and put them on the line without washing them. And when she soaked them, she mixed them, putting dark coloured work trousers with light coloured blouses and shirts the children wore to school, Mma Toshi lost so many clothes because of her maid’s incompetence. “At first Mma Toshi thought she did not know how to sort clothes. But even after being shown, the maid continued to mix them, so Mma Toshi concluded she was doing it deliberately. Mma Toshi threw her out and did not even pay her. She only discovered much later the maid had paid herself when she noticed her jewellery had vanished. “Setlare, a middle aged lady, has one boy child. About maids she had only one word for me – bitches. She narrated to me how at one stage her husband lost his job and spent most of his time at home. Setlare had one maid who had stayed with them for two years without a major incident. But when her husband lost his job, she realised the maid had started putting on very provocative clothes and sharing jokes with the husband. “For some time Setlare ignored the scenario because she knew the husband was having a hard time. Then the maid, the husband and the son started taking evening walks. Some evenings after work, Setlare would meet them watching TV. This made her blood boil. One day she went to work but because of the suspicions she had, she went back home and she found what she had all along suspected. The maid was half naked and the husband was naked in bed. Setlare sent the maid scrambling and swore to her husband there wouldn’t be another one in the house until he had a job. “Mr Molato was all smiles when sharing his experiences with maids. He is a jolly and outgoing man. Before they started employing maids, his wife used to take such good care of him. She would cook food and leave it for him in the fridge, which she called his friend, whenever she was out of town. She would call to say, ‘I hope your friend is looking after you well in my absence,’ meaning the fridge. But the coming of maids redefined a lot. Responsibility for cooking shifted to the maids, and his wife spent her energies trying to ensure a virtual brick wall between him and all the maids in their employ. Each time he was at the heart of an advance by one of the maids, he would tell his wife and she would fire that one and hire another. As you can see, she went from cooking to hiring and firing maids. “He explained how his wife resorted to employing the ugliest creatures. She would get their pictures by internet from her friends and would study them before making a hiring decision. As long as they do their job well, he 78

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says he has no problem. His wife’s aversion to good looking maids does not worry him, although he wouldn’t mind having a nice looking face once in a while. “Most men perceive maids differently from their wives or partners. Prosper thinks some maids are outright evil, especially those who just disappear, leaving the children at home alone, and without even alerting the parents. He really doesn’t understand what transpires between his wife and the maids she employs. The day the maid disappeared, they went home from work to find the children sitting outside in the cold, unattended. He was quick to add that some maids are very efficient and even better in management of house affairs than married women. “To him, as soon as a woman employs a maid, she transfers her responsibilities, apart from bedroom duties. It’s the maid who wakes up very early to prepare breakfast, ready the children for school, and clean the house for the day, while the madam sleeps. In many cases you find it is the maid and the husband who wake up early. This provides opportunity for the man to equate her with his hardworking mother and an attraction may develop. “These problems of maids and men in Botswana are common in Kenya as well. A close friend from Nairobi wrote me the following in a letter: “‘When I went back home from the Christian meeting that Sunday, I least expected what was to come. My 10 year old son told me the neighbour’s wife had come to see me over our maid’s behaviour. When she was told I wasn’t in, she proceeded to broadcast loudly to all who cared to hear about the maid’s amorous behaviour with her husband. She claimed that once when she took her three week old baby to the clinic, the maid visited her husband behind her back. “‘The broadcast took place at our gate while my husband was indoors. Finally, he had enough of the noise outside and requested the complainant to leave until I got back. He had this to tell me when I returned, “Let her go. She is trouble. The neighbours aren’t happy with this girl. If she’s as promiscuous as they say, this could get us into trouble?” “‘Well, I listened to him, and rang up a friend to tell her of the incident. She laughed loudly and asked why I hadn’t already fired the maid. I decided to take some time to think. The maid, she did her work. I really had nothing against her. I had seen worse. When I got back home from work, she was there, work done. My work schedule was too intimidating to let her go. How could I manage without her? “‘The maid, wasn’t she allowed to partake of her sexual meal? At 24 years of age, what could I do to stop her? I asked the maid about the report and she said she had nothing to do with the neighbour. I decided to 79

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ignore the incident and not fire her. The problem was with my neighbour, not me. My husband left for work in Mombasa, still asking me to dismiss the maid. The neighbours think I am inconsiderate of my fellow woman’s problems with maids, and that I too will suffer some day. I still retain the maid.’ The tape ended as abruptly as it began.

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‘O

nly when one understands the nature of research,’ so claims Dr Nanny, ‘can one understand the need to ask the same questions to each and every interviewee, even at the risk of appearing repetitiveness and boring.’ She was reacting to a remark I made, wondering if it was necessary to ask exactly the same questions each time we interviewed someone. I had my reservations, but I was equally aware of my position as a research assistant. The appointment to interview Mrs Esther Kasongo was after work on Wednesday at 5:30 pm. We arrived 5 minutes late, for which Dr Nanny apologised, but I could see that Mrs Kasongo thought this was much ado about nothing. Dr Nanny began the interview by saying, ‘You said you work at the university?” “Yes, I am administrative assistant in the Department of African History here at DUST and my husband also works here at the university. He is Professor of Linguistics.” “Like I told you the other day, I’m doing research on maids in Botswana. So I thought you could share with me your experiences with maids.” “I don’t know where to start.” “You’ve been here for a long time, haven’t you?” “Yeah.” “Since when?” “Since about ‘91.” “Ok, can you just share with us your experiences, as much as you can remember, since 1991 till today, including change of maids, etc.?” “Ok, one thing, they are hardworking people, Zimbabwean maids. They are dedicated to their work, at least, the ones I’ve had. But they can be too playful as well – having boyfriends around them. I think that can bring them down. The ones I lived with, they were quite good. “Some of them, it’s like they can run your home. You show them what to do, and they do it and are even willing to work late at times. The only problem is that they are too playful, wanting to have boyfriends, thinking maybe if they have one, then they will stay longer, because they cannot

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be picked up by the Police and things like that. One thing, they don’t have permits and they are border jumpers,” Mrs Esther Kasongo looked at us to see if she had captured our attention. “The other thing I’ve noticed is, during Christmas time, they want to leave very early and come back in good time. Unlike the Motswana I had, who could go on and on for several weeks, or go for good after a holiday. “My current maid claims she has this evil spirit, which I don’t bother about. I give her food, breakfast, lunch and super myself. And then her own money, for over the weekend, when she doesn’t come over. She starts the day very early – 6 o’clock. By the time we are going to have our breakfast, we are in a clean house. She does the laundry very well, the ironing. “The current one I have, she’s good. It’s like she is not very sure of herself, whether we like her or not. So she’s always afraid of certain things. The only problem is she burns things when she irons. It’s like she didn’t know the settings of the iron. And she can’t eat meat. When I want to give her my food, I have to be selective. She doesn’t like spices, things like that. But otherwise she’s a good person. The major problem I can say I’ve encountered is that, once you raise your voice a bit, it’s like…” “She’s timid?” “Yeah, and then she’ll cry. Of course, she wouldn’t show you. She will just keep quiet. The following day when you ask her, what’s wrong with you? She’ll say, ‘No, no, no I have a headache, I have problems at home. My father phoned me,’ things like that. But of late we discussed and she was ok.” “How old is she?” “She’s 26, I think.” “Is she married?” “It is her second marriage. Actually her younger sister was working here and she left her first husband home. When he passed away, she had to go. That’s when she asked her sister to come and sit in for the job, and the sister thereafter she stayed on. When the older sister came back, she started looking for a job herself. That’s how she was brought to my house. I knew the person where the sister was working.” “Have you had any experience with theft?” “Not with this one. Before this one, I had this other maid. She was from Zimbabwe as well!” Mrs Esther Kasongo exclaimed with despair. “She liked the phone. She used to phone Zimbabwe. At first my husband wasn’t checking all the bills. He was just paying and thinking it was the children. But then he started noticing Zimbabwe, South Africa numbers 82

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and places we hardly called. When we confronted her, she said, ‘I don’t even know how to use the phone. My people stay in the village. How could I phone them when they don’t even have a phone?’ “Eventually, when there was that eclipse in Zambia, we had gone, and she made several calls that day and she was the only one at home. That’s how we came to get hold of her and she said, ‘Well, yes I phoned.’ Then we traced all those other previous bills and we found out she was the most regular user of our phone. So I started cutting from her salary. She didn’t argue. She just said, ‘Yeah, I think I can refund it.’” “She left?” “Yeah, she left. She left because she really wanted to have so many boyfriends coming into our house and I didn’t like that. It’s like our house was going to be a den.” “She stayed in with you?” “She was staying in, yeah.” “There was a Servants’ Quarters?” “Yeah.” “Attached to the house?” “Not necessarily attached to the house. It’s a separate one.” “That problem comes up every time – this boyfriend thing.” “She was even beaten at one time. Around 4 am, this guy came in probably to sleep there, but she argued, and he said he had seen another man come in. Even my neighbours came out when they heard the screams. But she had been beaten and so badly.” “What do you think maids think of those who employ them?” Dr Nanny asked, with a laugh. “I don’t know what they think. Maybe they think, I don’t know.” There was a long silence, before she added, “I can only refer to the recent one. She thinks we are too harsh, because we told her we don’t want boyfriends coming in here, because of the previous experiences we had. She said she was a very responsible person and was married before and knew how to handle herself. But at the same time, she wanted a boyfriend. One time she asked me, ‘I’m wondering whether you could allow my boyfriend to come just for one weekend only.’ “I just laughed but she went ahead and brought him anyway. Then came the time when I got annoyed when she burnt my husband’s trousers and she was crying and said, ‘I’ve burnt this.’ The series of burning different items continued and she said, ‘I wasn’t thinking properly and my former husband, I understand he is very sick, he’s got AIDS and I’m afraid. I was with him for so many years. I had two children with him and I think I’ve got it. Don’t you think I’ve got it?’ 83

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“I said, ‘No, I don’t know, I can’t answer that. You have to go for a test.’ “She said she had gone earlier when she had her second child. After a while she said, ‘I don’t know whether you are going to allow me to work here now that my husband has got AIDS and maybe I’ve got AIDS too.’ “I think she even talked to the sister at one time, when she said, ‘I don’t know whether my boss’ husband likes me,’ referring to my man, ‘because he is always shouting,’” Esther Kasongo laughed. “So she asked the sister to come and ask me, ‘What about the father? Does he like her that she can continue working here?’ I said, ‘I don’t think there is any problem.’ Of course, we shout when we tell her this is the right way to do your job and she does the opposite, definitely…” “You would shout?” “I would shout, ‘Ah! I’ve reminded you a dozen times to change the sheets this thing, but you think they are ok.’ It’s normal, isn’t it?’” Dr Nanny seemed undecided what to say, so she kept quiet. Mrs Esther Kasongo continued, “The other thing is when I cook, I tell her, ‘Please help yourself. Dish out your food.’ I don’t want her to feel I ration her by serving her. So I say, ‘Here is the food. Dish out your food. Go and eat now and drink. We will remain and have ours.’” “Do you think, going back to a point you mentioned earlier, that your husband likes her staying with you or not? Have you had friends who have had maids where there was suspicion that the maid was trying to work her way to the husband?” “One of my friends, yes! This maid, she was of course a young girl, from Mochudi, and the man’s wife was working. Actually, she was doing part time and the husband was working for G-Plastics as technical director. When you visited them, you could see they were used to eating altogether at the table. The husband allowed that. He wanted them to be having food together. I think it’s because he had a big interest in the girl. But the wife didn’t bother. And you could go there and find the maid nicely dressed and made up with lipstick,” she laughed. “I think when his contract ended at G-Plastics, the maid knew more than the wife. So when they started having problems, the wife actually came to us and complained. When we asked the husband he also came with his own story. The wife wasn’t confronting her husband. She didn’t even bring herself to say, ‘Why are you telling the maid, an outsider, about ABCD – intimate and personal details you choose to keep even from me?’ It’s like she came to tell us instead. I don’t know if she was afraid of telling the husband what was on her mind. She had lived with him for a long time. They have a 25 year old son. 84

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“They are divorced no. What happened is the maid became pregnant. We were suspicious, but she never confronted the husband actually to say this is what I see. The coming late everyday – he was always in Mochudi. I think they had consummated, but I don’t know for sure.” She put her hands on her thighs and looked up at us. “The maid had the child. The wife at one point had gone for holidays. He remained here. No, no! He got a job with Millennium-Plastics in South Africa. But he insisted he wanted to come and stay in the house. The wife had moved from the house they were given, an institutional home and she found her own accommodation. She had moved out before his contract ended, because of the problem they were having. The children moved to the mother and he remained with the maid. “Then he went to ask the wife, ‘Now that I’m getting this gratuity, do you think the maid should also get a gratuity?’ The wife said, ‘Well, I’m no longer in your home, so you should decide what you do.’ I think he briefed the children, ‘I think we should give her a little bit more money as well now that we’ll be moving to South Africa.’ The children complained, but he had decided.” Mrs Esther Kasongo looked up at us again. “The wife thought he must have built a house in Mochudi for this girl. She never confronted the girl or anything, but she just decided she should move out. “My husband went to see her husband one day. When my husband knocked, she’s the one who opened the door – the former maid, with a baby. You can imagine his shock. ‘What are you doing here?!’ he exclaimed. ‘I’ve just come to see this guy,’ she explained. Just the way she said ‘this guy’ was evidence he was the one responsible for the maid’s child…” “Yeah, ‘this guy’ suggests intimacy.” “The wife set up a saloon and was actually looking for her to work with her. But I discouraged her. I said no, you shouldn’t call her to come and work in your saloon. I didn’t explain why, but just said she shouldn’t.” “So in a way you were protecting the relationship?” “We tried to, but I don’t know. She had too many problems with him, and there are certain things a married woman just doesn’t tell another woman about her husband.” Dr Nanny nodded in agreement. “It wasn’t the first time, as their earlier maid whom my maid had found for them, had complained to me, ‘Mma, you know these people. I don’t like what this man does. When all have gone and I remain in the home…’ It’s like after breakfast they would all go. He would also go to work. Then he would come back home and make advances. She also became pregnant. 85

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“These things happened because the wife was too good, I think. She is actually a very good person. She would even sit and plait this maid’s hair, because she knows how to plait. The girl was so frightened. She came back to me, because my maid found her that job. She said, ‘Mma, I think I’m afraid, I want to leave those people. The wife is so good, and small as I am, I don’t see how I can be stabbing her in the back with a knife.’ “I said, ‘What is it now?’ She said, ‘Well, the man doesn’t treat me well. He has a peculiar behaviour.’ She didn’t go into details. I didn’t even know, when she was talking to me at that time, that she was pregnant. I didn’t know. She just said she wanted to leave. “I tried to persuade her to stay, by saying that the wife needs somebody at home when the children come back from school. But she said, ‘No, she’s just too good, I can’t stay there.’ “Then after sometime she told the friend that the husband was responsible for this pregnancy, but the friend kept the story from me until the child was born. She left and had her child. Later, she went there and said, ‘I’ve brought the child. I want you to see the child.’ “She never saw them again after that. She didn’t stay with them, but she didn’t want to go home either, saying it was a disgrace to her parents in Zimbabwe, and she couldn’t face them. She more or less stayed with other maids, where their employers didn’t want to keep an extra person. So she left eventually, reluctantly. “I never told my friend about this. I’m sorry but I never told her.” She sounded both guilty and not guilty. “On maids and husbands, what do you take into account when you are choosing a maid? Do you look at her age, her appearance, whether she is wearing lipstick?” “I don’t know, but I think the most important is – she must be a mature person, somebody who is hardworking, whom you can trust. And we don’t think into those possibilities – that this one maybe she will have an affair with my husband. Well, particularly myself, I don’t look at that.” “You said mature and trustworthy. How do you know about that in a perfect stranger?” “When you are talking to somebody, definitely you can tell if the person is trying to cheat and go away from the truth. One is hesitant to say something, it’s like she’s withholding some information. I think you can tell too, like right now whether I’m being open with you or if I’m withholding, isn’t it?” Dr Nanny smiled. “So you have to be a psychologist, more or less?” Laughing Mrs Esther Kasongo said, “Maybe I’ve just had too many maids.” 86

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“Do you think there is a difference between Batswana maids and Zimbabwean maids?” “Yeah, there is a difference. I think after having three Zimbabweans, I came to have a Motswana. I think she was lazy, one thing. And she was too jumpy. She would do the work so fast and leave. You come from work, she’s at the gate waiting for you. Immediately you drive in, she walks out. With these Zimbabweans, some are polite people, quite polite, unlike the Batswana. Maybe it’s the way they are brought up, or maybe they take us as these Makwerekwere, I don’t know.” “So do you think Batswana maids would behave differently to a fellow Motswana employer?” “I don’t think so. I think that’s the way they are. I think they would just behave in the same manner with another person, whether local or not.” “And what is that due to?” “I don’t know, maybe the upbringing. This one I’m talking about, the Motswana, we would go to work and, she would do her work, but she would also go into my bedroom, into my vest cases, and just go through everything. She stole my rings, my necklace and… Except for the phone calls, I’ve never lost anything with a Zimbabwean, no! Never!” “Interesting. So if a maid samples your bedroom, you are uncomfortable?” “That also frightened me. What else can’t she do?” Mrs Esther Kasongo laughed. “She could even throw herself on my bed and…” “And throw you out of it eventually?” Dr Nanny came in. “So in a way, you have a concern, even if it’s hidden below, for your security as the madam of the house, isn’t it? Since others come in, in all sorts of guises, it is important to keep things in check, always, is that correct?” “I know, I know, yeah!” “Is that why you are the one doing the cooking and not the maid?” “Actually she does some of the cooking. Though she’s not so good, but at least when you explain and she’ll try and follow.” “Are you not afraid that if somebody can already cook for your husband she poses a threat, since the saying goes that the way to a man’s heart is through his belly?” “My husband complains,” she laughed. “He said this, ‘I don’t want to eat this food.’ I said, ‘Why?’ He reminded me of the time when the maid asked me if he likes her. So he said, ‘You know what? She’s always so afraid, so frightened when I ask her something. These are the people who can think: to cool this man down, let me throw something into the food.’ That’s the part he doesn’t like. So I’m afraid when I go for Christmas to Lusaka this time and she’s coming back to work.” 87

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“Your husband is going as well?” “No, he is not going.” “You are afraid you’ll go for Christmas and something might happen?” “He might refuse to eat the food. I think he’ll tell her, ‘Don’t cook for me,’ because he has been complaining about it.” “Now let’s talk on a different aspect altogether, your experiences here as a Mokwerekwere.” “It’s bad! It’s bad! That’s maybe what I should say. I always feel I’m a visitor. Though I’ve stayed here for all this long, I don’t feel this can be my home. There’s no freedom with these people. They can’t get it that we are just here for a short period and of course we go. Just the way they take us, I think they are not friendly people. They haven’t made us feel welcome into their country, you see?” “Yeah, exactly.” “I’m comparing with the foreigners who’ve been in Zambia and talk about the way they’ve been welcomed. Here, whatever you ask anyone the answer is, ‘I don’t know.’ They greet, yes, but then I don’t know whether that greeting has a meaning or it’s just a thing that comes automatically. They say ‘Dumela,’ but I don’t know whether it comes from the heart.” “My assistant here told me a story about attitudes towards Zambian women in buses, like when they travel across the border, where a Zambian woman took a bus to come here and she was forced to carry her luggage on her head and not even to have a sit in the bus. They told her she must wait until all Batswana got seats, even though she came early and deserved a seat on a first come first served basis. It was a long bus drive across the border, hundreds of kilometres standing, her luggage on her head.” Mrs Esther Kasongo nodded. “I have a visitor right now in my house, from Zambia. He came here on his way to South Africa to buy a car. He wanted to look at the prices here before proceeding. He said he had booked and bought a ticket, but for the whole of last week he failed to travel until this week. He came standing all the way, despite having bought a ticket earlier than the others. I don’t know why they sold the tickets beyond the number of seats. They even quarrelled when they wanted him to change to the next bus. So he came standing, and was complaining of a migraine headache. It was totally unacceptable. But I said, ‘You were paying, you were giving them money. You should have asked for a seat since you were the first person to pay for a ticket.’ He didn’t ask. I don’t know what happened. It could be what you were just saying.” “Do you think that Batswana attitudes towards whites are different from their attitudes towards Makwerekwere?” “It is! I’ve noticed that!” “How different?” 88

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“Better, far better. For us, it’s like we are beggars, and we see ourselves as rendering them services, great services.” “I’ve been interviewing Batswana women as well – they say they like Makwerekwere men, because these men have got what they call TLC…” “What is that?” “Tender Loving Care.” “Hmm, I think they would because our men are loving people. Though they may have problems in their families, I think when we get married, we stick to one another. Here very few people marry. That is what I’ve seen. There are so many single parents. So when they see these Makwerekwere people are always together, they can’t understand. It’s not because we are in a foreign country, but I think it’s the way we have been brought up back home…” “To cherish marriage?” “Yes. So they think, oh I can also make it, if I can grab the husband and…” “What is it that makes it difficult for people here to marry?” “What can I say? I don’t know what I can say.” “What would be the reason?” “They don’t have morals.” “They don’t have morals?” “I don’t think they take marriage as something serious. I’ve had Zambian friends, men who have married Batswana. A Motswana will just walk out of the house saying, ‘I’m going to buy sweets.’ But immediately she comes out there will be a car on the way, which will pick her up from the house. So yeah, our men, though they are married to them, they are like slaves in the marriage.” “The Batswana wives don’t want too much discipline?” “No, no. I don’t know whether they believe in having two men or what.” “And it cuts across?” “Yeah, and then there are others who like to report you. They can say he is doing this, especially those with businesses. I understand it’s like they want to take over from foreigners.” “Oh, they report you as trying to harass them, whereas you are not doing this?” “No.” “So, if one of these days a secretary from your husband’s department came and told you that he is harassing her, you would just dismiss her because you know this one is trying to use a trick?” Dr Nanny asked with a laugh. 89

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“I think I would believe her. Anything can be possible.” “It’s possible?” “You know men.” “And you, if someone told your husband you had fallen for another man, would he believe it?” She went silent, and after a while she said, “I don’t know, I don’t think so. We’ve been married for a very long time, and I know him well, just as he knows me. We both know who is most likely to endanger our trusting relationship.” “So staying here in Botswana, your greatest fear must be that you can lose your husband, not to a maid but to a Motswana desperately seeking TLC?” “No, that doesn’t worry me.” “How come most Makwerekwere women are not worried in that regard? I’ve talked to lots of other women and that’s not their worry. Is it the institution? Is it the way at home? Batswana women, on the contrary, are very worried about their men. They believe they can lose them at anytime. They are working so hard at keeping them, bending over backwards to do everything the man is asking. But it seems like the more they do, the more irresponsible the man gets. That’s the standard thing throughout the interviews I’ve had with Batswana women. But the Makwerekwere women instead are so confident. Even if you were to open their eyes and show the husbands with someone else, they will not listen. At least, it seems so to me. They will say that’s nothing and move on to the next subject of conversation. Is it a cultural thing or what? Since this appears to cut across the entire Makwerekwere community, have you an explanation?” “I think it’s more in the person. I think it’s not cultural.” “Is it knowing the person?” “Yeah, I think this depends on individuals.” “Not cultural? It is striking that in general, while Batswana women are very insecure in their relationships, at least from the interviews I’ve had, Makwerekwere women tend to be very secure – confident about their relationships.” “It could be the culture, come to think of it.” I observed how Dr Nanny, not often though, seemed to manoeuvre her informants into a certain position. In wanting to confirm her own understanding, was she influencing their opinions? Were they just giving the answers they thought she wanted to hear? When I asked her about this later, she said you sometimes have to challenge your informants by putting the evidence there on the table for them. 90

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“Yes, maybe cultural as you say. The way we were brought up and then before marriage, the initiation we go through, that’s important. We are taught certain things that stay with us and guide the way we relate to men. We are brought up to seek relationships that last, not relationships as an experiment.” “Well put. Ok, very final question now. You’ve told me about what you think are Batswana attitudes towards you and other foreigners. What would you say are your attitudes towards Batswana?” Mrs Esther Kasongo took a deep breath. “What can I say?” she laughed. “I have a few friends but we don’t meet. We just see each other in the streets – hi, hi, or they horn. But I cannot go to their houses and have tea or a meal together with them, the way I do with some friends. I don’t think they welcome people in that manner. Or to say, let’s go and have a drink or let’s go out and do this, let’s meet and… there are very few of them, if any, who do that. I’ve tried to invite some to my house, and they don’t reciprocate. They like what I offer, they would like to come again for tea, but with them it’s not vice versa, no. So I think they are fond of using foreigners. They always want to receive, but not to give.” “Interesting. I was wondering, what do you think you have achieved through being here in Botswana? Have you succeeded?” “I can say, I think crime here is not much compared to home and we sleep peacefully. I think that is the part I like most.” “A lot of money is going back home – truckloads of remittances…?” Dr Nanny laughed the rest of her sentence. “Not as much as you think,” Mrs Esther Kasongo laughed in return. “I think there’s a little financial freedom, but the most important thing is the peace of mind. But one feels lonely here, very lonely.” “Thank you very much for a fantastic interview,” Dr Winter-Bottom Nanny concluded.

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Chapter Fourteen

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A

n interview that has stayed fresh in my mind is one we had with Johanna Salmon, a Swedish blonde in her late twenties married to her Oxford University student-days’ sweetheart, a dreadlocked English-Motswana mulatto, Lucky ‘Bob Marley’ Lesego, but proudly determined to keep her maiden name. Sitting relaxed, a pot of tea and a copy of Alexander McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency novel on a little table by her side, Johanna Salmon seemed more than enthusiastic to share her experiences with maids and more. After the formalities of introduction, she started. “Coming from Sweden, you don’t have any experience with maids. I came here when I was sixteen. Everybody had maids. I think my parents were a bit shocked as well. You’re thinking, ‘No, we can do our own housework.’ But then, everybody had somebody working at the house. So you realise you have people coming everyday asking for work and then it just happens. “Our maid, Setume, was from Mochudi. We had her for two years, and we actually inherited her from my mother’s Swedish friend. She wanted Setume to wait on the table, but Setume wasn’t comfortable with that. My mother’s friend was sort of tired of teaching her, ‘Yes, you have to go to right side, you do like this, and then you hold the tray…’ Well, I think she was entertaining a lot. It just wasn’t a good match. So that’s how Setume ended up with us. “That was my first experience with a maid. I also remember that my parents wanted me to keep my room tidy. I had the master bedroom. I was lucky in the house, and my room was a mess. They’d instructed Setume that she should never come and clean if I hadn’t tidied up. I sort of understood that. But I was still like, ‘Shit, we are paying her. She is here full time. Why can’t she just do it?’ Sometimes she would just come and sort of lift the files and clean, sort of dust underneath the bed. We were grateful for staying in Botswana for a couple of years and sort of enjoying the luxury of having somebody doing your dirty work. And we taught her a bit of cooking, our style. We were grateful because we knew it was a luxury that wouldn’t last.

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“My dad had quite close contact with Setume. That I remember vividly. They communicated quite well together. I didn’t talk to her much. We weren’t very close at all. But I think she was happy. She was alright.” I remember Dr Winter-Bottom Nanny picking up on this in a way she later told me is called ‘probing’. “It’s interesting you say your dad had closer contact with Setume because normally it’s the mum who has contact. Interestingly, people seem to think that the world of maids is the world of mums.” “Yeah,” Johanna Salmon agreed. “I think it was like that not because my dad is necessarily very interested in house issues but because he wasn’t working very much then. It was my mother who was on a contract with a development agency out here. So, he spent a lot of time at home. He was doing the garden, digging up the pool. He was just there, he was around a lot. So it’s because of that. Moreover, my sister and I were already quite grown up. I was there from when I was 16 to 18, my sister from when she was 10 to 12 years old. If we’d been younger, I think things would have been different, as my mother would probably have been dealing more with Setume.” Dr Nanny pursued the matter further. “There is another dimension which comes across from interviews I’ve had. That when a man is interested in the maid, even if only marginally, suspicion surfaces as the woman of the house does not quite know how to situate his interest. With the benefit of hindsight, do you think that sort of suspicion might have arisen because of your dad’s closeness to Setume?” Johanna Salmon’s denial was emphatic. “No, I don’t think so! I think I could completely rule that out. No, I don’t think there was any sort of sexual compatibility, let alone complicity. No, I can’t imagine! Obviously, I don’t know what exactly their interaction was like. How she perceived his closeness. But they had this sort of joking relationship. They communicated at that level. I think that was it. It was also quite clear to her that they were just being friendly. And I don’t think… no! I would be very, very surprised if there was anything!” Here was a girl who knew her dad, Dr Nanny must have thought. But she wasn’t going to give up lightly. She was too much of a seasoned researcher to yield too easily. “Why would you be surprised? I mean, you said you couldn’t imagine it. ‘I would be surprised.’ I mean the sort of words you use.” Dr Nanny probed further. “I use the word compatibility. I don’t know if that’s a good word. Sometimes you can be attracted to difference. She was very smart, but not a very interesting person. I wouldn’t say she was very attractive. She was this sort of – I don’t know the word – slow at doing her things. So I’m 94

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certain she was laughing at my dad’s jokes and I think he appreciated that, but the two were coming from different worlds.” Dr Nanny gave up, with a smile that seemed to suggest she knew something that Johanna Salmon didn’t want to admit, and resumed with her next question. “From Setume you moved onto another maid?” “No, after Setume we left Botswana, and I only came back recently.” “How did it feel, leaving Botswana and having to take care of yourself again, given the luxury you had grown used to with Setume?” “Like I said we just had to enjoy those two years. In Sweden you know you come back from work and that’s when the housework starts. There’s nobody there to cook and clean. You look for a quick solution. You put something in the oven and hope for the best. The dirty dishes, you put them away and wash once a week. And you do the same the following week, and then maybe for Christmas, you do a thorough cleaning. It’s just not easy. My parents’ generation is a working generation, both mother and father, both women and men. I think the housework suffered. You don’t have time to iron your shirts, so you don’t bother.” Dr Nanny was particularly keen on this interview, from the questions she asked. “You think the pressures of work and that reality of having to depend on yourself for almost everything makes those who come out here uncomfortable with the whole idea of maids? What does it do to them?” “Yes, it makes them uncomfortable,” confirmed Johanna Salmon. “But they enjoy it too much. So I think they make up all sorts of explanations and excuses to justify what is so contrary to culture in Sweden, but it’s changed, certainly in the last 10 years. People are starting to hire help in the house, especially middle class couples who can afford it. And they have somebody maybe coming once a week, because nobody hires somebody full time – that’s ridiculous. You would have to spend 60 per cent of your salary to pay this person full time. So it’s possible to have somebody who comes and sort of cleans the house once a week. “Lots of Filipino women will do that and other kinds of house chores. And you even have companies that specialise in cleaning services. But they charge horrendous rates to come for 45 minutes, but they can rush through the house extremely efficiently with the latest cleaning equipment. So it’s changed. But before it started changing, before attitudes changed, I think it was just unthinkable having someone and especially a black person working for you as a white person. You would feel very uncomfortable. 95

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“In Sweden, we don’t have that same colonial experience, but still, we’ve seen enough TV about race relations in the United States and in South Africa. We were exposed a lot to British-American culture and that whole empire thing. I think that white-black thing makes people uncomfortable. But then, you get to know whoever is working for you and you just relate to them. I think the white and black thing is more theoretical. Once you come near and you interact with people, it doesn’t matter anymore, you just don’t think of that. But I think it’s still sort of a bit uncomfortable to have somebody different from you in skin colour doing boring work, the work you hate to do yourself.” “Do you think that somebody who feels guilty about the maid doing their dirty, boring work, would tend to be generous towards the maid? Tend to overpay her?” “Yes, I think so,” agreed Johanna Salmon. “I can give an example, a Swedish family who is staying here. They have a Swedish salary. You can tell what they are doing is trying not to stick inside the salary agreed to with the maid, but sort of thinking, ‘How can we bring some development, how can we do something for her grandson? We could give him a nice toy for Christmas, but it has to be educational. It shouldn’t just be expensive. It has to be a toy that can develop him and help him.’ And every time she babysits, she gets extra. They are giving her a generous salary, very generous, and benefits. And I think that’s certainly a way to compensate, to feel more comfortable – the sense of giving something back not just to this person but also to the wider community.” “What do you think would be the attitude of the maid towards your Swedish family?” “I know about her that she doesn’t want to work for Batswana,” Johanna Salmon replied. “So I think she is quite pleased with them, because she knows how other maids in her situation are treated.” “Let’s talk about your own experiences with maids, now as an employer. No longer as a 16 year old,” said Dr Nanny. “Yeah, we had Loveness because she impressed us. When we moved into this house, she cleaned the house. She scrubbed it down. We saw just after the tenants had vacated. It was a mess, and we were like, ouh! Is this going to be inhabitable? They painted it and she cleaned it and we saw it. So I felt she’d really done a good job, and when she asked for a job, we said sure. “She’s obviously a hard worker, and we have a very good impression of her. She’s sweet and I think we’ve sort of connected and also we didn’t want to go through the whole hassle of employing somebody – interviews and everything. And also I was a bit desperate, because my twins were 96

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one year old. They were driving me up the wall. So I was desperate to have somebody. And that’s even one of the reasons why I wanted to come to Botswana. I knew that here you could have support for the house and for the garden. And have somebody to look after the kids. I would say that is a big part of why we came here, not to be stuck in a two-room apartment in Oxford or Stockholm and also not having to do all the housework yourself. “So we hired her. We weren’t quite sure at that point whether the fact that she was from Zimbabwe was going to be a problem because I remember there’d been some signals coming from the Botswana government that they would be more open towards foreigners even without education and then it was a bit back and forth. Then they said no-no, it’s only for the farm workers, not for maids. The message was a bit unclear. “So for a long time she just stayed. Every three months she would go to immigration and they would say, ‘So do you have a job?’ ‘No, no, no, I just do a few piece jobs.’ And she never told them her real address, that she was staying in the Servants’ Quarters in our house. She’s got her permit now, so we’ve a seamstress, because she’s got a certificate from Zimbabwe showing she can sew. My husband wrote a letter, ‘Yes, we require Loveness to do so and so in the house and a whole lot.’ “So that’s where she’s at now. It’s a big relief, because she sees the Zimbabwean community has so many deportations. You look through the gate before you leave the house because the Police are patrolling in civilian clothes and picking people up from the streets. I think she feels really happy now. And it’s easier for her to cross the border. In the past, they wouldn’t let her through, and she would spend the night there at the border. She’s much more comfortable now. She feels relieved that she can do something for her family, and for her kids. “And her family is back in Zimbabwe?” “Yeah, but she’s got one son here who is studying as an accountant or something. She’s got another boy who’s finished school. For her other kid, school stopped.” “She must be elderly.” “No, she’s young. She’s 40 or 41.” “You are the first person who has mentioned 41 as young,” Dr Nanny commented. “People always tell me 40 is old,” she added with a laugh. “One thing that has come through from other interviews I’ve had is about the social life of maids, especially those that stay in with their employers. Some employers feel this is a problem because boyfriends come in and the maids impose their boyfriends on you. Do you have such a problem with your maid?” 97

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“Loveness told us she’s no longer interested in boyfriends. She doesn’t want anything to do with men, because they would just end up taking her money or giving her AIDS. She says no more. I don’t know if she’ll meet somebody though. Obviously you want her to have a social life. How can you deny that to somebody? How can you deny somebody the right to have a boyfriend? “I must admit though that it’s still a bit tricky because you don’t want this other person on top of you. Already it’s quite intimate, having a maid – somebody doing your laundry or going through all your stuff every day, seeing everything. Seeing you when you are feeling sexy, when you are feeling filthy... I mean, she knows a lot about us. Things are further complicated by the fact of the maid living in the house or the Servants’ Quarters. So if she brings her boyfriend home, he’ll be there in the house. But I’m not going to stop her, unless there’s like wild partying going on or something really bad. For now, we know she doesn’t drink. She has no boyfriend.” “So if she had one you would know?” “If she had a boyfriend? I think so. Obviously I don’t know what she does. That’s what she’s told us. But I think she’s being sincere about that. But whether she has a boyfriend or not what can we do? She has to have a social life as well.” “Exactly. But it’s tricky, as you say.” “It is uncomfortable but you can’t eat your cake and have it too. She’s a person with more than a working life. She’s not a cleaning robot.” “You mentioned a while ago that she knows a lot about you. It was an interesting statement. Could you substantiate?” “Ok… how much does she know? It isn’t that we necessarily sit down and have girl-to-girl conversations, but you just see things. She interprets things her own way, of course, within her frame of reference, and there are probably things she believes about us that we wouldn’t recognise. But it’s just living together. She’s always there. She sees how my husband and I interact. How we interact when we eat lunch or in the afternoon. She sees me together with the kids, even when I’m angry with them. She can hear me shouting at them. Even from the yard near the Servants’ Quarters, she can hear how I respond to them. Anyway, if there had been something, a boyfriend, we would have known. And also because her friend works for my husband’s mother, they interact and we interact with his family and so I think there’s probably some exchange of information there. Not that we have any secrets, but they just see how the family works, how everybody interacts with each other.” “Does it worry you to be so intimate with a stranger?” 98

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“I’m surprised to say that it doesn’t really. I feel quite comfortable with Loveness. I really feel I know her, that she can be trusted. I think she’s a good person. I trust her a hundred per cent. You can have somebody working for you who you don’t trust, you can’t sort of pin down, or you don’t feel a hundred per cent comfortable. If she was that sort of person, then I would perhaps do things differently. I would be more private. “ “What do you think she thinks of you?” “I think, again, this is white woman thing. My husband’s mother is a Motswana and my husband is half British, half Motswana, so he is sort of, not white-white category. While I’m a complete stranger in that I am wholly white, my husband and kids are somewhere in-between. So it’s not so obvious that we are foreigners. We are different and then we are white people. “I think she thinks we are quite rich – that we have money –, although we obviously are not, because we always feel broke. But I think in her terms we are very well off. She always expresses her gratitude, like, ‘I’m so grateful I have this job, I’m so grateful you got me this work permit, and I…’ She’s always too good. “It makes you feel uncomfortable, but you still find yourself taking a bit of advantage of that. You know she’s supposed to finish at 5, and you look you see, it’s 5:45. ‘Ah, shit! I still need to do shopping.’ Then you come home and you say, ‘Hmm! Sorry.’ She says, ‘No problem.’ So you sort of compensate by giving her a bit extra at the end of the month. “There must be things that really get on her nerves, but she always tells us she’s very grateful. And I think she is, because compared to how she was in Zimbabwe, she feels real gratitude.” “About Setume, your parents’ maid when you were sixteen,” said Dr Nanny, returning in time, “you mentioned that it just couldn’t be possible that there was an intimate relationship between her and your dad. You said: ‘No, she was just not the type. No, they had a joking relationship.’ What would you say is the relationship between your current maid and your husband?” “I would say it’s just very friendly.” “Would it be similar to the one your dad had with Setume?” Dr Nanny asked. “Ah, you want to know if there is more potential between Loveness and my husband than there was between Setume and my father?” Johanna Salmon grinned. “I don’t think so. Let’s say that my husband is interested in her, I think she would feel too much loyalty. I really do. I don’t know. It’s very difficult to picture it actually, very difficult.” 99

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Dr Nanny pushed the point further. “Yeah, it’s interesting. I was talking to a French couple and the French man is married to a woman from Burkina Faso. The man came here before she joined him with the children. When the wife finally came, the maid was very hostile to her and assumed a certain degree of comfort in the house that was suspect. The wife confronted her husband saying the maid had to go and didn’t even give her time to pack. She had insisted, ‘Either the maid goes or I do.’ Because these sorts of things always come up, even in my initial interview, I thought it’s a dimension to include even when it’s awkward.” “She treats me and my husband differently, I think. It’s partly because I haven’t been working since we returned to Botswana. Like she sees me sitting in front of the computer, but she doesn’t quite know what I’m doing. She sees stacks of paper lying around in a mess and me sitting at that computer most of the day, most days. And my husband is working long hours. She calls me mama, and my husband Lucky Bob. So I don’t know – you can interpret that she wouldn’t use my name. She’s never used it. She only uses mama, but I am clearly much younger than she.” “So how do you interpret it?” “I had actually asked her what she means by that. She’s definitely maintaining that distance between employer and employee, madam and maid in our instance. I remember in the beginning we invited her to sit at the table. But she never did. She sits in the kitchen when she’s eating. It’s a bit tricky because last week she was sick and had to lie down. As she wasn’t feeling well, I brought food and tea to her bed. Then I queried myself, ‘This is supposed to be my servant, but I’m bringing her tea and food. Would other people do that?’ “I felt strange, especially because I’m not used to dealing with people as servants. They are supposed to have the same rights – we all go to the same market, we all __buy at the same prices. There’s not this subordinate thing, but it’s there. Even if you want to eliminate it, how do you do that? I’m not sure. It’s something I have to think about further.” “Another aspect which has come up in other interviews has been that maids, especially Zimbabwean maids, are good but... There is always that but with a capital B, because they steal things. Have you had that experience personally, or do you know people who’ve had that experience?” “No, for us there hasn’t been any stealing. I think we are really benefiting from her gratitude.” Dr Nanny had an insight that couldn’t wait. “Let me interject something here if I may. Perhaps they don’t snatch because they will stand to lose a lot more than they gain, given how you pay them much better than other employers – who are maybe fellow Batswana and Makwerekwere. So one 100

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could assume, and this is my hypotheses, that where they are underpaid, maids will tend to snatch to make up for what they are really worth in their own eyes. And where they are treated well and given incentives, they tend to calculate that to snatch something is not in their interest, as they are likely to lose out on much more substantive benefits if it is discovered that they’ve snatched something.” Johanna Salmon wasn’t sure. “That’s thinking like an economist. It makes a lot of sense but you don’t measure gratitude in money.” Dr Nanny was unwilling to let go on this one. “I still insist that it applies. People calculate the risk when snatching something. And often snatching is done in response to something else. They do it in bits and pieces until they accumulate substantially, and towards the end when they have had their salary, knowing they are going to leave back for Zimbabwe or change employers, they disappear. “And you, you have no references on them. You don’t know much about them. You employed them illegally and so you cannot go to the Police to report them. They know your situation and they take that into account. “They come into your place in the beginning and conscientiously establish themselves as hardworking and sometimes even as honest. Then they strike. The point I am trying to make here is that they are not as dumb as we might assume. They calculate just like any human being does and they know what their overall interests are and what they stand to gain and it may not be in monetary terms. It may just be the comfort of the environment – not overworked, working with people who feel guilty about enslaving you, and so on and so forth,” Dr Nanny concluded. Johanna Salmon replied, “I’m not doubting that maids, like everyone else, could be calculating in their relationships, and that I may be gullible, but I trust her. It think it would be stupid of her to betray that trust because once we are fully settled and into jobs and all, things will be even more comfortable, especially with the kids being in kindergarten. Everything will be easier for her. We will also be able to pay her a bigger salary. “So what she should do is regard this hectic time –watching the kids and trying to do the housework while the kids are running around in front of you or behind you wrecking havoc – as temporal. It is a sort of investment for her. But I don’t know if she thinks that way. That’s what I think. But it’s not something we’ve sat down to discuss. What’s the basis of her calculations, I don’t know. I’ve got my calculations. Maybe that’s something we should sit down to discuss. 101

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“But, like I was saying, despite this whole thing of labour rights and having contracts and sticking to them, I feel she still feels that it’s also a personal relationship. She does feel very close to the kids. It is a bit too much to be too square and strict. Once I tried to suggest that maybe she should have a rate for babysitting. Her response was, ‘No, no, they are my kids.’ “That’s where she is coming from. She never attended God’s-Tear Maids’ Project. She doesn’t know her rights as such, but she knows what makes her feel comfortable.” “If you permit me, I could ask a transition question before I go to the next stage.” “Go ahead.” “If you were one day to find Loveness and your husband in a compromising situation, what would be your reaction?” “Well, I wouldn’t just sit down and pick the boots from under the bed and put them on. I think my world would fall apart. I would be shocked. When you get married, you sort of think of what happens if I should be tempted for example. What if he were to find out? How would we deal with it? I think it would be a big shock and maybe it would be easier to deal with if it were somebody where I could understand the attraction.” “An attraction to the maid could not be understood?” “No.” “That’s clear. On another topic, I was wondering how often you get propositioned by people in Botswana as you go about your business.” “I don’t know if I should interpret what I experience as proposition, as I don’t know how sincere it is. It’s always sort of ‘Hey, baby.’ Sometimes ‘Lekgoa.’ I should be open, but it pisses me off. I don’t know why they think it’s alright to call a grown woman ‘baby’ and ‘white girl’ or whatever.” “It’s interesting what you say. I have been talking to other foreigners, especially Makwerekwere, who say that Batswana men do not have basic etiquette about how to relate to women in matters of love. Somebody will come up to you and say, ‘I’ve got love to propose to you,’ or ‘I love you; can we go and have sex?’ It seems as most West, Central and Eastern Africans find it strange that Batswana men are not subtle. So much so that sometimes you even meet somebody you like, but they are so clumsy in their ways that you end up just telling them off.” “Yeah, that makes me uncomfortable, especially when I’m walking and in a bad mood. They’ll find they can get a very rude comment back. But the other day I actually talked to somebody. I was very reluctant because they started off in the same distasteful manner. I made it clear 102

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that I was married and that I wasn’t interested, even if I wasn’t wearing a ring. And then they said, ‘Oh, thank you so much. It`s so nice to meet a white girl who is forthcoming and wanted to talk to us.’ “I was like oh, so you have the feeling that we are not very open, that we are closed and dealing with people not in the right way. But I told them, ‘You could show some respect, you could say hello.’ Then we parted. I was going in one direction and they in the other. Sometimes they say ‘Hello, madam,’ which is a bit cold. Sometimes they’ll say baby even if they are just meaning to be friendly, but I’ll get so annoyed.” “There’s a thesis that Batswana happen to be amongst some of the most westernised people in Africa, despite their late start. Despite being for the most part a sleepy, rural, peasant subsistence economy, Botswana has rapidly westernised since diamonds became the driver of the economy after independence in 1967. Could their behaviour be an attempt to mimic what they perceive to be the way men would address a woman in Europe and North America? Could their attitude be based on what they consume from the media – television and so on? How would you situate it?” “If it is television that they are seeking to imitate, I’m afraid they are imitating the wrong thing from television. Like yesterday my mother-inlaw and I were watching the Bold and the Beautiful. There was this dream scene of a woman on a horse heading for a scene of ultimate romance. Being romantic is not just going straight to bed. It’s everything that happens before that. It’s helping the woman down from the horse, giving her bouquets of flowers and much more. So my question would be, if you wanted to emulate something, why wouldn’t you emulate that sort of gallantry? I’m not saying it happens like that in real life in America or Europe, but if you want to emulate an ideal fantasy, why wouldn’t you go for something really romantic?” “I’m made to understand that Botswana women tend to compare foreigners with local men. That they often say foreigners in general have got what they call TLC – Tender Loving Care, which Batswana men haven’t, and that the foreigners with the most TLC are the Makgoa. What comments do you have on this?” “I don’t have many close Batswana friends. I know very little about these things. But I remember my husband’s cousin’s sister and her friend. They’d been to a party and the next day they were so pleased they had met some nice gentlemen there who impressed them. They were talking not just ‘Hey baby’ crap, but ‘Let’s talk, let’s get to know each other.’ “Are there instances where you get approached by an individual in whom you have some interest?” 103

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“Yes, I think, it happens. But nothing comes of it, of course. I think it’s because I’ve led this very secluded life with the kids and often when I go out, I go out with my husband.” After thanking Johanna Salmon for the interview, Dr Winter-Bottom Nanny sought and obtained permission from her to interview Loveness, not on the same day, but on a different occasion, when Johanna Salmon would not be present.

104

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T

he occasion presented itself sooner than anticipated. One weekend Johanna Salmon, her husband Lucky ‘Bob Marley’ Lesogo and their baby twins were invited by his parents to the Lost City Resort in South Africa. Dr Winter-Bottom Nanny and I took advantage of their absence. At midday on Saturday, we picked up some chicken wings and soft drinks for three from Nandos, and went straight for the appointment scheduled the day before with Loveness. We sat in the garden, the three of us, and ate the chicken for lunch. Loveness gave us each a wet nap, before and after the meal, to clean our hands. I wondered if she used the same disposable wipes to clean the bums of the Salmon and Lesogo twins. Dr Nanny rubbed her hands together, maybe to help the moisture evaporate from them, but to me it looked as if she were rubbing them in excitement, in anticipation of yet another interview, and this time with a maid herself. Convinced that Loveness was ready, Dr Nanny began, “For how long have you been in Botswana?” Loveness looked around the garden for a moment and began slowly, “My first time to come here was 1997 in October. I was not working. I was selling beans and other legumes, as they will say in Setswana. I didn’t get much profit and I didn’t lose hope. I just said, ‘This is my first time, let me try again.’ “When I come next time, I come with those legumes and with clothes also. I do sewing, dressmaking, and I was making and selling. You know those Batswana people, when you come here they’ll say go-come-go-come until the days stamped on your passport for you to stay are finished. And then you go back. When you go back without money, you go and work hard there again to find money to come back to collect the money people owe you here. When you come again, they give you so little and say, ‘I don’t have money.’ I end up like I’m doing nothing. Except getting losing. So I change. I start to do part times, working door-to-door.” “Like piece jobs?” Dr Nanny sought clarification. “Looking for piece jobs,” Loveness agreed. “If somebody gives me something like – ‘This is my house, and I want you to clean and do this, and do that, and I don’t want thieves. Some of the Zimbabweans, they

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are thieves. They can…’ –, I just say, ‘Mama, I can’t say I’m not a thief, just try me.’ And they’ll be happy. “Like that woman in Block 9, Rudo Potokwane, I just saw her in her garden. I said, ‘Mama, mukupa part time.’ And she said, ‘Ala maZimbabwe, gana some of you they are thieves?’ I said, ‘Mama, I can’t say anything. Just go and ask another woman there.’ And she went back and that woman said, ‘This woman? I don’t think so, try.’ And I started to do washing and I spent almost like ten days with her. She liked it and went and extended the days for me. I spent a month doing washing there and cleaning the house for her – the whole house, the whole yard, everything. “I did it with all my heart. I was just working like I was in my house. I didn’t know that she would think, and she was asking me like, ‘What you are doing?’ I told her my husband died ‘96. In ‘97 I started to worry about what I would do with the kids. I just come to Botswana. So my problem is this, I want to work hard. “In the end she gave me my money. First when she said she would give me end of month, I said, ‘Oh shame, I’m going to overstay and I don’t know.’ She gave me my money, and she gave me clothes, all these Chinese things for my kids, for me. When I took her whole wardrobe and washed her things, she said, ‘Don’t pack them in the wardrobe. Put them on the floor.’ She took another day to give me some of those clothes. ‘And I’m very happy for you to stay here,’ she told me. “She stayed with my son. I went home and I come back. She was like my mother. When I come, I do part time there and some of the days I go elsewhere. I see like my life going up from there. She took me to her mother. I worked hard there, and she said, ‘No, my mother, she likes talking, talking too much. Loveness the way you are, you can’t stay with somebody like that. No, come back.’ “I came back to her place and she sent me to her friend to clean the house there. It’s here in Extension 10. I cleaned that house thoroughly. It was so dirty. That’s the time I found this woman, Mama Johanna Salmon. And they asked the friend, ‘Where does she come from?’ Her friend said, ‘From Zimbabwe, and she doesn’t have papers.’ She seemed interested because she asked, ‘What is she doing right now?’ and the friend said, ‘Just working and going back home.’ And she said, ‘Ah, we will talk with her. We want her to work for us.’ “That time I was already near about to go home and I worked for them for one week and then I went. They gave me money. I was very happy. I didn’t know they are going to do that. She said, ‘This house was dirty and see how well she cleaned it. We like her.’ And that woman – her friend – , she paid me also. 106

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“So now I just work for them – for ten years or more I hope. I don’t mind about time. As long as I am working, I don’t mind about many things. And if I’m here, I feel like I’m in my house. These are my mother and father, Mama Johanna and Lucky Bob. If I got problems they are here. “I told them I’ve got a certificate for sewing, and they were interested in my sewing certificate. They said it was not wise for me to stay without a permit, and assisted me in getting one. ‘No, we don’t want you to be here without a permit, we are going to make a plan.’ They bought me a machine which I use to sew when I am free.” “You’ve got your permit?” “Yeah, but the permit is for the dressmaking. But when somebody comes looking, I’ll just say I’m…” “Doing dressmaking?” “Yes. That is what I say. They went to Sweden for one month. I stayed behind to take care of the house. My heart was doing this and that with fear. It’s only me who knows this house, there is no electricity outside. I sleep in a house this big. They leave everything, the door open. Everything they leave. They left me with money to buy papers every week, to do this, to buy groceries when they come back. I did that and kept the change. When they came back, the house was clean, everything. I saw they were very happy. And with these kids, me I’m ok. I like kids, me I’ve got four of my own. I like them and they like me. Here, all the father and mother of Mama and Lucky Bob, they like me, so I’m ok. Me, I like this job of working like a maid. In Zimbabwe everybody must know how to work as a maid.” “Oh really?” “Really, everybody must know how to work as a maid – to clean the house, everything, sweep the yard, cooking, doing everything.” “How do you do it? Do you go to school to learn that or where do you learn it?” “We learn it from our parents in the family. When parents are lazy and not very strict with their kids, their kids become lazy. If the parents work very hard, the kids work very hard. They said, ‘You know, if somebody gives you something to do and you do like you don’t like it, but you like the money, it’s not good. Don’t work like you want them to give more money. Don’t expect more money. Let them see how you work. They’ll change their mind serious without medicine, without anything, without saying that I want an increase of my salary. You’ll see everything change.’” “That’s true. And you say that in Zimbabwe when you grew up, your parents taught you how to arrange the house, how to clean, how to wash and that everybody who grows up in a good family should know that. When you were growing up in Zimbabwe, did you go and work like maids elsewhere?” 107

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“We go. We go and work but not too much, because everybody is a hard worker. For most men, their wives can do everything. Or even if she’s going to work and the kids are going to school, we wake up early like 4 o’clock.” “People are like that too in Mimboland and other parts of West and Central Africa I’ve visited. They work hard. How come in Botswana here it’s different? Is it because of too much money or what?” “They don’t have money. They are poor, they are lazy. Even they have got money or they don’t have money, they are like that. This woman, she works very hard. I can’t say I am staying with a white woman. She can clean the dishes to help me. But she is a white woman. But with Batswana, you will find the dishes from Friday. If you take off Saturday, you’ll find them on Monday. They’ll keep on piling, piling right up. My friend is working for a Motswana. She is crying every day, ‘My waist is painful because of the job.’” “They leave everything for her to do?” “Yeah, they don’t even clean the dishes. They, they keep everything dirty. She, she’s comes, she works, she gets everything clean.” Loveness took one of the wet naps to wipe up what a bird had just dropped on the centre of the table. Dr Nanny continued her pursuit. “She comes and see the dishes piled up. Does the pay pile up as well? Is the pay good?” “I can’t speak for my friend or other people. For me, the people I work for are ok. The time I met them, they said they were going to pay me P100 a month for caring for two kids and cleaning the house. I realised that if I worked hard, they would change. And they did. I stay with them, I don’t pay rent. For food, I eat anything in the fridge, anything of my choice. Sometimes it is the leftovers which I eat if I choose to. Sometimes I ask for food from the lady of the house. ‘Mama, can I?’ Sometimes she tells me what to eat before she goes. So me, I’m ok. And I just say, ‘Thank God.’” “Earlier you said when you first came to Block 9, you saw a woman who wanted to take you but was afraid because Zimbabweans steal a lot. Is it true that they steal? “Some of us are like that. They come here, when they find a house with a lot of things, they steal. As for me, I told you I washed a whole cupboard full of clothes. More than 200 and something skirts and shirts and t-shirts. Some Zimbabweans think more about their personal problems than their employers’ interests, so they steal to solve personal needs. On the contrary, I think that if you are honest, people like you. 108

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“I told them that me I’m staying alone in Zimbabwe, my kids they are alone right now. My husband died and he was an only child. I needed to sustain my children. The first born was in Form 3. I ran out of school fees. I came here to try our luck. I came here with my son who came to study business management. He finished the course. He is doing Accounts stage 3 with that woman in Block 9. From the time he came here, the woman offered to be his guardian. She said she would tell officials that the biological mother of the boy is in Zimbabwe. I’m trying to help so-soso. And she did that.” “Oh, that’s good. Back to stealing, Zimbabwean maids who steal, why do they steal?” “Some of them they think they are going to be…” “Rich suddenly?” “But it also varies from person to person. Some of the Batswana girls also they will steal. When my neighbour in Block 9 took another maid, a Motswana, she took a whole bag. At the end they found her with the clothes. So the Batswana people too, they steal. But for the big record, they will say the Zimbabweans. It’s because we are foreigners. But we are not all of us stealing. Just like Batswana, they are not all good. Some are good, some are not.” “Maids are also human beings. You also need your life, you need to go out, need your man, your boyfriend. How do you cope when you are staying where you work, and maybe you want to come with your boyfriend, and your madam is twisting her face? How do you cope?” “I’m here. I just go to my church and I think about my life and my kids. I tell myself, let me work for my kids. I don’t care about boyfriends, but I’ve got a friend who helps me. For instance, when I wanted my days extended. That one is my friend and my boss knows him. He always comes here to help us. If I’ve got problems, ‘Ah Loveness, be serious in what you are doing, you’ll get something and I’ll get something.’ But with boyfriends, these ones they’ll just say, ‘Loveness, do you have anything for me?’ On Sundays if I don’t go to church, I knit in the house. My talent is with my hands. I knit, I sew. I don’t like to be idle.” “Do you have any friends who work for other people who have this problem of boyfriends? For instance, working as live in maids and want to bring their boyfriends, leading to complaints? And finally they have to leave to go and work with someone else who might allow them to bring their boyfriend where they work and stay?” “Yeah, some Zimbabweans are getting that problem. During weekends, some people they don’t know that somebody must be off. They tell you the day you start working, you’ll get off on Saturday afternoon at 2 o’clock. 109

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In the end, there is no off. If somebody comes there to see you, they’ll say, ‘No, you are bringing thieves, we don’t want many friends.’ “So they are like that. It’s also the fault of some of us, who have many boyfriends, but don’t let the madam know. Tomorrow somebody comes, I’m looking for Loveness. What do you want with Loveness? She’s my girlfriend. Next time somebody comes, same thing. It’s not good. They’ll think in the end, you’ll bring thieves. “Me, if I got a friend I’d be open about it. I think boyfriends should be introduced to employers, openly so they know where one spends one’s weekends. This is my friend and I am going to have a weekend with him. Telling them is the best thing. They’ll know that there is somebody here. If they didn’t know, and they find somebody at the gate, or coming out – a man –, they’d just say, ‘Ah, she didn’t tell she’s got a boyfriend.’ So me, I don’t go for that, I just tell them the truth.” “And they understand?” “I’d just tell them this is my friend, so-and-so.” “There have been reports of women employed as maid in homes with couples. The maid shows an interest in the man because she thinks he looks nice. She seduces him by dressing in short skirts. Are there cases like that that you know of ?” “Here?” “Have you known any cases like that?” “I haven’t heard of any.” Loveness confessed, “But such things do happen. Here, the way they wear their clothes is different from us. We wear long dresses. Even wearing trousers, like I am now, is not a sign of respect. It is because I am here that I am dressed like this. I work with kids and am busy cleaning. Otherwise, we wear long dresses. If I wear these trousers elsewhere, even my son would not forgive me. But those Batswana, they leave the house with hardly any clothes on. It makes the eyes of men too big. In Zimbabwe if you dress the way they do here, there is a real risk of being stripped naked by some men who say, ‘Go naked because it is what you want, you are hardly wearing anything.’” “How come Botswana is so different from Zimbabwe? Yet they are so close? They are neighbours and yet they are so different. How? Why?” “I don’t know, their freedom here…” “Is too much?” “And the other thing is their kids. They have got freedom… how do they say it…? They say their kids must be free. If the kid says no, it is no. The mama cannot say yes, or tell her kid that I don’t like what you like. In Zimbabwe it is different. Parents are still respected. If a father says his daughters must be at home by 6 o’clock, that is the law. Six o’clock was 110

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clocking in time and curfew. The same was true for the boys. Failing to respect clocking in times leads to punishment, such as missing meals, especially when children return home after super.” “So in a way, Zimbabweans who come here for the first time must be shocked to see how Batswana behave so differently from them?” “And married Zimbabwean men, if they came here – my husband died – they wouldn’t allow their wives to come here. These people walk naked, so some of them they’d say, the way I am wearing long dresses, nice, ok, and be attracted. In Zimbabwe if you wear trousers, they should not be made too tight. Wear trousers tight and t-shirts, with navel button, stomach and buttocks out? No, never!” “Zimbabwean men who are here, they must find these women very attractive. So when they come here, they leave their women to go for Batswana women?” “When they come here, they just take advantage of them because they are walking naked, they just use them. The Batswana they have got many kids outside marriage. I can have four kids without being married and they’ll just say ok, girlfriend. And sometimes the Zimbabwean men get into relationships of convenience because they want immigration papers, ‘I just do that because of the papers, to get the papers easy and stay here,’ they say. But at the end, Zimbabwean men return to Zimbabwe. Every month they are going home to take care of business that side.” “Do they provide for the children they have had with Batswana women?” “Yeah, and he will take that child back with him, whether or not he is married to the child’s mother.” “Really? Why?” “Yeah, although they find it tough because Batswana say if you didn’t marry here, the kids are not yours – everything for the wife if they are born before marriage. In Zimbabwe, a woman is allowed to stay with her partner before he finishes paying bridewealth. As long as he initiates payment, they are recognised as man and wife. The woman is expected to show respect to him, so that he finishes the bridewealth payments. “I’ve got to be a good woman, so my husband can be respected. I can say I was 15 years with my husband – I didn’t go to a bar. I was shy to go and call him in the bar if somebody came. I would never step a step to reach there. When he comes, I just look at him and he looks at me and he comes and he says, ‘E-em what’s wrong?’ I’d say, ‘E-e-h somebody wants to see you.’ “In our culture, if I’m married, if I want to drink beer, me and my friends we can just drink – drink a little bit. And I must know that my husband is coming, he wants to eat and he wants to bath. And my husband 111

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has drunk. So when he comes you must take care of him because it’s your husband. Sometimes he would come drunk and just fall on the bed and you’d take off your shoes, clothes and sleep with him. “And tomorrow you must wake up and know that he drank beer yesterday, and he didn’t eat. You must wake up and go and cook for him. When he wakes up, bath, from there to eat, clothes are they clean? Ok. Then he can leave. He is proud to tell his friends, ‘I’ve got a wife, a loving caring wife at home. See how smart I look?’ And he’d go and buy you something nice. If he sees somebody wearing nice clothes, he’d buy something like that for you. Actually my husband was doing like that...” The interview went on longer, but the transcription I made stopped because the batteries of the tape recorder ran low that afternoon in Johanna Salmon’s garden. Dr Nanny had felt really moved by the interview with Loveness. As a sign of her gratitude, she gave Loveness P100, and in return saw gratitude engraved on her face. “Can you believe how much joy P100 can bring?” she commented as we left. “‘The Pula means so much because there is never Pula enough,’ said the cow to the butcher, who replied, ‘That’s right, which is why every Saturday I lose a friend like you to the Pula at Maruapula.’” I started the joke, only for Dr Nanny to show how much she knew by completing it.

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W

e also interviewed Dr Mr John and Dr Mrs Jean Nicklewitt, both academics at Diamond University of Science and Technology or DUST, one in the natural sciences and the other in social sciences. It was Johanna Salmon who recommended them as family friends, being familiar, as she was, with the dinner table stories and anecdotes that Dr Mrs Jean Nicklewitt loved to share when they got together over tea, braai or a meal, now and again, as often they did. The Nicklewitts had an experience of being taken for granted by a maid that they were eager to share. The interview took place at their home, where we were invited to a braai of red meat, sausages and chicken, and served St Louis lager, which Dr John Nicklewitt described as ‘Gaborone Pride.’ Dr Mrs Jean Nicklewitt was not yet home when we arrived, so the interview started with her husband. Dr Nanny urged him to continue with the story he must have started earlier, in my absence, about the maid that they were forced to fire. “We could no longer trust her,” he stressed. “The last straw was when we all went away for a weekend and we asked her to take good care of things. She was in the house and we said, ‘We will be away, can you feed the pets? We will pay you extra on top of what we pay you every week.’ There was no extra housework, she just had to feed the pets. Anyway, we came back, it was a joke, she hadn’t fed the pets at all. What is worse, she disappeared for a day or so. Then she came back without as much as an explanation. We said we had had enough. But this was after a lot of things – breaking things inside the house, always asking us for extra food and to lend her money, and so on.” “You told me that all she did for you was ironing, and that she was washing for your neighbour as well?” “They are white South Africans, who have moved to G-West. She used to work there one day a week. We gave her free accommodation, but she was basically next door’s maid and she only worked for us one afternoon in a week, and we used to pay her quite a lot. So she had no sense of gratitude or loyalty or anything. We used to pay her and give her accommodation. For just one afternoon of cleaning up for us, ending at 4, we used to give her P40. And free food, electricity, and free water as well.”

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“Lucky girl, wouldn’t you say?” “Yeah, and another thing we found out later was that when DUST was selling furniture, we bought some to put in the Servants’ Quarters, which we thought was normal, only to be reliably informed that it is normal to have the Servants’ Quarters empty and they provide furniture for themselves.” “So you provided her with furniture?” “Yes, beds, some cupboards, a cabinet and a few other things.” “Did her boyfriend use to come?” “Yes, Tiny, she was called, her boyfriends used to come all the time. She had about three or four as far as I could work out. Always coming around knocking and nagging, on the doorbell and the gate, to come in.” “How did they cope with the dogs? Or how did the dogs cope with them?” “When they touched the gate the dogs would bark, but then Tiny would come out usually. But if she was in and I answered the gate, I wouldn’t let the guys in. I was a bit suspicious actually, because there were about four or five of them. I don’t know if she was a prostitute. But something was going on.” “So what sort of things do you remember her doing that irritated you? I mean that mounted up to this final firing?” “Breaking things inside the house, being careless, not doing the job properly. What she had to do were very simple things. We didn’t even ask her to do washing. Sweep the floor, dust, and iron clothes, which were hardly many, like five pairs of trousers, five shirts, so it was nothing really to do in the afternoon. A lot of times we would come home and she hadn’t done the ironing. This went on over a period of months. Anyway, it got to be too much.” “Why would she not do it?” “She didn’t seem to care. I think she took us for granted.” “She was a Motswana?” “Yes, from Molepolole.” “It’s strange, good accommodation, working next door and, you didn’t even ask her to do your washing. And her boyfriends came almost at will. Yet she took you for granted. So when you told her to leave, what did she say?” “I think she had been expecting it. She didn’t react at all. She just said, ‘Ok,’ and walked off. Then she came back like an hour later and said she was bringing friends to help her move her belongings. The next day, one of her boyfriends I think turned up with a bakkie and just loaded her things and went. 114

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“Our neighbour, the American who lives opposite there, we asked her maid whether she knew of anyone who was trustworthy because we had had enough of this Tiny. After asking around, she came and told us that she had got her cousin, who was looking for work. So we said, ‘Ok, go on and bring her.’ “And the cousin has moved in with us. She is fantastic. I mean she is amazing. She just does everything, without being asked. She only comes on Thursday mornings. Last Thursday she did all the washing, because we showed her how to use the washing machine, but we didn’t show her how to do that to wash our clothes. We showed her because we wanted her to use the washing machine for her clothes. We saw her using buckets to do her washing, so I thought she should use a machine. But anyway, she is now using the machine to wash her clothes and our clothes as well.” “Does she stay in the house with you?” “No, she stays in the Servants’ Quarters. She lives there fulltime, and she only cleans for us once a week. Then she cleans for other people. She cleans for people in the Village residential area, where we got her a job. She cleans for some Americans we got for her somewhere else. We got her jobs, so she buzzes with activity like a carpenter bee.” I thought of honey, a maid immaculately making honey when he said that. “The only problem now is she told us last week she is pregnant. It’s a shame for us because she is very nice. She is going in April back home to have her baby, and then I think she wants to come back soon afterwards.” “Was she pregnant before or…?” “No! No! She was pregnant after we had employed her. So she must have got pregnant right here at our Servants’ Quarters perhaps. What happened was just before Christmas she was very sick, and we didn’t know what was wrong with her. So we sent her home before she got really ill and we said, ‘You are not going to work,’ because she was really awesome. We sent her home and said, ‘Just recover.’ She disappeared for about three to four weeks and we kept asking about her from her cousin who was in contact with her in the village. And the cousin said, ‘We are not sure what’s wrong with her and she’s going to the doctor this week.’ Anyway, she came back and told us she was pregnant.” At this point in the interview, Dr Mrs Jean Nicklewitt joined us. It was perfect timing, as the braai was just about ready. She exchanged kisses with her husband, snatching at the same time a can of St Louis from him, just as he was bringing it to his mouth. 115

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“I was just telling Dr Winter-Bottom Nanny and her assistant here about Tiny,” the husband told her, as he went to fetch another can of beer. “Could you tell me more?” Dr Nanny asked after shaking hands. “Tiny,” began Dr Mrs Jean Nicklewitt. “She was, well, a very nervous maid. When we first came here, we had about a hundred people knocking on the door, ‘Can we live in your house?’ That’s the grapevine obviously when you move in. We came home and she said, ‘I want to be your maid.’ So we had Tiny. She looked after the house and I think we lived with her pretty well. She lost three relations in the span of a month and we bought her a few presents and stuff. And she was good. When she was living here and working next door, she was really good, looking after the dogs. “But then, as soon as her employers next door moved out and she followed to work for them, things changed. It was actually easier for her to come from Molepolole everyday and go to G-West than it was for her to stay here. So we stopped seeing her so often. If we went away we would ask her to stay, because she stayed for free in the house. We asked her to stay and look after the dogs, and we paid her to look after them. And then she wouldn’t pitch up sometimes, and we also wanted her here to look after the house. It just wasn’t working. “One time we came back a day early from a weekend trip. We had told her we would come on Monday but we came on Sunday. It was like 9 o’clock. The dogs obviously hadn’t been fed and, it turned out she hadn’t been around to feed them for two or three days. That was the last straw.” Like Johanna Salmon, Drs Mr John and Mrs Jean Nicklewitt did more than recount their own experiences with maids. They introduced Dr Nanny to another young white woman, Miss Amy Candlestick, whose experiences they believed might interest her. And sure enough, Miss Amy Candlestick’s story turned out to be very rich, judging from the interview Dr Nanny had with her at the local office of the global Aidswatch Network where she was doing her internship, in preparation for life as a development missionary.

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Chapter Seventeen

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M

iss Amy Candlestick wore jean trousers and a blue T-shirt on which figured prominently ‘If Everything Was Everything’. Following her after she opened the office door for us, I saw on her back, ‘HIV/AIDS: Save Africa’. She was preparing her afternoon coffee when we came. The smell of freshly ground Arabica filled me with nostalgia for my native grassfields, the leading coffee producing region of Mimboland. But Dr Nanny declined her offer of coffee before I could say I would like a cup. I was feeling rather drowsy – having spent the previous night at the place of a Zimbabwean friend who had just had a baby girl – and the sight of Miss Amy Candlestick so obviously enjoying her coffee only made matters worse. Dr Nanny began the interview soon after she had made the introductions. “I am interested in researching all types of things,” she began. “I believe that when one comes into a new country, one’s first and general impressions are always useful food for thought. Would you share your impressions of Botswana with me? Where they started, with what you started, and how they have unfolded and changed during your stay? When you were coming from Canada, what were your expectations? Has the reality been in tune with those expectations? What degree of culture shock was there? What déjà-vu?” I was literally dosing off. I couldn’t resist asking for coffee anymore, so I asked, and Dr Nanny said she would have some too. Thank God! Miss Amy Candlestick responded as she made us coffee. “I think in terms of expectations, I can’t really remember what they were, to be honest. It was two years ago. But I think it wasn’t that dissimilar from what I encountered, although I did expect the country to be friendlier. Perhaps it was more the way I reacted to the place than the fact that it wasn’t as friendly as I had envisaged. I didn’t expect it to be so developed, even though I had read up on the place. But on the ground, it’s not that dissimilar from any other big city.” She served the coffee, brought sugar and milk, and continued. “My disappointment was in the expectation that, being so developed, Gaborone would work the same as it does elsewhere where one finds a developed

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city. It’s very frustrating because the way it looks on the surface, you expect it to work as it works in my context at home, since it looks so similar. And there’s so much English, so it should be easy to communicate. But you soon realise it’s a different English. And even though people speak it, they don’t necessarily understand what you are trying to say. I think as soon as they hear a North American accent, they stop listening, they tell themselves they wouldn’t understand, so why listen. And there are all those perceptions of all what it is to be white in Botswana.” “And what are the expectations of being white, if I may ask?” “It’s really difficult. They have a different perception of you and I have always made a very conscious effort to be polite, to be civil and not be perceived as a white South African. I see the shabby and condescending way South Africans treat blacks in their daily interactions in this country. So I try hard to make sure they know I am not that. “But even if you are friendly, there is either contempt or indifference. It’s a different kind of racism I find, like, for example when you are leaving a shop and they are checking your receipt to make sure you are not stealing, they don’t check mine. The conception is that white people don’t steal – that assumption that white people are good. “I played football when I first got here, and when I was warming up with this one woman and she was asking me if I felt safe in Botswana, and I said how I liked it. And she said, ‘Hum! It’s good but I don’t feel safe.’ But I have been robbed more times in Canada than I have here. “So I think there’s racism, but against white people, it’s a different kind of racism. They don’t look down on whites as such. It’s more. I think it’s still the colonial leftover. I guess they still are afraid of white people. Yeah, and it’s frustrating to me because I don’t want to be seen at that kind of level. I don’t want to be glorified beyond my basic reality or circumstance.” “Could this be due to how South African whites have operated in the region?” “Possibly. I didn’t realise when I came how deep the resentment of South African whites is. I felt bad that we are painted with that same brush.” “That’s interesting. Though I would have thought that Batswana generally love whites, adore them even.” “There is also that. Much as the Batswana react to you with this ambivalence, there is also this fascination. When men meet you on the street, they desperately want to relate and so they shout ‘Makgoa’ or ‘Babe’ or things like that. Other white women complain about this a lot. I am forced to wonder, is it only because I am white or is it because I am a 118

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woman? I used to work at Women Against Patriarchy – WAP. I know that the gender relations in Botswana are quite extreme. So I have to wonder, is it because I am white or because I am a woman and they think they have this right to shout at me, to tell me they love me, to propose all these things? Which one is it, or is it a combination of everything? I know that African women get that as well. Is harassment the word for it? Whatever you call it, it happens to me a lot.” “Does it mostly happen with the young or it happens across the board?” “No, old men just want to say hi. Young men want to take you home,” she paused briefly. “And you get that feeling that the look is different and the handshake is different. It’s really a shame that that happens to foreigners, but I think especially to white people who are trying to integrate and wanting to feel welcome. The only Batswana that you remember are the guys on the street, the guys that harass you, the guys that ask you for money, the guys that ask you for jobs. Those are the only ones that talk to you and try to be friendly, because they are looking for something, and you don’t remember the others and you don’t make the effort to strike up a relationship with – I’m going to say normal – the average citizen, because you’ve met all these wing nuts walking on the street. It really taints your perceptions of people and it’s unfortunate. But it’s the same anywhere, you always remember the great people when you are looking for them.” “Have you related to other Canadians here in Gaborone?” “Yeah.” “And they have similar impressions?” “Some people have managed to integrate very well. I think a lot has to do with personality. How outgoing you are, how ready you are to accept people from different cultural lifestyles, friendship styles. I think a lot of it has to do with where they work. Where I worked before there were only three other Batswana women who were much older than I was, so why develop the interest in becoming friends? And it’s very hard to extend your social circles as part of work. Yeah, it’s easier to do it within work, where you get to know people for a long period of time. “The people that have made the most inroads into meeting and becoming friends amongst Batswana have huge numbers of colleagues who are Batswana. Like when I worked at the Nature Museum, there are hundreds of people who work there. You have a lot more opportunity to relate and I think that makes it very different.” “Do you think if you related along those lines of increasing your circles, you just might be more flexible towards the overtures made by the people, not necessarily those you meet in the streets?” 119

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“I think so, because I think it would give me a kind of cultural sounding board to relate to people, and be able to decipher what is normal.” “If my interviews are anything to go by, what seems to be normal here in Gaborone is that men have a very lose attitude towards sex. They believe the woman is there for them to harvest. All you need to say is that I have got love to propose to you, I have got sex to propose to you. If you feel there is no finesse, that they are rather crude, and you express your disdain, they are surprised and say how come. So that seems to be normal,” Dr Nanny elaborated. “And I wonder if it works,” said Miss Amy Candlestick. “It may be found to work amongst the Batswana women who have become used to the culture over the years. So that, if those are the prevalent attitudes and if your relationships are such that you need a man, then you better go along, rather than just stay and wait, perhaps infinitely, for the man with the right vocabulary. There will be no other better offers coming from anywhere, so you may as well learn to cope with a bad situation. Don’t you think?” Miss Amy Candlestick replied, “But you often wonder, it must be reinforced somewhere, but who in her right mind would go along with that?” “I interviewed a Motswana lady who said if you asked a Motswana to choose between you and the baby he has fathered with you, he will say forget the baby – come let’s go. So you can see from the attitude of the women, how they see their men,” said Dr Nanny. “Yeah, I have heard that.” “One thing I have also heard, that you can elaborate on, is that they tend to treat foreigners as having what they call more TLC – Tender Love and Care. Probably this is women to men. Batswana women see foreign men like that. But I don’t know how the Batswana men see foreign women.” “So you are saying that Batswana women see foreign men as a better patch?” Miss Amy Candlestick sought clarification. “That they are tenderer, more caring, and come closest to their idea of what love should be.” “I don’t know how it works, because most relationships I know here that are interracial across cultures is the women who are African and the men who are foreigners. My colleague and boss, Mrs Birgit Rattlesburg is one of the exceptions where it works the other way. She is Austrian married to a Motswana. “And I don’t know why because in North America, interracial relationships tend to be white women and black men as the majority. It is interesting to see the difference in a different culture. But I have never asked but would it be that way. 120

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“It might be because women have rather to look for a man to take care of them. And in Botswana, white men are much better placed to take care of them and usually because the white man is on an expatriate contract, good money and bla, bla, bla. I think white women who come in have the same expectations of men as African women would and don’t find it amongst the African population, Botswana population, I mean,” Miss Amy Candlestick explained. “I interviewed two Americans the other day and they told me that although attitudes towards the whites in shops are that of respect, broadly speaking, it tends to be a very male thing in the sense that the male whites are those that benefit. Women, if anything, they are likely to have a raw deal, especially from other women who treat them with condescension. If you are in the queue, people are most likely to come and stand in front of you and not treat you as if you had a right to be served by merit.” “I have noticed. But I don’t know whether that was because I was white or because they would just stand in front of anybody. I did a bit of watching and saw that some women just cut the queue and it doesn’t seem to matter who is in front of them. They speak about you in Setswana, in front of you, and I often hear Lekgoa, and it’s a word you learn to pick up. I can almost hear a cashier saying something like – ‘This silly white woman wants me to do a price check.’ So it’s like they would never say certain things to your face because they would be afraid, but they feel empowered to mock you behind your back. Yeah, I have noticed that as well. But it really depends on the situation you are in and the sort of reaction you get.” “What do you think whites or foreigners in general think of Batswana?” “I think it depends on the context of the foreigner. If you are a professional coming in with an expatriate contract, there is no comparing with if you are a Zimbabwean coming in with little or no qualifications. But most foreigners I talk to – Africans, Europeans, North Americans, white and black alike – find Batswana unfriendly and unwelcoming,” said Miss Amy Candlestick. She continued, “I mean, I went to Namibia last year at Christmas and to Zimbabwe the year before, and people were so welcoming and just chatting –wanting to know about you. But here, it’s hard to engage someone in that kind of discussion. When you first meet them, it’s like they are suspicious if you are asking questions, like say about their family. Ordinary normal questions – What do you do with your time? Do you have kids? – seem not to engage them. It’s hard to engage someone in that kind of conversation here. Whereas in Namibia, they invite us for dinner, and they are friendly and, it’s a terrible thing to say, but I often get the impression that here people wouldn’t talk to you unless they feel they can get something.” 121

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She paused for a while, then continued, “I never got the same impression when I was in Namibia. I am very sensitive to people thinking I am rich. I don’t like that perception! I understand where it comes from, and I understand why they would think that is probably true, but I am a volunteer with no pay,” she stressed. I don’t have money coming out of my ears and I am very weary when people try to be nice to me because they think they can get something. I never got that impression in Zimbabwe or in Namibia. There people just generally want to be nice. Here, it certainly happens that people want to be nice as well and that not everybody is that unfriendly, but more often than anywhere else, being unfriendly is the perception foreigners have of Batswana.” “I remember reading an interesting paper by an American anthropologist colleague about playful begging amongst the Batswana,” said Dr Nanny. “But I think they do it with each other as well. I think it’s not necessarily because you are white. I just think if you were white you will get more of it. That’s interesting.” “Do you think Batswana are like that because in relation to the rest of Africa north of here, they have come closest to whiteness?” “In terms of what? – Development? Race?” asked Miss Amy Candlestick. Dr Nanny elaborated. “In terms of development, and I wish to say when people especially from America come here, they are struck by how much like them Batswana are – they love all these American things. They thought by coming to Africa they would forget their own society a bit. They would try to run away from American television programmes and the media fodder and consumer gadgets that have harnessed them all their lives. You can imagine their surprise to rediscover all these trappings in the very heart of Africa, where they least expected. Batswana surprise them with the way they dress and with how they mimic American pop stars, Hollywood celebrities and so on. Couldn’t it be that perhaps Batswana do that because they have come closest to modernisation?” I could see that Dr Nanny was making a point more for herself than expecting Miss Amy Candlestick to answer. “I don’t know. But then you would be assuming that they think North America is unfriendly, right?” “We are the ones seeing them as unfriendly. Perhaps they behave the way they do to prove a point: we do our business, we are independent, we can do as we like, we have got our latest cars, we have money. We can afford everything, like blue diamonds twinkling in the African sky.” “But they are taking consumerism to new levels. I think when you try and copy somebody’s culture, you exaggerate. I have never thought about Batswana in that respect, but it might have to do with the fact that they 122

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weren’t ever really colonised. So they never had to learn to live with white people. Maybe that has something to do with it, that they were really never officially colonised,” said Miss Amy Candlestick. “Have you ever employed a Motswana?” “As maid, yeah.” “A Motswana or a Zimbabwean?” “I think she is Motswana. She is the cleaning lady. She comes once a week. We don’t have a live in maid, and we don’t have a gardener.” “What’s her name?” “Priscilla.” “And what’s her surname?” “I don’t know.” “It’s not unusual. Most people don’t know the second name of their maid.” “She doesn’t know my name either. She came to us through another Canadian woman.” “How do you find her?” “She is wonderful. She is a wonderful little girl. She is a young woman.” “And what is that?” “I guess I am just comparing her. We’ve had two and the first one took advantage and made several hundred telephone calls when we went home, to the tune of P400. So I am just comparing her. She is friendly, she is trustworthy and she is hardworking. She is just very pleasant.” “The first one, if you recall, was she Motswana or Zimbabwean?” “I think she may have been Zimbabwean, but I’m not sure. She was miserable and not happy.” “But she was hardworking.” “Yeah, until she figured out she could just make phone calls all morning,” Miss Amy Candlestick said laughing. “And that’s how we figured out that we couldn’t just trust her. I had never figured somebody would do something like that.” “So what did you do when you found out?” “Well, I confronted her and I said, ‘I can’t trust you anymore, and I am afraid I will have to ask you to please pack and that will be the end of our relationship.’ I’m such a soft touch and she begged me to stay, promising she would deduct P50 a month until she had paid me back, and bla, bla, bla. We just paid the phone bill and were very careful not to leave money or our valuables lying around. You don’t also want to tempt people by leaving money around. And then she found another job.” “It’s interesting this issue of phones. It comes up repeatedly when I interview people.” 123

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“It never dawned on me because in Canada you don’t pay for local phone calls. So it never occurred to me that it’s a big deal, that you have to prevent people from using the phone. And I never figured that once they use it, they will want to use it ten times.” “Did you notice other things missing?” “Well, we don’t have a lot, and I never paid particular attention. But we have friends who employed her as well. And they noticed things like clothes going missing and her using things like cosmetics when she was there. Instead of working, she just took advantage of her work. In my circles if you employ people like that, we try to follow the Labour laws – try and make sure I pay Priscilla over Christmas and give her a Christmas bonus, make sure I give her sick leave – and she only works once a week –, which is pretty generous. I find when people don’t work in that situation, when they aren’t familiar with that situation where they have those rights, they will take advantage of the employer. They will think you are a soft touch.” “You just mentioned a while ago that Priscilla is young and you live with your boyfriend or your husband. Doesn’t it bother you that eventually the maid could become very comfortable and begin to look for ways of ousting you and taking over the ultimate object of your desire and love – your boyfriend or husband? Maids come in, they appropriate the kitchen, they appropriate the house and they clean everything and sometimes they even cook, and so they take everything from you except your husband, and even the bed they make it up and they lie on it and have their imaginations. They imagine themselves ultimate owners of what you hired them to take care of. Does it not occur to you as a woman who hires and fires the maid to watch out against losing the ultimate object of your attention and love? Does it worry you? Does it worry any people you know? If not, why not?” Miss Candlestick was categorical. “No! It never actually crossed my mind and for a number of reasons. I feel my relationship is very solid, that it would never even cross my partner’s mind. But he also has never really had much contact with her. She comes once a week for half the day. She often comes when we are at work. For the longest time, Wobble’d never met her. He leaves for work earlier than I do. And she is not an aggressive woman. Not that I have seen, but I think she just comes in, does her cleaning and hasn’t been eyeing around and setting her imagination on fire. There’s little we do that we would feel embarrassed about if a maid found out about it. We do our own laundry, we cook, all those things. If we hire someone, it is not like we fight over the house. We hire someone 124

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to do the mopping, the sweeping and that is it. I don’t like the colonial attitude of coming in with a servant who appeals to me, but I do like the idea of having someone to mop.” “You say that she is not aggressive, but you know that the stereotypical presentation of the secretary is someone who is not aggressive, until the day the employer has a domestic problem and she offers him a shoulder to cry on.” “It never crossed my mind.” “I interviewed a maid recently who lived with a British family in a similar situation, where the husband did everything to have her.” “I think that has a lot to do with him rather than her and I think in my situation Wobble would never do anything like that because I believe he is not that kind of man. I’ve always gone for guys who are more interested in football and family than in playing hanky panky behind my back. It’s a different kind of man who wants to exploit that kind of situation, who would take advantage of someone who works for him. The kind of man who sits with the secretary, this is the same kind of man who sleeps with his maid. I would be very surprised if I had that kind of situation from Wobble.” “What about you and say Batswana men? If you were to really find one who is decent in his approach, to what degree would you be tempted to pursue your fantasies?” “I think the commitment that I have made in my relationship is such that the likelihood is virtually nil. It doesn’t matter whether it is a Motswana, or a Ugandan or an American. It is not something I would do at this point.” “So not having a relationship with a Motswana would have nothing to do with the fact that Batswana are unfriendly?” “No, I just wouldn’t.” “What about with a Namibian?” Amy Candlestick hesitated. “I wouldn’t.” “And do you think there are other people here, in the Canadian community, who are interested in having relationships with Batswana?” “I think the ones that I know are disinterested. They are yet to find the man who will make them interested.” “Of all of these dimensions, I think the greatest test of attitude towards people is the extent to which we go in creating and sustaining relationships with them.” “Just romantic relationships or…?” Amy Candlestick wanted clarification. 125

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“Relationships in general, but the greatest test are romantic relationships for any community. The test of the relationship pudding is in the eating,” Dr Nanny explained. “But I think for anything that came to me in that direction, it would have to be on a personality basis and not solely on their approach, the feelings you got and the culture they come from. No, I don’t think I would have a problem. But knowing the HIV/AIDS rates here can be a deterrent. “And if we go back to your previous questions, about husbands becoming not just comfortable but even close with maids, I wouldn’t say those kinds of relationships represent necessarily open attitudes about how far one would go in venturing into another culture, because the husbands may just be seeing the maid as a sexual object and stopping at the bed … hmmm just like the maid might go after a husband just because of the size of his pocketbook.” “Do you think you could imagine yourself in Mrs Birgit Rattlesburg’s situation, your white Austrian colleague who is married to a Motswana man?” “I think it would be very difficult. All interracial relationships are extremely difficult. It’s difficult to mix the expectations of the African family and those of the European one. Just when you marry into this community, you sign up for that and you need to know that the differences are tough, even if you and your partner get along. If you can’t accept the rest of the family and the expectations of the mother-in-law and the uncles, it’s going to be very difficult. People do it, but I think it’s very difficult. That would be the hardest thing for me, I think.” “Do you know Mrs Rattlesburg’s friend Dr Penelope Homewood, a Motswana? She is married to an Englishman, Dr Chaucer Homewood. Do you think she copes more with her family than does Mrs Rattlesburg with her husband’s?” “I don’t know them so well, but I know a lot of people in interracial marriages who move away from their culture and a lot of people who don’t go home anymore. I think the success of such marriages depends on how much you are ready to give up.” “What do you think accounts for misunderstanding along cultural lines, with one’s in-laws especially?” “I think most times, it’s because of language difference. I wouldn’t want to repeat myself several times, so I’m going to say something I have to say slowly and in small, simple words and not how I would ordinarily talk to someone who speaks English fluently.” “Do you think you are harder on Batswana than other people?” “No, I think we all have our good days and bad days.” 126

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“What is a typical bad day in Wobble’s life with a Motswana?” With a laugh, “He’s probably more generous than I am. But we have good culture days and bad culture days and days in which you think, ‘Well, I really connected with someone today.’ The bad situations are on days when you are like, ‘Ah! I can’t believe these people – that never would have happened at home.’ You get so frustrated – ‘These people!’ So there are good culture days and bad culture days.” “Are you looking forward to leaving Botswana? Or are you looking forward to coming back?” “No, I am not looking forward to leaving. But I am looking forward to being home in Canada. I am looking forward to travelling. It is nice to have a change. I just switched to this job in September and I really wish I had more time here with Aidswatch Network. I did not enjoy my time with WAP. It was a struggle from day one and I stayed longer than I should have. That tainted a bit my perceptions of work. I am not really anxious to leave, but I am looking forward to get home.” “Wobble is working?” “Yes, he is working for Naturewatch. It’s the leading environmental NGO in the country, and very well regarded.” “Any last words? Maybe I haven’t covered everything you were looking forward to covering.” “No. But I would like to say that out of all places to be, I think Botswana is a good choice. I don’t have a negative impression of the people and I think from an intellectual level, I understand the coldness and indifference. It is possible to understand all situations culturally and intellectually. That makes it easier when a situation arises. I don’t have a negative impression of Batswana to the point where I would say, never again, I would never be friends with a Batswana or that kind of thing.” “But they have a negative attitude towards you sometimes.” “I think it happens. I have a negative attitude towards French Canadians some of the time when I’m home. I think that anything that is not in your frame of reference you would find something negative about it. I think the most notable negative attitudes towards people in this region are from white South Africans. I just can’t stand them.” “Why?” “I don’t like the way they treat Batswana. I can’t stand the fact that they will treat me with respect and then they will treat others with disdain. I’m not interested in being friends with people like that. We always make an effort to avoid them. When we travel, we get away from them, try to distance ourselves from them at all costs. They really taint other white people. Otherwise there are very good white people in the region.” 127

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“Is it mostly the Afrikaners?” “Yes, the Boers mostly. The English South Africans are a more educated elite. They are racist but the racism isn’t the same as that of the Boers. They understand intellectually that apartheid couldn’t go on forever and that it was wrong, and bla, bla, bla.” “Subtle condescension, theirs is, while the Boers are rather brutal and openly racist.” “He is crude, the Boer.” “I’m told that amongst Batswana, the greatest thing you can use to frighten a child off, to bring it back to order, is to compare the child to a Boer. If you joke, you say you will grow up to be a Boer, and that is enough for the child to behave well thenceforth. So they actually use the Boer to frighten their children. The Boers are tranquilizers of sorts. Their savage hostility is invoked to keep children on their best behaviour,” Dr Nanny said, a mischievous smile on her face. She knew as well that sometimes the word ‘Boer’ is used to describe someone strict, a no nonsense person, and that it was therefore not always used with negative connotations. “They frighten me honestly, with their brutal racism. I think the intellectual racism is more ok. You can’t expect South Africans to be completely free of racism all of a sudden. It’s been maybe just ten years, since apartheid fell. There are many racists there. They can’t help it and it’s because it was internalised. Maybe at an intellectual level they can sit down and have a conversation about how black people can be educated, that they can have masters and PhDs, they know that. But they still somehow, in their inner selves, think that they are better. You can’t expect that to change in ten years. But I still think they give the most negative impression of whites in the region.” Dr Nanny desperately wanted to interview Miss Amy Candlestick’s boss, especially as, like Johanna Salmon, Mrs Birgit Rattlesburg was married to a Motswana. But she also didn’t want the interview to take place the same day, partly because she was tired, partly because she wanted to take time off to digest the material she had gathered for the day, and more importantly, because she didn’t want Miss Amy Candlestick to sit in and follow the interview with her boss next door. So she took an appointment with Mrs Birgit Rattlesburg for The Queen’s Arm, a popular bar with a touch of working class Englishness, for Saturday at 6 pm.

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Chapter Eighteen

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O

n Friday, two days after the interview with Miss Amy Candlestick, Dr Nanny and I met, by chance, two young American students – Annie Quick, a medical student on internship, and Stephanie Sprinkles, a social anthropologist on fieldwork. Although not employers of maids, the two had opinions and experiences of Botswana which Dr Nanny thought worth recording, and which turned out to be quite interesting. “Thanks for tolerating my intrusion, and for allowing me to ask you a few questions,” Dr Nanny started, once the two had said they didn’t mind being interviewed. “I just want to get your impressions in general about Botswana. You’ve been here since November,” she addressed Annie Quick. “You came with expectations and what did you find? What was the culture shock? What were things that turned out to be just as you expected?” “I wouldn’t say everything was just as I expected. My experience in Botswana has been a little strange, because of the organisation I work for and the situation I’ve been in. I work for the TB Alert Programme, a USA-Botswana collaborative initiative. The decision-making roles in the programme are American and there is a lot of resentment amongst the Batswana that work there. “It’s political. I think there is not a lot of understanding between the two cultures in that work environment. I was placed as the supervisor of this project up north. I feel the Batswana see me as a representative of that tension. It’s been hard to overcome that. I think there’s a lot of mistrust in the organisation, and it’s not that people treat me badly, but I feel it’s taken them a long time to see me as a person, as myself, rather than as a representative of the organisation. Also, I am new to supervising things. I’ve never even done this in my own country, so that’s been a challenge. “I’ve also been in a strange environment because I live in Sua, which is a town and not a village. But it’s tiny. I live with the people I work with, but I’m not part of the community. So I’ve had a unique impression of Batswana, sort of. I don’t feel like I’ve experienced real Botswana. I feel I’ve experienced a strange little work environment. I think Botswana is a

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beautiful country. I’ve really liked travelling around. I don’t think people approach me with openness. I feel I have to make an effort before people are friendly, or interested in talking to me.” “If other experiences are anything to go by, the only ones that appear to approach you with openness are the men along the street who call you ‘babe,’” Dr Nanny remarked with a laugh. “Yes!” Annie Quick laughed. “You’ve had that?” “Yes, but also sometimes people from other countries. Actually, I’ve had a lot of experiences where I’m just having a nice conversation with somebody and I’m like oh, this person is particularly friendly, and the next thing I know is they are from Zimbabwe, Zambia, just not here. So it isn’t only Batswana.” “I’ve also talked to a few Americans here who are struck by the fact that Batswana, the ones they’ve met, in their mannerisms and outlooks, tend to remind them so much more about America than about Africa. They tend to be glued to American TV and to dress like their stereotypical idea of being American. So when they come to Africa hoping to see Africans, what they are struck by when they meet Batswana is that they remind them very much of Americans,” said Dr Nanny. “That was the effect when I came here. I was struck by the fact that the place didn’t feel that foreign. People dress the same like where I come from, especially the young. I think if you are with a group of young twenty year olds, it feels like they could be from anywhere. It’s like the world has all become the same,” said Annie Quick. “They may be insular but they are not all that insular?” “I think there is a difference between young people here in Gaborone and maybe older people, and that the young are more like their counterparts where I come from, in dress and behaviour.” “You wouldn’t need to do much introduction if you were to suddenly find yourself in America as a young Motswana, is that the idea?” “Yeah. Although I think I have that impression more when I’m in Gaborone. But when I’m around Dukwe, I don’t feel like I am in the States. I don’t have that feeling of having come all the way to Africa only to discover that things are the same.” “Have you talked to the young people you’ve met about themselves and their values and aspirations?” “The young people I meet nowadays are mostly refugees, rather than Batswana.” “Maybe we should talk about refugees then. When you first went to Dukwe, what were your expectations?” 130

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“When people say refugee camp, you think of an emergency situation with people leaving a country and getting overcrowded in a place where it’s difficult to even meet the basic needs of life. I knew it wasn’t going to be quite like that where I was going, but before we went up there, some people had died, so we were prepared to expect it’s just going to be really hard. That’s how they prepared me but the feel of the place is not that. It could fool you into thinking it’s just a regular village.” “The refugees you meet in Dukwe, what did they tell you about how they were received and treated by Batswana hosts?” “Overall, there is a lot of discontent in the camp because they’ve recently had their food rations cut and from what I hear, I think what they are getting now is more in order with what UNHCR gives people throughout Africa. But it’s less than what they were getting before here in Botswana. Also, they don’t like having their movements restricted. They are allowed to work out of the camp, but they have to apply to leave. I think there is a lot of resentment amongst them about how they are being treated and the Batswana are surprised. You can hear them in wonderment, ‘We are having these people, we are giving them food, so what are they complaining about?’” “Have some of them tried to get out of the camp and start a normal life?” “Yeah, they are allowed to get piece jobs in other places, and some people apply for and get citizenship. It’s a pretty long process, and it’s hard to do. There is a group of Angolans who have been there for 20 years who are in the process of getting citizenship. There are a couple of refugees on our team who were hired as translators. Basically, they are doing everything with us. One of them is a linguist and he is applying for teaching jobs in Gaborone. So people can try and go about, but it’s hard. My sense is that there are just not a lot of jobs out there, nor is there a plan for them.” “Are there any who saw you as representing opportunity beyond Gaborone, like facilitating their going to the States?” “Yeah, I get that all the time. I’m constantly told, ‘You must know how I can apply to go to the States.’” “As a white person, what do you think whiteness represents to the Batswana and refugees you interact with? How do they come across?” “When I walk around, what I hear a lot is, ‘Lekgoa, Lekgoa.’ I once asked one of the Batswana that I work with, ‘Is the hello derogatory or what’s the tone?’ I was just curious, and he said, ‘Oh, no, no, no, when we say Lekgoa, it means…,’ and he was saying if one of his black friends had a lot of money or whatever, they call him Lekgoa. Some Malian refugees were talking to me and they said, ‘Oh you are from America, you are so lucky.’ I think it’s just seen like I have all the opportunities. I’m rich.” 131

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“It’s interesting how the attitudes are the same, regardless of where you find yourself, whether in Gaborone or in Dukwe,” said Dr Nanny. “Yeah, at the beginning of the project, there were a couple of other white people working with me. Now I’m the only one. So we were three and we were sitting just at the little shop in the village eating our lunch and some Somali guy came up to one of the Motswana nurses working with us and was talking about us and she said we were Americans and he didn’t want to believe her. He was like, ‘No, Americans are rich and those ones they’re just drinking a bottle of water, they didn’t buy much food.’ He couldn’t believe we were American because we were not flashing around our wealth.” “What is the general atmosphere in the Dukwe camp?” “I think there is a big attitude problem of the Batswana towards the refugees. There’s big discrimination. They say how people are so ungrateful and undeserving, and they react badly to individual people. There are a lot of Somalis in the camps. They’ve set up little shops and sell things that attract people. I’ve heard people say they shouldn’t be allowed to sell things, that should be just for Batswana. But from what they say, when they are not complaining they like the Somalis. They feel they are nice people and everybody makes friends. One of the nurses is offering a piece job to one of the refugees. “Actually, I was sitting in a car with a driver from my programme and one of the refugees who works for us, and the driver complained, ‘These refugees, they sell all the paraffin. They shouldn’t be able to do that. They have been given this by the government.’ The refugee patiently pointed out, ‘We get more paraffin than we need and we don’t have enough food.’ “So I tried to get the Motswana to look at it from this other perspective. He is such a resourceful guy. I know if he were in the same situation, he would do exactly the same thing and he would be good at it. He’d be doing what he had to do for his family. But he wasn’t seeing it from this perspective, despite my explanations. He had no problem complaining about refugees in front of a refugee, and one with whom he gets along very well.” Dr Nanny said, “It’s a pattern that repeatedly occurs everywhere. I know people who make statements like, ‘Oh these whites are horrible; they suck Africa dry, but you are different.’ So what they are actually telling us is that personal relationships with people bring on a human face, a human dimension that makes it difficult for them to lump you together with others, and that is why when people want to collectively label and dismiss a group, the last thing they want is for individuals within 132

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their group to talk across, to reach out, to create relationships, because once you create relationships, you see a dimension of those other people that is counter to the rhetoric of difference or exclusion.” “Yeah, although sometimes you even cling to the latter. In matters of belonging, we find comfort in the logic of regression,” said Annie Quick. “You mean the circles of belonging diminish when the chips are down?” asked Dr Nanny. “Yeah. The real test of belonging is when we are pushed to make life and death choices on whom to include or exclude,” Annie Quick explained. “I see. There must be no exceptions in our ability and determination to be inclusive. We must graduate from the logic of ever diminishing circles to that of ever widening circles. I like that. Thanks for the idea.” “You are welcome.” “Because we are still trapped in the logic of ever diminishing circles, permit me to continue in the same vein. What do you think Americans here think of Batswana?” “I haven’t really encountered that many Americans, except the ones I work with. And the ones I work with I feel like they’ve tried to transport to Botswana the American work model. They just want to do things the way they do them in the US, and they are just not happy with the fact that Botswana isn’t getting on with this programme,” said Annie Quick. “I don’t think they have a lot of interest in changing anything in their ways or in meeting people half way. They are pretty rigid. But…” added Stephanie Sprinkles, piping up for the first time. “…given the history and politics of international relations, people here automatically respect you, the Lekgoa with ideas and money. They do what you want.” “On the surface that is, isn’t it? It’s like attraction and repulsion. They are always together,” Dr Nanny interjected. Stephanie Sprinkles took up this point. “I think the rejection is stronger than the respect. There is this protectiveness as well. They are like, don’t invade us. Why are you trying to impose your being on Botswana? To some degree it’s perfectly understandable. But there are times when it doesn’t make any sense, like when I’m not a threat. What am I threatening? I don’t go around saying I’m an authority of any kind, so why should people feel threatened?” Annie Quick agreed. “In your case, they are denying themselves a good worker. In other cases, they are denying themselves something that could be useful, like the woman with whom I work who is Tanzanian. She works a lot on alcoholism and goes to these meetings and hears all these things about the need for more research on alcoholism in Botswana specifically, 133

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by Batswana who understand the local context. She finds herself disqualified by her origin, not the inadequacy of her science or knowledge of the issues. When it suits their interest they draw this particular card and next time it’s the same card they might use in a completely opposite way.” “How interesting,” commented Dr Nanny, scribbling away. Stephanie Sprinkles agreed. “Yeah, there’s an interesting thing about Botswana. When you talk to most people, like Lekgoa coming here, they’ll say this is not a place that was colonised, that had to fight for rights. This is a place that had three chiefs who went to England to negotiate peacefully for independence. We have maintained that kind of reaction on the one hand, but then you can also hear all sorts of things about white people who have done this and that to us. So you get both: nobody did anything to us and feelings of all sorts of bad things done to us at the same time. It’s all contradictions.” Dr Nanny reacted. “It’s like I am my own Lekgoa, even as I may acknowledge that Lekgoa means status. I didn’t have a Lekgoa that really controlled my life, but I dealt with them from a distance. At best they were present in Mafikeng. I am my own Lekgoa, so you can’t come and lecture to me about what I should or should not do in my own country, my own space.” Stephanie Sprinkles added, “And now it’s like all these white people, all their attitudes are reflected on me. We are all caught in the web of their blame game.” Annie Quick said, “It’s understandable. I work with a bunch of outsiders who come in and try and wriggle their agenda through, designed without adequate consultation with local agents and actors. They come in a hurry with suitcases of solutions to problems they think they understand. But then, it just seems like throwing the baby out with the bath water, when Batswana put everything and everyone in the same basket of cynicism and hostility.” “Well put,” said Dr Nanny. “I like that expression because it comes in handy in almost everything you do – this story of the baby and the bath water. Take academic disciplines, a western thing. Disciplines were developed and have reached most areas of the world through all sorts of expectations. Sometimes you get someone of yours trained there in the West, then he or she comes back. Say you’ve gone and learned sociology. When you come back, you want to affirm yourself, and you stick so narrowly to what you have acquired as sociology. Any other thing, even if it’s relevant to your discipline, like anthropology, is a threat, basically. That’s like throwing the disciplinary baby out with the western bathwater.” 134

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Stephanie Sprinkles reacted. “That describes the tension – in the unit where I am a part time lecturer at DUST –, between sociology and anthropology. Sociology has little experience in Africa, and anthropology has a chequered history but that doesn’t mean we should dismiss it. Granted the history of anthropology is dismal and a lot of ugly things have happened – and since changed –, but at least there were people sincerely interested in the rest of the world who wrote about their encounters with non-westerners. Most people who have written about Botswana are anthropologists, Schapera and all the others. So how can you deny your baby simply because you hate the western anthropological bathwater?” “The baby isn’t worth keeping if dipped in western anthropological bathwater. That must be the reasoning,” said Dr Nanny. Stephanie Sprinkles continued. “I can understand the antagonism, but anthropology has been dramatically transformed, probably far more so than any other discipline in the West. It has done a lot to re-conceptualise itself,” and, looking at me, she added, “to rethink itself. Economics is totally western, sociology as well. The rest of the world feeds so little into shaping these disciplines. Anthropology is the one discipline that has really and sincerely transformed itself. And it is unfortunate that scholars here in Africa continue to ignore these transformations. By acknowledging its past of bad science, anthropology seems to be paying a much bigger price than other disciplines that haven’t bothered to undertake such critical introspection. Hence my conclusion: people want to stand on firmness; once you show you are questioning, you lose authority and respect.” “Another way to look at it,” suggested Annie Quick, “is to say that a discipline is stronger for the struggle. And that there’s value in navigating and negotiating flexibility. And then we get back to your baby and bathwater: building flexibility and borrowing into thinking and theorizing without throwing out the foundations of certain academic disciplines.” Despite its quick pace, I tried to follow the interview, which seemed more like a conversation. It made me think about whether I was stronger for my struggle in Botswana. I wondered how Dr Nanny would continue. She said, “The good thing with stereotypes is that they are at the margins of reality. You can always pull out your stereotype of anthropology that was conceived in the 60s and 70s and make it relevant in the 21st century. By refusing to engage the discipline, some of us protect ourselves from all the transformations that have taken place within the discipline, and the world for that matter. Keeping stereotypes alive also serves certain political battles at the academy…” 135

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The interview ended abruptly, as Annie Quick and Stephanie Sprinkles had another appointment, with a car dealer. Stephanie Sprinkles wanted to buy a second-hand car to facilitate her research trips around Gaborone and into villages. She was studying passion killings and suicide among Batswana, a theme that certainly seduced Dr Nanny, as she exchanged contact details with Stephanie Sprinkles, promising to meet up with her and continue the conversation.

136

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Chapter Nineteen

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D

r Winter-Bottom Nanny was extra lucky that day. It turned out that Annie Quick and Stephanie Sprinkles had double-booked themselves. Just as they were getting up to rush to their appointment with a car dealer, a young Malawian assistant lecturer at the Department of Social Sciences where Stephanie Sprinkles gave lectures showed up for a drink with them. Dr Nanny, not being one to let an opportunity go by, took advantage of the situation and asked him if he would have a drink with us instead. Stephanie offered him her seat and Dr Winter-Bottom offered him a drink. Even before he could get some Windhoek lager down, Dr Nanny asked if she could interview him to, as she put it, ‘crosscheck some of the impressions she had just recorded, about attitudes, babies and bathwater.’ Mr Julius Settle, as the young man was called, was somewhat startled or surprised by this proposition but was soon most forthcoming, especially after a pint of lager. “You have been here for a long time, haven’t you?” “More than fifteen years.” “Fifteen? That’s long. Are you articulate in Setswana?” “Yes, very. Some locals say I even speak better than the northerner people, groups like the Kalanga and so on. That’s how they make the comparison.” “When you came, did you know Setswana already?” “I learnt it here.” “Why?” “To better socialise with the mostly local guys I was moving around with. But the first things they teach you are the insult words. To get beyond that, if you just learn the whole thing, you are aware of what people are saying about you and what is going on. “ “How do people react when they realize you understand them?” “They think I don’t understand and that they’re speaking behind my back, only to hear me respond once they finish. Some get shocked. ‘What? We thought you were one of those, the other type of Makwerekwere, who doesn’t take an interest in wanting to learn our language. So we thought we could speak behind your back.’”

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“What sort of things are Batswana most likely to speak behind the back of a typical Makwerekwere, as you put it?” “Well, the issues vary in relation to the topic at hand. But their basic inclination is to discuss how you are not entitled to the opportunities that come your way. They make you feel like an intruder, busy trying to grab opportunities here. But when they really insult you, they resort to their local language and say you are running away from your homes where people are suffering. ‘You have nothing to eat and there is no money where you are from, so you are all coming here to get our stuff.’ Those things, they say them in their own language.” “You must offer them a difficult time, as they don’t know how to locate you, given you master their language.” “Exactly. Should they categorise me as a typical Makwerekwere or as a wanna-be Motswana? Some people even say, ‘This is just somebody pretending to be a Makwerekwere, he is a Kalanga.’ Then the others, ‘No, this one is a Makwerekwere definitely, but he is a wanna-be Motswana, wanting to feel the benefits of being Motswana.’” “‘He is working his way towards citizenship,’ is that it?” “Yes, ‘He is working his way through the system, so he can eventually be within it and be accepted by it.’ That’s how they look at things.” “What do Batswana think of Malawians in particular?” “They seem to accept them a little bit better than our counterparts the Zimbabweans. They have the assumption that Malawians are friendly and easygoing, so they tend to be more tolerant of them than of other Africans.” “The lesser of several evils?” asked Dr. Nanny. “I guess you could say that,” replied Julius Settle with a smile. “They say Malawians are not amongst the most illegal Africans in Botswana. When Africans are caught, the media is likely to stress that there are only three Malawians compared to twenty Zimbabweans, for example. This makes the locals feel that Malawians are a better lot who do not inundate Botswana illegally. But, however gentle Malawians are, at the end of the day, they get labelled negatively as well, as ‘a bunch of people trying to get our resources, our money and our women for free.’” “What would they identify Malawians with in particular?” “There is this feeling that Malawians are easily exploitable, that you can manipulate their way of thinking, in a way, because they never say no. They are easily moved around. You can try to get them to do things you might not do or want to do yourself. Malawians are noted for two things – being friendly and being easy to manipulate into compliance.” “And the Malawian community, how big is it?” 138

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“There are many Malawians in this country. There are a lot of them in Gaborone and in places like Phikwe and Molepolole. At meetings in Gaborone, you can easily count 500 plus Malawians.” “Are there many Malawians who have been granted citizenship?” “Yes, some have taken up citizenship while others are trying. Some just come in, try their luck, and maybe go back. I categorise them into three types: those who have become basically locals, those who are in transit, and those who hang around to see.” “Batswana women, they measure foreigners in the domain of love and relationships. I have heard repeatedly that foreigners are said to have more TLC – Tender Love and Care. Are you aware of that and what would you say are your experiences in that regard?” “This is a belief they have – the young girls and the older ladies alike. They tend to say that their Batswana men don’t know romantic love. They say the other African people around know how to love a woman. I’ve heard many unmarried ladies who have kids say their ideal is to marry men from outside. Where Malawians have infiltrated, you’ll hear local women saying Malawians have love, they know how to treat a woman.” “So what does a typical Motswana woman accuse a Motswana man of in relation to this TLC?” “It’s the issue of being harassed, they are harassed, most of them. They say locals run after sexual intercourse. It is the number one thing they want. The women feel they are exploited and treated like sexual objects. There’s also the issue of money and spending it. They say that the men coming from outside treat them well, that they tend to take them out, buy them this, buy them that. That is not the topmost priority of the local men. To them as long as they can get the lady to bed, they are fine. So their women accuse them of not treating them nicely, not buying them little, little things, not taking them out, and of over focusing on sexual intercourse. That’s the type of thing they say.” “Are there differences amongst foreigners in relation to this subject? Do Batswana have a league table of foreigners? Is the way a Malawian treats a woman the same as the way a Zimbabwean treats her or do foreign men get lumped in one TLC basket?” “In my experience, there is a certain categorisation,” said Julius Settle with a slight smile. “Although I haven’t thought about it seriously before, there is a difference in the way they locate different men from different regions and countries. From southern Africa, Malawians are compared with Zambians, and from west Africa, the Nigerian man is known to splash women with cash, cell phones and other things that catch a woman’s fancy. The Nigerian man is said to want to spend on you and make a 139

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woman say this is the type of guy we want. As for the Malawians, they have the reputation of being just soft. They will not bully you about and they will not go around with you as if to monitor your movement and activities. So there is definitely some categorisation and differentiation of foreign men by Botswana women.” “What are the Motswana man’s attitudes towards foreign women and foreign men in this domain?” “I think I should start with foreign men. They see them as a potential threat. Foreign men pose as a danger to them in the sense that they are always worrying that these guys are taking their women. Of late, European men have entered the scene, especially with the influx of whites from the former Yugoslavia and other Eastern European countries seeking greener pastures. Now there is a preference for not just foreign men but for white men. Batswana men complain that these people are grabbing their women. When you are an expatriate walking with a local girl, and a local guy sees you, he actually says you should leave their women alone. He will tell you this is our woman and question the girl, ‘What do you get from that guy?’” “Do the men go out with foreign women?” “Difficult, I must be frank. Few of them get especially the African expatriate women. It’s not very easy to see a Motswana chap with a Malawian girl or with a Zimbabwean woman. It’s just not common. You might, maybe, find one in every ten or something like that. What is common is to find a local girl with a foreign man, African or white.” “Why do you think that is?” Looking at a mixed couple at a nearby table, he said, “I think it would be tough to try and pinpoint a particular thing. But I have observed that people here are obsessed with skin colour. The guys will say, ‘I can’t take one who is very dark.’ They would rather take a white female, and that is common – wherever they get the chance they will take a white lady. As for the other African women they will say they are too dark. They believe dark women don’t have love experience, that they don’t know how to turn a man on. They actually reverse what the women say. So it is an issue of complexion and how it affects the love game.” “Could it be that, maybe, they try with the foreign ones and they don’t succeed? They don’t know how to approach their own women, and they also turn off foreigners with their abrupt style? So the foreign women have no chance to warm up to them? And the reaction might be to justify the rejection in terms of sour grapes? So it could be more than just skin colour, but also their inability to court a woman, to attract a woman, dark or white.” Here I could see Dr Nanny was speaking more to herself for future reference than to Julius Settle. 140

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He replied, “To add to what you are saying, they have difficulties in approaching the ladies, so I think it also has to do with differences in culture. Foreigner women will not easily be taken in by a simple invitation to go out…” I was thinking, in between the back and forth between Dr. Nanny and Julius Settle, ‘Maybe they just want to be taken, for who they are, instead of being objects of some constant hunting game.’ “And these guys are not subtle. Their best chat up line is I’ve got love to propose to you…,” admitted Dr Nanny. Julius Settle agreed. “They just want to walk with no talk. They think, ‘Well, I can get that girl, the local girl out there, without much talk, without much complication. I will tell her, ‘Let’s go out.’ I will go out with her and tell her, ‘Let’s make love,’ and that is it. With their own people, they don’t have to say much, but with an expatriate, you have to know how to negotiate.” I could tell Dr Nanny was ready to move on, but I was thinking about this idea of negotiation and how knowing how to negotiate might be something that helps you move across boundaries. But to go deep, wouldn’t you have to be able to walk the talk after the negotiations? “Where do the Indians, the Chinese, the Asians fit into this obsession with foreigners?” asked Dr Nanny, continuing to unload her questions from her cart in her typical fashion. “If we take both Tswana girls and Tswana men, in relation to the Asians, there is no connection, and again that has to do with the culture. I know two experiences where Tswana men tried relationships with Indian girls, and both ended up in disaster. In both cases it was the parents rather than the young girls breaking up the relationships, to the extent of one of them being removed completely from the country. The girl was sent to the United States for further studies, so she could not be anywhere near this Motswana guy. “Actually, most of the local boys will never take an interest in these Indians, unless it’s for economic gain. These days the Batswana guys have started saying, ‘If you take one of them, you know you are going to be getting money.’ That is how you take back from Indians what they are taking from you. “The women in general will never agree to relationships with the Asian boys. I have only seen one like that which has actually worked. But it has been in complete secrecy, making sure the parents should never know. As for the Chinese, the attitude of Batswana towards the Chinese is a very negative one. They don’t like them, not at all. So the Chinese are at the end of the stake, in terms of relationships with local men and women.” 141

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“Yeah, I remember a tribal chief at one point saying he hated the Chinese.” “Yeah, that’s what we hear. What is interesting is that a year back, when this Chinese construction company was building in Molepolole, they did get into relationships with the local girls. The Chinese ended up leaving lots of kids there, mixtures of Motswana-Chinese type kids squinting all over the place. How do you explain it? Maybe it was out of desperation or ‘Let me get money as they are giving money,’ a type of commercialised relationship.” “What do they say about Lekgoa in this regard?” “The Lekgoa are actually the favourites, as we were just saying. Most people I know tend to say, ‘I think I would rather take a white person.’ When you ask them why, ‘Is it money you want from them or what?’, they make it clear that other African men may be good, but whites are the best. ‘They know how to treat a woman right, they can spend the money. They will take you to the Bahamas, the Okavango Delta, Sun City, Johannesburg, and everywhere nice.’ That is why the white person is liked. Interesting though is that for every local girl who has a relationship with a white person, there is always an African guy besides.” “Really? They go from side to side?” “Yeah, they have a relationship with this white gentleman, but on the side they have either a foreigner African or a Tswana guy.” “Should I ask your colleague who is married to an Englishman about her side dishes?” Dr Nanny teased, referring to someone she knew from the same Department of Social Sciences, who was married to a Serbian. Laughing, Julius Settle replied, “I don’t think she will tell you. But that’s what we found out. We know a lot of ladies who have these relationships with Europeans, but there is usually a local or an African man in the wings. It seems like what is first class about the whites is the TLC of their wallets.” “And first class isn’t quite enough then? I see a logical connection with the issue of sugar daddies and sugar mummies, where you have a man, and still you have another, one for love and the other for money. This one stands for material needs and that one for emotional satisfaction. Is the phenomenon of sugar daddies and sugar mummies present and active here?” “It is rampant, and it goes both ways. Even women who are married are taking on young chaps and giving them their cars to drive and handing out money and keeping them around. Both the men and women who do this feel that the younger person is sexually agile. For the sugar mummies, 142

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the belief is that the young man will outperform the husband. So it is very common. You actually see it everywhere you move around. It is part of the norm and culture, basically.” “How would the men react if they notice that their wife is a sugar mummy, if they see their car being driven around town by a boy?” “In the case of men, I think they are protected by the law. If the woman takes a young boy, it is the young boy who actually gets into trouble as he could be accused of destroying somebody’s marriage. So the men tend to run to the legal system for protection when their wives start doing what they do best. They say, ‘I am suspecting my wife who is involved in an extramarital affair with a small boy.’ It might not necessarily be a young chap, it might even be another married person, but it doesn’t matter, as the legal system protects the husband, who can go to the Kgotla or to the courts to seek justice. He is covered in the sense that the man his wife is cheating with will be charged to pay a certain number of cattle for daring to milk a cow from another man’s kraal. But if a woman finds out about her husband’s extramarital activities, she will say, ‘What to do? You can’t do much about it.’ The law is put in place by men to condone the excesses of their manhood by disciplining and punishing women and youth.” “I like that the way you talk. If there are so many sugar daddies and sugar mummies around town, there must be a crisis of where people go to make love, isn’t it?” “I will tell you what my friends give you as answer. They say this is why people have come up with lodges and hotels that charge by the hour like quickie dispensing machines. I observed some lodges in Francistown, which actually have listed amongst the services offered something called Happy Hour. This is supposed to be an hour booking that enables you to come in with this person you have stolen and, within an hour, get as much out of each other as you can. Even in Gaborone some lodges and hotels survive thanks to the Happy Hour, the most common hours for that being lunchtime and immediately after work. “It is not just in the lodges and hotels. The car has become a number one bedroom, and men can give you a long list of explicit things they like doing at the back of their cars. For this, they park just behind Diamond Stadium or go somewhere else nearby. Even now, it still goes on. Just drive around and you find cars parked in these little bushes and when you get near, it is not something you want to see if you are not into pornography.” “If sex is harvested in a hurry, under such pressure and in cars, what guarantee is there that the person will use a condom?” 143

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“There are basically no guarantees and in looking at my own experience of friends, some of them have come back and complained about having to make love in cars. They can’t take the girlfriend to the parents’ house, something culturally unheard of even in a Westernised society like Botswana, and they don’t have the money to go to the lodge, so they will use the car and come back and say, ‘I ended up not using this condom thing’ or ‘We tried to put it on and it didn’t work.’ The guarantee of people actually using the condom in a careful way is not there. Half of the time it is not used at all.” “Yet the word condomise is on everyone’s lips. I gather from what you are saying that one also needs to look at the circumstances under which people are called to condomise.” “The circumstances are hardly conducive to condomisation. Cars don’t offer that especially with the introduction of patrolling by the Police. People want to get on and get off, get done with it and go. Whether you have a condom or not, as long as the lady is available and you have a car, then just do what you have to do and get out. That has been my observation and stuff I’ve been hearing from friends.” Dr Nanny said, “Final question, not to abuse your generosity. Where do you think DUST students fit into all this?” Julius Settle replied, “I think in a way they have actually defeated us all. Back to the issue of sugar daddies, most of our young people are having affairs, even with the top chaps around. The advantage they have, the university students, is that those who stay on campus use their rooms as avenues for these activities. There is a notion among students known as exiling, whereby you remove your roommate for the night, so your boyfriend or girlfriend can stay the night. You bring in a man or woman to sleep with you, and the next time, it is their turn to do same. One good turn deserves another, the saying goes.” “Is there an exile fee as well?” “Only sometimes. If the roommate can do the same the next time, there is no need for a fee. You just tell them, ‘I have a visitor and you need to quit.’ Doesn’t matter where you go, nobody cares. You just find accommodation somewhere else and don’t return until the next morning. This is why there is a lot of this unwanted sex or unprotected sex at DUST, and people rarely look at that when talking about the ills of society. The practice of exiling is so rampant that, as one student said, every one minute within the university campus there is sexual intercourse happening, be this among students or between students and people from outside.” “Another thing you find with the university is this great number of pregnancies amongst students. Do you think DUST lecturers have affairs with students?” 144

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“Bluntly, some of them do. It could start from meeting a student and initiating a relationship, but it could also be the continuation within the university of a relationship that started elsewhere. There are some who meet them outside, without actually knowing that these kids are university students, only to find out later that this kid I met at Kanye is at DUST.” “Both female and male lecturers?” “Yes. The majority being male I think.” “Do you think female lecturers have affairs with students?” “I wouldn’t say a great many of them.” “Do you think that lecturers have affairs amongst themselves?” “I have never disputed that fact. I would say yes, definitely.” “And where do secretaries fit in?” “They are the best part of the whole thing.” “Really? With whom – students or lecturers?” “Both the students and staff. The younger secretaries are especially active in this regard. I think if the secretary is a very senior person, then her chances of being with students are not very high. The young librarians are certainly available to students. I have had a lot of friends who have referenced and bookmarked the women in the system,” he said, laughing at his own terminology. “And now they have PhD rooms at the library, where you can lock…” “And have a PhD with a librarian?” “Yes, where you can pull her down,” he laughed out loudly. “So it is happening. It is definitely happening in the university, it is.” “Thank you very much,” Dr Nanny concluded hastily, and offered Julius Settle a well deserved third pint of Windhoek Draught Lager. With this interview, Dr Winter-Bottom Nanny resolved to broaden her research questions to embrace more on attitudes, identity, and sexuality. She also wanted to interview more staff and students of DUST, but that would have to wait until we had rounded up the interviews already scheduled.

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Chapter Twenty

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D

espite the rowdy atmosphere at The Queen’s Arm, which was filling with working class whites taking liberties with beautiful young Batswana bar girls, the interview with Mrs Birgit Rattlesburg was ‘exceedingly rich and generous,’ to quote Dr Winter-Bottom Nanny. As soon as the drinks were served – St. Louis Draught Lager all round, the local favourite having dried up –, Dr Nanny started, as was her standard practice, by re-introducing herself, me as her assistant, and the research before proceeding with the questions. It was almost as if she performed this ritual more for the tape recorder she carried with her than for the person she was interviewing, as in several cases people already somewhat knew her or of her and her interests before the encounter. “I am pleased you were able to find time for us and as I said, I am interested in maids and wonder what interesting experiences you might have to share in this regard. How many have you employed?” “Well, I’m employing one right here at my Gaborone office. She comes once a week. I’m employing one at home in Molepolole but had others before her. She comes every day. I also had ones when I used to live in Gaborone. So what else should I say about them?” “What have been your experiences with the different maids you’ve had?” Mrs Birgit Rattlesburg laughed. “I don’t know ... the two at home in Gaborone, they were Zimbabweans, no papers. One got pregnant and sent her friend to replace her. They were young girls and only came twice a week. I was fine with them. However, other people in the household claim they stole, which I cannot verify, but the person I shared them with – the same ladies went to my friend’s house once or two times a week –, she also claims her property had been diminished by a few CDs and things like that. “Otherwise, I was fine with them. They were quite involved in doing their own things. I didn’t have to supervise them or anything. But the ones in Molepolole – all of them Batswana – they work legally. The first one robbed us. She was a young girl. The second one had mental problems. The third one, I am quite happy with her. She is an elderly lady, very

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responsible, very motherly. She looks after the house when we are not there. So I think there are different experiences with different people. A lot depends on age. I think I was mistaken when I thought I should have young girls, thinking it was difficult in Botswana culture to tell an elderly person or another woman older than me what to do, and that was one of my criteria. When I chose an elderly woman, I told her, even if you are older than me, and culturally I should not be chasing you around and saying do this and do that, if you are my employee, this is what I will have to do. She kind of understood – yes – that’s what we should be doing. I guess understanding comes with age and experience. I was not used to employing people like that, and I guess I did not know what I was doing from the start, but now I know what I want and what I have to do.” “The criteria for choosing a maid, what do you take into account apart from age?” “Experience, but I think it’s not really fair to play experience. But for the last two I requested that point, which meant that Timely, my husband, actually went out and checked with the people for whom they used to work. Because we had been robbed by then, we were trying to be more careful. Otherwise the moment they said they could do the job, we were relieved and took them. We tell them they can work as many hours as they want, as long as they come in at 7 am, so I can meet them before I go to work, and they get the job done.” “So they stay at home while you are at work?” “But they don’t live where we live.” “The one who stole, was she staying at home while you were at work?” “Yeah.” “You came back and she had stolen or…?” “She teamed up with the security guard and used the house key. She didn’t have her own key to take home. At that time she had an agreement with Timely to leave the key outside the house. So when we came, somebody had opened the door with the key and cleaned out quite a lot of what we had. We reported the robbery that same night to the Police and went to her house. Unfortunately we couldn’t get our stuff back. It was even clear to the Police that she was the one who had stolen, but we never managed to get our stuff back. I think she was clever enough not to leave what she stole where she lived. “It was our fault. You should not trust your maid so much that you give her the key to the house. But what can you do, if both of you are working? Three days after she spent the whole week in custody at the Police Station, she actually came back to work. My husband asked her why she came back. She said we had been bewitched, our house had been 148

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bewitched. There was a lot of witchcraft she kept saying, and then she started saying that Timely should change or remain forever cursed. We had no time to listen to such rubbish. So that was the robbery.” “And the other maid?” “We dismissed her because she obviously had mental problems. She cried all the time. She told us very weird stories that also had to do with witchcraft – dead people in her family who were talking to her. When we dismissed her, I think we actually called Labour and asked how many months we should give her and they said we should give her a week’s notice. She got very, very angry and said she would bewitch us. She also said she would go to Labour and we would have a Labour hearing. We said, ‘Fine, if you think we haven’t treated you well, go to Labour,’ but it never happened. Perhaps Labour advised her that there was no way.” “You’ve employed Zimbabwean as well as Batswana maids. How would you compare them?” “Let’s keep out the woman who had mental problems and also the elderly ones. The others were young and I think you can’t compare a young person and an old person, but I don’t really see a big difference. Obviously communication is a big issue. Most Zimbabweans can speak English very well, which makes it easier for people who don’t speak Setswana to employ them, like in my case. That was also a problem with the woman with mental problems. She couldn’t speak English very well, which made it very difficult. I had to keep on telling Timely what to tell her. Comparing her with the other young girl we employed who robbed us, I think attitude and initiative more or less were the same. I really, really prefer the one I have now. I think she has her own initiative. I don’t really know whether there was a difference between the Zimbabweans and the Botswana ones. I can’t see it.” “When you choose a maid, are her looks ever an issue – especially in relation with the possibility that she could compete with you for your husband?” With a laugh, Mrs Rattlesburg delivered an emphatic “No!” Laughing as well, Dr Nanny insisted, “Never at all? Why not?” “I don’t think my husband chose me because of my looks,” she laughed. “I guess I could check to know whether they are intelligent people, but I don’t think that if they were super intelligent they would be working as maids. Unless they are old and had no chance to go to school.” “But there could be some young girls that are strikingly beautiful and provocative the way they dress while they are cleaning…” “Well, he sees those girls everywhere, doesn’t he? Oh, no! That has never been my issue. But I think I have learnt a good lesson with young 149

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girls. I think young girls really have the wrong attitude. They think they are too good to be maids. Because they don’t have a formal education, that’s the only chance they get. “There was one young lady who wanted to work for us, and I decided against her in the end in favour of this elderly woman who seemed to have the right attitude. She was like, ‘Ok, I could have done better in life, but unfortunately I didn’t and now I will have to be a maid and I accept that.’ But the biggest problem with a lot of young girls who are maids is that they don’t really think they should be doing this, however they have to earn money. “The issue of age also came in because I find it easier to pay somebody like the lady who works for us now. She is elderly, has five children, and sends three of them to school. I find it easier to relate to her. With a young girl, I always think she will probably not want to stay very long and I don’t have the patience to deal with new maids. I don’t want to change them all the time. If I employ somebody, I hope she can be with me for two years or so. But with a young person, that is unlikely. This particular one, she’s been with us for almost a year now and we haven’t had a problem at all.” “She’s satisfied with her pay?” “We’ve been helping her in other ways. The only thing I think we haven’t done, it’s my fault, and I have to do that very soon. I promised her in the beginning we would make a proper contract so she can qualify for gratuity and things like sick leave. But I haven’t done that. I have been too busy. I should just do it. But we have done other things for her. “Her daughter got married. We gave her a loan to buy a cow and 15 days leave to prepare for the daughter’s wedding because she’s a single mum. And usually we pay her basic salary plus something for transport. Equally, we pay her something extra when she does extra work for us, which usually we don’t need when it’s only the two of us. But when we have visitors, and there is almost no month with nobody else staying in the house, we give her P10 extra here and there. If there is childcare for extra people who live in the house, we pay her a proper rate for babysitting and that gives her extra money.” “She doesn’t stay in?” “No, unless she babysits, then she sleeps at the house if she wants to. For example, if my sister is there with her baby, she stays at the house, she sleeps there, she doesn’t mind. But normally, she doesn’t want to stay there, and we really don’t need a person 24 hours a day throughout the week. We don’t have any kids. If she stays, it is for her security, after working late. She stays right far and she has three little kids still at home, so she doesn’t want to stay in a Servants’ Quarters.” 150

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“Now, let’s move from these maids to another aspect. I would like to know what you think Batswana’s attitudes are towards outsiders, based on your experiences and perhaps those of other people you know.” “Well, I don’t know,” began Mrs Birgit Rattlesburg. “I have always felt that I am a foreigner. I think it may be because I have been in and out of here for too long, but I feel pretty much at home. I have never made an issue of my being white and being at home in Botswana. But I am neither English nor South African, which I guess is an advantage in this part of the world for whites. Even in Setswana, if you hear how they say Lekgoa, they mean English people. “But then, perhaps my being Austrian is one of my advantages. The fact that my first language is not English attracts such attitudes as, ‘Oh she has already tried to make an effort to talk to us, she is not talking in her first language.’ “I am a woman, which also makes it easier to have intermarriage in Botswana. Culturally, it means I am now part of my husband’s family. He has not become part of my family really. So they have actually gained something instead of us taking something away. “So to be honest, I have never really experienced, on a grand scale, big issues about me being a foreigner. I think the biggest problem in Botswana is the issue of language. The issue whether English is our official language and whether we all adhere to speaking English in public meetings remains a sensitive issue. “If you don’t speak Setswana, I think you can easily feel left out. Compared with other white women who have intermarried here, one of the things that has also helped me is that I have never been seen as an expatriate. I have never worked on an expatriate contract. I have always worked around local appointments, so there is never any suggestion that I am taking somebody’s job or being paid extra just because I came in from the outside. I think there is a lot of talk by people always thinking that foreigners are taking away something from them – jobs, potential marriage partners, business opportunities. I have heard a lot of that, not that I have experienced it myself, but I hear a lot of that. “I think that since the end of apartheid in South Africa in 1994, white South Africans have moved in here, resulting in negative attitudes. There is a lot of negativity coming from white South Africans which Batswana can’t stand. So the Batswana retaliate with negative attitudes of their own. The situation is made worse by the fact that things are getting tougher. There is unemployment, and university graduates increasingly don’t find jobs, even as they see other people finding jobs. 151

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“There were two complaints that came into my office within the NGO world, where a local person died of AIDS. She ran a local organisation of people living with HIV and AIDS, but she was somebody with no experience and no educational background. So when her organisation found funding for a director post, they employed a Zimbabwean, not her. There was a big outcry by the locals about how they could have done that to her and they complained whether that was ethical. To me, it was ethical because she wasn’t very qualified to do the job.” “I interviewed two American students the other day and they were saying that although Batswana treat the Lekgoa with a lot of respect, respect limited mostly to the male – the white male. They said that females are victims of being ignored or even of hostility. Fellow women in shops don’t treat you with any regard. They are hostile towards you, and if a man wants to treat you well, it might be out of a sexual interest. If you met a male Motswana who is treating you well, he wants you as a woman, but not necessarily because of your being a Lekgoa. If it’s just the fact of being a Lekgoa, the women have a raw deal, while the male Lekgoa seems to be very esteemed by the Batswana. I would like to get your comments on this observation.” “I think what is a problem in Botswana is, if you go to a shop, you usually get a raw deal, no matter what colour you are. Most of my friends are not white. If you go to a shop, nobody ever wants to help you. It seems people really do not have an interest in assisting you in this country when you are trying to get rid of your money. They let you get rid of it without any help. I don’t know whether that has to do with being black or white or male or female. There is just not a sense of customer service. “In my working world, I work with as many women as men. And my working relations with men are not filled with sexual innuendos. To be honest, I think there was a lot more of that at DUST where I taught briefly than I find in the work I do now. It’s much tougher perhaps to establish yourself in the NGO world, but once you have done so, I don’t have the feeling that people work with me or respect me or don’t respect me because I am a woman, sexually attractive or not. A lot has to do with what you manage to get off the ground and what you don’t manage to get off the ground. “Sexual overtones are part of life everywhere in the world, and I have not seen it as more pronounced for white women here in Botswana. A lot of black Batswana women will tell you the same kind of stories of how men are flirting and making sexual remarks. People are careful with people from human rights or women rights organisations. A lot of the prime candidates in government, whom people talk about making such remarks, 152

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would not dare make them in my presence or in the presence of any other serious gender equality advocate. Why would they? They know that the next day they will be in trouble because people will make a proper complaint about that.” “Have you heard the view that Batswana men are useless and don’t assume their responsibilities, and so on?” “I think it has also to do with the attitude towards serious relationships and marriage. A lot of men shy away from long term commitments of any kind, which explains why a lot of women have a bad image of Batswana men. “I think this is partly because of cultural constraints. Marriage is a very expensive thing. A lot of friends we have just can’t marry because nobody seems to agree on alternative modes – like we pay half now and half later, which I know happens in many other places. But with Batswana men, there is also the issue of not taking responsibility in matters like pregnancy. “Our courts are full with women trying to claim maintenance. I think that is a major problem. We were sitting together with a few young Batswana men at Love FM the other day, because our chairperson for Aidswatch Network works at Love FM. He is my age. He just got married, and he was with two friends who also just married. I seemed to become the marriage counsellor there. Because there has been such a class system in Botswana, people don’t marry because they have found a soul mate. They marry because they have found somebody who is, according to their class, the right kind of partner. A lawyer will never marry a primary school teacher. A primary school teacher will never marry a maid. They marry according to their class, but they may have very little else in common. “So once they have gotten over the marriage part, they don’t know what to do with each other. They get bored and start going around doing all sorts of other things, and then they have problems. When you ask them, ‘Do you think you are good husbands?’, all these men claim they are good husbands because they give part of their salary towards the household, pay for insurance, and so on. It all has to do with money. They is very little of – well I like spending time with my wife, I take her out every week, we like going to the cinema together, or we go on holiday once a year – those things you think about when you talk about quality relationships. “When people hear you are married to a Motswana, they think you got a raw deal. How on earth could you possibly marry one of their men when they have proven to be so uncaring in relationships? There is something to that, but there is more. Some believe those from outside 153

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may not be HIV positive. Those from outside also give you a ticket to the outside world. Those from outside are possibly rich. So I think all that comes into it.” “Interesting perspectives. Now what would you say are the attitudes of foreigners you know towards Batswana?” “I think foreigners integrate very, very poorly. It’s difficult for them to integrate. I don’t know whether it’s because of Batswana’s attitudes – which I find difficult to believe, because I am a foreigner and I didn’t find it difficult to integrate. Foreigners here have a big tendency to stay amongst themselves. And they stay amongst themselves even if they intermarry. There is a whole bunch of white women who have intermarried, and they get together and talk about their absent Batswana husbands, as if they are some kind of entity out there, with very little to do with them and the children they’ve had with them. “Foreigners always say people here are difficult to make friends with, and they don’t invite you to their houses, and I always tell them I think it has to do with their wrong expectations. Here people don’t have the tendency to invite you, they just pop around. So don’t wait for them to invite you. Pop round to their house, which is probably what they will eventually do to you. So you have to adapt to different modes. “To be honest, I don’t think most foreigners have a lot of respect for Batswana. A lot of them talk about Batswana as if Batswana have no idea what they are doing, while everything they foreigners do seems to be ok. I always ask myself, as they sit in a very comfortable African country and talk like that, how all this happened if Batswana are such useless characters. From the highest level, from your current DUST Vice Chancellor – a British citizen, Dr Mrs Serena Summers – who thinks she can do her nails when she sits in a meeting with the President, to volunteers here at Aidswatch Network.” Mrs Birgit Rattlesburg shook her head with a sense of pity. “I really wonder why to them Botswana always seems to be made of such bad characters. I hear very little positive talk about the country that makes it possible for them to put bread and butter on the table. I usually get defensive and say, ‘Why don’t you just go back to where you come from if it’s so much better there and so bad here?’ “But Botswana obviously offers something to people. Our President has a very respectful attitude towards foreigners. I remember the other day we had a meeting with him, and there was one of us from Burkina Faso, and none of us could say his name. We called him by his first name. We said ‘Dr Pius,’ but Pius is his first name. His last name is Ouedraogo. So the President asked him, ‘Dr Pius, is this your proper name?’ He said, 154

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‘No, your Excellency, my name is Idrissa Ouedraogo.’ So the President said, ‘My people, why can’t you call this man by his right name? You are too lazy to pronounce it.’ And then the President asked, ‘Where are you from?’ He said he was from Burkina Faso. ‘Oh! I am very happy. How long have you been here?’ The President was very respectful, kind of saying that you people are not respecting this man properly, because we didn’t even make an effort to call him by his proper name. “But then, there are stories about how some people in this society really struggle because they are not considered to be proper Batswana. They are born and bred here and speak Setswana and whatever, but they are perceived to not quite belong, regardless of how well we pronounce their names.” “So what qualifies one to be termed a proper Motswana?” “At the moment, if you seem to be discarded as a proper Motswana because you are not black, then it appears to be the colour of your skin, which obviously makes life very difficult for a number of people. But it doesn’t seem to apply to coloured people. There is a lot of discrimination and bad remarks about coloured people, but never to the point of saying they are not Batswana. Probably that would be taking things too far. When I look at some of these conflicts at a political level, it seems to me that it has to do with the colour of your skin more than anything else. Not that you have a home village, not that you speak Setswana, not that you can tell people your family history over two generations in Botswana. Colour is first and foremost.” “At the same time, it is not so clear cut, because some Makwerekwere are Batswana by marriage, even if not recognised as such, perhaps because they don’t speak Setswana,” commented Dr Nanny. “Yeah, maybe. I think differences become a major issue when people are experiencing problems. While Botswana experienced a lot of problems of poverty in the 60s and 70s, now it is more problems with people. “Today people experiencing these problems are more educated. Identity becomes an issue. Ethnicity and identity, which I don’t think Botswana talked about so much some 20 years ago, are coming to the fore, as people are more and more educated. Also, a lot of intermarrying has been taking place, which perhaps in other countries took place a lot earlier and on a bigger scale than in Botswana. In the past not many Batswana were overseas, not many white people came here. So I think today’s problems have to do with the newness of it all. “Like I told you before, when I first came here in 1990, there were a few white people running around, development workers mainly. Here for a year or two, then they would go. Now you see Gaborone is full of whites. 155

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Sometimes you wonder what all these people do, and there are many of them. I think that’s what makes people feel threatened. For an African male colleague who marries a Motswana woman, it is difficult for people to really consider him as a Motswana, even if he has a Botswana passport, especially if he does little to domesticate his tongue by speaking Setswana. He is a man and he married as a man into the society. So theoretically his wife is part of his culture, his group, his tribe. So if any emergency happens, he will take her with him and his children and not the other way round. The locals can’t quite see how a foreigner who marries a Motswana woman can convincingly claim to belong with them. It is easier for his wife to belong to the community he comes from, which is the normal order of things.” “How do Batswana react to the negative attitudes of foreigners?” “Unfortunately, they react defensively. I think they should be a lot more proactive. They should be tougher on people who show so much disregard for them. On the other hand, they should also show a lot more of the good side of Botswana. They should project more of a positive picture about themselves, ‘Fine, whatever you guys are saying, this is what we are doing and our country is ABC and it is…’ “Unfortunately, what we hear is foreigners saying bad things about Batswana and Batswana saying bad things about foreigners. It probably starts from both sides and that’s why we are in such a xenophobic mess now. I think this is going to be one of our biggest problems. “Things are not made any better by the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Apart from all this mutual labelling and dismissal, Batswana are dying. And whether we have ARV programmes or not, they will die and we will have to take in a lot more people from outside, which also contributes to the outside being perceived as a threat. Batswana feel really threatened.” “To conclude this interview, I’ve heard of an NGO here that seems to be all about human rights evangelism – God’s-Tear. What would you say is God’s-Tear’s place in this debate on issues related to maids, rights, foreigners, and so on?” “Well, they should play a crucial role. There are a lot of issues, especially when it comes to HIV and AIDS. The Maids’ Project they run should be really vocal in trying to get maids to know about their rights and the ways that they can get help. Even though they are not covered by the employment act and their legal position is not clear, our labour offices are well equipped to help these people, just as they are well equipped to help farm workers in Gantsi. “So we could do a lot to empower these people to take care of themselves, regardless of where they come from. I guess you could do a whole new project on maids and HIV and AIDS, because this is an issue 156

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for many people who employ maids. How do I handle especially those looking after my children? Should I test them? Do I have the right to test them? What do I do if they test positive? Can they still look after my kids? Maids should know about their rights in these matters. “So, yes, God’s-Tear should play a role in helping prevent abuses of maids. I don’t know where their Maids’ Project is going, even though they sit on our board. We’ve been trying to involve maids when we look at employment legislation. About xenophobia, there is a lot God’s-Tear should be doing. Not just telling people not to make derogatory remarks, but engaging people in dialogue. “Why do we tend to make these remarks? Why do we feel threatened? Where do our insecurities come from? That’s the kind of role I think they should be playing, they should stimulate public debate. After all, most of what most of us do as human rights organisations should be the creation of dialogue and getting people to interact beyond their comfort zones. We serve or should serve to sharpen people’s minds in certain areas. But I don’t think there is much of that happening at the moment. “We need to move beyond complaining to encourage people to sit down and properly discuss. Has anybody organized roundtable discussions for those people who try to make an issue of identity and belonging, to discuss the merits and demerits of inclusion and exclusion? God’s-Tear should go beyond rhetoric and begin tackling these issues. It is not enough simply to resort to declarations in the face of the blazing saddles of identity politics.” “Makes me think of Frankie Laine,” said Dr Winter-Bottom Nanny, nostalgically, and began singing softly: “She rode a blazing saddle She wore a shining star Her job to offer battle To bad men near and far She conquered fear and conquered hate She turned our night to day She made her blazing saddle A torch to light the way.” There at The Queen’s Arm, Mrs. Rattlesburg and I applauded and we all brought our mugs together in a toast. Mrs. Rattlesburg added, “Well put,” as she put her mug back down to the table. “Do you have any last thing to say?” asked Dr. Winter-Bottom Nanny. “The theme of foreigners makes me think as well of those who are seen and treated as foreigners even when they would, given the opportunity, claim to be bona fide locals. What accounts for this constant shifting of the boundary posts of belonging?” 157

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“On Saturday we had a long discussion about coloured identity with a good friend who is coloured, and incidentally, my husband Timely is half coloured, half Basarwa. We were talking about how people perceive and classify coloureds and about the hierarchies of colouredness – Englishspeaking coloured, Afrikaans-speaking coloured –, hierarchies informed by existential realities. There is a whole identity-making industry and a thriving market for competing identities amongst coloureds and between them and other groups in Botswana that warrant closer social scientific attention. It is much too easy to limit the notions of insiders and outsiders to foreigners and locals at the scale of inter-state relations, as if that were the only level where community and belonging are possible. “But from my perspective, what is very interesting is to see how HIV and AIDS are appropriated, to see the industry that has been created through the disease and how people react to it. Take for example all these people coming from outside to make a career of this epidemic. Do we need doctors from outside to be responsible for the ARV programme? Do we need people from outside to do training in certain areas? Do we need people from outside to run our labs? There are a lot of issues about foreigners and how people perceive those who come in. A lot of Batswana feel people are treating them as if nobody local can do anything. “I think it will be interesting to talk to big organisations and their whole apparatus here, which is totally foreign. It would appear the only thing local about them is taking up the name Botswana as a prefix. They have employed very few Batswana in senior management. Most of them are from the USA. Strategically chosen, they have an African-American director, a Caribbean woman who is this, and a Senegalese, Kenyan, Nigerian or whatever African who is the medical director, this or that. So you see black faces, which does not necessarily mean local faces, let alone care for local issues. So I think there are a lot of problems, as locals start saying, ok it’s others who are managing this disease, and the whole issue of ownership and owning up to the disease becomes an issue. Our role is to make the disease thrive so that outsiders can come in thrive from it! Can we afford such cynicism in the face of such a killer disease?” “So in a way, Botswana is presented essentially as a problem by those who are benefiting from her?” “Yeah! And some of this is outrageously silly. Certain donors within the whole development machinery or industry require you to take somebody from outside whom they have just recruited in New York or wherever to be the director of their project. That person comes in and does damage because they don’t know how to deal with this or that in the Botswana context. Result? Disaster. By the time they realise they need a local 158

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counterpart, it’s usually too late, and people have already made up their minds that that organisation is not doing a good job. So all of this is going to create a lot of problems and somebody at some point should look at the impact and we should try to stop such disasters before they start. Not all that comes in the name of aid is worth a Thebe, even when it rains Pula.” “Do you think the new shopping malls like Game City and River Walk are succeeding better in localising?” “When you look you see that there are no Batswana owners.” “At least they have Batswana consumers.” “I don’t know. I think most of the shops there are owned by Batswana through citizenship empowerment loans, but they are South African franchises, aren’t they? I can only think of two shops out of the whole lot where you can see that a Motswana is the actual manager and it is not a franchise from somewhere. It’s actually somebody local putting up his or her own idea about his or her own shop. Otherwise, everything you see, you just think of a South African mall implanted in Botswana, isn’t it? It looks like all the supermarkets are run by South Africans, and all the bars by Batswana. The locals promote drinking and drunkenness and the South African franchises blossom and laugh all the way back to their South African banks.” Mrs Rattlesburg laughed in irony as she took a drink of her pint. “You are very right when you say Botswana definitely has something to offer, despite all this negativity in the air,” said Dr Nanny. “I really wonder why that is, the negativity. But I remember living in England and how those who were not English were constantly complaining about England, but then staying on. They perhaps had a better reason because they were going to school and perhaps England’s reputation in schools was excellent. Remarks about England were endless – English people don’t know how to make good food, English pubs close at eleven, that kind of thing. People seemed to enjoy themselves, but not without grumbling and criticising the English. The same is true I think of foreigners in other countries, at least as far as I have been exposed beyond my native Austria. “But it seems to be particularly bad here in Botswana. You hear people who have lived in Kenya, Uganda and whatever before who come here and say Botswana is particularly bad. I have a good friend from Uganda who says he’s never heard so many outsiders complaining about a country where everybody is living so well. And I think even in Kenya white people are not integrated that well. There’s the same issue over there as here. They have problems but it is not constantly at the level of discussion you 159

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find here, so I don’t know what it is about Botswana that makes local attitudes such a sing song. Perhaps people have different expectations of Botswana and then they are disappointed in what they find when they get here. I don’t know, it is a good research question, ask yourself that.” “I shall,” concurred Dr Nanny. “And thank you very much for an exceedingly rich and generous interview. Now let’s drink,” and she ordered more beer.

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Chapter Twenty One

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N

aturally, our next port of call was God’s-Tear, repeatedly mentioned by various informants as the local human rights NGO. Mrs Rattlesburg had been a bit more reserved and Dr Winter-Bottom Nanny was more than keen to find out just what special place God’s-Tear had created for maids. The building was gigantic and impressive. I could smell the fresh aroma of donor funding in the oil paint, the furniture and even those who worked there. Marvellous Faith was assigned by the unavailable director to receive us. She started with the background information. “God’s-Tear is a human rights organisation started in 1996 by the present director. Before then no single organisation in Botswana looked at human rights in a holistic manner. There were organisations looking at women’s rights but not human rights generally. We have at the moment four fully funded programmes. “One of them is the paralegal advice to people who earn less than P600 a month. We use P600 as a cut off point. But really we assist almost everyone who comes through our door even though their salary might be above that level. But in order to manage the numbers we say P600. “We have a research programme, which at the moment is looking at issues of HIV/AIDS and human rights. Currently the research and the paralegal programmes are merged. Within the paralegal programme, we have projects such as the Maids’ Project. We also have an orphan rights project, looking at issues of inheritance, and we have a lot of HIV/AIDS subprojects. “We have an advisor of the programme, who looks at urgent human rights issues that might arise. One of these issues is the death penalty, another is refugees. The programme deals with Zimbabwe as an issue, because Zimbabwe has a very negative impact in the region in matters of governance. We support organisations in Zimbabwe that are looking at the issue of governance there. We have hosted a number of civil society delegations and the private sector that have come to Botswana seeking solidarity and support.” Dr Nanny thanked her for the overview, and asked, “How do you get your funding?”

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“To survive financially, we write project proposals, which we submit to various donor organisations. That is very difficult for us, because Botswana is perceived to be a middle income country. So a lot of international donors have pulled out. Secondly, Botswana has a very good human rights track record, so a lot of donors do not realise there are human rights problems in Botswana. It takes a lot of convincing to attract the international donor community. “As an NGO, we do not rely on government support. We might have government support for some very small projects. But generally, we like to be independent from government. So we rely on international and regional donors or supporters. At the moment our main donors are mostly European and American organizations. Basically, funding is on a project by project basis. For example, for the Maids’ Project, we got funding from the African-American Nanny Empowerment Foundation, which… maybe you are familiar with,” she said, becoming aware for the first time of the coincidence in name. “So it depends.” Dr Nanny smiled and explained that the foundation was actually founded in honour of her great grandmother, an African-American nanny known for standing up and saying enough is enough. Dr Nanny came back to God’s-Tear with the remark, “That’s a lot in your basket.” “Yeah, we have to continuously be doing proposals.” “Your Maids’ Project, for how long has it been running?” “It’s been running since 1997, after research done by God’s-Tear. Maids meet here once a month, the second Sunday of the month, to raise their concerns. We are in the process of registering their association legally. We have sent a draft constitution to one of the trade unions to see if there is anything they can help us with.” “Since 1997, what do you think you have achieved through that programme?” “When they started, to tell the truth, they didn’t know what their rights were. But since then they know. Some of them really know. They can solve problems between them and their employers without seeking help from anybody else.” “What sort of rights do they claim?” “Annual leave, servant’s benefits, maternity leave, compassionate leave, notice when coming to termination, etc.” “I’ve been talking to some maids and their employers and one of the rights seems to be the right to a social life. There is this conflict, ‘Do I bring my boyfriend to come in and stay with me if I’m staying in, and do I go out on weekends?’ And so on. It’s always a problem. Has that cropped up during your meetings?” 162

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“Yeah, some of them always complain that even their families are not allowed in their quarters. They want to be given days off so they can meet with their boyfriends or families outside if they are not allowed in.” “There’s this suspicion that when a maid comes in, especially if she’s young, she settles in very fast and takes over the house. She dresses in a very provocative manner. The man of the house doesn’t fail to notice and sometimes he might want to look at her twice, often to the distaste of the madam in the house.” “I’ve never heard that.” “So you only deal with them at a very formal level?” “The maids who come to see us are the old ones. They are old mothers. I’ve never met those young ones. Mainly the more mature women come here. There are also young ones who come but the attendance is not very regular. So you might see them once, every three or four months or something like that.” “Do the older ones who have moved between several jobs tend to compare their employers when they are with you? Do they say different things about different categories of employers?” “They have problems with public holidays. When white people employ them, they seem to get the holidays, no matter what. But if non-white people employ them, it seems to be a problem. They don’t just give them all the public holidays that are observed legally in Botswana.” “Why do you think that is the case?” “I cannot say.” “Have you also heard some of them say, when you work for an Indian, what you earn as money is just money for the hospital?” “Indians are a problem. They will claim that Batswana are not hardworkers, and that it is better to employ Zimbabweans. But they are also exploiting Zimbabweans because they are not paying them agreed wages.” “What do you mean?” “Ok, like if I’m your employee and you seem to be interested in a Zimbabwean. Let me say you are paying one P400 and you say I’m not a hard worker, you prefer to take a Zimbabwean. You’ll tell that Zimbabwean, ‘I’m going to pay you 250 per month.’ She will agree to work for that, and some of those who don’t have hearts wouldn’t even pay that woman P250 as agreed. They will keep on saying, ‘I will do this for you.’ When that woman complains, she will say, ‘I’m going to report you to the Police to take you back to Zimbabwe,’ without paying the agreed amount. That’s what they do.” “Could they report them to the Police, knowing that they are employing the maids illegally?” 163

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“They will say the maids don’t have work permits and maybe have crossed the border illegally. That’s why we say they are exploiting them.” “Could it not be said as well that the Zimbabweans exploit their employers, in the sense that they know the employers are employing them illegally, and they know that the employers cannot go to Labour or to the Police to report?” “No, I don’t think so. I don’t think they are exploiting their employers. Because their employers know what the law says. They are the ones exploiting Zimbabweans. Those Zimbabweans, I think, they don’t know the laws of this country. But those who know the laws are the ones to blame, because they should be preventing not encouraging exploitation. They know they are going against the law.” “I’ve also talked to some employers of Zimbabweans. I don’t know whether you’ve employed any yourself, but I know lots of people who do and who consider them hardworking but...” “What comes after the BUT?” “That’s what I want to know from you,” Dr Nanny laughed. “But if you don’t pay them, they will pay themselves.” “That’s an interesting one. Can you just elaborate on that? I think that’s a powerful statement.” “They will look for something they can pay themselves with, maybe by taking your clothes. Whatever they can come across that will benefit them.” “So everywhere you find clothes missing, you should know that Zimbabweans are not being paid?” “If you are not paying them.” “But what if you pay them and still miss your clothes?” “It might not be them.” “It might be someone else?” “It might be someone else.” “I like your statement. Those to whom you deny payment, shall seek to pay themselves otherwise.” “I don’t think if you are paying somebody well, she can do anything bad to you. Of that I’m sure. If you are paying me well and treat me properly, I cannot do anything bad to you.” “Do I understand you correctly? Are you suggesting that those who are victims of their maids – come back from work and find their maids in bed with their husbands or boyfriends –, they are to blame for the situation? You employed her and she now uses your bed with your husband, and you blame yourself ? If you go to work, you come back and your house is swept clean even though you pay your maid regularly, you blame yourself ? Is that what you want me to think?” asked Dr Nanny, adding, “Because these things happen.” 164

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“Yes, but with regard to finding them in bed with your husband, you blame yourself and your husband. Because you have a relationship with your husband, and your maid is your employee!” “The husband and the wife, there might be something wrong between the two of you, but what about your maid?” “I doubt the maid would have come in and undressed herself and thrown herself at the mercy of this man. I don’t think so.” “She was just like an innocent sweet forcefully unwrapped by this man and consumed without consent. Is that what you want me to believe?” Marvellous Faith conceded, “Maybe she would have contributed also. But where you should be directing the blame is at your partner, not at the maid.” “I gather that elderly maids are often employed by younger women who are schooling, working, or both, and who are very youthful in their age. And these younger madams have problems with these elderly maids. One of the women told my assistant here her experiences with maids. She is very young and both she and her former husband used to work. Her mother-in-law stayed with them. And one day, she was giving the maid who is elderly work to do when the mother-in-law was not amused and said, you girls of this young generation, you should sit down and let the maid tell you how to treat your husband. The young madam was so furious she decided the maid must go. But the mother-in-law would have none of it. She told her, if anybody is to leave this house, it is you because you are not treating your husband the way a wife should. My question is, have you had such cases of inter-generational conflict brought to the notice of God’s-Tear?” “I’ve never had one. But I think she has a problem with her mother-inlaw,” she added. “I’ve never heard of that.” “Ok, let’s go now to more serious things since this was just an introduction. How do you identify maids for your programme?” “We pass messages over the phone, over the radio and there will be a meeting for the maids and as they hear this message, they come and they introduce themselves, telling us when they heard the message, where they are from, how long they have been working there, etc. In addition to passing the message on the radio, we also have maids tell each other about our activities, and also we have employers who actually come to us for information, promising to send their maids to attend our meetings. They do send them, so there are different ways in which they are identified.” “Since 1997, how many people have participated in your programme?” “I can’t say, it’s a lot.” “How many people normally regularly come to your meetings?” 165

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“It depends, because most of them also work during Sundays. If that Sunday most of them are not at work, they will turn up in large numbers. But if most of them are at work, they will turn up in few numbers.” “How many would come for a meeting?” “Sometimes less than 20, and more than 30 especially when we have workshops. When we do training workshops and they come in very large numbers, we don’t even have it here. We have to look for a bigger venue and pay to have it.” “Are you familiar with employment agencies that target maids?” “A few.” “So different agencies exist that recruit and place maids?” “And claim to train them.” “Are you particularly interested in those groups? Have you made them part of your programme?” “We have had one particular group come to actually take a component of our work for their training programme and we have had contact with some of the agencies both negatively and positively, because as I said we provide legal advice to clients also. Sometimes some of these maids who might have been mistreated by the agency, they also come. So we have had interaction at various levels with some of these agencies. But we don’t go out there to market the programme really, because what we are trying to do is to build the capacity in a particular group of maids who meet regularly, so they can take control of the project for themselves. “We don’t want to be running a Maids’ Project in 2010 and 2020 because we have a sustainability approach and for the Maids’ Project, it’s a programmed approach. One, we have the meeting with them. We are trying to build their capacity so they can do things for themselves. Two, is the registration, a step towards independence. “We also link them up with trade unions so the trade unions can tell them how they go about their work, lobbying for their rights. In fact, every year at May Day celebrations, one of the maids would participate in the trade union celebrations. Even when they have conferences, they want the maids to go and speak, to present the case of maids, where we are targeting law reform because the law does not really cover maids as employees. So in that way we are trying to build them up so that they can take forward their matter themselves, and especially since maids are women, if you want to follow gender specific projects.” “Have you ever had a maid yourself ?” “Yes, I’ve had maids from 1999 till now.” “Did they attend?” “No, she does not attend.” 166

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“Because she’s Zimbabwean?” “What if she is Zimbabwean?” she laughed loudly. “Are you trying to implicate me in some way or other?” “No, but I think the Zimbabweans are hardworking, are they not?” “Until now I’ve never employed one but I hear that they are hard workers. But even then they can attend as long as they have their legal papers to say, ‘We are here illegally. We have work permits,’ then there’s no discrimination. We cannot then send them away. We have a few Zimbabweans who attend but they have been in Botswana a long time. They speak Setswana, because, as I explained, the meeting is in Setswana, not because we are discriminating but because it’s more comfortable for communication for those concerned.” “But then, don’t you think that as a human rights organization there’s a problem if you target only those with papers? It means that human beings without Omang or regular border entry lose their rights.” I watched in awe Dr Nanny pushing Marvellous Faith into a corner. “Do you know how many border jumpers we entertain and we help here, whether they are maids or otherwise? But generally, the border jumper maids, they do not come here. If they come, there’s no way we will send them away. They don’t come.” Marvellous Faith was determined to take nothing lying down. “The ones who come in do so because you target them, you speak their language, you make them visible, you want them. You make the announcements on radio in Setswana, you invite them as maids with a right to be trained. But the Zimbabweans without papers are maids who are more like Zombies, because rendered invisible by bureaucracies, by employers and even by human rights organisations like yours. They pay themselves when they are underpaid, and we do not see them because they don’t meet our criteria of visibility, don’t you think?” Dr Nanny was particularly aggressive, but somehow managed to maintain a touch of humour in the way she asked the question. Raising her voice, Marvellous Faith said, “Well, there are a lot of human beings who fall through the cracks of God’s-Tear. It’s impossible for us to help everyone, especially if they do not present themselves to us. We do not have the human and financial resources to do that. But at the same time we are trying to help the Zimbabwe situation. Like I said, we have one project that works on Zimbabwe. We have focused seminars where we invite a lot of people, including Zimbabweans themselves, and we urge them to try to help their fellow Zimbabweans in whatever way possible. A lot of illegal immigrants, asylum seekers, come to us and we have had a lot of Zimbabweans. Some Zimbabwean maids are very well 167

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qualified, if you can speak with them. They have O Levels and diplomas, but just because of the deplorable economic and political situation, they are forced to seek a living somewhere else. So what we are trying to do is to assist with governance in Zimbabwe, which will have the spill over effects of reaching down to those people who suffer the most.” “I totally agree.” “But we try to target the bigger picture. So if unfortunately, the Zimbabwean maids fall through the cracks, there is little we can do. One can only do what one can do.” Dr Nanny challenged, “The bigger picture often depends on the sensitivity of your camera lens. There are certain cameras lenses that are so narrow in focus that they wouldn’t even capture your head, let alone the whole human body, and there are others designed to be sensitive to the bigger picture. In Zimbabwe, Mugabe maintains power without legitimacy, yet here we expect border jumpers to come in legally. How can that work when the inner situation is illegitimate occupation of power? So perhaps you could make a case of hunting out illegal maids and providing for them the sort of security you make possible for your legal maids. You could say, as a human rights organisation, you are going to protect them from the Police. You can make a case for this particular set of illegal immigrants, some of whom have A Levels and university degrees, so it could also rain on them in this land of the Pula.” Marvellous Faith reposted, “But may I ask you a question? Are you willing to come and assist us with this project? We have in the office five programme staff only, plus the director who is busy as a bee. She also does programme work when she can. The bottom line is we are too thin on the ground. It’s not that we are not interested in the illegal maids, we are very much interested. We help all illegal immigrants, refugees, whoever. But the actual fact of going out there to find them is beyond us. We do not have the human potential. That’s why we are asking for volunteers to find illegal maids.” “You can go to Pink City for as many Zimbabwean volunteers as you want.” “They stay at Pink City?” “They gather there looking for piece jobs. If one day you arrange your meeting here and you want extra hands and you want piece jobs, just go to Pink City and get a few. Bring them here and they will assist you. That’s where they gather to look for jobs. You’ve never been to Pink City?” “No.” “I should take you round. I’ll be your guide amongst the Zimbabwean community of Pink City,” Dr Nanny offered, half teasing. 168

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“Because one camera lens might be a bit too narrow?” Marvellous Faith retorted. “Honestly, it’s not that we don’t want to help. People always ask, ‘How do you ignore them?’ Even the Zimbabwean men are exploited, not as maids but from doing piece jobs. They do piece jobs and at the end, they are not paid or they are not paid what was agreed, and that’s exploitation. Then again, there is the issue of treatment while in detention by the Police. In detention, because you are an illegal immigrant and you are going to be deported, certain rights are not extended to you. You are not allowed to communicate with other people to inform them of your detention. These are all human rights issues, but because of our lack of capacity, we cannot humanly deal with them all. We would really love to help all the people in prisons whether they are Zimbabweans or whatever. There are a lot of people who’ve been in prison for years and their cases have not been heard and they are also subject to human rights abuses. It’s just our limitations that stop us from doing all that we would love to do.” “I understand the limitations of God’s-Tear. Many are called but few are chosen.” “That’s the world for you.” “There’s a Shona-Ndebele saying that the tortoise loves boxing, but its hands are short,” replied Dr Nanny, determined to have the last word. “I could swear that’s a Tswana saying,” Marvellous Faith was not ready to be outdone. “It is used interchangeably with ‘God made the tall people first, and when it came to others, He was out of material.’” “Leaving them in tears,” said Dr Nanny, heading for the door.

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Chapter Twenty Two

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A

nother fascinating interview was the one with Miss Rosemary White, a single parent and a Black British lecturer in Social Psychology at DUST. The interview took place at her office, but it was clear Dr Winter-Bottom Nanny had met her before. Miss White was first to ask questions, once formal introductions were done. I liked the way she bubbled with energy and self-confidence like a spring that refused to stay compressed. DUST had decided against renewing her contract ‘because a local staff person specialising in the same area has returned home with a PhD from the University of North Dakota to fill the position.’ But she bore no grudge, even as she knew she wasn’t going back to any job in the UK. “Why do you want to interview me on maids?” asked Miss Rosemary White. “Maids are a fascinating topic for research.” “Why?” Dr Nanny hesitated, not used to the role reversal. “There is very little literature on them. Very little writing has been done and I’m interested in different people’s experiences with maids. I thought perhaps you might have something to share with me.” “I do. I have a very powerful experience, and I think the most important thing is for you to speak to my maid. I’ve had two and the one who stayed with me the longest, her name is Bwaho. She was very oppressed when she first came to me. But I think by living in an environment where she has been able to be herself, she has evolved. She has shown initiative, she has shown competence, she has shown professionalism in her work, to the extent that it has allowed me to actually get on and do what I needed to do. “I think she has graduated from being ‘a maid’ because I never saw her in that context. I saw her in the context of somebody who was coming into my employ. I was going to pay her to be a part of my family. So her duties could not be defined by a job description or job contract. There had to be an element of flexibility because day-to-day life is really unpredictable. “I found it impossible to work with somebody who took the approach that to be a maid, you have to do A, B, C & D when I need them to do Z, X, S and in no particular order. Now that means that somebody coming

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into my employ as a maid needs to be aware of those dynamics. That takes initiative, but I feel the socialisation of the maid… the stereotypical image is such that they are reluctant to actually take that on board, and they really do seek the guidance and direction of their employer on a regular basis. ‘What do you want me to do? Now that I’ve done that, what do you want me to do next?’ “I think this is a hangover of how maids have been treated in the past. They weren’t allowed to show initiative and they weren’t allowed to recognise their position within the family. As a result, a lot of people who employ them, as well as the maids themselves, have just tended to respond to a prescribed way of seeing and doing. Everyone thinks that this is how a maid should be. “I had no previous experience with maids. I came from a culture where a housekeeper or home help is in the domain of the rich. The au pair is beyond the dream of most middle class families, who are forced to settle for DIY – Do It Yourself – or hire part time help. So it was an impossibility to employ one on a modest financial reality like mine. I did my own chores. “So, to come here to Africa, where if you don’t have a maid you aren’t doing justice to society, was to me a total culture shock. I came along and I finally said let me employ somebody. And I was blown away by the way somebody was there to help me with my day-to-day stuff. It was a big shock to my senses. “The person I employed, because of my flexibility, was like, oh, hey, this is wonderful. I’m going to take advantage of this. And she took advantage of it to the extent where she wasn’t seeing it for what it was. As long as you did your job, I didn’t have a problem. You would get paid well for your job because I wanted to acknowledge my appreciation. There were incentives, bonuses, and other elements, which I consider necessary whenever you employ anybody…” Miss Rosemary White was interrupted by a phone call which lasted for three minutes, after which she returned to the interview, but without a sense of where she had been interrupted. Dr Nanny gave her the cue. “Oh, yes, and I feel maids are socialised to think they can take advantage of employers who come from abroad, particularly those who don’t know. So for example, my first maid would say, ‘Can I borrow your clothes and can I have this day off?’ “At first I was like, ‘Ok. No problem.’ But then, I began to realise that this person was actually taking advantage of what she perceived to be my ignorance of what was involved in her job. I was clear in that I wanted somebody to be a house helper. Somebody who’s going to participate in 172

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the home, see what’s needed to be done and do it. Ok, I was going to employ somebody but I was also going to employ them in the sense that it wasn’t just a job. A job is a lot easier to categorise than being a maid, and maids have got to understand this to be successful in pleasing their employers. “I began talking to other people about the roles of a maid, and I got so many views. And painful experiences. In one painful experience, the maid apparently wasn’t allowed to drink from the cups. The employer wouldn’t allow her to sit on the chairs. The maid had to sit outside, and to me that was totally oppressive, absolutely ridiculous. It was just awful and then there was the extreme of a white person who was literally paying P2000, which she believed to be a reasonable wage for somebody to live on. Of course, the maid’s family took advantage of that, as did the people in the village. One of them even burnt the maid’s house down, because they felt she was just too lucky. Seven years after that incident, she is trying to recover, her spring of life having dried up when the white man returned to Denmark at the end of his stay. “To me that kind of environment is an absolute mess. But how do you empower somebody? How do you allow somebody to break away from the stereotypical image of how maids should be treated and how I see them? Total clash! How do I reconcile that? For me, using a holistic approach, derived from the culture, has done exactly that. I’m really pleased. “This is why I feel it’s important that you have the opportunity to interview my maid, so you don’t get my perception only. For me, I’ve seen this young person evolve into somebody I consider to be part of my household. She gets paid at the end of the month. And at the end of the day, she is able to exercise a level of freedom, to be respected, and to have the opportunity to complain. “If there is anything that I haven’t done or if I have taken advantage of her, she’s been able to feel comfortable to actually say no, this is wrong. And when she complains, I respect her all the more. She’s been respected and not condemned for that. I don’t know what else you want me to say. Except you want me to pinpoint exactly what is it I’ve done.” “Maybe we should go back to that first case of the maid who wanted to take advantage of you.” “Oh! Yes!” “I’d like to know more. Just how did she seek to take advantage of you?” “Well, I don’t think she deliberately went out of her way to take advantage of me. She was in an oppressive relationship. She was being 173

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abused by her partner. It was her first relationship and she was stuck in it. She wasn’t married. She wanted to be married. It was a desperate goal of hers to be married. She had a child by her partner, who was insecure. “The first thing when she was engaged by me was that I had to go and see the partner, and the partner had to vet me and that vetting process meant his being able to assess the extent to which I could be taken advantage of. So beginning with his gender bias he thought, this is a single woman who is going to employ her. He is going to be safe. “I made it clear to him that I had a lot of work to do, which included writing a book and I needed to work late. He felt that was wrong, he didn’t want that. So whenever she did work late, he would lock her in the house, so she couldn’t come to work the next day. That was about his insecurity, but because of her background, she accepted that as a sign of ‘he loves me.’ And she placed that as a priority above anything else. “When it came to getting paid, obviously she would give all her money to him and he would distribute to her what he felt she needed. Now, that is in contrast with an employee who felt that she was able to make decisions for herself and actually run a household. It was too much of a contrast for her to expect to be given what she wasn’t given in her personal relationship. That’s how I saw the element of the maid seeking in her job the freedom and respect she hadn’t in her relationship. ‘I want to be respected, I want to be nurtured, I want to feel free.’ “She was feeling that she could do that in her job environment, which meant, ‘I don’t have to do certain things. I don’t have to do the job that was required of me,’ which was primarily to look after the child in the morning and take care of the household. And that was very sad because I heard reports from my neighbour that my daughter wasn’t being looked after and as a consequence, I called her in and her employ was terminated. “Why I realised the environment was different was that she saw fit to come back on several occasions. I believe she felt able, she felt heard, recognised to be listened to, and as a result, she has come back on several occasions. She even left her number to say, ‘Look hei! I want to come back.’” “You terminated her employment?” “Yes, it had to be formal. I had set up a bank account for her. Not a bank account, just a building account. And part of her wages went into that account. At the end of the year, she would go get the accumulated sum and spend it on whatever she wanted. There are bonuses and other advantages, but I have expectations of you and that, to a certain extent, may have been quite frightening for her. It was just too much for somebody so oppressed all of their life. So she took my employ as total freedom!” “It makes sense.” 174

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“I felt it would take far more time for her to begin to realise what that was about. This was a very young girl. She was 18 and had left school, obviously because of her pregnancy and controlling, abusive partner. All she knew in her very young life was that she must do what she’s told, whether by an elderly male relative, by her male partner, or whatever. “And in that environment, coming to me, her impression was that I wasn’t going to listen to her anyway, because she is just a woman. “So for me, there was a lot tied up in that and at the end of the day, I had to look at what was in my interest and that was very different for me to do because she was good at what she did and my house was meticulously clean and I had no complaints about that. But I could not rely on her to be responsible and I think having that kind of expectation of somebody was a bit too much. “Then I had a string of other people who came in, but I soon learnt that it wasn’t worth having somebody who didn’t want to be there. For example, I had somebody who came in to babysit – an 18 year old –, just to babysit. But she couldn’t even do that because she was having this impression of being beyond a maid. She held this stereotypical view that it was beneath her to do anything like this. So after a week, I said, ‘Off you go. Thank you very much. I don’t want you to come back.’ “Then I had somebody who did everything reluctantly, because she made it quite clear she didn’t want to work for anybody who wasn’t white. I supposed she had been working for white people most of her career. And so she only came to me because she didn’t have anybody else. Even then, I realised she came from a background of being oppressed and she noticed my realisation. The situation with me was too painful for her. And her reluctance was intolerable for me. The people who had employed her before, they thought she was getting a very good deal and couldn’t see her problem. They were so oppressive in their approach. For me there was no benefit in keeping her in my employ, so I let her go. “And another woman came to me. I think she was more mature. She had a 16 year old son. She left school at 14 because she was pregnant and had no other opportunity to do anything different and had obviously got into the position of being a maid. But she valued the job, because she realised the value of the money and what she could do with it to support her family. She was the only breadwinner in the family and as a result, people were so dependent on her and so she took a different approach which was, ‘I need to be employed.’ And having that attitude coming into my employ meant she took responsibility. “I think when she realised there was no element of discrimination, and that we needed her just as much as she needed us, it sank home that my home was somewhere where she could develop her skills. I think she 175

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felt she could explore and show initiative. And when she did show initiative, she wasn’t condemned for it. She was actually praised for it. She would get a bonus. “As a result, it was like, ‘Oh my God! I’m respected! I really value this. Ok, I’m not going to take advantage of the situation or overstep my rights.’ “Slowly, she began to see me as a person, rather than an employer, and then as a mother. Her difficulties of being a single mother were mirrored by my difficulties of being a single mother, and as a result, it was about sharing and joining together, to the point of saying well, we could support each other. This encouraged her to feel she could just be herself. She could take time off. But she would say, ‘I can’t take time off tomorrow because you got this meeting and you need to do this and that.’ I felt, to a certain extent, valued in my own home, and it could be a home as opposed to a place of work. And then it took on a different feel. The household I’d assembled became a nourishing place, it became our home.” “How did you resolve the problem of her social life, her boyfriend and things like that?” “Oh, she would say, ‘I’m off. I’m going to visit my family this weekend,’ and I would be like, ‘Ok, no problem,’ if it wasn’t a problem. If it was a problem, I would say, ‘Look, I really need you this weekend.’ But she knew that she could have time off when she wanted. She could go to the shops. She could go to pay her bills. She could do whatever she wanted, within the timeframe of my timeframe. “She also went to her church and to a church convention where she happened to fall pregnant. She was very afraid to tell me. But she told a friend of mine, who said she thought she was being so silly in not telling me. She finally came to me and said, ‘I’m really afraid I will lose my job.’ She didn’t lose her job and I told her I was really upset she didn’t feel she could talk to me. Rather than lose her job, she got a pay rise. “She’s gone ahead and had the baby. Then, ‘Oh my God, what will I do with this baby?’ So I said, ‘Why the problem? Bring the baby.’ She was like, ‘Oh my God! This is wonderful.’ She came to work with the baby on her back. The only problem I saw and I told her so was, ‘You are not letting me or my daughter play with the baby. And that’s upsetting to me because we want to play with the baby.’ We wanted to get involved with that side of it, but she’s still nervous, because she feels that’s not my responsibility. But I’m seeing a baby who is getting so attached to the mother and not getting to anybody else. I’m saying this is serious stuff. You’ve really got to be mindful of how your baby is socialised.”

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“How would you situate your attitude in relation to the dominant attitudes? Your friends have maids, people around have maids, and they don’t treat them that same way.” “Absolutely.” “Yes?” “By focusing on me, I can’t change them. I can only change me by focusing on my attitude – to treat people with respect regardless. I have created a very positive household that has become a warm home. And my house is spotless. So when somebody comes over, the response is, ‘Oh my God! This is really gorgeous.’ My maid is renowned and the neighbours have all been positioning themselves for her skills when I leave. When you are really happy with who and what you are, you become good at what you do, which is her case. I think the evidence is there. But people are not making those kinds of connections. She likes being a house helper or domestic worker. She doesn’t want to do anything else, and I think that neither she nor anybody else who wants to be a ‘maid’ should be condemned for that. “To be with a family that respects you, that translates into quality of work. And my maid has demonstrated that, to the point that she has shone like a bright star in my neighbourhood. As I said, when people come into my home, they say, ‘Oh my goodness. This person really knows how to work and how to keep your place sparkling.’ That has spun off to her benefit. She now has a choice of who is it she works for when I leave, back to the UK at the end of next month.” “Where is she going when you are gone?” “Across the road basically from where I live. And that person is really happy she’ll be coming across to clean her house.” “You’ll most certainly miss her.” “Yes, she’s good. I’ve enjoyed living with her. She’s helped me beyond words. My dressing gown, she would sew it every time it ripped. My daughter’s clothes, she would sew them. She kept them meticulous to the point that we could pass them off as nearly new clothes. It’s that kind of closeness we’ve had.” “You’ve become intimate strangers?” “Y-e-s, and that is the most important thing. For two years, I washed my own underwear, because it is not something a maid does. Nobody has done that for me since I was a child, until one day, I came home and found all my knickers washed and swinging on the line. I was like, ‘Why? What’s this change?’ So I asked her, ‘Why are you washing my knickers?’ She says, ‘It is ok, madam, I want to because I know you. You are fine and I have no problem.’ 177

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“That for me was her way of saying, ‘What I feel is so much more than just being your employee.’ Yes, this is being intimate strangers. She may not articulate it, as her English is not very good, but what she did is her way of articulating her appreciation and her acknowledgement of how well I’ve treated her.” The interview went on for much longer, but the recorder, for whatever reason, ceased recording. Unfortunately we never succeeded in interviewing her maid. Twice we were given an appointment but twice Miss Rosemary White found an excuse to call it off, busy as she must have been with rounding off her stay in the country.

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W

e interviewed many other lecturers at DUST. I felt privileged to get to know how these elite Africans relate to their maids and to one another. I wouldn’t have had a glimpse into their world, had I not been working for Dr Winter-Bottom Nanny. The university was a place we only talked about from a distance when driving past it in the Kombi. The closest we came to the campus was overhearing students in the Kombi talking about lectures and professors and the travails and excitement of student life. Dr Nanny was particularly pleased with some of the interviews we did with lecturers from other Africans countries. A joint favourite of ours was an interview with Dr Gladys Nana of Ghanaian origin. She started by recounting how many maids she had had from Botswana and Zimbabwe, after cracking a few jokes about why the beautiful ones are yet to be born. “I’ve had both Batswana and Zimbabweans. One Motswana, I had her for more than five years, I think. Well, she behaved nicely at the beginning. The problem with them here is that when they stay longer, they think you should treat them like part of the family.” “Is that so?” “Yeah, so the longer they stay, the more difficult it becomes. They think they should be on holiday every other day almost or something like that. So, even though she stayed that long with me, I decided just to let her go. The thing is, all of them, if you are not there they’ll do a little bit and stop. “At least I haven’t had that experience where they just sit in front of the TV. I put the TV on stand-by and hide all my remotes. I don’t leave them there for them, otherwise they’ll just sit and watch. Even then, they do not do the things you want them to do. They like to be told, here, the bed sheets, there, the dishes, especially when they’ve been there for long. You would imagine having stayed that long, they should know what to do and when.” “Exactly.” “I don’t think it’s good to be told every time, like you are a baby. ‘What are you using your head for? Do what is supposed to be done.’ The bad thing about them is they like eating your food.”

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Dr Nanny laughed encouragingly. “Oh! Boy! The amount you spend on paying them and the food you buy, it’s not worth it. The potatoes – they love them – and the bread – Oh! Boy! – and the drinks! They have a habit of, if they drink your juice, of putting water to bring it back to the same level. Even with the oil, they do that. That’s why I decided to put everything in my storeroom, closed and keyed. “If you want to trust them with these things, forget it! If you don’t have a lockable fridge, you’re in trouble. Sell the one provided by DUST, and get the lockable one and that’s it. Lock your fridge. They have that bad habit of eating part of the food they are supposed to prepare for you, doing little, and getting more from you. “And the washing. Oh! Boy! Washing white things, they are not good at it. Definitely not! White garments? Forget it! Ironing is bad because they don’t know how to iron and even if you tell them you don’t iron the swimsuit or whatever, that’s the first thing they’ll go for to iron. Then when it burns, they’ll hide it somewhere, until one day your child is going in the morning and you can’t find the swimsuit and you find out what happened, and it’s the only swimming costume you have for the child, and then you have to write a letter or you go to school and explain.” Dr Gladys Nana heaved a great sigh of exasperation. “That’s the bad part of them. What you say don’t do, that’s what you push them to do. Ah! That’s definitely how it works with them. “And they are very good at pinching your clothes if you are not vigilant, especially for the little ones. Most of them have kids of their own, so they will definitely do it. Mine, I handle my own. I don’t want anybody doing my clothes, so in terms of those things going missing, it’s very rare. But for the children, it is possible because they handle them – especially things like socks, underwear, what have you. Those are bound to go very quickly if you don’t check at the end of the day. But sometimes you are so tired, you don’t check. You say well, some other time I’ll do it. By then it will be too late. And most things go missing like now when they are about to go…” “For Christmas?” “That’s when your things disappear, or when they are expecting friends for the weekend, so by Thursday – Friday definitely – things will start moving from your room to somewhere else. That is very common amongst the maids. “And they are not straightforward. If they get pregnant, they don’t tell you, and they just sit there. I know I’m supposed to be considerate and all that, but the thing is most of the time when somebody is pregnant, I just 180

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think it’s the heat or the onset of general lethargy. They want to keep the job, so they’ll pretend nothing is happening in their stomach. “When you want to chase them, they are the first to cry, ‘Where would I get a job?’ And the white stories! So you feel bad and you don’t sack the person. But basically, you don’t get much from them. Absolutely nothing! Except headache. “I don’t allow them to cook my food, because I know their hygiene is questionable. Even if you say, ‘Before you do this, wash your hands,’ they don’t. They will come from the garbage straight to your plates. There isn’t much hygiene, so I refuse to let anybody cook my food. Even if I’m very hungry, tired, I’ll cook my own food. No matter how late I come from here, I’m going to cook my own food.” “Does it mean when you cook they eat with you, or they cook their own food?” “No, no, no. If I allow them to eat with me, I’d burden them. When I’m not eating, they’d go hungry. So what I do is I supply. Usually I supply them, like every Monday to cover Tuesday, Wednesday to cover Thursday, and Friday to cover Saturday. Sunday is not working, so I don’t cover that. That’s how I do it so they don’t run out of food, because sometimes like during the heat, I don’t eat my lunch, and sometimes my children are still in school, so they don’t come back. If I do like what you say, which would be easier for me, then they wouldn’t eat. So I always buy. But it’s a double take. I buy and give them, but still they’ll come and get what I have!” “Even those who stay in?” “What?” “There are some who stay out.” “No, no, mine stay with me. Usually, actually, here it’s very difficult to get somebody if you don’t have accommodation. They are not eager for your job. “They like people with cars. That’s what I’ve found out. So sometimes we have that problem. Two men might collide, and you have a problem in your hands.” “Is that so?” “Y-e-s. Most maids with little houses, they attract a lot of…” “Men?” “Exactly. They do.” “Really?” “Yeah, they do, and they do attract the ones with cars. Except now that we have a wall, they find it hard to get in because we are fenced and I’ve told her I don’t want the gate opening. But when we were in G-West 181

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and Broadhurst where the gate was this small, sometimes they’d even jump over at night. They jump out and back the next day, and that’s where the problem comes in.” “You say you’ve had experience with both Zimbabweans and Batswana. How would you compare the two?” “Well, I think for mine, they were not very different, because if you get a Motswana maid from the Francistown area, they are quite hardworking. That’s the one I got, anyway. But they say if you get from this side, that’s around Gaborone, Molepolole, Mochudi and so on, they tend to be lazy. But I’ve never got anybody from this side. The one I got was from the Francistown area, and the second one who is a Motswana originally from Zimbabwe, but she has an Omang, she was quite hardworking as well. “Except that the Zimbabwean maids, the bad part is, they like stealing more than the Batswana, because they think they can run away and you will not be able to catch them. When they know you have a Zimbabwean maid, the authorities come and visit you. “Well, the first time they warned us when we were in G-West that since you don’t know, it’s a warning. But now they charge you. You pay, because you have contravened some regulation. Now they have made a provision that you can apply for a permit for them. Only after you have shown that you can’t find a Motswana maid, then they’ll allow you to do that. That’s how they operate. “I know most people complain that the Tswana are not hardworking, but they say it depends. That’s why I got one from the Francistown area, maybe because they share the border with Zimbabwe, they are more hardworking. But I haven’t seen much difference.” “If your maid is from the Francistown area, she must be Kalanga, am I right?” “Yeah, she wasn’t Tswana-speaking. She was Kalanga.” “And that area is reputed for producing hardworking maids?” “Yeah, and usually they are always punctual, and the Zimbabweans too. They rarely miss because they know if they don’t come, I’m not paying for anybody who doesn’t come.” “But if they stay with you, it’s easy, isn’t it? Then they can’t but come, since they are already there.” “Yes, but sometimes it’s a weekend, that’s when they take time off. Monday they might have difficulties if they travelled to Francistown. Something happens, then they don’t come Monday, they don’t come Tuesday or whatever. That has happened, yes.” 182

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“And when they work with you and they stay in, it means when you leave the house…” “They are alone.” “And they can search every part of the house?” “Exactly, except that my bedroom, I lock it. And all the closets, I lock them. I actually put extra reinforcement because I know I missed quite a few things. So I decided, after I threw that person out, I decided to put more security on the closets. And my room they can never clean unless I’m there or one of the children is there. I never leave it open for anybody completely like that.” “Have other people – colleagues, friends – shared with you their experiences with maids?” “Oh! The other people! That’s where I learn more, from them. The other people, because they leave their remote controls, maids spend the whole time watching telly. Sometimes you find they come back 5 pm, nothing has happened because she has been watching all these soaps and everything. So the person gets mad and just throws them out. “They are so liberal they allow their maids to do anything and the maids even cook lunch, because some of the wives are working, sometimes out of town, like in Lobatse. So they allow them to cook lunch for their husbands who are coming back for lunch, and once you let them start satisfying your man’s hunger, things don’t work out so well. No, they don’t. That’s where most of the problems spring up. Appetites grow. “And if the maid is married, then you end up being a mediator between the wife and the husband. Like my cousin had one, ‘Oh you can stay with your husband,’ so they moved out of their place and now they don’t pay rents. They are staying with her. But both of them were drinking, so every time when they come back from drinking, she has to be the one mediating. In the end she got tired and said, ‘No, no, no. I think both of you have to leave because there is no way I’m going to cope. I made the mistake of allowing you to stay, and there is no way I can keep on mediating between the two of you. No!’ My cousin had those problems with a married couple because she thought the maid would be more stable with her, but it never works out that way.” “Are there instances where some of the men who fall prey to maids are actually either boyfriends or husbands of their employers?” “That can happen, if you let them into your bedroom or leave your man at home alone at lunchtime with them. The experience I had was between my maid and one of the men who was working here at our faculty photocopying service. He’s passed away now, may his soul rest in peace. She was clever. She would tell him, ‘No, don’t come at this time,’ saying I 183

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refused her from having visitors at certain times. But I didn’t do that. It’s simply because she had somebody else coming at that time instead of him. So she had a nice schedule for each one of them to come, while using me as an excuse for not allowing them to come and go as they pleased. “So he came and asked me, ‘You mean I can’t go and see her at this hour?’ I said, ‘Who?’ He said, ‘Your maid?’ I said, ‘I’ve never given her hours. We don’t have a wall in G-West. Her house is there, my house is here. It’s a free for all.’ And that’s when he realised it had nothing to do with my refusing him to come. How would I stop him coming? After all there is no wall. He didn’t have a car, the others had cars. She was smart enough to give them specific times and to use me as her excuse: ‘Well, the owner doesn’t want you to come at this time.’ Some would come during working hours, in the afternoon especially. “There was one who was very lively. He would come and greet me and say he’s the one seeing my maid. I told him I didn’t want to know about everybody seeing my maid, that it had nothing to do with me. All I want her to do is work for me. Whatever she does in her private time, it’s got nothing to do with me.” “What would you think motivates them to see these men, given that some of them may actually be married back home in Zimbabwe or wherever they come from?” “I think it has to do with needing to earn more. Maybe they don’t get enough as maids, or maybe because most of them have got children at home and their mothers are looking after their children. So they want to earn more to carry back home. But maybe they just want a partner.” “Some are married back home?” “I don’t know. I know the Kalanga one didn’t have a husband but she had two boys going to school, ’cause I remember one time I bought them uniforms. They were two of them. She wasn’t married and both of them were from different fathers. “The other one had just gotten divorced. The ex-husband was in Molepolole, and she was staying with her mother. I know the mother. But the mother didn’t want to know her. The mother said, ‘Well you have relieved me,’ because she was looking after two of the daughter’s children and the daughter had just gotten a third pregnancy. She was saying, ‘I just don’t understand this daughter of mine.’ “So she was so happy when the daughter got employed and came and said, ‘Well, I hope you can look after my daughter.’ I said, ‘What? No! I’m not looking after her.’ When she got pregnant, it was almost like the worst thing which could happen to that lady. Not that she is doing badly. She 184

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works for the BDC actually. It’s just that her child hasn’t gone far in school, so the only thing she could do was be a maid. She was already looking after two grandchildren and didn’t want the daughter to add a third.” “This is a very general question, but you could also make a personal comment. What do you think maids think of their employers?” “Well, I think they think you are stingy, because they think they should have access to everything. Just because they work there, they think it’s their right to everything, so they should not be restricted. They should do whatever they want. It’s like they are part of you, and I don’t treat my maids like that. No! She is my employee, there has to be an employeremployee relationship. Relation should end somewhere there. “Sometimes they think you are working them too hard. Especially when you are there, they pretend at least to try and work hard. They think there is a lot until they leave you and go somewhere else, then they realise there’s much more work over there than here. And they love talking in between.” “Oh! Talking with people?” “Talking on the phone, they just love talking to a cell phone or mate across if they can. So most of the time, they’ll be like just talking. Or if it’s not talking, it’s watching TV, if it’s not watching TV, receiving visitors even during working hours.” “And do they use your phone at home?” “No, I take out my phone because they abuse it, especially one Motswana maid I had for a short time. They’ll call their… she said it was a sister. I get the itemised bill to see the numbers I know are not mine. I know mine, and those my children call. She was gracious enough to tell me, yes it was my sister and I talked to her. But you know how much it was? It was close to half her salary. If I took it from her, it wouldn’t be fair, so from then on, I started plucking off my phone every time I’m coming here. I thought I would leave it for her, so she calls me in case of emergency. But instead, what does she do? She stays on the phone calling. So I decided this bill, I’ll foot it, but from now on I’m not leaving my phone around.” “Do you think that maids think differently of employers who are nationals from employers who are foreigners?” “Yes, they tell you that they will never work for a fellow Motswana. Because they don’t pay them, but if they do, they pay them very little, so they’d never. I know the two maids I had from Francistown, they told me they’d never, never work for a Motswana. They would rather not work, because they would overwork you and at the end of the day, they don’t pay you. This might be true because I’ve seen even here, when they get 185

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something from you, they’ll say, ‘Oh I don’t have money. I can’t pay you,’ or ‘I’ll pay you next time.’ And it goes on like that, and they make them work very hard. “They would rather work for expatriates, because they know expatriates are afraid, so they give their money on time. That’s why somebody said that they can always run, except that now it doesn’t work, to the Labour Office. Any little thing, they’ll run to the Labour Office. Before, the Labour Office used to listen to anything, and they’d summon you and everything. But now, it doesn’t work anymore. The Labour Office either has seen that there is nothing to it or are simply overwhelmed. But definitely expatriates pay all the time, on time. They definitely pay them more than their fellow Motswana.” “Who are the preferred expatriates?” “The whites they prefer. They prefer the whites. The Indians they don’t like that much. Because the Indians, I hear they don’t pay them that much. For the Zimbabwean maids the Indians say, ‘I’ll go and report you at the end of the month.’ So you get scared and you just keep on working for months without being paid. Actually, there was an incident in Broadhurst. The maid just beat up the lady when it was month’s end, and she said she didn’t have money. The second month she still said she didn’t have, so the maid just beat up the lady and packed her bags and went. They do that.” “Really?” “Yeah, they do that to the Zimbabweans. They’ll say, ‘Well, make a noise and I’ll just go and report you with immigration.’ Well, maybe you want to stay, maybe you say next month she’ll pay me, and you don’t want to be caught and driven to the border post, they do that.” “Do you also think that perhaps maids are more likely to steal from expatriates, from foreigners, than they would from Batswana because they know foreigners are afraid to go to the Police, since they employ them illegally?” “I think the Tswana know their people much better than we do. We learn a little bit late after they have committed all that. But basically it’s true. They do steal more from the expatriates and most expatriates actually don’t like being to Police officers to complain about anything. That’s why they say, if it’s a small thing, they’d rather just let it fly. But the Motswana, every little thing, they’ll go and report.” “Sometimes I talk to people and they have different stories about maids and one of the things I come across is that Zimbabwean maids smell. That’s what some people say. That they smell. That they are sweaty, they are this and that. What truth is there to these claims?” 186

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“No! The ones I’ve had, I’ve never had that problem. They are clean, they are ok. I’ve never had anybody smell. Even the one who works in the yard doesn’t smell, and he is a Zimbabwean and I got him through somebody else. That one, this is the first time I am hearing it.” “The very final question to conclude, what do you think Batswana think of foreigners like yourself ?” “Wow, I don’t think they like us. For sure, they don’t. I tell you they are much friendlier now than at the beginning when I came. I go back to ten years ago. If you went to a shop and immediately you spoke English, they wouldn’t say a word. I know when I first came here, they wouldn’t warm up to me. “I remember an incident in Serowe. The lady refused to give me a receipt and gave one to the white lady who had asked for a receipt behind me. She refused simply because I talked to her in English. Of course, the Makwerekwere at that time, it was very, very common. Even when I go to pick up children, Tswana children say, ‘Oh Makwerekwere, bus of the Makwerekwere,’ because there used to be a bus taking children, from where we were in that area, to school. Over time, we’ve become very friendly but basically they just don’t like us. They don’t. I don’t think they do, but they are far much better now than then. “They do realise, maybe that there is something legitimate to people coming here, because now they are also moving out of here, so they realise. But basically in the past, they used to say we are the ones who eat their national cake. They don’t eat. I remember newspaper articles talking about that. That the expatriates are eating the fruit of their diamonds, cattle and good governance, and the Motswana is not eating anything. “It looks like we have a better life than they have, which is true, given that the jobs are not the same. They think we are taking what is rightfully theirs, in terms of jobs, houses and so on. Even others think the house is given to you by the government, that you don’t pay a thing in rent. It’s like everything is on a silver platter for you. You don’t struggle at all. “Actually, there was one robbery where it involved an expatriate. What the thieves were saying to those expatriates was, ‘You are the ones taking all the money. That’s why we are coming – you have all the money. So give us all the money which you earn. You have lots of money. You can’t say you don’t have.’ “And the man was saying, ‘Look, I don’t have money,’ and they couldn’t believe he didn’t have the money. ‘You should have money in this house. If you don’t, we’ll shoot you.’ ‘No! I don’t have.’ ‘You have.’ But he couldn’t convince them, so they shot him.” 187

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“Do you think the attitudes are the same towards Lekgoa and the Indians?” “I think they like whites a lot, definitely they do. There is no question about that. They all love whites hundred percent. I think the Indians, it isn’t much a cosy relationship, not really. No, I don’t think they love them that much. I think there is more friction with the Indians but any white is acceptable. The black ones, especially the neighbouring ones! I don’t think we are the favourite, no we aren’t. But if any white comes here, they prefer them to us.” “I hear there are frictions also in the Kombis. When you are taking the Kombi as a foreigner, you are subjected to a lot of insults, such as Makwerekwere and things like that. And also in the train, international train…” “I don’t know, because I haven’t taken a Kombi for a long time. I took a Kombi once, but the driver was very nice. He even was the one who showed me the university, where to drop, which way to go. I think I had taken my car somewhere. It’s possible, especially now with the Zimbabweans. “I don’t know why the Zimbabweans are the most hated. With too much an inflow of Zimbabweans, everybody has the perception they are the ones doing all the stealing. All the bad things are attributed to them, prostitution, everything, is attributed to especially the Zimbabweans. Sometimes, even when you have a Zimbabwean maid, they will report you, not that they’ll get information from Zimbabweans themselves. But if she has a neighbour who has a Motswana maid, and maybe they quarrel over these security guards who are their boyfriends. Or just when they know there is a Zimbabwean next door, they’ll go and report to the Police and they come and say well, the person next door told us there is a Zimbabwean. Everyone thinks they are the source of all evil. “They could never steal alone here, without an accomplice, a local one. It can never work except somebody, a local, is showing them where to go and where not to go. There is a Ghanaian saying that a rat, however well fed, can never compare with an elephant however starved.” “I will take those words of wisdom along with me. Thank you very much for an excellent interview.” “You are welcome,” said Dr Nana. “We must always know that even the most efficient drug has got an expiry date,” she added, shaking our hands to say goodbye.

188

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Chapter Twenty Four

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T

he only interview I ever recommended to Dr Nanny was with Angel, my good friend to whom I owe so much. Angel had mentioned in passing when I stayed with her how her divorce was caused by a maid, and she had used this as a reason not to hire me to be her maid. I didn’t pursue the issue then, preferring to limit myself to what she saw fit to tell me. Feeling the time was ripe for me to know more about what had happened, I recommended an interview with Angel, which Dr Nanny accepted. But the interview didn’t take place until a month after Dr Nanny and I started paying Angel visits at her place, Angel having insisted she needed to feel comfortable enough with Dr Nanny to share her story. Then came the evening Angel decided to share. We were at her place when she, all of a sudden, began recounting the story of her bitter experiences with maids. She had one, and only one condition: Dr Nanny was free to write as much as she wanted, but she wasn’t allowed to record her story on tape. That settled, Angel told us of the confrontations with her mother-inlaw that led to her divorce. Just after starting her story, the phone rang. “I used to be married,” Angel explained after the phone call. “That was Lesego and Chebanne on the phone, my two boys. Their father used to be my husband, quite loving, until his mum came between us, because of a maid.” I nodded, and my eyes told Angel she could trust me with her story. I had told her the story of George Tsenchwaka, the fiancé who had dumped me, and she had expressed sympathy. Now it was my turn to listen and support Angel. Even now, as she watched Dr Nanny scribbling away, Angel felt reticent. She insisted we have a drink. Being the Mimbolander that I was, I didn’t resist, knowing how alcohol is a lubricant for the sharing of intimacies, although ordinarily I kept my intake strictly minimal. “Let me tell you what happened,” she started, opening her can of beer. It all began six years ago, when I recruited a maid after the birth of Lesego, my first son. I grew up in an extended family, where there were always

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aunties and cousins coming to give my mother a hand, so the world of maids was a new one for me. Since introducing myself into it, my experiences have been colourful to say the least. Each maid is unique, I must tell you that,” Angel took a sip of her Windhoek. “The first maid I had was far younger than I. There were things she couldn’t quite handle about the baby. Lesego was my first child and I knew very little about babies. I expected to learn more from the maid, which I did, in a sense. After staying with me for just five months, she started acting like my boss, doing things her own way, frowning, talking at me, and talking back.” I could feel the anger she felt then coming back. “Normally, if you have a small kid, you don’t want to offend anyone. You don’t ask a maid to leave just like that. Until my decision not to have anything again to do with maids, one thing that was difficult for me was to fire or to confront one. I would stay with someone for a long time until she started doing things that were way out there. Then I’d turn and say, ‘No! This is too much. I think we should part ways.’” She looked up, took another sip, and refreshed her lips with the tip of her tongue. “Then came this elderly woman, the beginning of my troubles. Initially she was ok. Normally, when there’s a maid in the house, I treat her more like a family member, because she becomes like a mother to my kids. She spends more time with them than I do, and they learn many things from her. So I tended to try to make the maid happy. I kept her to a standard where someone would come and say, ‘She’s a member of the family, not a servant.’” I nodded approvingly, to say even I had witnessed her generosity of spirit and was not in doubt that she would treat a maid with kindness and respect. Dr Nanny was busy writing. “After a year and a half with me, this woman became impossible,” Angel continued. “She became bossy, telling me what to do and what not to do, as if she were my mother, or I a little girl. There were days, Fridays mostly, when she would say, ‘I want to go home to Moshupa,’ which is just outside Gaborone. ‘Ok, I’ll come back from work before you go,’ I would say in reply. If I came back after 5 o’clock, she would shout, ‘You said you’d come home early.’ I would say, ‘But I can’t come home early before I knock off.’ I thought, if you have kids and you change maids like serviettes, it’s not good, so I kept her, though I was not comfortable at all. It became just too much.” Angel contemplated her long fingers, as if seeing their beauty for the first time. Her nails were well trimmed and dressed with a lovely varnish. 190

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“Can you believe? She started bringing elderly men to the house! If I happened to come home before 4:30 pm, you’d find her boyfriend there as if in his own house, comfortable and commanding the kids to leave him alone, do this and that, turn up the volume of the TV, change from Cartoon Network to football or something, and on and on. When I came in, she wouldn’t even have the courtesy to explain his presence or apologise for what I saw as an intrusion by a stranger into my house. “She would just keep quiet. Until once when I came home earlier than usual. I wasn’t feeling well. I just went to my bedroom and slept. And around 4, I think it was 4 o’clock, she called the boys to bathe them and give them food. And she was shouting and insulting them and using words she never used when we parents were there.” Angel was fuming, even then. “There and then I decided enough was enough. ‘Ok. I can’t stand this. I’ve kept her and I thought she was good with the kids but she is not, not at all.’ I fired her a week before month end. And she left, thank God, without a hassle, which is not the case with all of them.” With an uneasy laugh, Angel added, “I had another one, who was maybe two years older than I. But she felt she was more adult than I and was telling me, ‘With kids you do this, you do that,’ and I told her, ‘What you do with your kids in the countryside is not what I want to do with my kids here in the city.’ So we cleared that out, ‘Treat my kids how I want them treated and not how you think they should be treated.’” ‘I hope she took the cue,’ I wanted to say, but changed my mind, not wanting to interfere with Angel’s train of thoughts or to infuriate Dr Nanny. “Then I noticed a problem with her language with the children,” Angel continued. “My small boy, Chebanne, developed a new use of words and a strange behaviour. He would pinch the bottoms of my feet and the insides my hands. I thought, ‘What is this?’ I talked to one lady, a social worker. She said, ‘There is someone at Childline, maybe you should talk to that person. They normally know how to analyse these situations.’ “When I went there and explained things, a lady listened to me and said, ‘If you see him pinching you, especially when you talk to him harshly, it’s because the maid is doing the same thing to him. She’s pinching him inside the hands and under the feet, so you won’t see that the boy is being pinched.’ “What could this be? I went home and asked the elder boy, Lesego, who was four at the time, and he seemed not to know what I was talking about. Then I just talked to this woman, ‘Do you ever pinch…?’” Angel paused and sipped. She was boiling. 191

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“She answered even before I had finished, ‘Nono! I never do that!’ “I just said, ‘Ok, maybe we can’t do well together, let’s just go our separate ways.’ “‘Nonono, I’m not going and I’m going to keep this job,’ she protested. “So this woman decided not to go. She stayed in the house. She said, ‘I’m not going. Not today, not ever. I’m staying here and working.’” I sat up, anxious to know how the drama unfolded. Even Dr Nanny stopped writing and looked up. “‘Lady, I gave you your money for the month. I gave you cash in lieu of notice, so leave my house!’ “‘I’m not leaving,’ she insisted. She didn’t budge until I called the Police and they forced her out of the house. “I was thinking maybe I’m just too young and too inexperienced, and that’s why maids are taking advantage of me. “Although I never had a case of maids coming between me and my husband, one did come between me and my mother-in-law and the result was our divorce.” ‘How sad,’ I whispered. “They, my mother-in-law and the maid, spent a lot of time together and talked about me behind my back, when I was at work. A strong bond developed between them.” I could feel Angel felt lonely, but also that she had since moved on to accept things the way they had unfolded in her life. “This maid came in just before I started my postgraduate studies at DUST. It was a particularly difficult period. I was working and studying at the same time. I would go out into the field – the communities –, return after a week or two, and go somewhere else, and so on. Then I went to Côte d’Ivoire for two weeks, for a seminar on internal migration in Africa. Before I left, I washed some clothes, to reduce the workload of the maid, and left them to be ironed. My mother-in-law came in just to help with Chebanne, the baby who was about nine months by then.” Leaving a nine months old baby in the care of others, ‘Hmmm …,’ I thought to myself, ‘what sacrifices working mothers make,’ as Angel went to the fridge to fetch three more cans of beer. I had not yet finished the first. Dr Nanny had hardly touched hers. I noticed after a drink that she had to wipe the moisture from her fingers on her trousers before taking her pen back up, so as not to spoil her field notes, so it seemed like she was prioritising what she was getting from Angel over any other thirst. “When I came back after two weeks,” resumed Angel, “those clothes were still unironed, and my husband had taken to ironing one shirt every morning for himself. Ironing a shirt himself must have seemed less 192

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complicated than asking the maid to do it. Normally, men don’t push maids around. I wondered what had gone wrong but didn’t look into it straight away. I came home around 6 o’clock one evening. She was cooking. I went to bed. I wanted to sleep. I was tired. “During the night, Lesego, the elder boy, disturbed my sleep when he came to my bedroom.” She sipped her beer. “‘Mummy, I want water,’ he said. So I went to the kitchen to get him some water. “The kitchen was like a pigsty. Unwashed dishes and kitchen utensils were strewn around. The floor was dirty. It was chaotic. “‘Oh my God?!’ I screamed. It was around 2 am, and I was so fed up. So, I cleaned the plates and the floor. “The next morning I found the maid in the sitting room, seated on a chair with her legs crossed, and mother-in-law, she was sitting there too, next to the maid. “I wondered, ‘Aha! These women! What are they waiting for?’ I went to the maid. I called her to the kitchen. “I said, ‘You left the kitchen in a mess last night. Plates were all over and unwashed, so I cleaned them. Why are the clothes I washed still not ironed?’ “She said, ‘You are the lady of this house. You should do some of this work for yourself and your family.’ “I said, ‘Well, I thought I hired you so you could help me with these things.’ “Before she could answer, my mother-in-law appeared and said, ‘But a daughter-in-law – mwetsi–mwetsi – should do these things. A married woman should show she is a woman and look after the house, take care of the household.’ “I said, ‘I do that, in my way. With studies and work, I am not always here, and that is why I have assigned certain responsibilities to the maid.’ “I kept quiet after that and the maid kept on talkingtalkingtalkingtalking. Basically she went on with things like, ‘These educated daughters-in-law. They say they work, but they don’t. They are lazy.’ “I finally said, calmly, ‘You move out of my house now. I’m going to the bank before I go to work. I will give you your wage for the month. I don’t expect this kind of behaviour from you. And I don’t expect to find you here when I return from work this evening. You are here because of me. I hired you because I needed your services.’” Tension was mounting in me, as I anticipated Angel’s story, as if I could influence the past. 193

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“I went to the bank, collected some money, gave it to her, asked my mother-in-law to look after the baby, and went to work to ask for a day or two off to sort out the situation. After about two hours at the office, I telephoned home. “‘Is she gone?’ I asked my mother-in-law who had picked up the phone. “My mother-in-law said, ‘Let me call someone for you.’ And she called this lady. “She came and repeated, ‘I’m not going. I’m going to work here. Please I’ll change, I’ll…’ “I said, ‘No, you won’t change. I’m doing the changing. I’m changing maids after that the way you talked to me.’ “I went back home and what did I find? This lady and my mother-inlaw, sitting on my lawn, sharing a mat and having tea! “Still here?’ I asked, glaring at the maid incredulously. “My mother-in-law responded. ‘She is not going. You need to sit with this lady and talk things out and divide duties amongst yourselves. According to setho Africa, you are supposed to do some of the work. You can’t let her do everything in the house.’ “‘Oh, my God!’ I exclaimed. “I went to G-West Police Station and talked to a police officer. He came with me and greeted the ladies, ‘Dumelang bo mme?’ “When they returned his greetings, he asked, ‘Who is supposed to leave and doesn’t want to move?’ “My mother-in-law said, ‘No, she is not going.’ “He asked her, ‘Who are you?’ “She replied, ‘This is my son’s home, she’s not going…’ “The Police officer looked at me and said, ‘Are you married to this lady’s son?’ “I said, ‘Yeah but not to her, to my husband. This lady is going.’ “He looked befuddled and searched for words, ‘Um… maybe you people should talk this thing over.’ “I said, ‘There is nothing to discuss. This woman should go. I don’t want her. She’s my maid. I hired her, I paid her, and now I am firing her. She has no need to stay and every need to go.’ “This policeman, he ordered the lady, ‘We give you thirty minutes to get inside this house, collect everything that belongs to you, and be on your way.’ “So she went inside and collected her stuff, and they entered the police car and drove off.” ‘Thank God,’ I whispered. “I said a secret prayer of good riddance and thanks in my head. 194

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“After that, it became a conflict between my mother-in-law and me, over the maid who had gone. “‘The maid shouldn’t have gone,’ she insisted. ‘She is elderly and you were disrespectful. She is older than you. How can you give her instructions?’ “I explained, ‘I hired her because I needed her services, and when what you get is not what you pay for, the answer is simple.’ “She retorted, ‘You know, you are spoilt. My son has given you too much leeway. You are a bad wife, and you have tried to hide your incompetence by blaming a poor old woman you ought to have been taking care of.’ “I couldn’t believe my ears. They were starting to burn. My insides were starting to burn. “She went on and on, rubbing more salt into the wounds. When her son, who all along had tried his best to stay out of the conflict, came out openly in support of his mother, I was flabbergasted. In disbelief, I turned to him and asked, ‘What did you say?’ “‘That mum is right. You are an impossible woman.’ “I went wild with rage. Utter disbelief spun quickly into bitter disappointment. Questions took hold of me from every side. Had she convinced him to toss me away and take on a new wife? Was he having an affair that made him think he could provoke me as he liked? Since when had he thought what he was thinking? Instead of facing my rage, instead of sitting down and discussing with me, he invited his mother out, abandoning me at home alone with my boys. I had never felt so forlorn, so disgraced, worse than disgraced.” Dr Nanny nodded in sisterly compassion. The sheer fact of recalling this episode brought Angel into such a state of sadness. Dr Nanny rose to visit the washroom, to let Angel recompose a bit I think. When she returned, Angel was anxious to go on. “When they returned late in the night, they were falling down drunk, and to add salt to injury, he started battering me, his mother providing the music of insults he needed to accomplish the feat.” I pictured Angel in such a setting and didn’t know whether to feel pity for her or for the man and his mother. If there is anything I can’t stand in a man, it is this cowardliness of resorting to force when confronted with a challenging situation, when others aren’t seeing things your way. When shall men be educated enough to understand that what is needed is the force of discussion and argument rather than the argument of brute force? “That was the last straw,” said Angel. “In the morning, I telephoned the President of the national Women-in-Action movement and told her I needed the services of their divorce lawyer. Wife battering is something 195

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Women-in-Action does not condone. Their lawyer did not relent until I had chased the bugger and his mum out, keeping custody of the children, and getting comfortable maintenance for childcare.” “Excellent,” Dr. Nanny exclaimed in empathy. “It wasn’t easy after the divorce, taking care of the children while continuing with full time work and as a part time student. For a year or so, I had the greatest turnover in maids. There were times when I would have someone stay for a week or two and then disappear. Right now, I’ve got about four bags with clothes of former maids who disappeared…” ‘They just left?’ I asked Angel. I saw Dr. Nanny look at me out of the corner of her eye when I asked a question. But I didn’t read dissatisfaction on her face. Angel continued, “Yeah, they just go, leaving their things behind, what they don’t care much for, that is. There was a point when I had two maids, one to look after the house – to clean, cook, do this and that – and the other to take care of the kids. The one who looked after the kids worked for a week and became erratic. She would take too long to return after some weekend breaks and be back on time after others. And she would disappear from work sometimes. One time, it was a Tuesday. She went and told this neighbour woman, ‘Please help me look after this little boy.’ The elder boy was in school. ‘I’m just going to the Tuck shop. I’m coming back.’ “Then she went, and come back after a day. “‘Where have you been?’ I asked. “‘I went to the Tuck shop and I met my boyfriend and he pulled me along and got me inside the Kombi, and…’ “Aha! Baha! I didn’t want to listen to tales, so I said, ‘Listen good, I’ll give you one last chance.’ “She stayed in the house for I think a week again, and then one day, this other woman who was looking after the house said a boy came with a bicycle and started blowing the horn and this woman disappeared. She never came back and her bag is still with me. I went to her auntie and said, ‘Please tell her to come and collect her stuff.’ But she never came back. “A woman cleaner at DUST helped me find my next maid, her sister. She stayed with us for a month and she was good and so perfect with the kids, with cooking, with everything. And she was a fast learner. At month end she took her money and said she was going shopping. “Normally, I give maids the weekend off, except this one never went away on the weekends. But this time she went away and she didn’t come back on Monday. 196

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“I missed all but one of my classes that day, as I was compelled to stay with the kids. The following day, Tuesday, she came around 11 o’clock and she was like… like someone who had been hiding in a hole or something. She was covered with soil and looked beaten up. Her eyes were all blue. I said, ‘My dear, you can’t look after a baby like that. Just take your bags and go.’ I gave her money for the Kombi because she didn’t have a single Thebe in her pocket, although it was only two days after month end. And she left.” Angel took a sip, and another. “Maids are funny people,” she said, shaking her head, half smiling, half bitter. “Well, I had to look for another one, to look after the kids. I announced to people who I thought could help that I was looking and one lady said, ‘Ok, you are looking for a maid. I’ll send you someone.’ So I waited for that someone. She was supposed to come on Monday morning. “Someone eventually turned up. She came on time, around 7 o’clock. I was supposed to leave for work at that time. But when she stepped into the house, I took one look at her and told myself, ‘I can’t leave my baby with this person.’ “I mean, her nails were long, her hands bluish, and her lips scarred. She looked too shabby for comfort. I couldn’t leave her with my child in that state. So I gave her a new facecloth, soap, toothpaste and a toothbrush. ‘Please, take these. Have a bath. I’ll come back later.’ Then I showed her the pots and told her to cook herself something to eat, and I went with the baby. “I came back around 4 o’clock in the afternoon. She was there, seated, but I still felt uncomfortable leaving my baby with this woman. I took my baby back with me to work again the next day. I just couldn’t find it inside my heart to trust her with the baby. So for the whole week, I just kept on going to work with the baby. “And then on Friday she said, ‘I’m going out, at around 7 o’clock.’ “‘You are going out where?’ “‘I just want to go out. I’ll come back around 9 pm.’ “‘Ok. It’s ok.’ “She went out and came back Saturday night around 11. I heard knocking and went to the door. There were two people. I said, ‘You can’t bring visitors to my house at this late hour.’ “‘But this is my boyfriend,’ she claimed. And they were both drunk. “I repeated, ‘No, you can’t come with your boyfriend inside my house.’ “‘But this is where I live,’ she insisted. ‘And this guy is my boyfriend. It’s not like we are going to sleep on the same bed with you. So lady, what are you talking about?’ “But I stood my ground, ‘Sorry, you can’t come in.’ 197

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“I locked the door and they kept knocking until my neighbour, a man, came and asked, ‘What is happening?’ “I explained. “He said, ‘You people get going. Leave now. Go!’ “But they didn’t leave. They slept on the veranda. Because they were drunk, they fell fast asleep. In the morning I found the sun shining down on them and she was like, ‘Please, forgive me, please…’ “I said, ‘No. Just take your bags and go. You can’t work for me. You can’t.’ “So she too left,” Angel concluded, paused for a while, took another sip of beer, and continued. “I’ve had many maids. I think around 15 now, if I’m not mistaken,” she laughed loud, as if at her record. “Many of them leave because of boyfriends. Even if you go to the village and get someone you think will work quietly with you, after a month she gets to know someone and they hook up and she’s gone,” Angel sighed and shook her head as if to say, it’s a no win situation. “Such was the case with one I got from the village,” she remembered, going to the fridge for yet some more beer. I had barely touched my second can. She opened her beer, sipped reflectively and continued. “This one, my mother knew her mother and her mother said, ‘Look. This is a mother of four kids and they all go to school, so she can’t leave home.’ “And my mother said, ‘No, I stay alone. I can look after the kids.’ “So my mother took in two of her kids, the youngest, and her mother stayed with two. “My mother told my maid-to-be, ‘I’ll stay with these ones and they’ll become part of my household. I’ll support them when it comes to food, and since they will be here with me, I’ll buy them what they want I can afford. You, with your earnings, look after the two who are staying with your mother.’ “You can’t imagine. I stayed with this woman for two months. She was ok. Then she found a boyfriend and this boyfriend was from my home village. He would come when I was away and see this woman. Before then, he never used to come to my place. He was working for Tswana Automated Security Systems. Whenever he passed by, he would say from a distance, ‘Hi, hi, how are you?’ “I’d answer, ‘I’m fine,’ and then he would pass. “I think when he was passing one day he saw this woman and they developed something. The third month, she started going out on weekends and not coming back the same day, coming back Monday morning. But 198

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she was coming back early enough, before I left for work, which was good, and she was staying in my Servants’ Quarters, where you stayed, Immaculate, come to think of it, when you stayed with me. And then, one day she said there was someone who wanted to move in with her. “I said, ‘No, but you can’t invite a man to my place. You may be staying in the guest wing, but you are still part of my house. You can’t stay with another man.’ “She said, ‘Ok, but let me move out with him.’ “I refused and drew her attention to our special relationship. ‘The relationship between me and you goes back to our mothers. So you can’t just move out. I’ll have to go back and tell my mother to tell your mother. Maybe you want to explain to your mother why you want to move out and who this person is?’ “Before we could even go to see my mother, she and this guy had met her mother. ‘Well, I’ve met…’ – the maid was called Tinkle. ‘I’ve met Tinkle and I want to marry her.’ “The old woman said, ‘But with four kids?’ “‘Yeah, yeah, they are ok. So I would love for her to stay where I stay. She can get to work in the mornings and come back in the evenings.’ “The mother invited the daughter’s uncles, as this was a very serious matter. They discussed the issues and advised my mother. My mother asked me if I wanted a live in maid. “I said I needed a live in maid. But we tried out the situation of the maid living out. She only had to spend the night occasionally, when I had lots of studies. “The arrangement worked for about a month, until the man started saying to Tinkle, ‘No! You can’t go and spend the night. Who will cook for me? You stay here with me.’ “Oh! My God! And she told me all this, ‘Gana I have to go cook for him. I have to be home when he is off.’ “I said, ‘But you are not off when he is off. So, no, no, and no…’ “And this man kept on saying no too, ‘No, Gana, I need my woman near me…’ “So this woman stopped working to stay home. I’ve got a cousin who said, ‘Since she was good and she is more like family because her sons are now staying with your mother, let her find a job where she can, like, go in the morning and come back 7:30 pm.’ So this cousin helped her find a job with one of the shops. “But the guy was jealous. ‘You should not work. Stay here. You want to meet other men out there,’ he told her. 199

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“So Tinkle would say, ‘Gana I can’t go to work because he doesn’t want me to go to work and he says he will look after me.’ “That’s how she stayed home. By the end of the month, the relationship was over. At that time, I had another maid. So when she wanted to be reinstated, I couldn’t take her back. Then my dilemma was, her kids with my mother, what would we do? Could we lobby my mother to stop caring for the children? Tinkle’s mother was from our village, but married to another village. “I talked to my mother. She would not have the boys taken away from her. ‘You just leave them here,’ she said. And they stayed with her. “Even today, after two and a half years, she still looks after them. And this woman is not working.” Angel paused, sipped her bear, then added, “That’s the story of Tinkle. She came and worked for some months and someone claimed he was madly in love with her and would take care of her. She just followed her heart and ended up in a row. She was dumped like refuse. She’s now in the village. She goes to my mother to help her with this and that. But I can’t take her back again.” The story of Tinkle and her tragic love affair reminded me of my own disappointment by George Tsenchwaka, my ex-fiancé in the United States. I wished I knew what pushed him to call off our engagement the way he did. “And did she ever get pregnant again?” asked Dr Nanny. “No, no. She has four kids, the same she had when she met the guy.” “It means they were playing safe, one assumes. It’s delicate, these relationships. I guess any relationship is delicate. Anyway, let me not interrupt your story. Please carry on,” said Dr Nanny. Just then Angel’s cell phone rang. “It’s my pastor,” she told us. “It’s a private prayer call. Give me 30 minutes,” she added, heading for her bedroom where her Bible was waiting for her. Dr Nanny looked at me. “The pastor takes his flock seriously,” I told her. Recalling Angel’s favourite hymn – Give, give, give … It shall come back to you… full measure –, I added, “Especially at month ends when tithes are due.”

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Chapter Twenty Five

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‘‘I

’ve hired a couple of Zimbabweans as maids,” Angel resumed following her virtual prayer meeting with her pastor. “Zimbabweans, normally they are good. It’s the legality part of it that always bothers people. But they are good, especially in the house and with the kids. The first Zimbabwean I had when I was still married. When she came, she was always in the house. Besides her boyfriend who phoned from Zimbabwe, she talked with no one except for us. I used to ask her during weekends whether she wanted to go out. And she never did, until her boyfriend moved to Gaborone and then she had to take weekends to go and meet him, which was OK, except sometimes she wouldn’t come back until Monday. And then later she wanted to bring her boyfriend to live with us in the house. Then, we lived in a house without a Servants’ Quarters. “We told her, ‘Look, we don’t have enough room here. If we had a separate room for you, that wouldn’t be a problem, because that would be your household. But if you live with us in the same house and you sleep in the same bedroom with my kids, how can we allow you that?’ “She wanted to bring her boyfriend into the room, with your kids?” asked Dr Nanny. “Yeah. That is what she wanted to do. It really made me flip. Probably he felt she was up to something and he wanted to be right there by her side. And when we didn’t allow her, we noticed a big change in the way she was behaving around the house. That’s when we realised we had to stop.” You admit them, and then gradually they encroach and encroach. Next they start acting as if they own the place. I couldn’t believe what Angel was telling me. I would have been her perfect maid, if only she had agreed to have me, I thought to myself. “So she left on her own?” Dr Nanny asked. Angel could see that we wanted to know every twist in her story. “Ultimately, we agreed to part amicably. “The problem with Zimbabwean maids is, once they start establishing these friendships, especially with other Zimbabweans and the neighbours,

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they become difficult to predict. “I observed that change of attitude in another Zimbabwean maid I had. She stayed a couple months, and then she started visiting, and going places…” ‘And before you know it…’ I interrupted, before regretting doing it, but fortunately, Angel didn’t seem to mind, nor did Dr Nanny. “I cautioned her against visiting too often. ‘Don’t do something to endanger your stay in Botswana. If you start visiting and visiting, that’s when the Police will catch you.’ “She said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll play it safe.’ “But she used to go to Tswalamosesi. One day I came back home. She wasn’t in and the house was locked. Where could she be? She was nowhere to be found. So I had to call Gabriel, a colleague at work I am seeing, to ask for the spare key. “I unlocked the house and all the kids’ clothes were gone. They were gone, and she never came back. And since I met her like you meet a perfect stranger – ‘I’m looking for a job,’ and you hire that person –, I had nowhere to turn when this happened. No background information, no ID, no nothing. I didn’t even know her surname. She was gone, just like that. Vanished into thin air. “Then I stayed without a maid for, I think six months, because there was a cousin of mine who completed her Form Five, wasn’t working, and stayed with me. “But even a family member, if you take her on and ask her to look after the kids in exchange for an allowance that I would have paid to the maids, she starts behaving like a maid. “So with this one, I think she felt even more comfortable because she was a family member. I came home one day to find a boy seated here watching football. ‘Who is this? I inquired. “‘He is my friend.’ “The next week I found another boy here, and when I asked her who he was, it was the same response, ‘He is my friend.’ “And she frequented neighbours’ houses and other people in the neighbourhood I ordinarily wouldn’t visit. “Once I went home to attend a funeral and I was supposed to come back on Sunday. But on Saturday after all proceedings, I decided to go home. I arrived at night around 10 o’clock and found her sleeping with an elderly man. Not exactly elderly, the guy was around 40 or 50, but for her age he was an elderly man. In fact, what made me find out there was someone was that I found this army cap and mace on the dining table. 202

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“My immediate thought was, ‘Oh my God! What is this? There is someone here.’ “Then I saw car keys, but there was no car outside. He had parked the car on the other side of the road as if he was visiting other houses. What could this be? I went to her room and knocked. It wasn’t locked. So I opened the door and switched on the lights. The guy woke up and said, ‘Switch off, please.’ “I said, ‘Who are you in my house?’ “He said, ‘No please, please, my God!’ “I went outside and waited by the door, not knowing what to do or what to say. I went back in and the guy was seated on the bed with his clothes – the uniform. “Then I said, ‘Sir, who are you?’ “‘She will tell you.’ “‘She will tell me? You should tell me.’ “I went back outside. I called my neighbour who was outside, getting ready to get into his car. I explained things quickly. “He walked in and said to the man who was downstairs by then, ‘Who are you, Sir?’ “‘No, please…’ “Normally men, when things like that happen, they lose their temper, and so my friend was dramatising his anger. ‘Who are you? What do you want here?’ “I pleaded with him, ‘No, don’t fight him. Don’t even shout at him. He should tell us who he is.’ “Only to find out that this guy was married, with a wife and kids staying with him, and that they lived at a camp. We just decided to let him go. As for the girl, I gave her marching orders the following morning. ‘Go back home to your mother, I can’t have you stay here,’ was what I told her. “Then I quickly got a maid, from my home village, around Francistown. She was a Kalanga, older than me, maybe around 35. So, the first day I talked to her, ‘This is how we do things here and you know why I hired you is because of these kids. So you should look after the kids and make sure nothing happens to them.’ “The first day I left her with the kids, big damage happened in the house. “When I was at work, my mechanic called and said, ‘I’ve fixed your van and I’ll drop it off at the house. I’ll collect the money later.’ “I said, ‘Ok, there’s someone at the house. Just go, park the van there outside, leave the keys, and then come here to the office and collect your money.’ 203

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“So this guy came and collected his money, after dropping off the van. Lunch, I didn’t go home. At 4:30 I went home with my friend and found this woman had decided to keep the house spotlessly clean by not allowing my kids to watch their favourite programmes on TV and by locking herself inside the house to watch soap operas instead. “My kids ran away. I think they got bored. Either they took the keys and she wasn’t aware or whatever, I don’t know. They unlocked the fuel tank of the van and filled it with water. And the whole yard was covered with water. What happened, I don’t know. Whether they started the car or what or they released the hand brakes, and the car just went over the fence. “I didn’t know what to say to her. So I called someone in the morning to come and tow the car and take it to the garage for repairs. That was my money wasted, and she expected me to pay her at the end of the month. “She stayed on with me for a few more days, but I had lost interest in her and in maids in general. I don’t know what others have done in such situations, but I have given up. It is impossible to tame them, just as it is impossible to change a buffalo into a pet. “Because I gave up on maids, I had to make a decision about my children, schooling and work. Staying with me would have meant me giving up work altogether to take care of them, or sacrificing their education. So I allowed their father to come for them, and now they go to school in Francistown and live with him and his girlfriend, and I suppose they are more successful with maids than I am. I see them during holidays and on weekends when I’m up there for a funeral, work or something. We telephone daily, and I am happy without maids in my life.” “You’ve had an outstanding career in maids,” said Dr Nanny. “And a tiring one too,” Angel replied. “Were it not for the kids and my work, I would never have had much to do with maids. I have a friend who calls them a necessary evil, but sometimes I think they are more evil than necessary.” “It comes with wealth. The wealthier one is in kids, in money and in opportunities offered by modern life, the more likely one needs the services of maids!” said Dr Nanny. Angel agreed. “Yes, modern life creates the need for maids. It makes us so dependent on maids and maids so dependent on us. It imposes their services on us, and our needs on them. What I can’t stand is the arrogance of maids. One would expect them to be on their best behaviour for a job that requires no degree whatsoever. They don’t see it like that. We think maids are dispensable, but maids treat us as disposable napkins. They give us headaches, and enjoy us tensed up. Never again shall our paths cross. End of chapter.” Angel sounded decidedly firm. 204

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“So you think the world of maids is a world of luck?” asked Dr Nanny. “Yes, employers have got to be lucky to have good maids, but maids do not need good employers to get what they want. They are hardest on those who treat them with love and kindness. Where they are not treated well, that’s where they stay. There are many households where the maid will be seated in the kitchen door, when the others are in the dining room having their meal as a family – the meal she cooked. She can’t even sit with them to watch the TV. She can’t use condiments like tomato sauce to cook her own food. She can’t eat with them, but she stays with them longer than she would with those of us who treat her like a human being.” “Really?” Dr Nanny feigned ignorance. “Yes,” Angel affirmed. And that’s what aches. The likes of us, we give them all the freedom, allow them to do what they want and eat as they like, and then they don’t stay. Maybe they are not meant to enjoy freedom.” “It is also possible that they misuse their freedom,” Dr Nanny suggested. “If you are nice, they tend to think they are among family. They feel more at home. They forget that you afford to pay them because you go to work and have to bear having your supervisor shout at you and colleagues treat you badly.” My mind flashed back at my experiences at Sun Power. To shift the focus away from maids to employers, Dr Nanny asked, “What do you think your maids used to think of you?” “A maid once told me I was like a teddy bear.” “Meaning what?” asked Dr Nanny “She meant I was like a baby, ordering her around but incapable of doing anything myself. Of course, I felt insulted.” ‘You had every right to be. Given the little I’ve seen of you going about your activities, organising your kitchen and home, and taking care of yourself, how could anyone possibly call you a teddy bear?’ said I. “That’s sweet of you, Immaculate. You are a good person, which is why I’d rather cherish you as a friend than face the temptation of losing you by yielding to your insistence to be my maid. Be my friend, and I don’t run the risk of ever being described by you as a teddy bear.” ‘I could never call you that,’ I added. “Who knows? Things change and human nature is so unpredictable,” said Angel. At this point it dawned on me that Angel drank not because she was helpless with alcohol, but because she was lonely and disappointed with the turn things had taken in her otherwise sparkling life. ‘ There are certain things you just know you can’t do,’ I insisted. 205

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To move the conversation away from us, Dr Nanny asked Angel, “And what used to be your former husband’s attitude to your difficult times with maids? With of course the exception of the woman who came between you and your mother-in-law?” “Ordinarily, men don’t enter the world of maids. They see it as women’s business. Even if something happens when their female partners are away, men wait until the women come, and say, ‘But why is she doing this?’ And whenever something doesn’t happen the way they expect, they blame women for poor supervision. That is the normal thing. But in the case of my ex-husband, he began taking sides and interfering, when he allowed his mum to influence him over my relationship with that particular maid…” The interview continued right into the night, and at one point, Dr Nanny gave up writing and just listened. And then, it just became a conversation amongst friends.

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Chapter Twenty Six

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F

ortunately she is beautiful, I thought upon setting eyes on Dr Beauty. Otherwise, what would she have done with her name? On the other hand, beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder, and even the ugly exude beauty. But there is a limit even to that logic, not so? Dr Nanny began by thanking Dr Beauty. Then she introduced things as she always did, settling her plump self into a rather undersize office chair, leaving me to stand against the bookshelf until Dr Beauty took pity and asked me to perch on the side of her office table. It was a curiously undersized office for such a tall, elegant, graceful, light-skinned, and accomplished scholar, but Dr Nanny mentioned something I didn’t quite grasp about dirty departmental politics. Throughout the interview, Dr Beauty spoke like a princess well schooled. Her words came out smoothly yet lively, as if she took time to dip each and every one in palm oil. “I’m interested in maids just to understand how people relate to them, and how to capture the various representations in an unexaggerated way. I do know, of course, that the domain of maids is the domain of the lady – the madam of the house is the one who’s in charge of the maid. It’s almost as if the maid is an extension of the madam – a second pair of eyes and hands, as it were. The man keeps as much as possible out of the daily allocation of tasks to the maid. That’s why I am focusing a lot more on women as those who hire and fire. I am conducting interviews with maids as well. They have their own side of the story. So, as an employer, what have you got to share?” “It depends on what you are looking for,” Dr Beauty began, “because there’s so much.” “Did you grow up with maids?” “Not as much as when I had my child. But yes, I grew up with maids. My parents lived and worked in Gaborone, so having maids came naturally.” “In those days, there were mostly maids from within Botswana?” “Yeah, I think, hundred percent. This thing of maids coming from outside is fairly new. Otherwise, it was hundred percent local, I believe, in those days.”

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“Because you have been used to maids who were hundred percent Batswana and maids who have come from elsewhere, how would you compare and contrast your experiences of those two sets of maids?” “Well, when my children were growing up, it was mainly Batswana maids. But since we came back from overseas after my PhD, we found that mix and yes, we have found ourselves taking part in the mix. My own experience, I think it is the experience of many people, is that Botswana maids compare less. They are not as productive as the ones from outside, especially from Zimbabwe. “Zimbabwean maids, maybe because they are highly motivated to make money, not to make trouble with the bosses, they work very hard. They do their work. If only they didn’t have this problem of their stay, because we know when you hire somebody from outside, you are very much aware that you shouldn’t and therefore we are not relaxed. But they are so much better. “Botswana maids, I don’t know. It’s not very easy for one to talk bad of your country people. But Botswana maids really give us trouble. Almost all of us have the experience of hiring a maid for a week and then she disappears. Come Christmas, they always go for Christmas, they don’t come back. And then when you start searching and you eventually find them a month later, they will tell you a story about how the mother was sick or how they had to go home to help with the ploughing because it was the ploughing season,” Dr Beauty sighed. She continued. “They are just a problem. They are not reliable. And when you have small children, it can be difficult. Sunday night you want the maid to come back from wherever she went, so you are sure that Monday when you go to work, the maid will be there to stay with the children. But sometimes, Sunday night there is nobody. She hasn’t come back from the weekend and you have to run around. “The tendency is for us to give them time – a weekend off at the end of the month, after they are paid so they can go home –, and that may be the end of them. I am not sure I know why they behave like this because they are always complaining that we are hiring people from outside instead of hiring them. “I wouldn’t want to buy the story that we don’t pay them well. I have seen maids who are paid much less than what I would pay who stay simply because the person who is hiring them is not a Motswana. Maids don’t want to work for a Motswana woman. Batswana girls don’t want to work for a Motswana woman. They would rather work for a white person or an Indian, and Indians pay very little. Though they pay little, their maids stay because they are Indians. They don’t give them food, but still maids would rather work for Indians.” 208

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Intimate Strangers

“Is it that they really prefer working for foreigners and even glorify them to some extent or are foreigners the lesser of two evils, because they don’t want to be seen as servants among their own people?” “I have personally experienced somebody saying, ‘Me? Work for a Motswana woman? I would rather go home and plough.’ And she was actually looking for a job and I had no maid and my children were going to be alone the following day. She just wouldn’t work for me. Once in a while you get an exception. But overall, it’s that mentality of ‘This is a Motswana woman and I really don’t have to bow down to this person.’” “You say you don’t know why they do that, and that they like to work for a white person or an Indian, even when the Indians don’t pay well. This is an issue that comes up repeatedly in the interviews I have had. They tend to believe that the white person is the best person to work for. To them whites pay well, they take good care of you, and they don’t overwork you. You do their washing with washing machines. They treat you like a human being. I don’t know if you have encountered that?” “I agree. There is an element of overworking them that we do. We do not observe working hours. Somebody even at 6 o’clock is still cooking dinner. After cooking dinner they have to wash up. By the time they can go to sleep, it is 9 o’clock. The problem is that we treat maids the way we treat a child at home. According to Setswana culture, when there is a young girl in the home, whether it is your child or not your child, you send them to do chores as if they were your own child and they can work until anytime. Let’s say somebody, your friend or your relative, sends a child to stay with you and go to school in Gaborone. This child is expected to do chores and they do chores anytime. “I think it’s that mentality of the child in the home. We don’t take it like this is a worker. So we don’t observe working hours. They can work from early in the morning when my children have to go to school, which means before seven. They should be up to prepare the children to go. But remember that during the day they have an easy time. It’s not like they are forever on their toes during the day, for who is there to supervise them? And they don’t really do a good job. Most of the time, they’ll just be there so that there is somebody at home. But yes, we do have long working hours.” “Sometimes the maids are more elderly. They could even be older than those who employ them in certain cases. Does this pose a problem?” “Yeah, I think I have seen them being more reliable, the older ones. They are more reliable but won’t do as many things in the house as younger persons. If I ask a younger person to sweep the yard outside, they would, but with the older maids, it isn’t so sure. Things have changed actually between the time when my children were small – it was in the ‘80s to ‘90s

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– and now. The maids, we expected them even to sweep the yard. Not to use spades, but to take the broom and sweep. I got surprised when I saw that nowadays they don’t work outside the house, it’s only inside. They won’t sweep outside. The older woman gets tired quickly, but they are more reliable.” “One thing that comes across from other interviews is the social life of maids, especially the maids living in with you. They do tend to want to have their own life. Sometimes they approach you – boyfriends –, or lots of people knock at your gate wanting to come in to look for her. Or sometimes she asks you, ‘My boyfriend, I want him to come and stay with me or if not, I want to go and stay with him.’ Has that been an issue with your maids?” Dr Nanny asked Dr Beauty. “Well, yes and no. You see, nowadays we lock our gate. Then we didn’t, so the boyfriend could come in, and yes, the most important point is that they don’t want to live inside the house. There was a time when I had a 3bedroom house. One child was sleeping with us, so I wanted the maid to take one of the bedrooms so I could rent out the Servants’ Quarters to help me augment our income, and she said no! Of course we had to leave her in the Servants’ Quarters. We were with her for a long time, she was very good, her boyfriend used to come. We never bothered because it wasn’t bothering us. Whether you slept or not, it wasn’t an issue. “But yes, a lot of people are against boyfriends coming, especially if they come and they drive in. ‘Oh no! We don’t want a Mercedes Benz to park in our yard.’ But for us it was not an issue at the time. Yeah, sometimes I was bothered, but some people always have problems with them coming, saying it makes the girl take food from the house to feed the boyfriend or that he keeps her from sleeping and she’s too tired to work the next day, that’s where the problem is. And then also when she’s doing your laundry, she will bring in the boyfriend’s clothes to mix with your clothes. That’s the part that makes us a little bit apprehensive about them coming in. Otherwise, I don’t see much difference.” “Some people have also indicated that the maid sometimes becomes a problem in the house, especially when she starts competing with the lady of the house for the attention of the man of the house,” said Dr Nanny. “I have never heard that, not at all. But I don’t see why that should be a problem, because if the lady of the house thinks that this girl is competing, she should just tell her to go. I know those cases are there, but not personally with me. Not even the slightest bit did I have a problem with that. But I don’t see why it should be a problem. Just tell her to go.” “Some people claim that maids, especially younger ones, tend to dress in a very provocative manner – diminishing skirts, bellybutton display, and things like that,” said Dr Nanny. 210

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“Well, I have seen some, but not in my own case. I suppose I was taking the ordinary girls. When you hire somebody, you look at her, and if it’s the provocative dressing type, you will see – painted face and all those things. Personally, I would definitely not like somebody who comes to dress in a funny way. Not because of the competition for the man, I don’t think I have a problem with that area, but chances will be that she wouldn’t listen. Chances are she will refuse. She would want to do as I do – if I am sitting down, she would want to sit down. So I probably would not like her.” “My assistant here – Immaculate – told me a story of somebody she used to live with who had an elderly maid who became increasingly difficult to control, and the lady’s mother-in-law felt uncomfortable having the daughter–in–law order her age mate around to do things here and there, and told her off saying, ‘You don’t say this to somebody who’s older than you. What’s wrong with you girls of this generation? You girls should sit down and ask the maid to tell you what a woman does for her husband. She should give you your tasks rather than you telling her what to do.’” “The maid should give the madam of the house tasks?!” Dr Beauty exclaimed. “Yeah, ‘because that is how we grew up, elderly people taught you what to do for your husband. Now you are telling this elderly woman, these are your tasks,’” Dr Nanny confirmed. Dr Beauty said, “The answer is to get rid of the mother-in-law. That is the answer. Mothers-in-law can be trouble. She is already interfering, you see? Because she likes this woman, she wants you to take orders from her. How can that be? Of course, you have to address her in a mannerful way, because she’s older – perhaps old enough to be your mother –, but does that mean she should turn the tables on me? “Right now I have a maid who’s almost the age of my mother. I advise her like I would advise any elderly person, but I still give her instructions. If I can no longer give her instructions, then out she goes. Either the mother-in-law should go or the maid should go, but obviously the motherin-law is the cause. She would cause problems with anybody. But if she cannot go, then this lady would have to get out of the house entirely,” Dr Beauty was categorical. “As you have said, Zimbabwean maids are very hardworking. Everybody I’ve interviewed acknowledges that, but there is the complaint that they pinch things, they steal. Is that widespread?” Dr Beauty replied. “Apparently it is, from what I hear. Well I had one experience with somebody who pinched P1000 plus. I put P1000 plus, I think it was P1300, in a drawer and this girl disappeared and I never bothered with her. A few days later I searched for the money and it was gone. 211

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“But I wouldn’t say it’s because she’s Zimbabwean. It could have been by a local girl as well. The problem with the Zimbabwean maid from what I have gathered is that they network. Our Botswana girls tend not to network. When they pinch, they pinch for themselves by themselves, and I have a lot of experience of girls who have taken very important and valuable things from my house – Botswana girls. “Zimbabwean girls, on the other hand, network such that they can clear the house, not even a piece of carpet, nothing, will be found. If they have connections with some men who have trucks, if you leave the maid for the weekend and go for maybe a long journey, when you came back there’s not a single thing left, nothing. She’s taken everything and she’s crossed the border. Batswana girls don’t do that. That is the difference. They can pinch a watch or food or shoe, but they cannot clean the house.” “That’s a very interesting point, that everybody pinches, that everybody can steal now and again as a maid, but the difference is that the Zimbabwean maid networks and sometimes they network not only with fellow maids but also with men and they can come in and take advantage of you in a very large scale way. They clean you dry.” Dr Nanny had the same excitement in her eyes she did whenever she came by an important insight. Dr Beauty confirmed. “That’s where the danger is. It’s the magnitude of their stealing. It’s not a coin or a watch that disappears. It’s not small things, it’s big time. It’s everything in your house that disappears, and usually without a trace. “You know you cannot take this person to the Police or the court because she’s from across the border. She could have brought papers that were faked. At the same time, where would you go to complain, since she was illegal in the first place? And they are aware of that. The fact that they are illegal makes it impossible for us to go after them. There’s a certain nebulousness in which they are obliged to exist and in which they have learned to operate. “With a Motswana girl with Omang, the first thing I would want to do is get her Omang details and trace her. If she’s taken something that is really substantial, I could trace her and find her. The Zimbabwean maids, their power comes from their awareness of our vulnerability. They can come in, and when you have really learnt to trust them, they do more than just clean, they clean you out entirely.” “Another thing, one cannot talk maids without talking relationships. It’s impossible! When you bring a maid into your house, it affects your relationship with the person in your life and sometimes the maid assumes functions that are crucial in the domestic division of labour. The woman 212

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is supposed to do certain things – take care of the kitchen, do the cooking and entertain, given the male chauvinist circles in which we operate. Then in comes a maid and these responsibilities are thrust on her, to the point where the only function left for the woman is the bed. Isn’t there temptation there? Wouldn’t the maid be tempted to go all the way, to the point where she tries to hijack the relationship of madam with her man?” Dr Nanny laughed. “So doesn’t having a maid in the house redefine relationships, at least to some degree? How much the man loves you could be affected by the extent to which your functions in that relationship have been appropriated by someone else.” “That’s very interesting. First of all I think a husband needs to appreciate what his wife goes through during the day. If I am a housewife, should I sit and watch television when my husband comes while the maid takes the briefcase? He sits down and the maid goes for his beer? The maid makes his dinner and serves and makes her way to his heart and I don’t make any input into the quality of the food? I wouldn’t blame anybody if there is a problem in this marriage. I wouldn’t blame the man if he starts looking at the person feeding him. If the maid takes over, isn’t it madam who let her so do? “To me, the role of a maid is to assist me and I cook. Even when my children were small and I was already lecturing here, I had a lot of work to do. I still cooked in the evening, and she would be peeling potatoes for me. I did the mixing and seasoning and all that. They could never cook the way I cooked. And I know what he likes. I don’t even begin to expect the maid to know how to please my husband. “So it depends on how much I want to please my husband. It depends on how one is brought up. How lazy one is and how smart or not smart one is. It’s not smart, no matter how busy I can be, it’s not smart as far as I am concerned, to allow her to take over completely. “But at the same time the husband should appreciate the extent of commitment of his wife. In addition to tending to matters of the home, she brings earnings and even intellectual and other stimulation from outside the home to the family. While being a breadwinner, her husband should also recognize and appreciate how she juggles and manages. He would have a hard time doing as much, and a smart man knows this. When she is pregnant, he should be tender and understanding and supportive. A smart husband will know how to do these things. A smart husband will know how to please his wife and not just wait for her to please him.” “That makes me think of something related. When you were comparing Zimbabwean maids to Batswana maids, you said Batswana maids don’t measure up. If what I get from interviews is anything to go by, there’s also 213

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a set of people in Botswana who don’t measure up in relationships – Batswana men. I’m told foreigners have got more TLC – Tender Love and Care. Batswana men, they don’t assume their responsibilities towards their women. Sometimes if you ask a Motswana man about the child he has given you, he will say, ‘Forget the child, come, let’s go.’ That’s a caricature of course. But is this an issue?” Dr Nanny asked. “Unfortunately there’s a lot of that going around – that Batswana men don’t know how to love. That’s what people say and in this case I will definitely refrain from using any personal experience. Generally there’s that talk about Batswana men and foreign men. I cannot say much since I don’t have a foreign man. Neither have I ever had one, nor do I plan to have one. I am perfectly happy with my Motswana man. But there is a lot of talk about Batswana men. Really, my daughter will say. ‘I will not marry a Motswana man. Momma,’” Dr Beauty laughed. “How do they situate that? Where is this myth from? It’s more like a myth, isn’t it?” “I am not sure, really. For somebody to compare it means they must have had the experience of both. So I am not sure I know where all this comes from.” “It could just be make believe,” said Dr Nanny. “But I think the fundamental point is... let’s take a Motswana man with a Motswana woman, the chances are he knows and is used to the women he likes, so he doesn’t have to go out of his way to please her. The foreign man couldn’t act the same way. Chances are he wants to be accepted, so he goes out of his way to make his case. He may go an extra mile, or two, to please. “We have heard stories of white men, especially British and American white men who marry Batswana girls. They behave very nicely to them when they are here. When they take them back home, they change and they become normal. Which means when they were here, they were not normal. They could not afford to take their women for granted because they were living with them as daughters of the soil. A foreigner living here wants acceptance. He is lonely and there are no support persons around. So this local girlfriend is the only person on whom he has to focus, and she brings him the confidence and visibility he needs to survive and excel in a foreign environment. Whereas for the Motswana man, the wife is there, especially when he is already married, and he is a son of the soil. As a daughter of the soil, she’s there and she won’t go anywhere. So there is a possibility that there is some taking for granted going on.” “That’s confusing to me. I must confess,” said Dr Nanny. “Anyway, let’s move on. I’ve been made to understand that among foreign men, Indians are the ones least interested in or interesting to Batswana women. 214

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They are said to be the most inward looking. Even when they come up to have something with you, it’s only here and now and then they forget you forever. How true is that?” “I think it’s religion. They cannot afford to be seen going out with a Motswana girl. They are not allowed. So they cannot afford to really associate. I suppose but I don’t know much. I know also that people don’t like the Chinese. I am not sure I understand why, because the Chinese haven’t been here for very long. It’s just that they come in large numbers very suddenly, like locusts. But I know that Batswana don’t like Chinese,” said Dr Beauty. “I have also heard among Batswana you find preferences, very strong preferences. While somebody who is Kalanga is more likely to marry a Tswana wife, it is very difficult for Tswana men to marry Kalanga women. It’s almost as if they say the Tswana men love women who are light skinned – this is a stereotype – and anybody who is fair skinned is already considered 60 per cent beautiful. Whereas, if you are dark skinned and even 80 per cent beautiful, you are less likely to be eligible for marriage in the eyes of the Tswana. Somebody needs to put glasses on or take off glasses to see whether you are truly beautiful. The Kalanga, represented as mostly dark skinned, marry into this lightness. But few Tswana men would marry into Kalanga darkness. Of course, different cultures and personal choices are advanced as reasons, but basically, it seems as if that’s the pattern. Similarly, it is very difficult for a Tswana man to go out with a Makwerekwere woman and a lot easier for the Tswana women to go out with Makwerekwere men.” Dr Nanny wrapped up her longest question yet. Dr Beauty replied, “About Batswana and Kalanga, maybe it’s true. But I don’t think there is anything I can say to support why. What I know is actually the opposite of what you are saying. What I know is that Batswana women are lazy. Kalanga women are hardworking. They are also very respectful of their husbands. They don’t question anything. They take everything as given, whereas a Tswana woman will be questioning her husband. Tswana women are lazy and not very respectful. They don’t know how to treat their husbands properly. They are not submissive enough. I think that’s the right word – not submissive enough. Kalanga men are used to having a woman who is very submissive, and Tswana women, they question things.” “During a recent interview with two Makwerekwere maids and one Makwerekwere lecturer, I was told that Batswana men are most irritating in approaching women. They are said not to be subtle. They might say, ‘I have got love to propose to you’ or, ‘I love you, let’s go and have sex.’ The 215

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lecturer even made a very damning statement that where she comes from even a ten year old is more sophisticated in chatting with her than most Batswana men who have tried to chat her up. Any comments?” Dr Beauty said, “I think it’s this thing that I said earlier of taking a woman for granted. There is a lot of that in Batswana men, who assume she wants marriage. They see themselves as attractive –attractive to any woman –, no matter how he looks or acts. That’s really typical of taking a woman for granted – that she wants a man no matter what, and however educated she is. So they do tend to take the woman for granted. That’s why probably they tend not to marry from outside, compared to women.” “Do you think it affects the relationship of Batswana women to Batswana men? If the men take the woman for granted it means the slightest opportunity a woman gets with a man, no matter how casually he declares his love, she’s likely not to want to miss that opportunity. You cannot hope for any better, given that they tend to want to take you for granted. So one has given up expecting words that are romantic and has learnt to go for anything to keep hope alive. Do you think it affects women’s expectation of men?” Dr Nanny said convolutedly. Dr Beauty said, “Yeah, it could be that the Motswana woman does not have many expectations. So as far as she’s concerned, it is enough that he has shown the slightest bit of interest. Now, obviously there are differences. But I think the perception of women of their men is that their men don’t know courtship. They are not interested in trying hard to win a woman.” “So they start their story and the woman completes it?” “I suppose. But I am just wondering whether this is not universal, especially in Africa, where women depend so much on men, particularly for a woman who has not gone to school, and therefore needs marriage as her cushion in life. Sometimes I think men in other African countries could even be worse than Batswana men. “We read in African novels about men who take a second wife and the first wife cannot even say a word. Maybe the foreign African men when they are here they behave differently. But my suspicion is that out there, they are even worse. “Batswana women, they do speak out, that’s why the divorce rates are so high. They do not want to take things lying down. So I think we are talking about two different groups of people here. There are those who will settle for almost anything, and those who will be choosing and therefore if somebody lured her into marriage and then starts to misbehave, she will be quick to go to the courts. Are you ready to put these different kinds of people and relationships into a hierarchy, Dr. Nanny?” 216

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Dr. Nanny ignored the question and moved onto her next subject. “I have also heard that here in Botswana the sugar mummy syndrome is quite rampant. Women, precisely because men don’t treat them well, will want to have men on their own terms. So they will go for the younger boys in DUST whom they can provide for financially, to assume responsibilities that more delinquent men have absolved themselves from. You know about that?” “I don’t know. These are the kinds of things that would really be done undercover. So unless you associate with people like that, you will know very little. And I wouldn’t associate with people like that, and even they wouldn’t tell me. So I know very little about things like that.” “It seems as if everybody big and small is employing maids, especially foreign maids, but nobody wants to own up to it by actually providing for legislation that will make their fate glossier and make it possible for you to be able to employ a Zimbabwean maid in a legal manner and pursue her when she takes your things because you have her details, and she is no longer clandestine. Why do you think things are that fluid?” “Actually, it’s upsetting because as far as I am concerned, we should be allowed that kind of cross-border competition. That would likely improve the productivity of our local maids, I mean them knowing they have to compete on equal footing with those from outside. At the same time, it would protect those of us who employ foreign maids. “I don’t know why government thinks that they should protect Batswana maids from competition – I don’t understand. Batswana maids don’t want to do the work, they don’t. They hinder those who are potential maids. Why? Because there is so much money around – so much assistance from the government. “Somebody will just come and work for you and then after a day or two, your work is too much. They go away and the Zimbabwean will come and will work and will never complain, not one bit. I have been in a position where I have had to do the work of a maid. I had no maid and I am able to do the work from A to Z, and much better than my maids do it. So in my opinion, they want money without work. “I don’t know about the lowering of wages, because they are low enough or too low. That’s a problem and probably also has an impact on productivity. Another issue is, just as government approved hiring of cattle herders, I don’t know why it cannot be done for maids. Some people talked about it over the radio, immediately after the legislation. They were calling in and having a debate and they were saying how this is a men’s world because the men are taking care of themselves by allowing foreign herders to come in. 217

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“Why? The cattle post is men’s domain, and men don’t have herders and have made it possible for people to come from outside to be herders. Maids will come looking for a job, they will work for one day to two days and then they disappear. So why can’t the same apply? Why can’t the market for domestic workers be opened to outsiders? Women say this government is being typical, by only protecting men’s domains and not women’s. Cattle without herders could be a headache and government has found a solution. Why doesn’t government find a solution for households without maids? “With respect to this, men will say, ‘Yeah, I know we have a problem,’ and then go to sleep. The woman will not sleep because first thing in the morning she has to go to work, but the child has to be taken care of. So she will be running around from one place to another, from sister to mother to cousin, to find help. And come back rushing to prepare lunch for this same man who sleeps with no headaches.” At this point the interview was interrupted by a knock at the door. Dr Beauty’s teenage daughter, a photocopy of the mother, came in, and the mother stood up like someone stung by a bee. “I must go,” she said. “My daughter has an appointment with her dentist. I had totally forgotten it was time to pick her up from school and take her there and now she is here.” Turning to her daughter, she apologised, “Sorry darling, I’m terribly sorry. Let’s go.” And that was the end of a rich and thrilling interview, one Dr Nanny would have loved to pursue further. But all subsequent attempts to obtain another appointment failed. One month later, Dr Nanny learnt from Kalahari FM of Dr Beauty’s appointment as Minister of State for Higher Education and sent congratulations by email.

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M

rs Warona Bimbo had a nice little office, with sunlight streaming into it. When we arrived, she was watering healthy potted plants on her window pane. A bulletin board above her desk was crowded with postcards from around the world. I inhaled the smell of air freshener. There was something energising about the place. I could have sat there all day without feeling tired. But the interview with Mrs Bimbo was a disaster for the first 20 minutes. The tape recorder refused to record, which we realised only midway into the interview, and she was not the sort of person to rewind. The tape comes alive where Dr Nanny asked, “The fact that one is married doesn’t mean that one doesn’t find other people attractive, does it?” “Well I think finding someone attractive and even being in a position where you think, ‘Ouuuuuuuh! I like this person and I could love this person,’ those things happen to everyone, even pastors.” “Really?!” “Of course! But you just have to say, ‘Well, I love this person, but I know I can’t have him because of my status or because of this or that.” “And how often do you say that?” “Come on,” she laughed. “What do you mean?” “I’m just asking a question.” “Hhei! I can’t count the times,” Mrs Bimbo said with a smile. “But it’s something that happens. I think for any person who is normal it happens at least once in a while, but if you find it happening every day, you should have yourself checked.” “Have yourself checked if you find it happening often? Why? Is it abnormal to find people attractive?” “Not at all. Genes are genes. People think the attraction has to do with looks, but it also has to do with smells. Biology works on all of us you know. But just think how exhausted you would be if you gave into every instinct!” Dr Winter-Bottom Nanny decided to pursue a different but related topic. “Batswana women tend to say foreigners have more TLC or Tender Love and Care than Batswana men. Are you familiar with that general area?”

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“I’ve heard that and even analysed that.” “Can you share with me about that then?” “I think if I compare a foreigner with someone who is a local here, the local will have extended family, a village, cattle, the farm, this and that, and his eyes will extend to all these things. So the little time he has away from his work, he’ll have to answer to other calls of duty. Attend someone’s funeral, go to the cattle post or the farm, do this and that, etc. But the foreigners, they are just here, riding around in their cars and having time on their hands to waste. So the foreigner can manage to be in a woman’s house the whole day, showing various dimensions of Tender Love and Care. He doesn’t have an auntie nearby seeking his attention and assistance, so why wouldn’t he be found to be more loving?” “Interesting, very interesting.” “And your money? You don’t have to spend it on cousins, sisters, or nephews. You spend it on me – the local woman. And I eat it up! So when things happen this way, I just look at you and think, ‘Emm! He is so tender, so loving, so caring!’ “I’ve seen cases where Batswana women will meet someone, like guys working here from East Africa, West Africa or Central Africa. They tie the knot and go home with them, and when they get there, these guys start living like Tswana guys. Because they’re home! His nephew is nearby, his auntie is not far, his mother is around, his grandmother is somewhere, his cattle are there and someone is tilling his land. So he is expected to spread his attention around and then he’s supposed to go and supervise that guy working on his land. And he becomes just like the local boy here, and it is even more painful because you start to see this other side of him that was hidden from you before. In a land that is not yours, where you don’t have family, where you are just on your own, and in most cases, the Batswana women come back battered like they went to attend a funeral somewhere.” Dr Nanny said, “Your analysis is perfect. But I’ve also heard that Batswana men are irresponsible. They don’t assume their responsibilities, even something as basic as taking care of their children. They drop a child like you will drop excrement, and they never look back at the woman and the baby they’ve left behind. That’s not exactly due to extended family or lack of extended family, is it?” Mrs Bimbo replied, “I think I could agree with you on that one, but what it really depends on is socialisation. I think our culture doesn’t emphasise enough about a kid being a part of you. That’s why a man will make a baby with me one day and the next day with someone somewhere else. 220

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“If you look at the Ndebele culture even now, it is still largely true that if a Ndebele man makes a baby here, he will do his best to look after that baby. And if I just kick him out, he will say, ‘Ok, you kick me out but this guy is my son. It’s either I take him home with me or I maintain him here.’ So they will insist that this kid should always go home and meet other family members, because a man is a man because of others, and a man without a child is like a life without a future. “This is common with other people like Ghanaians and some other Africans, but then with our culture it’s different. It’s so with the Ndebeles, because in this culture, if he impregnates or makes a baby with someone, he is supposed to tie a knot with that girl, whether you love her or you just wanted her to give you comfort for that night. The fact that you’ve slept with her and made a baby makes her your wife. That’s just the culture. “But our culture never emphasised that. So people are just making babies like snowballs, and going away. We end up with so many snowballs, just because there is too much snow. And the other reason is because in the Setswana culture, this thing of being a virgin for many years is not an issue. Whether you are a virgin or not a virgin, you are still a lady and you will get a husband. If you don’t get a husband, it isn’t because you are not a virgin. So people can start playing around when they are still young and it doesn’t matter. Hence, I think it’s all about how you have been socialised.” “I’ve also talked to foreigners, and several of them have told me Batswana men don’t know how to approach a woman,” Dr Nanny laughed. “And how do you do it?” asked Mrs Bimbo. “I don’t know. That’s what I’m asking. Do you think Batswana men approach you as a woman should be approached?” replied Dr Nanny. “Wow! I think it depends on who you are and what you want. What are your expectations? I’ve seen cases where someone will just stop you at the shopping mall and say, ‘I love you.’ And you say, ‘But you don’t know me, are you sure you love me?’ Then they insist, ‘I love you, I’ll do this for….’” Mrs Bimbo laughed. “‘Get lost!’ “Normally I shut those people down. I think maybe it is part of the culture. I’ve seen cases where you’ll meet this person who will make an effort to know who you are, and you get to know each other, and he gets to the point where he can even tell you how he feels. Normally, those people are mostly non-Batswana. And like I said, it depends on what you want and what you expect from a man at a particular point in time. Do you just want sex? Do you want a sense of romanticism? Do you expect to look up one day and hear someone say, ‘I love you,’ and feel swept off your feet?” 221

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“In mainstream Botswana, what should a man do to be taken seriously by a woman?” “Depends,” began Mrs Bimbo. “There are those who would want someone who’s persistent with that ‘I love you, I love you,’ and to some, that is not good enough. Then there are those who would want to know someone a little more. And then there are others, like someone I know, who would want to know someone to the extent that this person becomes a friend. You should know him in such a way that you know what he wants and when and he knows what you want and when. You know his weaknesses and whether you can tolerate them or not and that’s when you could say, but I could love this person. Otherwise I might like him, but I can’t love him. I have to know him first.” “As a woman, when do you know that a man is interested in you?” “Men are different. It depends.” “I mean the whole catalogue of possibilities.” “You mean as a woman, as being myself ?” Dr Nanny nodded. “Wow! It is too complicated. Normally, if someone just says I love you, just like that, it’s more like a joke. I just laugh and go away. Normally I’d prefer someone who would get to know me and if you become friends you can easily sense it. You can even see it in his eye and in his walk. Ok, this person is interested. You can see it from things he will be doing and the way you talk, the way you do things together. Like you go into his office, and he is talking to someone. He will just tell the other person, ‘I’ll call you later. I’ve got someone to talk to,’ to show you you are special and to show his special interest. He might buy you something small but special like perfume, not big things. Not someone who will say, ‘I love you, I adore you.’ Oh my God! No, someone who’s, whatever he is saying as plans, they are realistic. Not someone who will say, ‘I love you, I’ll marry you…’ Get off! Those guys are normally jokers.” “Those ones, they are the snowball type,” Dr Nanny volunteered. “Ah!” “They make snowballs and they move on.” “Ah! You!” she laughed. Laughing as well, Dr Nanny asked, “What have I done? What is it?” “No, it’s just the questions.” “Are they difficult ones?” “No, they are not. I just…,” Mrs Bimbo couldn’t contain her laughter. “I’m interested. What sort of questions are they?” “I just didn’t expect this kind of study.” “This kind of study that I’m doing on maids and relationships?” “Especially the one on relationships. I would like to know more, why…” “Why am I interested?” 222

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“And see the paper or book when it’s done.” “Ok, I’ll give you other papers as well, that I have written on the same theme based on studies conducted in other countries. Now, another thing is, the Lekgoa seems to occupy a special place in the issue of tender care amongst Batswana. Why is that so?” “We Batswana normally look at this Lekgoa as someone who is so perfect, someone with all the money, someone with all the knowledge. Like even if someone talks to me and she wants to show me that she thinks highly of me, she will call me Lekgoa. If you wear a nice perfume, we will say ‘Mankaso Lekgoa,’ to say you smell the way a Lekgoa would smell. Anything nice, food or whatever is sekgoa – likened to whiteness. Anything that is perfect, beautiful, is associated with Lekgoa. “So normally, people think Makgoa, wherever they come from, they’ve got money and life is just a bed of flowers. And some Batswana get disappointed when they follow these white boys home only to find that he is from South America – from Bolivia or whatever – and it is just like home! Nothing much to write home about in terms of the real image we Batswana have cultivated of the Lekgoa. That’s the worst form of insult for a Motswana, fake whiteness,” she laughed. “So we normally associate Makgoa with money, even though nowadays for most of them their pockets are empty just like those of Batswana. The Makgoa, because they are not home, they’ve got no family here, they can afford to display Tender Loving Care. But back home, with them it’s even worse. He is here and his home is so far away that you can’t compare him with someone from Tanzania or from Burkina Faso. “I think Batswana are tired of the culture, where if you are in love with someone, you become involved with his family and other relatives. If you become his wife – they normally say musadiwagatu, meaning our woman, the woman who belongs to my people, the woman who belongs to my family –, you become their wife. With Lekgoa, you become his wife and whatever you do, you do it with him as your husband. Not with them as partners. I think Batswana also like the culture where you’ll be convenient in your own world, just the two of you, you and your wife. It’s just you and him, no mothers-in-law or whatever else, just the two of you. That’s how people believe the Makgoa live their lives. Maybe that’s why they like Makgoa.” “And Asians?” “The Asians we Batswana have been exposed to so far are mostly Indians and they hate their culture. Asians and Africans, our cultures are not the same. So they don’t like them that much. Indians hardly marry from outside, except those who are outcasts and normally if you are married to that one, you are just like an outcast yourself.” 223

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“What about Chinese?” “Ahhh! I haven’t heard much about Chinese, but I’ve seen two women who have got Chinese kids. And Chinese to me are just like Batswana. They will make babies all over, like they are buying fat cakes, and just leave them and don’t even care where they are. Even Indians, I went to school with one guy, his father was Indian but this guy never even cared. He wasn’t supposed to do it in the first place. And now he is punishing this boy who wasn’t there when he decided to see the Motswana woman naked.” “We talked a while ago about TLC and Batswana women who will go out with foreigners in the various categories. Do you think the same is true of Batswana men going out with foreign women? Is it easy? Is it popular?” “It’s not that popular and it’s not that easy. Why? Batswana women, they go out with these men because they want money. They want the TLC, they want this and that. The way I see it for men, if he goes out with this woman, it’s because of love. It’s not something that comes after. It’s not because he wants money or something from this person. For women I know it’s because of the surplus income. They know that, well he doesn’t have a nephew to sponsor, so he is well to do and will spend on me. Even if he sends money home to his folks, it can’t be all the time, and I can always get to him before they do.” “But there is also the issue of sugar mummies, where young men go out with working and well placed women. I understand it’s very popular here in DUST, where many young men are given access to cars and to money, in exchange for the emotional and libidinal services they render their sugar mummies. Don’t tell me you don’t know about this.” “I know about that. Well, I think that one is a two-way thing. Young men, they need these women for their money, for this and that. There are also cases where it’s because of love and nothing else, especially now that the culture is moving away from where we say no, she’s elderly. We now say, ‘Oh age is just a number,’” Mrs Bimbo paused briefly, as if searching for what to say next. She continued. “So there are cases where it’s because of love. There are cases where the young boy needs her money. And there are cases where this woman is lonely and she needs someone. And there are women who can’t keep a man. They are bullies, they are this and that, perhaps too successful for men of their age who feel, ‘Oh my God! If I’m seen with this doctor, academic or whatever, and I’m just a nobody, how will I cope?’ So these overly qualified women fish among the boys who don’t care. ‘Even if they see me with her, they know I’m young, and so what?’ 224

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And there are cases where women need these boys because their men have reached their sell by date or early retirement. There is a point where it goes down for all men, as you very well know.” “When from?” “I don’t know. I am not sure of the age but men get tired, most of them.” “Really? Starting from what age?” “I don’t know, but that’s what I think. Women when kids are now big, you don’t have to wake up at night to take someone to do this and that. That’s when you become more active. And that’s when most women start looking after themselves and going out, because they never had chance to go out. There are cases where families just become dysfunctional. People just live in the same house because some years back they tied a knot. They’ll just be there. He will take his car, go somewhere, enjoy beer, and if you go somewhere, you meet this boy to keep you busy and make you happy, and you go back home ok. So it’s something like that.” “Thanks a lot. Is there any last thing you’d like to say to conclude this interview?” “No, but I’d also like to interview you about this one day,” said Mrs Bimbo with a laugh. “So you can tell me all you know on these themes that interest you so much.” “My pleasure. Just let me know when you are ready,” Dr Nanny agreed, tendering her complimentary card.

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Chapter Twenty Eight

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D

r Nanny shook hands with Mrs Mildred Good-Hope, who invited us to sit. She was a junior lecturer with the Department of Rural Development at DUST. She took her time with the afternoon tea and some Eat-Sum-More biscuits she was having, leaving us to idle about her room with our eyes. Through eventually, she cleared her table and then her throat, and turned to us to warn, “I’ve got a 4 pm tutorial, so we’ve got exactly an hour.” I saw in her a well organised woman. Above her desk on the wall was a sketch of an elderly man in academic robes captioned: ‘Phobia For Good Ideas.’ “I’m interested in different people and their experiences of maids. So would you share your experiences with me?” Dr Nanny began. “The maid that I have, I’ve been with her for two years. That was when I was having my youngest daughter. She only goes home in December and comes back in January. I’ve never had to change, and she’s fine. She’s different from initially because she doesn’t do a good job like she used to. Now she’s gotten used to the place. She’s already part of the family and she doesn’t know a lot of people outside, so she always spends the night at home. She doesn’t end up spending the night with friends and relatives. She is always at home.” “Where does she come from?” “Somewhere up north, Francistown area. She’s Kalanga.” “How did you find her?” “I had a friend in Francistown when I was expecting. I had to look for a maid, so she advertised in the papers in Francistown. She had her for an interview in which she did well.” “So you recruited her through Labour or was it informal?” “Informal.” “But she had to go through an interview?” “By a friend.” “What was the interview for?” “Just to see, because she was going to look after a small baby. So she had to say if she’d be able to cope when there’s a small baby. She doesn’t mind when there’s a small baby and another kid, that sort of thing.”

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“You had to verify her parents and things like that?” “No!” “Have you ever visited her family?” “No.” “But she goes…” “Yeah, she goes home every year. December sometimes, during the holidays.” “You mentioned that initially she was quite good and now she’s no longer.” “She’s not as good.” “Can you elaborate?” “Yeah, she doesn’t do a good job. She always has to be reminded about things. She always has to be told, ‘You haven’t cleaned the windows.’ She always has to be told, ‘You should move the bed and clean under the bed.’ It was something she used to do on her own.” “What do you think happened? “I think she’s gotten used to the place now and maybe me. Maybe I don’t talk to her the way I should. Some people are very strict with maids. Really I don’t think I’m strict. So she’s gotten relaxed. The first impressions I got were good and it was like she would do a good job all the way. But nowadays, she’s not so good.” “How old is she?” “She’s a year younger than me. Twenty-eight.” “Are there instances where people become uncomfortable with their maids for one reason or another, generally?” “Uncomfortable how?” “Like you have your maid and then suddenly relations get difficult and you are no longer very happy with them.” “Yeah. There are days when she’s just not in the mood and you can’t talk to her. She gets serious, and you can tell today she’s not in the mood.” “But with somebody who’s twenty eight years old, she has got a life over and beyond simply being a maid. She’s got her social life, for example. How does she cater for her social life?” “She goes away every Saturday afternoon, and maybe comes back Sunday. But like I said, she always goes, maybe in the morning and comes back in the evenings. She rarely spends the night out. She’d rather go, come back and go again on Sunday. Within the week, no.” “And do you think she hasn’t a boyfriend?” “She has a boyfriend, in the neighbourhood.” “Does the boyfriend come to stay the night in your place?” 228

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“No, she stays in the house with us, so wherever they do their business, no, not in our house. But they can come to us and tell us they have a problem with this and that. She takes me more like a sister.” “It must be quite difficult for you, being just one year older, to control someone who is just one year younger.” “It is!” “So, how do you cope?” “I try to be firm. Like one time she went away to her home village and she spent two days not coming, and I told her that should never happen again. She did it again, and I told her the next time she does it, I’m going to cut off her money. Like you said, it is difficult. But I try. I find it a lot easier being firm with students and male academic staff than I am with my maid.” “You don’t want to change the maid?” “No.” “Why?” “I don’t want to get into the hassle and hustle of having to teach somebody afresh or having to find somebody who’s only going to give me a headache. Some people have had three maids within the time that I’ve had her. So I really don’t want anybody else.” “And your husband, how does he feel?” “He feels I don’t talk to her like I should. He sometimes feels I’m too soft on her, but it’s my responsibility to tell her ABC. So he’s always on me to talk to her, but they get along ok. Because he can tell her, no! This is this.” “Do you think that could be because he’s a lot older or something?” “I think so, and I also think she’s got more respect for him than me.” “Why?” “I don’t know. Maybe it’s because he’s a man and he’s always serious, more serious than I am, so she’ll tell me, ‘No. Please don’t tell him.’ So I think she respects him more than she does me. “How old is he?” “Thirty-five. I think she respects him more because of the age.” “Has it ever crossed your mind that your maid could play tricks with your husband?” “What kind of tricks?” “You know what kind of tricks I mean.” “From conversations I have with her, she tells me that our neighbour had a friend and the friend used to ask the neighbour out, and she tells me that she can’t do it because if she goes out with my husband, she would 229

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feel terrible. At least if somebody tells you what she thinks, you know she can see this is not right. She can do something else but not this. But it hasn’t occurred.” “Could you not see that as a trick meant to take your mind away from what might actually be going on?” “No, I never thought about it like that.” “You don’t credit maids with such amount of cleverness?” “I’ve never really thought about it. Hasn’t crossed my mind.” “Do you have a problem sometimes that a maid goes to your wardrobe and tries to sample some of your dresses and maybe even put on something that is yours?” “Unless she does it during my absence, but I haven’t caught anything. I haven’t seen anything. I haven’t heard anybody saying, ‘Mummy she was putting on your things.’ My children would have told me. I haven’t had that problem.” “How many children have you got?” “Two. The first is seven and the youngest is two and a half.” “And for how long have you been married?” “Three years.” “Before your marriage, your parents had maids?” “Yeah, we had maids all the way.” “Can you compare your experiences with maids now and when you were growing up?” “My mother was very strict. You break a glass? Tomorrow you are paying for it. So I’m completely the opposite, I think.” “And what do you think is responsible for you being lax with maids?” “I don’t know. I think that’s how I am, first of all. And I think it’s too much trust that I’ve put into her. And the first impressions that she gave me that I was so good because I was treating her as a sister.” “Do you think that sometimes the maid feels she is Kalanga, while you are Tswana and that those tensions can occur?” “No, not at all. She’s just ok.” “I must stress this next question is a very general question one How do you think Batswana people in general see maids? What attitudes do they have towards maids?” “I think they have this attitude that you are a maid. You’ve come to work for me and they forget maids are human beings like them. They feel some people are less deserving. They say their maids cannot sit in their lounge with them. Their maids cannot eat in the house. They have to go and eat in the Servants’ Quarters, and sometimes they are just too harsh. 230

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But people who are strict on their maids, their maids stay longer with them and some of us who are too soft and too lax with maids, the maids give us hell.” “So you think those who are strict, their maids stay much longer?” “Yeah. They stay, they do. Like my mother was very strict and her maids used to stay very much. You break her glass, you pay for it tomorrow.” “Do you have friends or family that have Zimbabwean maids?” “Yeah, but in Francistown.” “What do you think are attitudes towards Zimbabwean maids and how would people compare Zimbabwean maids with Batswana maids?” “Batswana maids are not known as hard workers. The problem is with these Batswana, every weekend they go home. They tell you their grandfather is ill, their uncle is ill, and this and that. ‘I have to go home.’ This weekend there’s a phone call. Another story. They have so many stories. With Zimbabweans they are here to work and when they think, ‘My son is there and I have to work,’ they work. With these Batswana, ah no! They are not recommended at all.” “They are not recommended! So you wouldn’t go for a Motswana maid if you could help it?” “It’s a last resort!” she exclaimed. “Except, of course, the Kalanga, who are more like Zimbabweans.” “And Zimbabwean maids are all good?” “My mother used to have one and she was fine. They were good. My eldest was also brought up by a Zimbabwean. She was fine. They are hard workers, because they need the money.” “But there are also certain things about them which people say.” “Like what? They are thieves?” “Negative things, you just mentioned it.” Laughing, she said, “Yeah, that’s it. It’s a shame, isn’t it? We can’t all be the same. It’s a shame they do like that.” “What else?” “They do something to the kids.” “Like what?” “They beat the children or that sort of thing. They put the children in the ovens. But I think those Zimbabweans only do something if you do something to them. If you don’t pay them and give them only part of their salary at the end of the month, they’ll do something and if you treat them as desperate Zimbabweans who can’t even eat, obviously she doesn’t feel right about it. She has to do something about it, and this might include taking your wardrobe and going away with it.” 231

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“You mentioned something that they put children in…” “In the oven! Akiri they did that in Tlokweng.” “Oh! Can you tell me about that? I didn’t hear about it.” “I don’t know the details. I think the lady did something to the maid. So when the mother went to work she put the kid into the oven and ran away. When the family came back, the mother couldn’t find the children. There was something burning in the oven and when she opened, it was the child. Burnt! She died. The lady died of shock.” “They put the child in the oven and turned on the heat? When did that happen?” “It’s a year or two back.” “Really?” “Yeah.” “Was it reported in the papers?” “I think so. I heard so from people. You haven’t heard?” “No, not until now, now that you are telling me.” “Why not? Aren’t you the researcher?” “Interesting, isn’t it? And do you think that people who say Zimbabwean maids work hard know about that?” “I think it depends. They are more affordable. We don’t expect them to be as expensive as our Batswana maids. And normally, they are much cheaper.” “Do you think that they could be stealing from you because they consider that they are not well paid?” “I only think that could be one reason. Another reason could be that they are only trying to get at you for something, maybe that you did to them. There you are, you have to pay them and you are giving them half their salary. Or you have to pay them and then it’s a month over and you are just saying tomorrow, tomorrow. You are not giving them their due. You are not treating them right, humanely. She’s bound to retaliate. She’s bound to do something and get back at you. But sometimes it’s just in them to steal. Many Batswana also do that.” “Are there any instances of maids who came and ended up sending away the wife and being taken over by the husband?” “Well, I’ve just heard of the guy making the maid pregnant, not getting married.” “Is it common?” “Well, that one happens. I wouldn’t say common. But it happens.” “And what does the maid do?” “Go away.” “Then the man takes care of the baby?” 232

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“I think so, I don’t know. And they will talk, ‘Oh, that one, the husband impregnated the maid.’ It’s just grapevines that you get.” “How, according to you, do Batswana see foreigners?” “I don’t know. I think they tend to give the first priority to foreigners.” “Really?” “Ehem, especially the whites. But with these other foreigners, it’s a bit different. If you are from Zimbabwe, they are so harsh. I don’t know whether it’s because Zimbabwe is economically down. When they provide service you here, ‘He is from Zimbabwe, just Zimbabwe, from Zimbabwe after all.’” “So in a way you are telling me that Batswana generally, they offer services to foreigners, especially the whites? And that some types of foreigners are not very much appreciated? Depending on the economy of their country?” “Something like that.” “And you think the respect of whites is only because of the economy?” “I don’t know, whether it’s just automatic, it’s just there.” “Are there many Batswana who get married to a white person or have a relationship with a white person if they get the opportunity?” “Ehem,” replied Mrs Mildred Good-Hope. “And why do you think that is?” “I think they believe or think they are more responsible than blacks.” “Oh! Talking about responsibility, in my interviews, many people mention something about foreigners having more TLC than Batswana. What does that mean?” “That they are more responsible than our guys, our men here. They are more considerate. They are more loyal to relationships than these Batswana guys.” “Foreigners in general or particular categories?” “Foreigners in general.” “At a personal level, have you ever had any relationship with a foreigner?” “No.” “But you have all these ideas about them being considerate, being more loyal. Where do your ideas come from?” “It’s sometimes... you just have friends and you just talk. You can see that this person is this or that. Just from friends, because I have foreigner friends.” “Apart from TLC, what else do foreigners have to offer?” “Like?” “I mean in areas of relationships, what else are they good for?” 233

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“Hmm. I don’t know.” “Do they make love better than Batswana?” “I don’t know. I haven’t gone that far. I don’t know.” Mrs Mildred Good-Hope glanced at her watch, probably hoping for the end of the interview. “And the very final question is that in Botswana, there is something remarkable. Young women start life with a child. It’s almost as if you have to have a child when you are of age. Often you don’t stay with the person with whom you had the child. But you are happy and you move on to start your life afresh. I’m just asking, because this strikes me. What do you think that is due to?” “Guys do that and get away with it. We don’t practice our tradition. Unlike in other African countries, we’ve just adopted the western culture and we forget our culture. In older days, we never used to have that. It was very scarce. You would be at home and you can’t go and stay with somebody in the same house. Our parents were the ones going to look for your husband for you. We don’t practice our culture and we have just adopted this western culture.” “You seem to be blaming the guy who just moves on. What about the woman? Does the child force its way into her?” “Eih! It’s the culture. I don’t know what to say, whether to blame it on our parents. The culture doesn’t allow us to talk to my daughter or son openly about such things. There I am. By the time I get there, I’m already in there and I haven’t somebody to talk to me about it. I haven’t had somebody to tell me if you do A, C is the result. The culture is to blame, I think.” “Would that culture also explain the light heartedness with which people approach relationships here? I mean, people don’t invest in relationships. They could have affairs on the side, even as they invest in relationships, but they don’t.” “Maybe if our parents talked to us and told us to respect our men and be faithful to our men, then we would practice what they are practising. Maybe.” Dr Nanny thanked Mrs Good-Hope – who was on the edge of her seat – for a rich interview, as we were shown the door. She had allowed the interview to overrun, and was in a brutal rush for her tutorial.

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Chapter Twenty Nine

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I

remember Mrs Sebese Sebeso as a pleasant, imposing and very respectable dignified lady. She didn’t introduce herself as Dr, nor was she called one, but I could give her a doctorate degree, if I knew how these titles were awarded, for, as far as I was concerned, she exuded wisdom, pure delightful motherly wisdom. I loved her from the moment I set eyes on her, and would not have hesitated being her maid, if she had asked. The whole time that Dr Nanny spent asking questions, there I was glued to Mrs Sebeso in admiration. “How far back can you recollect living with maids?” Dr Nanny began. Mrs Sebeso smiled. “You are looking for somebody who is an employer. I don’t have a maid and I have not had a maid for quite some time. I used to have them when the children were young. But now my children are all grown up adults. I don’t employ them anymore.” “Ok, but I’m still very interested in past experiences. Since when did you last have one?” “It was a long time ago. I can’t even remember when.” “And how can you survive without one, given first that you work in a very demanding environment like DUST? And second, maids as I understand are very affordable these days.” “I live alone and there is not much to do, plus I have a microwave.” I remember speculating at this point what could have happened to her husband or the father of her children. Was he one of those fly-by-night types –keener on inflating than assuming the responsibilities of their inflations? Who in their right mind would abandon a woman this sweet? I wished Dr Nanny would pick up this point in her interview, but she didn’t. “Could you recollect your experiences of when you used to live with them?” she asked, speaking of maids. “It’s imperative to have them if you have small children, because you need to have someone at home all the time. But with no children, and not much to do, I don’t think there is a need for them. That’s why I don’t have any anymore. Then they were a necessary problem.” “Interesting, could you elaborate?” “They steal, they have friends that come in and they destroy your property, and they are just wasteful. But if you have children you need them. They have to be there.”

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“As you say, a necessary pain. Would the stealing be by all maids, certain types of maids or maids from particular areas?” “Most maids, irrespective of where they come from.” “What sort stealing do they do?” “They steal clothes. They steal small things in the house. They steal big things as well.” “When you realised that a maid had stolen, what did you do?” “I would sit down with her and tell her, ‘I have discovered you have stolen this.’” “What would they say?” “Some of them would admit it and they would cry and ask for forgiveness and we would continue with her working. But others, they would deny it.” “Then you would send them away?” “It’s only when you catch them in the act or provide enough evidence that they admit it. Otherwise, even if you know it’s they who stole, they deny it all.” “Why do you think they used to steal?” “It’s not that I think they used to steal. I know they stole because I caught them at it,” explained Mrs Sebese Sebeso. “What do you think are the reasons for them stealing?” “There’s one particular servant. I think she was a kleptomaniac. She was not stealing out of need. There are some who steal out of need. For instance, the ones that come from across the border from Zimbabwe, they are desperate. When they come here, they have left desperate families back home. They will steal as much as they can to support people way back home. Those ones are stealing out of desperation. But this particular maid I’m referring to was a kleptomaniac. She was not stealing out of any need. She wasn’t even coming from Zimbabwe. She was a local, and I came to discover long afterwards that it was her habit to do that, and she had even been in prison. I didn’t know about that.” “So it would appear that the world of maids is a risky world. You don’t know backgrounds. You don’t know enough to be able to decide if this is the sort of employee you really want. You have no references…” “Even if they are recommended by somebody you know, you can’t say you know a human being. People from church will recommend someone and say, ‘This one is a good person. I know this person, and where she comes from. We are from the same village at home. I know this family, I know this one, I know that one.’ But you cannot say you know an individual. This kleptomaniac, for example, was recommended by somebody from church, and that person, I think they were even cousins.” 236

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“That’s true, humans are so unpredictable. On this issue of boyfriends or friends generally, how did you cope with your maids?” “If they are living with you, you give them your Servants’ Quarters. The boyfriends are bound to come. They cannot live without sneaking boyfriends in. So what we normally do, we say to them they should point at one person. ‘Show us who your boyfriend is, so that we know when we see him.’ But they will change them, and they will have squabbles, they will fight. They will do all sorts of things.” “So do you have the feeling that employing a maid to assist you is…” “Is a necessity?” “Is a necessity but at the same time it turns out to create unfathomable problems for you?” “Yes, it does.” “At certain moments people have the feeling that maids take over their lives,” said Dr Nanny. “You might have examples of people when you used to have maids. In certain cases they come in, you have a partner in your life, whether a husband or a boyfriend, and I’ve been made to understand that some of them deliberately target those people as well. They want to dispossess you of even the ultimate thing in your life.” “Take your man?” “Your man or boyfriend.” “I don’t think that is the main thing. I don’t think that is a problem that much, because the class difference between the employers and the maid is big. The gap is wide.” “I’ve also heard that maids working with people generally tend to compare employers and there’s often this comparison between Makgoa employers and other types of employers, and a maid who has worked with a Lekgoa is likely to feel, when they are employed by someone else, that they are over tasked, and that the Lekgoa is generous and easy and that they have facilities, like washing machines, whereas other employers will expect them to hand wash tough clothes like jeans and treat them like slaves or zombies.” “Yeah, they do feel like that. The previous employer had been easy with them and the current employer is kind of strong and needs everything done up to a particular standard. They do compare.” “Do you see a difference between young maids and elderly maids?” “Yes, there is a difference. The elderly work steadily and thoroughly. They tend to be thorough more than the young ones. What the young ones are after is the money whereas what the elderly ones are after is being worthy of the money.” “Do you think that the age of the employer matters in relation to the age of the employee?” 237

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“Depending on the type of work they are doing. For instance, a young woman who has three, four young children, she prefers to employ an elderly woman, because she knows she will be motherly. Young ones that have young children prefer a mature woman.” “And is the younger person more likely to be respected by an elderly maid than by a younger one?” “You are not likely to be respected by a young maid if you are young. But an older employer, she may even direct and guide you if you are young, because of her experience.” “But you are likely to find yourself in a tricky situation if you want to treat her as an employee, order her around and so on and so forth. It might be a problem in relationships, don’t you think?” “I don’t think that it’s much of a problem being young if the maid knows her job. I think they sit down and say, ‘This is your job, you will do this, you will do that.’ I think they agree before she starts to work.” “There is the case of someone Immaculate my assistant here knows, someone young, who was married then. They had an elderly maid but the mother-in-law was not happy with the way the young woman was ordering and giving work to the maid. She told her off in these words, ‘You, these young women of this age, you should do your responsibilities to your husband. This is the way you are supposed to keep your house, this is what you are supposed to do. This is what you are supposed to cook for the man, rather than asking the maid to do it. Let the maid sit you down and tell you how we treat husbands in our tradition. What a woman does.’” “That is a matter between the mother-in-law and the daughter-in-law. I don’t think it has anything to do with the relationship between the daughter-in-law and the maid, as long as she and the maid understand each other. As long as the maid knows that, ‘I’m employed by this person and if she says do this, I will do it because she pays me and I agreed to do this at the beginning.’” “But it reached a level where she asked the maid to go and the motherin-law said the maid was not leaving, and the maid said she wasn’t leaving. The poor woman went and brought the Police,” Dr Nanny specified. “That was a domestic relationship between mother-in-law and daughterin-law.” “Is it not a common employee-employer relationship?” “It is common between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law. But it should not interfere with the relationship of employment, which concerns the daughter and the maid. Those are two different issues. Mother-in-law was interfering.” “Some people have said because the world of the maid is not regulated closely by the labour code, everybody takes liberties. Employers take liberties, maids take liberties.” 238

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Mrs Sebeso nodded. Dr Nanny continued. “And some of this stealing with impunity could go on because they know you cannot go to the Police and complain. You didn’t employ me legally, whatever and so on. So it would appear that the maids are very informed about the situation in which they are employed and they know what they can do and get away with. And in some situations…” Mrs Sebeso was unequivocal. “That is human relationship. All these things come at the beginning when you employ somebody. That this is what I expect of you and this is what I am prepared to offer. I will respect you and I also expect you to respect me. So the manner in which I will talk to you and the manner in which you will answer back should be guided by respect. And this is what I’m prepared to give you, on condition you do this, that and that for me. So that contract that you sign at the beginning with them guides the relationship as it moves with time.” “I’ve also heard that generally, Batswana employers overwhelmingly prefer maids from Zimbabwe. Of recent, the trend is to go for maids from Zimbabwe, because they are hardworking,” said Dr Nanny. “People from Zimbabwe are driven by what is driving them. So they will do their level best. They will not play around because they cannot afford to lose any job, as their lives depend on it. They will work because their life depends on that. Even schoolteachers have had to leave Zimbabwe to work as maids here. Whereas locals, they know they can get another job elsewhere.” “Some of the maids from across the border have also told me that it is a cultural thing. They are socialised right from childhood to assume their responsibilities in the house – clean whatever place there is. No matter how modest your circumstances, your mother tells you to clean well, to arrange things, and so on. They don’t go for any special courses to become a maid, it is a cultural thing.” “No they don’t.” “But if recruited, they excel just in terms of drawing from their upbringing.” “The upbringing also plays an important role. It does not mean that Batswana do not bring their children up also with principles, they do. Just like in Zimbabwe, there are also people who are not like some of the people that we get from there. It’s allowed. But generally, people from Zimbabwe are hard workers and they know their work, plus desperation. They will also want to please you as much as you want, so they can keep the job as long as possible.” 239

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“Could this determination to excel at their work and even to please you in certain cases be a ploy to make you inattentive while they suck out things without your noticing?” “Sometimes they do that, so that you get completely relaxed with them. She knows everything and then when you least expect it, you discover that they had done a lot of damage.” “Some people have also told me that some of the problems people have with maids could be caused by their determination to treat the maid as a slave, as sub-human. In the sense that the maid comes in and the job description is very vague and they literally take over from the woman of the house. The maid takes over, not only cleaning and arranging the house, but also cooking. The husband grows used to eating what the maid cooks and, eventually, her love. The functions diminish to the point where the man now finds his wife disposable. You might not have a relationship necessarily with your maid, but it pushes you to have relationships outside, because this woman no longer represents that basket of functions or roles that could make her relevance in your life prominent and reflected on a daily basis.” Mrs Sebeso replied, “It is a characteristic of that particular woman that the man has married. Supposing the maid was not there and the woman was lazy, was not working properly and didn’t know how to cook. The presence or absence of the maid does not change the wife. A lazy woman is a lazy woman, maid or no maid.” “Let’s come back – and that’s the final thing because I know you’ve got work – to this idea of fascination with outside maids. What do Batswana have to say about outsiders and relationships? I am just fascinated by attitudes towards outsiders, and the parallels in attitudes towards maids from outside.” “I think it’s the culture in that case. The culture here is different from the culture elsewhere. If you were to apply that in Zimbabwe, I don’t think you’d find what is happening here. The manner in which Zimbabweans bring up their children is different from the manner in which these ones here bring up their children. “Also with men, the culture of Botswana is different from the culture of Zimbabwe as far as relationships go. For instance, there is a culture where the main thing that is important between husband and wife is respect, irrespective of the type of woman or the type of man you marry, respect characterises that relationship. In some cultures it is a subordinate-superior kind of relationship. “We are longing for a culture where women are having a say. Where, even when people come with a problem or to say something, the man, no matter how old he is, will listen to them and after he will say, oh my wife, 240

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the mother of my household, is here. In other cultures a man can even make his own decision. He can decide, irrespective and then the wife will just hear about it. So I think people are longing for that sort of culture which is not in existence here.” “That’s an interesting perspective. Could it also be that, in addition to that cultural factor, the sheer fact of people being away from their homes, far from their own regions? Where the demand on their time by family activities, friends, funerals and all what is not as much as the demand on the time of a local person? And therefore if he falls in love with you, he is more likely to be available and spend more time with you than any local person would?” “You mean the foreigner?” “Yes, the foreigner. So there is that dimension of not being in their own original setting and therefore having more time on their hands to show Tender Love and Care,” said Dr Nanny. “I seem to be disagreeing with most of the suggestions,” said Mrs Sebeso. “I don’t know why, but even as you get to a new country, you are not in isolation. You are living in a society. You talk to people. If you are a working man, you talk to people at work, you expand your circle of friends and you get to know friends. You get to know when someone is dead, and you are expected to commiserate and to attend the funeral. You get to attend weddings because there are people you know. You are living in a society amongst people. You are not isolated from everything else and only open to this woman with your Tender Loving Care. “I think it’s a cultural thing. Some cultures are different from other cultures and in this culture there are certain things that are lacking in another culture, and vice versa. So Batswana women know what is missing in their culture and like to have those positive things from other cultures.” “Thank you very much for a scintillating interview.” “Pleasure.” I could not resist shaking her hand before we left her office, and when she held my hand, I felt peace like I hadn’t felt for a long time. There was something magical about this grand lady. How I wish our time with her had been longer, much longer! ‘There are people like that, that just bring the best out of you,’ was what Dr Nanny said, when I related to her Mrs Sebeso’s effect on me.

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Chapter Thirty

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M

rs Happy Karabogo, I remember, was reluctant to have the interview taped. She was busy interpreting data for her doctorate degree, which she was doing with a university in England. What I liked about her was that she created time for us after being pestered for days by the relentless Dr Nanny. Perhaps because of her own field research experiences, she vigorously protested against the use of a tape recorder, which my boss had taken for granted when she simply pressed record without seeking her permission. She was strikingly tiny – in a beautiful sort of way, I must add, but not like a woman whose husband refuses money for food, even at the end of the month. “Is my name there?” Mrs Karabogo asked when she saw the recorder switched on. “No, no, no, your name is not there,” Dr Nanny reassured. “Feel free to talk.” It was only then that she relaxed and accepted the interview to be taped. Dr Nanny began, “As I told you the other day, I’m interested in researching maids and what I’d like to know is your experiences of them over the years. Did you grow up in a family with maids?” “No.” “When did you have your first maid?” “When my daughter was born – 1996.” “Since then, how many maids have you had?” “Hhm! Uncountable. I can’t even get the number.” “You can’t count the number?” “They’ve been in and out.” “About how many?” “Hhei! It would take long to count. I might even forget some. Some would stay for a week and go, so…” “So it’s about twenty?” “Not twenty, but more than ten, I guess.” “So, why do you change maids so often?” “That’s a good question. I don’t think it is a question of me having power to change them. I think they have power. Whether they want to

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stay or they want to leave – it depends on them. With the maid, she comes to work today, if the following day she doesn’t feel like coming, she stays away.” “So what have been the reasons for them staying away or not staying long?” “I think there are many reasons why. Some are under the influence of maybe boyfriends. She would love to stay but if the boyfriend says she has to leave, she leaves. Like I remember I went to Kanye one time to get a maid. I thought she was mature enough to make a decision whether she wanted to work or not. I was able to talk to her mother as well, but I remember that particular week, we went to pick her up from Kanye – it was either a Wednesday or a Thursday. But Friday the boyfriend was here in Gaborone. He had come to fetch her, and naturally she went with him. The boyfriend felt like, ‘No, you can’t leave,’ whereas there was a lot of need in the family and the mother felt like, ‘No, you have to go.’ The boyfriend was not there when we took her to Gaborone. I don’t know if there was communication between them or not, but what I know is the boyfriend was here by the weekend and he told her, ‘We are leaving together, I can’t leave you behind.’ “And for some, it’s a question of they don’t want to be told how to do their work. Sometimes maids, they come and we don’t talk about the question of experience. She comes and you say, ‘This is your job. I expect you to do 1, 2, 3, 4,’ and then she says, ‘Ok, this is how much I expect you to pay.’ And sometimes I think I’ve not been really very careful about whether the person has any experience. Maybe, because I grew up cleaning myself, I think it’s something everyone should be able to do. And I don’t get up to try to find out whether the person is experienced or not. Later when you try to talk to the person, ‘No, I don’t think you are doing this thing right. Can you do it this way?’ she feels like, ‘Why do you have to tell me how to do this thing? I know how to do it better,’ and I think they ignore the fact that even if they have worked somewhere before, households differ. She might have been cooking beef one way, but I want her to prepare it another way. Such things sometimes annoy them and we end up not having peace in the house and suddenly she decides to leave.” “Do they leave or you send them away?” “They leave.” “You hardly dismiss any?” “Recently, I dismissed a maid. This month she is serving notice and she only started last month. The whole of last month, I can’t tell you what she did. I remember how much I suffered when I had to pay her because when I tried to quantify the amount of work, there wasn’t much. 244

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First of all, she was hardly in. She comes to say she is sick, and she wants to ask for a day off. The next day her arm is swollen, and the next day her baby is sick. What I was counting were the days she managed to come to work. I expected her to really put in a lot of effort, but I realised that even on those days, she didn’t pull all the efforts she needed to really do an excellent job. “So I thought no, she can’t work. I asked her to serve notice, beginning this month. Believe me, today is Thursday. She hasn’t come to work. She worked on Monday half a day without telling me because I am hardly at home. Tuesday she asked me for some hours to go somewhere. I understand she left in the morning. Yesterday she didn’t say anything. She left around 1 pm. Today she didn’t make it. Tomorrow if she comes, she’ll continue as if nothing has happened.” “And you want to terminate her work this month?” “Yeah, I’ve given her notice to serve notice this month because I feel like she can’t change. We talked. ‘I expect you to observe the hours even if I’m not there. You have a tea break at this time.’ Not that that is rigid. If she wants to have tea break at 9 or at 9:30, it’s ok. But it has to be for 30 minutes. She has to have her own hours for lunch, so she comes to work around 7 and I expect her to leave at 4 and if she comes at 8, I expect her to leave at 5. It’s her choice. If she wants to have her lunchtime at 12, it’s up to her. She might have it at 12 or at 1 or at 2, but it’s for an hour. For those things, she doesn’t hold to them. Even leaving before time. We talked about it but she kept on leaving, so I thought there’s never going to be peace between us. The best thing for me is to ask her to leave.” “How do you recruit your maids?” “Normally, I asked around from friends to find someone for me.” “Always from friends?” “If my neighbour maybe has a maid, I can find out from her if there is anyone she knows looking for a job.” “And your maids have all been Batswana since you started?” “No, I think I had one Zimbabwean maid. She was youngish, almost the same age as a Form Two dropout, but she was excellent. That was when I was in the States, but I always came home during the vacation and she was good with the kids. I was really inspired by her because I would phone, and there’d be a lot of noise and I’d be like, ‘Why is this baby laughing so much?’ The way she played with the kid, she did everything like it was her own. “At that time, my house was big, but the way she just put effort into cleaning, I was so impressed. For me, it’s not that you have to do 1, 2, 3, 4 and finish them within a day. I do a timetable and say this is how I want 245

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you to work. But even if at the end of the day the person hasn’t done the amount of work she was supposed to do, but she has done an excellent job, I’m happy,” explained Mrs. Happy Karabogo. “Say for example with cleaning, I like someone who really cleans a house very clean. If she hasn’t done some of the work, but I go home and find that what she has cleaned has been done in an excellent way, I’m happy with that. I don’t want somebody to rush to finish the work, only for me to look at it and find it pathetic. She didn’t have to go through all that labour of finishing the work when indeed she hasn’t done a good job.” “Are there certain places in the house where they have to go and some places where they don’t have to go?” “Not in my house.” “So they can go to your bedroom and clean?” “Yes, they can go to my bedroom.” “And make up the bed?” “No, not the bed. I pack my wardrobe and I do my bed, but they can do the cleaning.” “And they can access your wardrobe?” “Yeah, maybe, it depends. Some maids don’t know how to pack. Some are excellent. I don’t lock my wardrobes.” “Are there some things which you clean yourself or they can clean anything, like your clothing, shoes and things?” “Some stuff is sensitive of course, like underclothing. I clean them. Maybe if I have some dresses with special material which I think they can’t do, I do it myself.” “Why do you call underwear sensitive?” “Because some of the things you really have to maybe read the label and know how to treat the material for you to bring out the best in them. Things like a silk dress. The maid wouldn’t know how sensitive the material is, and ends up burning it. So such things, I don’t let the maid clean. Depending on the type of maid I have I’ll say, ‘No, this one, leave it out, I’ll iron it myself, I’ll wash it myself,’ and so on.” “And underwear?” “No, that one is out.” “Why?” “Why? I thought it’s for obvious reasons.” “Why’s it out?” “I don’t know. I really feel like it’s… I never thought that question could be asked, because I thought everybody does their own underwear.” 246

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“So you can clean your underwear, but you cannot allow the maid to clean your underwear?” “No, I can’t. It’s a no go area for the maid.” “You can clean your husband’s underwear?” “Yes, I can.” “And he can clean yours?” “Yes.” “But you cannot allow your maid to clean your underwear?” “Yes.” “Why?” “I don’t know.” “But your maid can cook for you?” “Yes.” “I give up on this one.” “You better.” “Do you think there is a difference between Batswana and Zimbabwean maids?” “I don’t have much experience because out of all the maids I had I just had one Zimbabwean lady. But from my friends who have Zimbabwean maids, I can see that they are different. In the way they handle the work, I think they are more professional. But Botswana maids don’t take this maid work as something that can be done professionally. They just do it the way they feel it fits them. “I work here, for example, on the university’s terms, not my own terms. And I think the same thing applies to that type of work. I expect them to have the same attitude towards work. ‘Ok, I’m going to be working here and I get the rules from the owner of the organisation, being the house. I’m going to work according to her terms.’ “But I don’t think they look at it that way. They come and they want to impose what they know on you. ‘I worked for so and so, for this white man. This is how I did things. Why do you say I should do things this way?’ It’s like me leaving DUST and going to work elsewhere like FLASH, and I start telling them, ‘Ok, I did this thing this way at DUST, why do you want me to do it differently?’ It doesn’t make sense.” “Why do you think they do that?” “I think it’s pride. I feel they don’t want to be told. They feel like they know everything.” “Why should they be proud as maids?” “I don’t know. It’s quite difficult for me to really understand why. I have travelled, I have seen people, especially like security guards who have a positive attitude and take pride in their work – ‘I’m a security man 247

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here, I am in charge, this is how things are done.’ Not imposing rules or laws on people, but just being able to be proud of doing that job. But the maids here are negative. They come to your house, and they end up wanting to give you the rules. ‘Why do you want me to do things this way? And why do you think you can tell me this thing?’ “I’ve found a situation where a maid works for someone and ends up being bitter and negative towards her boss to the point of ill treating the children, and I always think, ‘Why is she not leaving this job?’ If she feels like she can’t have a relationship with the lady of the house, she should leave, instead of ill treating the kids in the absence of their mum and trying to do weird things in the house because she doesn’t want to be told or be given the rules by the owner of the house.” “That’s an interesting point. What impressions do you think maids have of their employers in general and you in particular?” “I think they do have impressions. Sometimes I sit back and try to find out how they feel. It helps if I go and sit in the kitchen on the little stool the maid sits on when she takes a break. Being in her space can maybe help me get in her body and mind and know how she might feel. I try to imagine what she must think when she interacts with me. I would say two different attitudes probably collide, mine and hers. “Nonetheless, when somebody comes to work for me, like I said before, I expect her to do her work and abide by the rules of the house. She needs to know something about housework. She has to know how to clean, it’s no big deal. I grew up in a traditional set up where you had a traditional house. You’ll have your small box, make it nice and be able to put your cosmetics and your clothes in the house, nicely packed, and the house well swept. “When I had the opportunity to be in this modern house, it wasn’t a big deal. It’s only that there is a wardrobe for your clothes. But the cleaning is the same. I still felt like I had to clean the house. And I found out that these people are different and sometimes I wonder, ‘Do they keep their houses clean?’, is cleaning the house such a big deal? “When somebody comes to work for me, I expect that she knows how to keep the house clean. I put up rules, but I don’t sit down and start teaching you how to do all sorts of things. I think, maybe, that’s the first mistake that I make and after some time, I’m like, ‘How can she clean and not be able to move this wardrobe? How can she sweep and not be able to move this chair?’ It’s surprising to me because I feel it’s an obvious thing and then, maybe you start to say, ‘I’m not happy with the way you clean,’ and suddenly she feels some negative attitude towards you because you are complaining about some of the stuff she is doing. So I don’t know exactly what impressions they have about me. I don’t see anything 248

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wrong about me being the boss, telling her what to do and how to do it. As her boss, I should be able to tell her, ‘Ah, you did this thing but this is not the way to do it.’” “Are they usually the same age with you, or younger or older?” “Some have been older than me, some younger.” “What criteria do you use in deciding on the maids you employ?” “I remember my first maid when my daughter was born, she was elderly. I wouldn’t say I interviewed her because I was very desperate. I had to come back to work and I had never had a maid before, because I had just my son and myself. My husband was living in Kanye, so I did the cleaning and I didn’t have a problem with my housework. When my daughter was born, that’s when my problem started, so when I saw that lady, I asked about her from a neighbour’s maid and she brought me that lady. “I don’t remember interviewing her. I just took her. And that was my first maid and she was the best, because she was good with kids. She brought up my daughter basically. It was after sometime that, influenced by other maids around the flat where we were staying, she started complaining, ‘You are not paying me well, so and so is paying her maid so much.’ I said, ‘You should be grateful. You stay here, you just work for me and my two kids, and you are not doing anything for my son,’ because he was old enough to take care of himself. The only thing she could do for him was just to wash his clothes, but he did every other thing for himself. He knew how to get his food and so on. “‘You know, your job is just to look after the baby. And look at the household you are comparing us with, how many kids they have. The housemaid is there, she has many kids, so you are trying to compare yourself with that person? So the amount of work you are doing is not the same, you see what I mean?’ “So I told her, ‘I think you have a choice here, because I feel like I’m overpaying you,’ and actually I was, because the maid was so awesome. She was great, she did the job well, and anytime there was a special sale at Game, I’d go and buy her, maybe a set of plates, a blanket and other stuff. Because she’s elderly, I thought, when she goes back home, she has to be able to say, ‘I worked and this is some of the stuff I acquired during the time I put in there.’ “But she was not grateful for such gifts. I said, ‘I think I’m overpaying you.’ So you know what she did? She laughed and left. She found a job somewhere in Tlokweng. After two weeks she was back in my house. She was saying I want my job back. She said, ‘That lady is cheating me. She’s paying me less than what you are paying.’ I lived in the Village area in a two bedroom flat. She said that house has got five rooms. ‘She expects me to clean all that. She is paying me less than what you are paying.’ 249

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“I said, ‘I can’t take you back. I already have someone.’ She left but I had to go back and take her again, after my husband said, ‘You need to give her a second chance. After all, she didn’t do anything wrong, she just wanted to be paid better.’ So we went and we took her back in, but when she came, she came with her own terms, yet again. “She started saying, ‘I’m good at this, and you better recognize it.’ She started complaining about lots of things. And she kept repeating, ‘I don’t think you went back to get me because you were desperate. It’s because I’m good, so you have to do this and this for me.’ Fed up, I told her, ‘No, you need to make a decision again about whether you want to leave or not.’ “The great thing about her is that even today we are friends. She still calls and asks how my daughter is doing. When she comes to Gaborone, she’ll come to our house and see us. And there are times when we feel like taking her back, but we are afraid. If we take her back, is she going to come with her terms again, for a third time? I don’t know. Actually, I have had just a few good maids and most of them are very lazy. That’s my impression of our maids. They are very lazy and very prideful.” “But the pride is different from the pride you said you admired in some security guards, who play by the rules and exude a sense of fulfilment from their work?” “Yes, the pride of the maids is disdainful generally.” “Why do you think they are lazy?” “They are lazy because if you look at how they handle the work, the amount of effort they put into it, it’s very little. I can’t imagine coming to sweep this office and not moving that chair and then telling you I’ve cleaned, when all I’ve done is move the broom around. When you try to explain what you mean by clean, they just complain, ‘Oh, she’s too harsh on me,’ and they keep to their bare minimums. “I always tell them, ‘You need to see how I work. You have to really do your work with pride. You should show pride that this is your area and you know how to do it best.’ “Then I give them an example and say, ‘Look at me, I have an office job. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that my boss there doesn’t tell me, well you are not doing this thing the right way. What I need to do is just to have a positive attitude and say, ‘Ok, if this is not the right way, I have to learn how to do it best.’ But I don’t think the maids from Botswana do that. Once you want to show one where to clean, she starts saying you are too harsh. ‘You are judging me, and so the best thing is for me to leave.’” “Do you think your husband has better relationships with the maids than you do?” 250

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“My husband doesn’t deal with maids really directly. Unless, I think maybe the time when I was gone, that’s when he had to do that. But he doesn’t usually do that.” “That’s your domain?” “Yeah, but he does help. He can talk to the maid, but in most cases when he sees something in the maid, he would rather talk to the maid in my presence, or he can say, ‘I saw this, can you find out why she did that?’ We did have a couple of fights, when she was making dishes he didn’t like and I didn’t take his concerns seriously enough. But when we hire the maids, we sit together, we talk. But after we hire them, in most cases he doesn’t interfere.” “Why is it you who is directly involved with the maid?” “I don’t know. Maybe it’s just a belief that it’s a woman’s area. Maybe, sometimes he feels like he wouldn’t be able to deal with them in a proper manner. He is a man, he will have different expectations.” “So that’s a woman’s area – the domain of maids? Why?” “Why what?” “Why is it the woman’s area – the domain of maids? I just want to know.” “That’s how we grew up, knowing that it’s a woman’s area. Even though men are trying hard to penetrate, it still remains the woman’s area.” “That the woman is in charge of hiring and firing maids?” “You want me to say so?” “Do you sometimes take into account when you are hiring a maid, what your husband is likely to think of her looks?” Mrs Karabogo shook her head. “No, truly speaking, I’ve never thought about that. It’s not an area that I’ve ever thought about.” “Why not?” “Maybe I should say I’ve never had a problem before with him. So there is no cause to doubt him.” “But do you know of some other people who do?” “Who do what?” “Some other women who take that into account?” “Not amongst my friends. I don’t remember anyone really talking about that.” “Has any complained that the husband has gone out with the maid?” “No.” “Do you know any case at all, who may not be your friends, of somebody who went out with maids?” “Hm! No!” 251

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“Yeah, let’s come back to one point which you raised, which I thought was quite interesting. You said the maids are reluctant, or they are not happy when you want to teach them their job, and they often tell you, ‘I have worked with this Lekgoa, I know my job.’ Why do you think they do that?” Mrs Karabogo sighed. “What should I say? I think they have a way of looking at people and judging them in terms of somebody being better or not good. If it’s a white man, she thinks status – it is like a testimonial. I think they just look at you and they feel, ‘She doesn’t deserve my respect, because I have worked for people much higher up.’ When they have written you down in their book that you don’t deserve their respect, they feel like they can’t put up with anything from you. I have a problem with an employee who judges on her own terms whether she shall respect her employer or not.” “But why do they compare you to others?” “I really don’t know. Sometimes they’ll tell you, ‘I’d rather work for a white man, I will not work for a black person.’” “The whites pay more?” “I don’t think it’s a question of pay per se. I see it more as a question of giving respect, of whom she is prepared to respect.” “That’s an interesting point. You’ve had only one Zimbabwean maid, and most of your maids, you change like ones changes one’s makeup, or a baby’s diapers. Which part of Botswana do these maids come from – the ones you’ve had?” “Mostly from the South. The one that I was talking about, my first maid, was from Kanye. But I have had one from Phikwe who was excellent too. That one, we really never had a problem with her. We took her from a family friend and she was a Form Two dropout. We thought she didn’t know anybody around this place. We took her like our sister and were kind of protecting her. But somehow she had a boyfriend from somewhere and she always wanted to stay out. “Being traditional, I thought she was too young to have a boyfriend, let alone me authorising her to sleep out. We always fought about that because she would just let us sleep and then sneak out. Several times we were not aware that she was sneaking out except in the mornings when she would come back. She would get the key from the kitchen without us noticing and then, early in the morning, she’d sneak back in. “Unfortunately for her the alarm went off one day just as she was getting back, so we caught her in the act. We talked about it and it didn’t change. I talked to her mum, and although she didn’t say let her do as she 252

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pleases, I could sense that it wasn’t such a big deal to her mum. So we thought if the mother isn’t objecting, there is nothing we can do about that issue. “But the biggest issue was when she misused the phone. It was that time when Telecoms had so many people having these huge bills – we were one of them. When we went to ask for a listing of our bills, we found that she’d been phoning all over the place, including cell phones, which were very expensive to call at the time. Somehow, she got to know the code, since the line was coded. So we thought like, no we can’t compromise this one. That’s a lot of money – P3000. She said, ‘Ok, let me work for you and pay for it.’ We really loved the girl and she loved us so much she wanted to stay and work for us for no pay. In the end we said, ‘No, that’s against our morals. We can’t keep you in the house to work for nothing. You are going to be tempted to use the phone again. So the best thing for us is to dismiss you.’” “That’s interesting. This is the second time or even the third time that you’ve mentioned this boyfriend issue. It seems as if the boyfriend has got a big part to play in the life of a maid? Can you tell me more?” “Yeah, it’s difficult with the maids. I don’t know whether it’s a question of need or a question of power, that a maid will not be able to make a decision for herself and say to her boyfriend, ‘Ok, I’m going to work, if it means you losing me because of work, I’d rather take the job and lose you.’ “In most cases you find they would rather give up the job and go with a boyfriend. If the boyfriend comes and says, ‘You can’t move from Molepolole to go and live in with the people you are going to work for in Gaborone, I won’t take that,’ they just yield, as if hypnotised. As for me, I didn’t have a Servants’ Quarters, so I lived with them in the same house. For them to entertain their boyfriends, they had to wait for the weekend to go to them, or leave the job. So I don’t know what compels them not to be able to stand up and say, ‘I’m going to take a job, not a boyfriend.’ Maybe it’s a question of need.” “And a question of ‘borrowing’ power from a boyfriend, in a world where a male represents more power than a woman holding down a job?” “I’ll give you another example of that. I had one maid. She left end of December last year because she had to go for maternity. When I took her, she desperately needed a job and she had kids and I wanted her to move in with me because the kids were with her mother at Molepolole. But the boyfriend said, ‘No, you can’t move out. I need you here with me.’ I took her from a friend and somehow she fell ill and my friend told her, ‘No, you can’t work in your state.’ I understood she was pregnant again although she ended up losing the baby. To help, my friend was giving her P100 for survival, even though she was no longer working for her. 253

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“So when I took her in, after she recovered from the miscarriage, I said, ‘This is an excellent maid.’ I wanted her to come and live in with me, but she couldn’t because of the boyfriend and father of her children. He would rather she lose her job than earn money to provide food for their children on my terms as her employer. I could see that he was holding her down to do his beck and call. And curiously, she was prepared to go along.” “Have all the maids you’ve had had boyfriends?” “Not all. The first lady I talked about didn’t.” “But those who had boyfriends, did they in the course have other men, or did they stick to their boyfriend?” “I never knew because I didn’t have a Servants’ Quarters where I can tell whoree this person stays here permanently, because in most cases, they have to go out. So I didn’t know much about their personal life. The only thing I could tell whoree, I didn’t want their boyfriends to come to my house in my absence. So I’d give them a chance over the weekend to go and come.” “But, you go to work and your husband goes to work, and they stay at home with the kids. What makes you think the boyfriends don’t come when you are at work?” “I don’t know. I just thought because I told them, they should respect that.” “You’ve had mostly Batswana maids. Have there been any cases of theft of your things?” “Yeah, but not much, sometimes a pair of shoes and sometimes food goes missing, but nothing much else.” “Food?” “There was one in particular who used to steal food. All you needed was to take one good look at her, to see there was a lot of need in her. When she came, my husband said, ‘You could tell whoree this lady is really in need.’ His aunt was teaching at Mahogo and she’s the one who found the maid for us. It’s like there was a lot of need in the family, and on weekends when she was going home to the village, she would carry a big bag of groceries which could only have come from us. But we used to pretend we didn’t notice, though we knew that for everything in the kitchen – from omo to rice –, she had her separate stash, hiding in plastic bags. Apart from her, I haven’t had much stealing from the maids.” “I understand that Zimbabwean maids steal more, have you heard that?” “Yeah, I hear that. But mine never stole anything from us, even the day she left. We don’t know if she might have stolen something, had she been well, but she returned from vacation in Zimbabwe very sick. My 254

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daughter told my husband, ‘Whoree, auntie has a cut in her tummy.’ We suspected maybe she didn’t have the right passport because I don’t think my husband checked, and we suspected she must have hurt herself trying to jump over the fence at Plumtree. She came back weaker than before, and that month, she didn’t stay. I was still in the States studying, but I understand that particular month, when the month end came, my husband paid her and after he left for work, she took her stuff and she left and she never said goodbye and we never really understood her but she didn’t steal anything.” “I’ve talked to some Batswana about relationships and they always tend to tell me – women – that they like foreigners, especially Lekgoa, because they have got TLC, meaning Tender Loving Care. I don’t know whether you are familiar with that viewpoint?” “I’ve never had a relationship with a foreigner. So I don’t know.” “Thank you very much for your time. I really enjoyed it.” “I hope you find the interview useful in your work.” “Certainly. And good luck with finalisation of your PhD. If ever you come by the United States again, don’t hesitate to call.” And with those words, we left Mrs Karabogo’s office.

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Chapter Thirty One

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M

rs Kettle Maphane was a cheerful, inviting, dimpled-face, smiley young lady. Dr Nanny liked her instantly – that I could feel from the warmth in her words when she introduced her topic. “I am interested in maids, a fascinating theme, given that maids are amongst the people who share your most intimate spaces. Even friends and some family members don’t know you and your intimate circles as much as maids do. So I thought maybe I could add your thoughts to my collection of opinions. Could you tell me your relationship and experience with maids as far back as your childhood days?” “We have got maids at home, but I’m not sure what you want,” began Mrs Kettle Maphane with a hesitant smile. “I just want to know, what do they do that you like or dislike? And things like that.” “Ok, maybe I should forget about my childhood because then I was too young. Since I started working here at DUST in 2002, I didn’t change maids until a few weeks ago when mine left. She had to go home. Now I have a new one, but she doesn’t listen. If I’m not there and my husband asks her to do something that I told him to tell her, she’ll do the exact opposite. And when you ask her, she’ll say, ‘Your husband told me to do this so.’ I guess I should be the only one giving her instructions.” “Playing the one against the other, it seems.” “Yeah, she doesn’t listen.” “Do you think she really doesn’t understand or that she is being mischievous?” “I can’t tell because when you tell her to do something, she’ll say yes, but then she’ll do something else. She only comes once a week. So that one day she does the exact opposite of what she is asked to do. Yet when you ask her, ‘Do you understand?’ she will say, ‘Yes, of course, I understand.’ “How old is she?” “In her thirties.” “And where does she come from?” “From Zimbabwe, but she’s been here for years. Whoree she’s staying in somebody’s Servants’ Quarters. She works there full time, and helps us out during her spare time.”

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“She comes to you for once a week. You think once a week is enough for you to have someone?” “It’s enough because I only need somebody to help me with the washing. The cleaning I can do myself.” “The one who left, for how many days a week was she working for you?” “One.” “And she went back to Zimbabwe?” “Yeah.” “How did you find them?” “The first one I met her through my mother-in-law. My mother-in-law knew some lady who knew her from back in Zimbabwe and she asked my mother-in-law if she needed somebody. That’s how I got her.” “Did that one listen?” “She didn’t listen either. My problem with these people is that you always have to tell them what to do, ‘Do this, do that.’ I feel whoree if you are doing the laundry, after you wash the clothes and the clothes are dry, you iron the clothes. But they wait for you to ask them to iron the clothes. They always wait for you to tell them what to do, that sort of thing.” “So they don’t take initiative?” “Yeah.” “What is the reason for that?” “I don’t know. I was brought up to know that after sweeping the house, you dust. After you wash and dry the clothes, you iron them. So I expect everybody to do the same. Maybe it’s the way they were brought up or maybe I’m asking a little too much from them, I don’t know.” “I think many other people feel the same way, that maids wait for instructions and that they don’t take initiative. So it seems to be a pattern,” remarked Dr Nanny. “And because we women are the ones who give the instructions, the maids complain that we talk too much.” “Especially like in your own case, they’ll think you are almost the same age as they or younger. So they don’t want you to boss them around. Do you think that maids in their private moments have their own ideas about their employers? Has it ever occurred to you that they could be discussing you as an employer in their private moments?” “I suspect so.” “What would they likely discuss about their employers?” Mrs Kettle Maphane laughed. “I have my own observation from when I was growing up. I think when you fight, what you say stays with the maid to be mimicked, the way a parrot would do. They won’t keep it to 258

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themselves. They will tell their friends. So with a maid you have to be careful about what you do and what you say. The way you talk to your husband, and how he addresses you in front of them should be done with utmost care. If you must insult each other, it is advisable to lock yourselves up in your bedroom and vomit whatever you have within you, far away from the prying eyes and ears of the maid. And what goes for addresses goes for caresses. They should happen behind closed doors.” “Else they take them out?” “Yes, to their friends, ‘Oh! Today they were fighting.’ It will get into the neighbours’ homes and may get as far as the fruit and vegetable sellers down the street and maybe even farther.” “Do you think that maids watch clearly what goes on in the relationship of their employers? And depending on what they observe, they can position themselves accordingly within that relationship?” “I think so. I remember hearing about this one gardener who would climb the tree outside the bedroom of his bosses, to, supposedly, trim its branches. Apparently the couple would frolic in the mornings. The gardener would peek through the window and partake in the pleasure to a certain extent. And pretty soon most of the neighbourhood knew about the morning habits of the couple.” “Do you know of maids, or gardeners, who have taken advantage of their situation and the unique relationship they have with their bosses?” “Yeah, I know of a few cases, where the husband slept with the maid or the gardener slept with the wife and that sort of thing. That’s what you are talking about?” “Yeah.” “Yes, I know a few cases.” “About how many?” “How many do I know?” There was a long silence. “I know two where the husband slept with the maid. And then another one I know of is where a maid accused the man of making advances and the man disputed that. I think maybe if you have a maid, it’s not a wise idea for your husband to give her instructions, because sometimes she doesn’t like it, and she will tell you whoree, ‘He made a pass at me. He said this,’ bla, bla, bla. So I think it’s always better for a man to keep quiet when it comes to instructing the maid.” “The two cases that happened, how did that affect the relationship?” “The first case, the wife knew about it. What did she do? Actually, the husband had raped. I don’t know whether they had agreed or consented or whatever, but she later claimed it was rape. And then the wife talked to the parents of the girl. I think they paid them or something.” 259

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“So they kept it within the family? They didn’t allow it to go to the courts?” “They are still together in the family. So I don’t know.” “And do you think a woman can know if there is something going on between her partner and the maid, based on how the maid reacts to her in the house?” Mrs Kettle Maphane thought before replying. “I think to some extent you can tell. I think it depends on the kind of relationship you have with your husband in the first place. How can I put it? There are husbands who will always agree with their wives, and whether there is anything between the maid or not, if he doesn’t agree, if say you have an argument about the maid, or you complain to him about the maid and you think he takes the side of the maid, then some women might think whoree ok, so she’s your girlfriend and bla, bla, bla. But for me, I wouldn’t think that, because what I say my husband doesn’t necessarily have to agree with me. If we differ on a matter about the maid, I wouldn’t necessarily think there is something going on. So it’s a bit difficult. I think it depends on the kind of relationship.” “On choosing a maid the first time you meet, what criteria do you go for? Would you go for someone of modest looks because you don’t want your husband to be tempted?” “I go for anybody, as long as they do the job and they listen.” She was interrupted by a phone call. Her husband was on the line to remind her about their lunch engagement. “About going for somebody as a maid...,” Dr Nanny tried to refresh her memory after the call. “I’ll go for anybody. Because I feel not doing so boils down to not trusting your husband. If you are always going to think whoree he is going to cheat on me, he is going to do this, you will worry yourself to death. I think it’s ultimately up to him. Even if you choose the ugly one, if he really wanted, he could go after her. Don’t we say beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder?” At that moment I thought back to Dr Beauty who was beautiful, and the potential attractiveness and intrigue and beauty in ugliness. “You are right. Now let’s come back to the idea of maids in Botswana. Many people go for Zimbabwean maids. And you have gone for two of them, even if just once a week. What do you think accounts for this preference?” “I think for some people that I know, it’s for exploiting them. It’s easy to exploit them. And for some people, they are better maids than Batswana. With a Motswana, if I go home and get somebody there, then the family will start saying, ‘Hei! Now she’s staying with her, it’s her slave,’ and so 260

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on. I think there is a lot of politics surrounding Batswana maids. Zimbabweans are obedient and hardworking and they are better maids than Batswana.” Dr Nanny commented, “So in a way you are saying they subject themselves more to exploitation without complaint. Unlike their Batswana counterparts whose families are likely to complain and come nosing around to ensure their daughter isn’t enslaved, whereas Zimbabwean maids, even if they have families, these are distant families beyond the borders. So in a way one can debase and dehumanise them without a sense of guilt or without the politics of human dignity coming to the fore?” “I think so because I’ve seen some of them working in the garden, doing all sorts of things which I think are not part of the agreement, but if you don’t have a choice, you can’t tell somebody no, this is not part of the deal. I’ve seen it happen.” “And do you think it’s because of their economic situation, the economic situation of Zimbabweans?” “I think so.” “But you might also find poor Batswana in the same situation, but they refuse to subject themselves to such exploitation.” “Not necessarily exploitation,” said Mrs Kettle Maphane. “I don’t think all of them are exploited. I don’t exploit anybody. I think Batswana don’t generally want to work, especially the poor ones. They just want handouts. Most of them I know from our village, they work today. After getting paid they don’t come the following day, which I take as not wanting to work. They don’t put in an effort because they know they can get food from the government and that sort of thing.” “You mentioned your village, where in Botswana are you from?” “I’m married in Molepolole, but I’m from Mahalapye.” “What are prevalent attitudes about Zimbabwean maids?” “There are some stories that they take what doesn’t belong to them. But I have never experienced that. So I wouldn’t be in a position to substantiate. But most people I know, they always ask me, how can you leave somebody in your house? This is what they do. There are a lot of stories about the excesses of maids, especially Zimbabweans. They are said to connive with their boyfriends to steal the belongings of their employers.” “I hear that it’s possible that those who stay in become very popular with men who come looking for them.” “I think it’s the case. But at the same time, people with Servants’ Quarters don’t want a lot of movement. The employers know they can’t keep men out and they would prefer it be just one coming at a time and 261

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the same one each time, but the maids do tend to exaggerate these things. In general, you don’t want people staying in your Servants’ Quarters to have visitors and to have a lot of movement.” “Hhmm! You are right. Now the final question. I understand Batswana women in relationships with foreigners repeatedly compare them to Batswana men. Have you ever come across such comparisons?” “A lot,” agreed Mrs Kettle Maphane. “Can you share some of them with me please before you go to see your Head of Department?” Dr Nanny was reacting to another call from the Departmental Secretary requesting Mrs Kettle Maphane to see the HoD at his office. Mrs Kettle Maphane replied, “Generally, they think foreigners are better. They make better lovers and better husbands, but I don’t agree.” “Why don’t you agree?” “Because it depends on the person. There are affectionate and amorous people from every culture. Repressive or brutal people from every culture. I know a lot of persons who are not Batswana who restrict their wives and cheat on them. It depends on who you meet. It has got nothing to do with where you come from.” “So in a way it’s a stereotype?” “Yes, it is. Most women think whites are better lovers than blacks and that sort of thing. But I know of white guys who beat up their wives. Maybe it’s because I grew up in a society where my aunt is married to a white guy. I used to stay with her, and there were a lot of whites around there. And the same stories circulated that you hear in black circles. So it depends on the person. It has got nothing to do with where you come from or the colour of the skin. I don’t agree with that.” “But I hear that they have got a lot of TLC.” “You can get it…” “Anywhere?” “Anywhere. I know some lady married to this somebody from outside. He never takes her out. He goes out drinking and when he comes back, he beats her up. It depends on the person. My suspicion is that, maybe the reason most Batswana women like foreigners is because they give them money, because most of them have more money than most Batswana men.” “And finally, very finally,” said Dr Nanny, who must have been thinking of her interviewees two impending appointments, one with her HoD and one with husband. “I’ve remarked that most female students at DUST, about 90 per cent of them started life with a baby. And often they are not with the boyfriend or with the man who gave them that baby. In fact, it’s almost like you move on and start your real life after the baby. It strikes 262

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me and I was wondering whether you’ve noticed that as well? And what could account for that?” “I think it’s society. Right now everybody is wondering why I don’t have a baby. I think whether you are married or not here, you reach a certain age and everybody expects you to have a baby. Honestly, I don’t know why they have kids in their teens. I really don’t know, but it could be that they have kids because they think they can keep the boyfriend or that the person will leave his wife for them.” “That is quite popular. In DUST you see lots of unmarried people with kids.” “Very. When we were students here, nearly all my class had kids, and they were always asking me, ‘Why don’t you have a kid?’ and I’d say, ‘Why should I have a kid? I don’t even have anything to feed them with, I’m not working.’” “How did you manage to escape it when everybody falls prey?” “I didn’t want a situation where I would have a kid, and then I would have to take care of that kid on my own. I know of cases where women have started life with kids and the relationship grows sour, and they can’t bear the sight of the kid because it reminds them of the man who has moved on. So I don’t want a situation where I’m stuck with the kid, and my life and the kid’s life are disturbed. I have this feeling that these guys are using the women. For different reasons, they are using them.” “I’ve noticed at DUST that if a Makwerekwere is going to go out with someone Batswana, the most likely option is a secretary. I don’t know whether you’ve noticed that as well?” “Batswana men are easily intimidated. If a Batswana woman were to get her PhD without getting married, it is not going to be easy for her to get married. Or if she were to build her own house or have her own car before getting married, then it’s not going to be easy getting married. And if she gets married, there are always going to be problems of, ‘Oh she wears the pants in the house.’ I think generally men, Batswana men, because they are the ones I know best, are easily intimidated. They don’t want anybody who…” “Who can challenge them?” “How can I put it, someone who is economically independent? I would infer that maybe for foreigners it’s the same, I don’t know.” “Is that perhaps what is pushing working women who are well established in Botswana to act as sugar mummies?” “I think so. And it could be destructive for the boys. They could end up having difficulties having relationships with people their own age because of that. I don’t know for sure, though. 263

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“There seems to be a general belief that if a woman is independent or liberated – whatever you want to call it –, she will want to make all the decisions in the house. Whereas I think everywhere women make most of the decisions at home anyway – even our mothers who never used to go to school. My mother used to make or contribute to most of the decisions in the house. Whether it involved money or not, she would suggest to my father, maybe we should do this, maybe the kids need this and that. And there never used to be a problem. So if increasingly this is a problem, I attribute that to men’s growing insecurity.” “You are perfectly right. The woman in me identifies with what you are saying,” said Dr Nanny. “And sometimes I also wonder if even women might be a bit insecure about sharing more of the home decision-making with men. If they do share, they give us some of their traditional power and complicate their lives in a way. If they don’t, they have to juggle an awful lot on their own and complicate their lives in another way.” “I guess it’s a process that is working itself out,” volunteered Mrs Kettle Maphane. “The very last question, what do you think of Batswana who are married to Lekgoa?” “What do you mean, what do I think?” “Yes, what is your opinion?” “Nothing.” “In the Caribbean people are very hostile, even in the US and UK, they are very hostile to black men marrying whites. They say the whites are coming to take away our own men. You’ve taken our labour, you’ve taken our everything, and now you are taking our men, and diminishing the purity of the race in the process…” “No, here I don’t think the problem is that. I think the problem here is that, those women who are married to whites, there is this stereotype about them that most of them, how can I put it?” “Are prostitutes?” “Yeah, that’s the only word I can find. But I think nowadays things are changing because what used to happen, those women who used to date these white guys, usually they were these girls with a lot of makeup, very short skirts and that sort of thing. So I think that’s where it started, that stereotype.” “Here in Botswana, I notice that people marry within their major tribal groups, like you a Tswana would marry within the Tswana community and Kalanga men will marry Tswana women, but Tswana men hardly marry Kalanga women and something like that. Kalanga, they marry into Tswana a lot more than Tswana men marrying Kalanga. Is it because they 264

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are too dark skinned? Because men tend to go for light skinned women and most of those are Tswana and the Kalanga women are darker in skin colour?” “I don’t think it’s true. I don’t think so. I don’t accept that.” “So if a Kalanga had come up to you and said, ‘I want to marry you,’ after inspecting the wallet, wouldn’t you inspect the skin colour?” “My husband is very dark, very, very dark. In fact, so much so that most people think he is a Makwerekwere, but he is a bona fide Motswana. I don’t think colour matters. I think it’s who you meet, because nowadays it’s unlike during our mothers’ days, where they used to be confined and mobility was limited. There was no movement beyond tribal borders. But nowadays, we go to school, we meet different people and we travel in and out of the tribe and country. Like I said, it’s who you meet. I know of many people who have married Kalanga, and as interaction with others beyond our borders increases, the day isn’t faraway when Batswana will be marrying Makwerekwere, and God knows what.” “And how do you know that you like somebody when you’ve met that person? That’s the last question.” “I don’t know,” Mrs Kettle Maphane giggled. “Maybe you look at the wallet, I don’t know. I think it depends on each individual’s criteria.” “Even though you are married, do you sometimes look at somebody and say this person looks nice to me, even if it doesn’t lead to anything?” “Being married doesn’t mean you don’t have eyes, don’t have a heart. It happens to everybody. Whether you are married or not, you are BornAgain or not, it happens. The important thing is how you handle the situation.” “Thanks for a most interesting interview. I hope your HoD hasn’t waited too long. We could continue...” “Maybe next time. Feel free to call in, anytime,” said Mrs Kettle Maphane, most charmingly.

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Chapter Thirty Two

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W

ith Dr Penelope Homewood, Dr Nanny took care to specify ‘interview with a leading feminist scholar married to an Englishman, Dr Chaucer Homewood, a writer, literary critic and Professor of Enlightenment European Literature.’ This made me curious, as she hadn’t done the same for other interviews. Unfortunately, I wasn’t at this particular one, and therefore could not say why she thought this specification important. Dr Nanny began, “I’m very interested in maids. So I would like to know what your experiences with maids are. I suppose you grew up in a family where there were maids, and that you’ve accumulated impressions and opinions about them. Could you share these with me?” Dr Homewood responded. “Well, I think you are right that we’ve had people working for us in our home since my childhood days. But I think you never really realise what the dynamics are until you are an employer yourself. You know what our parents – our mother in particular – had to deal with. One can safely say that the arena of maid management, particularly within the home, is definitely along gender lines. “I could be culturally biased, but I think a lot has to do with having children or not having children. I think that puts a whole different twist to it. When I had an older child, it was a different dynamic. There was childcare involved, and the interaction with the maid was quite different. The maid could focus on management of the household and keeping it clean, cooking, etc. But with my younger children over the last three years it’s been a much closer and quite qualitatively different relationship. I think one becomes really occupied with the safety of the child. And within that context, one wants to establish whether or not the person one hires to take care of the children actually will be up to the task. It can’t just be anybody out there. You have to be sure that this person is interested and shows commitment and care. It becomes quite an ongoing issue and one that I find emotionally taxing.” “When you are going for a maid, what criteria do you use to select or reject?” “Oh, I think that experience is important – where have you worked and what kind of job have you done? I think another key question is:

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have you looked after children before? I mean, you can’t just hand over a child to anybody and say because you are a maid or you are a woman, you will actually know what to do. “I prefer references, character references if possible. Do you have a reference person, even if it’s not somebody that you have worked for necessarily? Where are you from? In addition to the fact of rendering service, this person is basically joining your household and your family to a certain extent for a certain period of time. And whatever it is that will happen, whether positive or negative, I think it’s actually important to have references.” “Have you always proceeded like this?” “It’s come with time and my changing situation. Before, I think the scrutiny wasn’t much because it wasn’t as necessary in my view then as it is now. So over the years, I’ve become particularly careful about whom I employ and the conditions under which we associate with one another.” “Do you think there is any qualitative difference amongst the maids you have employed over the last three years or so?” “Well, I think I’ll talk in general. The people that I’ve come across are much younger and a lot of them, actually, the young women who are looking for work, are between the ages of 20 and 35. Many of them have JC – Junior Certificate. These days those less qualified can’t find a job easily, as those with higher qualifications are shopping down for jobs as maids for lack of alternatives. So being a maid is not exactly their first choice of work, as they are definitely more educated nowadays.” “Amongst the 20 to 35 age bracket that you have experienced, which age group are you most comfortable with?” “Hm! That’s a different question. Currently I’ve got two maids. One is 25 and has sort of limited experience but had other qualities that enabled us to be together now for one year already, which in this day and age, I think is quite a long time. My second one who is more recently employed is 34. So it’s difficult to say what my choice is. Before, I’d say to somebody that I thought 30 is a good sort of age. Otherwise, I can’t say I have any preference.” “What would you say are the difficulties you have encountered with your maids?” “I think it’s just the experience in getting used to working in your particular environment. It takes time for somebody to get used to you, your habits and the requirements of her... sort of mastering the terrain and mastering the work. I think it’s a lot about routine and getting into a rhythm of one’s own, which takes a bit of time. Obviously, there’ll be a kind of constant reminding. 268

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“Recently, this particular year, I had one maid who was working for a brief period of time and unfortunately passed away. That’s never happened before to my family and it was quite difficult coping. “Obviously, you are supposed to cater for the needs of your maid. How far you go is another story. For example, saying, ‘Ok, when you are not feeling well you can go to the clinic.’ But I think it was more than that because also, as I said when I started, it was an issue of childcare. So there is a different set of circumstances, such as the safety of your children. “So we found ourselves going all out, getting her as much medical assistance as we could. We had only known her for two months, and it was a really unfortunate set of circumstances. It’s not the sort of situation where you as the employer can say I’m sending you home to be nursed. There are many family members back home and most will have a relative or two in town, but they can’t use their meagre earnings on sickness. So, it’s not that simple. You try to do as best you can. We found ourselves fulfilling the role the family should play.” “One of the issues people I’ve interviewed have repeatedly brought up is the social lives of maids, especially of those living in with the employer, which seems to be an issue over which they fall out often. In the sense that the maid wants the freedom to entertain her boyfriends or men at home, and sometimes employers are hard, and there is a problem there. If your maids live in, how do you cater for that particular aspect of their lives?” asked Dr Nanny. “It’s very interesting. I have never had a problem over the years. I must admit and we have basically had a policy where, these are adults, they will have partners, they will have children. What we cannot cater for is to provide family accommodation. We can’t do that. We don’t have the facilities and there are so many other implications. But we have basically said, ‘Look, come in, if you have a partner, they are welcome to come.’ And most of them have had partners, but it has been a sort of private arrangement between them that we basically do not interfere with or we have not had cause to actually be concerned about. So that has not been an issue for us.” “In my other interviews, some women came across as being very strict on what areas of the house the maids can access. And their bedrooms were strategic positions where they don’t allow the maids…” “So they’ll clean the rest of the house but not the bedroom?” interrupted Dr Homewood. Dr Nanny replied and continued. “Yes, and cooking also, some women said they don’t allow the maids to cook for them because the way to a man’s heart is through his food, as somebody put it. If a maid begins to 269

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cook for your man and access your bedroom and other strategic areas, then she becomes a wife substitute as it were, and the final stage is crossing the threshold into your husband’s heart. There were instances where the maids have actually ended up having affairs with husbands and eventually taking over completely in certain cases. So, I don’t know whether, in your selection of maids or in your knowledge of other people with whom you are related, that has been an issue.” “In my own personal experience, the maids clean the whole house, bedroom and all. They cook for us, always have and probably always will. I am not aware of any restrictions that have been placed on maids by my larger family either. That, though, is a very interesting angle you just shared with me.” “What accounts for this difference?” “I really don’t know. What I was going to ask you is what would you attribute this sort of belief to? You’ve thought about this, I suppose?” Dr Homewood returned the question. “I haven’t quite thought about it, as I am more preoccupied with data collection for now. But I would certainly share my thoughts with you when I get there. Coming back to you, could your approach also have to do with the circumstances of the maids that you get? Where you got the maid in the first place? How you got the maid? You talked about references, which means you must not get your maids through the normal channels.” “Yes, I do try to get references.” “Others get their maids from the streets, with hardly any serious background screening of the sort you said you do. So the circumstances of the maid, the uncertainties in their lives and the insecurities also, could determine how they exploit the situation where they find themselves, towards bettering their own personal situation. Whereas in your case, the maid comes through formal referencing and her status is legally protected. I’m just trying to see where the difference is,” said Dr Nanny. “Let me just say domestic service is an area of uncertainty for both sides. Looking at it from an employer’s point of view, there is no legislation in the employment act. It does not really give us any guidelines. It’s a grey area. Dr Nanny commented, “For both sides, there is very little protection. I think if you let somebody into your home from the streets, there is going to be uncertainty anywhere, whether they enter your bedroom or not. When you look at our lives these days and the amount of things we accumulate, the catch becomes how much you can pay your maid and how much they will find in your house. But generally, I’d say the average kitchen has quite a lot which a maid could easily walk off with, to make up for what she is 270

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not paid. So for me, I think that does not answer the question about uncertainty about letting people into bedrooms. I will just say that generally we are taking a chance. So that might be a cultural thing.” “Maybe, I don’t know,” said Dr Homewood. “I think ultimately we are forced into a situation of desperation. You may be without a maid for a while and the situation at home becomes untenable, especially with working women like most of us. It just becomes a crisis, and you have no choice but to get somebody from the streets. I have friends who have had difficult experiences with these people where basically you go to work and you just can’t relax for one minute because you don’t know what is happening at home. They are completely on edge and anxious and can’t get one ounce of work done. “Placement is still a new thing in Botswana and it’s not every maid who goes and registers for placement. I’ve actually used two placement agencies. One is more formal and the other is more a small scale enterprise. But it is very difficult even for them to vouch for the background of these individuals. They are there basically to provide a service for the client, it’s more client-based. I think they’ll try as much as possible, based on, I suppose, market research and experience, to say the right things and match you with the right person. But there is very little they know about those people. It’s all an issue of chance at the end of the day.” “Another thing which came up in the previous interviews has been the attitudes of maids to work. They come in, they are obliging, they are obedient, and then they lapse and become stubborn with time. They even talk back. They challenge you and sometimes they take over. Have you had such an experience?” “Well, yeah, I’d say that I had that sort of experience with somebody who had been with us on and off for a good eight years. And I think it was a situation where the individual was not very communicative. You know people are just different. You will meet somebody who can talk a lot, but then you’ll find people who are more reserved. She treated her work ok, but I think in the end we put her down to exhaustion. “It’s just like anybody else. Is it the 7-year itch or is it 8 or 9? I don’t know. After a certain period of time, they find it very difficult to associate with you. So we put it down to that. We are individuals and, maids are just human beings like anybody else. I think that they are in a position of power. Initially they are desperate to find work, and then it becomes a constant negotiation of power, of how far one can go, basically. Salaries and conditions of work are neither here nor there. They come to you, you say one thing. They come to me, I say another thing. So, yes, I could see situations where people try to turn the thing around so they feel more empowered in a situation which is quite shaky.” 271

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“So what do you think a maid would do to get more empowered?” “I think it depends on what she feels are legitimate forms of power under the circumstances,” said Dr Homewood. “Empowerment for me is actually speaking your mind. Communication is empowerment and stating your case, as far as I’m concerned, but being able to state it in a way that will reap positive outcomes. The major areas of contention are salary and hours of work. Can you imagine no fixed hours? I started at 6 o’clock in the morning and I don’t leave until my employer says so, how would you like that? But in my situation, if somebody said, ‘Look, I am going to improve ABCD, then maybe we can renegotiate my salary on the basis of ABCD,’ I’m willing to listen. Whether I’m able to do something is another story, but I’m willing to listen.” “I’ve heard that maids who have worked for a Lekgoa are very assertive and more stubborn to somebody they consider of lesser means or status. So they would say, ‘This is not how this is done. Where I came from, I was washing clothes not by hand…’” “You are kidding. Ah! Ah!” laughed Dr Homewood. “‘…but by washing machine. If you don’t look for a washing machine, I’m not going to wash jeans… I’m not going to do this…,’” Dr Nanny continued. “So why didn’t they say, ‘Then I don’t think we can work together’? So what happened? What was the response?” Dr Homewood was curious to know. “‘So, if you want me to do this, put my salary up.’ So that’s bargaining…” Dr Homewood interrupted, “This is what I’m saying, that there are various forms of empowerment, and if one of the perceptions of empowerment is working for so-called Makgoa, so be it. I’ve been to the Labour Office and I’ve been told by people there looking for work, ‘We want to work for Europeans’ or whatever, straight to my face and no question about it. So if you are not white, move on. Obviously that’s a factor.” “And why do they do that?” “Maybe there are different conditions of work. The approaches to domestic work and workers may be different. As we know, in a lot of western countries, there are no maids.” “Exactly.” “So this is a new thing for a lot of people who are coming out here. Basically the criterion, the parameters and the conditions under which people are hired may be quite different.” “Even for rewarding,” Dr Nanny suggested. “Precisely,” Dr Homewood agreed. 272

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“Yeah, you have these guilt prangs about using another human being in a way that could be seen to be demeaning.” “Possibly, it could be guilt. It could also be what they consider the standards under which people should live. It could be a whole range of things,” said Dr Homewood. “Do you think there is a difference between Zimbabwean maids and Batswana maids?” Dr Homewood replied, “I’ve never had a Zimbabwean maid. Till date I haven’t. But I have friends who have Zimbabwean maids and the general thing that is said about them is experience and approach to work. The Zimbabweans get stuck into their work and they set about the work by themselves without being reminded all the time and taught. There is this general belief that Batswana tend to have a lot more options than the Zimbabweans have, so they don’t have the same approach to their work. And they don’t stick around long. As soon as another opportunity comes along, they dump you and off they go.” “Has it ever crossed your mind, during the long hours you are at work, what your maid could possibly be up to? Some clean your rooms, and maybe your wardrobe and lots of other things at home. Has it ever crossed your mind?” “Obviously just like anybody else, you think, oh! What’s happening at home? I’ll call home just to find out how people are, how the day is going, and once in a while you find the TV’s been on in the morning. But you know, I’ve told myself that there are two ways of going about that. You can become absolutely paranoid and imagine somebody dressing up in your clothes and going out enjoying themselves or whatever,” she laughed uncomfortably. “Or sampling your expensive perfume or something like that. No, I say to myself no, look, this is the maid. I just have to trust, I have to.” “To what extent does this attitude with maids inform or draw on a general attitude towards other types of relationships?” “What do you mean?” “I mean, you say, relationship of trust, because you can’t possibly be everywhere at the same time.” “It’s true.” “So in what way does your attitude towards this particular relationship with your maid draw from attitudes in general in life towards other relationships like boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife, and so on?” “I think it is general. I think that whether it’s husband, wife, colleague, friend, it’s just a general sort of belief that I think human beings are human beings, and once you adopt a stance of questioning what people do all 273

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the time, I don’t think it’s healthy. I’m talking about my own personal health. I don’t know about other people, but I think there are some things that are out of my control. There is not much that I can do about that.” “That must be very devastating for somebody of status and power like yourself who cannot control a situation. A position of status and power should normally make it possible…” Dr Homewood laughed dismissively. “Oh dear! That’s very interesting. So a person of my status should necessarily be running around trying to tell everybody what to do? It is empowering that I feel very comfortable with myself.” “Your concluding statement.” “I’m alive and that’s good enough.” “Which means?” “In this day and age, isn’t it wonderful just to be alive? Why should I worry myself trying to follow every action of my maid when there are many bigger issues to get worked up about?

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Chapter Thirty Three

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A

mong the tapes I transcribed were two that contained notes Dr Nanny had dictated for herself, following a series of interviews with mostly 18 to 25 year old girls staying with family in Gaborone. As she noted, these young people had attempted and failed their ordinary level exams. They took advantage of their relatives being in the city to join them and study towards repeating their exams, while helping out with babysitting and household chores. Dr Nanny had taped her recollections as cases. Case 1: Tuesday October 24, interviewed an 18 year old girl from Serowe. She lives with her brother and his wife in a company flat in Broadhurst. The brother has a 3 year old boy, whom she takes care of. She told me she finished her O Levels three years ago and did not pass well. She then came to live with her brother in Gaborone, who registered her to re-seat her exams. She assists in the household as best she can by cooking, cleaning and doing laundry. Usually her sister-in-law helps her with the duties after work or on weekends. She spends the day with the toddler bathing, feeding and playing with him. She appeared to be really enjoying it because she spoke with such passion for her nephew. In the evenings, the whole family usually plays games like monopoly, truth or dare, checkers, play station and puzzles. She is not paid anything but they buy her toiletries and give her pocket money all the time of up to P200, and usually they bring her gifts of shoes and clothes when there are sales in the shops. She says she is happy helping out and being helped out by her relatives in this way. She hopes to pass her exams well this time and train as a teacher. Case 2: Interviewed a second Serowe girl aged 21, Tuesday October 24, in the afternoon. She quit school when her parents could not afford books for her to repeat exams she had failed. She came to stay in Gaborone with her sister and her husband hoping things would be better than in Serowe. Unfortunately, they are not doing anything to assist her to continue with her studies. She just stays at home, cooks, cleans, does laundry and irons, but is not rewarded in any way. They do not even buy her toiletries. She shares theirs with them, which is highly uncomfortable for her.

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Her brother-in-law always finds something to complain about – she is a very bad cook, lazy and untidy. Her sister always has fights with her husband and she is convinced that it is because of her. Of late, she has taken up plaiting people’s hair when her sister and husband are at work in order to raise some money for herself. Her plan is to save enough to pay her way back to Serowe. She hates to be the source of conflict between the couple. Had she her way, she would be out of there in two days. Case 3: Thursday October 26, interviewed a 25 year old from Tonota village staying with her maternal uncle at Kgale Hill. They stay in a low cost Botswana Housing Cooperation house with two bedrooms, a sitting room, kitchen, and shower and toilet. The house also has a beautiful flower garden and lawn and a magnificent rockery, which she takes care of with the help of the eldest son of the family. She has a 9 year old son whom she got from a pregnancy over which she was expelled from Junior Secondary School. She has since been doing part time jobs, especially in road construction companies. She was asked by her parents to come and stay with her uncle in Gaborone, because he was very ill of a heart problem and there was no one to take care of him at home. She stays with him and his two boys. The brothers treat her as their sister, which she likes, as it makes her feel more youthful. During the day, she stays home and does her chores, but in the evening, her boyfriend drives her to and back from evening school. She prepares meals for the whole family and does the laundry and takes the boy to the clinic for his medical check up. She does not receive any payment, apart from a monthly token of P100 for toiletries. Her boyfriend, who is from Bobonong village, gives her a monthly allowance of P300 as well. Her parents take care of her son who is schooling back at Tonota and the boy’s father pays the school fees and buys the uniforms when he can be tracked down. She does not mind being in the city helping a family member who is in need. She will go back home to Tonota when her Uncle is well enough to take care of himself again. Case 4: Tlokweng, Friday October 27, interviewed an 18 year old staying with her 28 year old sister and 32 year old brother-in-law from Mabeleapodi village. Her sister is a managing officer with Dust-to-Dust Funeral Services charged with coordinating ‘The Final Journey.’ The sister makes more than P7000 monthly from the dead and dying, and her husband has an international trading company. They stay in a five bedroom house they built themselves and they do not have a child. The young woman said she didn’t pass Form 5 well and would like to pursue her studies at a private learning centre, and to major in literature. 276

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Her sister and brother-in-law leave daily early in the morning for work and she is left alone in the house. Usually she cleans the house quickly and then goes to relax by the poolside, her favourite spot. She writes poems as a hobby and prefers to write them in the mornings when her mind is most creative. She usually prepares lunch at around 11 am because her sister usually comes home for lunch. Her sister takes her out for lunch when she does not feel like cooking. During weekends her sister or brother-in-law gives her at most P200 to go out, and she usually goes to Galaxy World at Game City or The Fun Centre at the Grand Palm Hotel to play games with her friends. She saves most of her pocket money because she wants to buy herself a laptop in which she can save her poems and share them with a wider public someday. In the evenings they crack jokes as a family and she recites her poems because they enjoy them. Sometimes they just watch movies at home or at the cinema. She is very close to her brother-in-law and they are so free with each other, but he has never made any sexual move on her. He treats her like a little sister. She also does not have any sexual interest in him, but wishes she could be lucky in life like her sister and get married to a man who is so caring and successful. Currently they are hiring a young man from Mmokolodi village to clean the yard, the pool and to take care of the garden. He works on Wednesdays and Sundays only and is paid P350 monthly. They once hired a Zimbabwean who made off with all their garden tools and has never been seen again. So they swore never again to hire a foreigner, as they must be able to know the home of whoever works for them. She says her sister has never been a major supporter of maids from childhood. Maids have a reputation of stealing from their employers no matter how well they are paid. Her sister believes that maids are very selfish people who play desperate so as to get a job and steal, and if they are caught, they always play the ‘pitiful’ ones. Regardless of where they come from, maids are the same and have the same distasteful attitudes and behaviour. She has no mercy on maids. Case 5: Tlokweng, Friday October 27, interviewed a 17 year old girl who lives with her mother and her Standard 6 pupil brother. Their father passed away two years ago, leaving their mother, who is a nurse and earns about P5000 monthly. The girl dropped out of school last year due to pregnancy with her son. She is currently not doing any course because her mother cannot afford to send her to a private school. They barely survive at home. The father to her son failed Form 5 and is trying to raise funds to further his education, by working as a bus conductor, and earns P650 277

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Francis B. Nyamnjoh

monthly. He provides their son with basics like milk and clothes. But what she really wants, his undivided attention as a boyfriend and father to her son, she can’t get. Her mother also assists, especially with her son’s health and nappies. The mother usually brings food provided by the government in clinics, which includes a cereal called Tsa Bana, cooking oil, sugar beans and powdered milk. This helps the whole family survive. They don’t have a maid at home because they can’t afford one. She plays the role of a maid, which she finds very tiresome, especially with a young baby that requires active attention. Her mother usually helps her with the laundry on weekends, but still, she does not have time to go and look for a job. She feels depressed to see her child grow up in such poverty. She sees her struggle for all she needs as punishment from her ancestors for disappointing her family by getting pregnant before completing school. She feels responsible for the misery of her family and tries to make money by plaiting people’s hair at home and babysitting for neighbours. She has nothing against foreigners and feels she can learn many life skills from these people, especially from the Zimbabweans and the Zambians who are very creative with their hands. Case 6: Monday October 30, at Block 8, interviewed an 18 year old girl who completed her Form 5 and performed well. She has applied to DUST for a degree course in accounting and also for external placement, but she hopes to be admitted to DUST. She is currently staying with her parents and two of her sisters. There is a maid who comes in for work at 8 am and leaves at 7:30 pm. The maid does the cleaning, cooking and laundry during weekdays and is given P400 monthly. She comes from Lerala village and has been with them for over two years, but the young woman was keen to stress that they don’t have any problems with foreign maids, as all they want is a hardworking and reliable person. She assists the maid with her chores, especially with cooking when the maid does the laundry. She sometimes helps by cleaning the car because she enjoys listening to music from the car stereo and parking the car under the shed where she washes it. She has a part time job as a waitress at Sports Café in the evenings and gets P30 daily plus tips. Her father picks her up at 11:30 every night from work. She is saving her money so she can buy herself a big radio to use when at DUST, if admitted. She loves window shopping at Game City and River Walk. Case 7: November 1, interviewed a 23 year old Zimbabwean who lives in Tlokweng. She is very bitter about the three women with whom she lives. Her mother was guardian to them when they were schooling in 278

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Zimbabwe, and she used to treat them like they were her own children. Now they look down on her daughter. She came to Botswana to search for a job because of the situation in Zimbabwe and had hoped the sisters would take care of her as her mother used to take care of them. The eldest sister is affianced and an economist. The other sisters are schooling at DUST. The girl stays with these women in a large 11 room house where their mother, who works and lives in the UK, pays all the house bills. The girl is still searching for a job and in the meantime, they are using her as a maid, although there is a maid in the house. Whenever the eldest sister comes from work, she directs her complaints at her, calling her irresponsible whenever the maid has failed to do as she was told. With the duties they have given her, she does not get enough time to search for a job and they do not assist her with transport costs. Sometimes when the eldest sister’s fiancé comes to sleep over, he feels pity for her and may even give her P100 pocket money. She wishes he was interested in her beyond pitying her, as she would like to get back at the sisters. He has found her a secretarial job and she will be going for the interview next week. She hopes to get the job and will move out immediately after her first pay. Case 8: Interviewed a 23 year old DUST student at Block 8, who lives at her paternal aunt’s place. She babysits 3 children – a 17 year old boy who is doing Form 4, a 12 year old boy doing Standard 6 and an 8 year old girl doing Standard 3 – as the aunt has gone to India on a month long trip. She is used to doing this for her aunt ‘who travels like Pope John Paul II.’ During the long vacation however, she usually goes to stay with her mother at Siviya. She and the oldest son prepare the meals, and she cleans the house. She does not feel like a maid because it is like taking care of her own brothers and sister, and she does not expect any reward. Her aunt takes care of most of her expenses when she is at school, including toiletries and money for hairdos. She usually receives P100 pocket money every month, but in general, she sees her services as a ‘scratch my back and I will scratch yours’ situation. She says maids are handy people and can be very productive if they are treated like their job is important. People should learn to appreciate when someone does something for them because they can do much better if acknowledged. Case 9: November 16, interviewed a young Motswana man from Maun at Extension 9. He says he has too much of a workload but doesn’t complain because he gets P850 monthly. He cleans a 12 room double storey house, which has carpets from wall to wall, using a vacuum cleaner, and keeps the garden and yard beautiful and clean. 279

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With him is a cook who prepares all the family meals. They don’t eat the same food as the family. He says it is actually better this way because their employers are Indians and their food is not appealing, especially the baby mango salad. There are five people in the house: the parents and their two sons and a daughter who are all above age 18. They are truck and restaurant businesspeople and each member of the family owns a car. Having no small children around to dirty the house makes cleaning easy. The wife and her daughter are usually the ones who do the laundry using a washing machine and a tumble dryer. He rarely communicates with the children as they usually leave for school very early in the morning before he starts work at 8:30 am. He shares the Servants’ Quarters with the cook. It has two single beds which they found there, but they brought their own bedding. They are not allowed to bring any visitors home. Although he gets good money and has free accommodation, he would like to work elsewhere like in a mine, where he would be nobody’s slave. Case 10: November 26, in Block 5, encountered a 34 year old Tswapong woman, who is a relative of the wife in that household. She is there to assist, as is customary, her 32 year old cousin who has a two week old baby girl. She assists by cooking food for her cousin, who eats separately from the whole family, as custom requires of the mother of a newborn baby. She also assists her cousin with her baths and with general care for the new baby. She therefore shares the bedroom with the new mother while her cousin’s husband uses the spare bedroom. She agrees that you should not be paid for such assistance to your relative, as these relatives have been and continue to be of assistance to her as well. She is treated with respect here, as she is older and has more experience with children. She has three school going children who live at SelibePhikwe with their father, her husband, who is a qualified Junior Secondary School teacher earning approximately P3500 monthly. She does not have a job but sells clothes she buys from South Africa, and she can make up to P7000 monthly if customers pay well and in cash. There is a maid in the house as well, but she doesn’t think that maids are necessary. To her, a maid can only be necessary if there is a toddler in the house and you have a job, which requires you to spend hours away from your home. Otherwise, maids are strangers best avoided. They will not handle your property with care because they do not know how much you sweated to attain it. Some will steal both your property and your man or may have an attitude and lack discipline. She therefore prefers not to have a maid at all. Case 11: November 29, in Phase 2, interviewed two sisters who stay together in a third sister’s house, left to her as the oldest child, when their mother passed away. Their sister stays with her fiancé and they will be 280

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getting married next August. She works for Diamond Bank and her fiancé is a Secondary School teacher. The two younger sisters are at DUST and only come to stay with their sister on holidays. Any member of the family who feels like doing this does cleaning, and cooking is done by whoever is hungry. The house was spotlessly clean. They prefer it that way because nobody will feel abused since everybody works optionally. There is no maid in the house but they do hire Zimbabweans occasionally – two men who are paid P60 each to clean the yard, and two women at P40 each to do laundry, and their laundry is usually a lot. Zimbabweans are hardworking and don’t fuss about pay, which they like. Batswana are not attractive to hire because of their inefficiency and laziness, and because they are either complaining that the washing is too much for too little money, or objecting to certain types of clothes like jeans. It is common, they claim, for Batswana to proceed to rinse clothes without washing them. There is no practical reason to hire a maid on a permanent basis. Case 12: November 30, in Block 9, interviewed a 20 year old woman who lives in her parents’ eight room house all by herself. Her parents have been transferred to Orapa to work there for two years. She could not move with her parents because she is schooling in Gaborone, where she is repeating the math and accounting exams she failed in Form Five. Her parents pay the rent and electricity and water bills, and deposit P600 monthly for her transport to school and for food. She is very lonely and afraid of robbers. Her boyfriend, who stays at the Village and works as a court interpreter, comes to stay over every weekend. Her parents would never permit her to stay with a man in their house, though they are aware the boyfriend visits her on weekends. She has hired a Zimbabwean man, who comes to cut the hedge monthly and clean the yard, and pays him P100 on every occasion. This man has been working for her ever since January when her parents left for Orapa, but she still does not trust him enough to let him do his job unsupervised. She admits to eating out often, because she is usually lazy to cook, but she misses home cooked food. Since her cousin will be coming to stay with her in August, maybe it will be better as she will be cooking for two people. She has nothing against maids but does not really need any as she stays alone. If ever she hires one, it would have to be someone from Botswana, as it would be critical to know her home to feel safe. She can’t afford to take any risks with her parents’ property.

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Chapter Thirty Four

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O

ur last formal interview took place a week later than initially scheduled. Dr Nanny took time off for a bit of tourism at the Okavango Delta, ‘to avoid a burn out’ so she said. This meant having to reschedule the interview with Dr Mrs Amina Oga Yorigbo, a Nigerian working for a newly launched American NGO, Bot-Home-Care, for HIV/AIDS victims. It was at a party organised by Dr Long-Bottom in her honour that Dr Nanny met her. It took some convincing for Dr Mrs Yorigbo to agree to another appointment. The interview took place at Dr Mrs Yorigbo’s sumptuous residence at Phakalane, where she recently moved in with her children and a Sotho maid. Dr Mrs Yorigbo began her story with experiences of maids back in Nigeria. “I want to just go back a little bit before I started getting maids in southern Africa. I came with Eve, a young girl from Nigeria. The practice back home is I can go to the village and get the extended family to provide me with a maid. They get a relative, a child, who doesn’t possibly have the means to go to school or do something with her life. And so, I got her to help me take care of the children. “The children were younger at the time as well. So it worked out well to have a slightly older girl with the children at that stage. But I realised that there is no need to have anybody around the children who cannot read and write. So I did send her to school. She finished her class seven in northern Nigeria where I worked for some time, and she wanted to do sewing. She started, but it didn’t work, as I had a chance to go to Lesotho and brought her along. “Being English speaking, Eve was able to go to secondary school there in Lesotho. She has just finished her course, and I left her in South Africa because she wants to do hairdressing. But at least she has that basic education. She has now stayed with us for so long she is like part of the family. She is like an elder sister to the children. She is not much older than they are.

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“Even with her around, I still got a maid, somebody to do the work and everything for all of us, but she did her own share of work, and encouraged the children to do theirs. “My experience of house helps in Nigeria has always been in that regard with relations – somebody you either compensate directly with cash or by helping them have a trade, or you compensate them by sending them to school, even if there is some kind of cash remuneration. Because there is some kind of distant family tie, and you want something sustainable and long term, that they can look back on and say well, she helped you with your children and this is what she got out of it. Unlike in Lesotho where I just go out to the Main Mall and hire somebody purely because they could render me a service and I pay them financially, which makes my rapport with my maid in Lesotho different from that I have with Eve, who is family.” “So there is a maid market in Lesotho?” “Yes.” “Can you talk a bit more on that market?” “I think historically, in the whole of the southern African region, blacks are migrant labour. The maid market in Lesotho is not only for maids to work in Lesotho, it is exporting maids to South Africa. It was not only miners who went to South Africa; there was an entire population of maids who went there as well. In Johannesburg and everywhere, if I visit most of my South African friends, and even well placed foreigners, their maids are from Lesotho. So even in the international community, people tend to take maids from neighbouring countries and Lesotho seems to be one of the high producers of maids. And unlike Nigeria, in Lesotho the arrangements are mainly financial. You deliver the service – those are the terms –, this is the remuneration.” “So you recruited your present maid from an agency?” “No, I talked to the secretary in the office, who is like the longest serving staff at the American NGO where I worked in Lesotho, and she brought several people. She knew people who had maids and maids who knew other maids, so I interviewed a significant number of maids and ended up with her.” “The labour law in Lesotho, is there any section of it dealing with maids?” “They just tell you the minimum salary and like every other kind of employment, notice, cash in lieu of notice, termination – it’s the same basic things that you get in any standard labour contract.” “And is the job description for maids clear in the statutes?” 284

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“I don’t really think the provisions are clear. They deal basically with salary, hours worked, compensation – those kinds of things –, and not directly with what exactly is in the job description. I had the luck that the NGO for which I worked gave me guidance upon arrival about who was employable locally – maids, gardeners, this and that. They have a whole packet they give you. You are not forced to adhere to it, but it’s some kind of guidance because historically maids have taken employers to labour unions and everything, so they try as much as possible to make sure you understand what you are getting into.” “You said you interviewed lots of people to have a maid. What criteria did you have in mind? What were you asking for?” “Back in Lesotho, everybody speaks Sotho and even though English is an official language, people have a reluctance to speak it. So for me, number one criterion was that you should be fluent in understanding and speaking English. I don’t speak Sotho. A lot of the maids came, had a lot of willingness, and good body language, but I could not communicate with them. “Number two was your ability to read and write a little because my children are getting older. In a foreign country, I need somebody who can take succinct clear messages, who can follow instructions, for whom I can write things they can read. So reading and writing were important criteria and, also, just a sense of responsibility. “I needed somebody who had a good past record of being stable at jobs – somebody who stayed with one employer for a significant length of time and whose reasons for leaving their employers were clear. Either the employer was leaving the country or something understandable happened. There were lots of people whom you could see had changed jobs every year. They could not give me a clear explanation and I was careful about what could happen if I ended up hiring the wrong person. Why did they change jobs so often? Those were the kinds of things that I was looking out for in my choice of maids.” “From your experience, do you think that Sotho maids have a preference of whom they would like to work for, in terms of nationalities and race?” “I definitely noticed that some maids I interviewed would tell me, oh they’ve only worked for Lekgoa – white people – and so on, and to me I did not use that negatively. I felt that they were being honest in expressing their fears and concerns. Some actually said they were afraid to work for Makwerekwere. But overall, they prefer to work for foreigners because I think they get more pay than if they work for the Basotho.” “Why is that?” 285

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“At least personally, I followed the minimum standards recommended by the NGO and I truly believe if somebody is working for you, for them to be able to survive, in all fairness, you need to give them a certain minimum. We all buy bread from the same place, sugar from the same place, it’s not different. So either I am ready to do that or I shouldn’t hire a maid.” “And do you think that if a maid is working for a foreigner, her attitude towards the foreigner is different, depending on which foreigner it is? I mean if you are there in Lesotho and you are a foreigner. You could either be seen as a welcomed foreigner or as a foreigner who is not welcomed, and maids might internalise and reproduce some of those attitudes.” “I think they treat you differently when they know you got the job from outside before you came into their country, and it makes you different from a foreigner who is hustling and has hustled within the country and got something. I could see they kept making that distinction to me. They would say, ‘Oh they have come to take our jobs,’ or ‘They’ve come and they are not treating us nice.’ They say all sorts of things about people who hustled within the community to get to where they are. They refer a lot to hairdressers. People who have come and hustled and are making it now and looking down on them.” “What do you have to share on the social life of maids, especially those staying in with you? There is this aspect of boyfriends coming in to stay. I don’t know if you had such experiences in Lesotho.” “No, my maid in Lesotho never lived in with me for several different reasons. Overall, one thing the maids feel when they live in is that there are no working hours, you just have them working all the time. Even though I had beautiful Servants’ Quarters and everything, she chose not to live in and I did not really bother because I had Eve, so there was a big girl at home. “Sometimes if I were to leave and travel suddenly, there were other Nigerians in the community, so I would just ask somebody to come and stay at home with the children. Sometimes, if I couldn’t find somebody and knew I was going to be away, the maid would accept to stay as the responsible adult in the house. So she did not refuse to stay over as such, she simply did not live in. Also, I felt my children were getting to the stage where I wanted the maid to be able to leave and them to be able to do some of the chores. The maid cannot pick up and run and clean up after them 24 hours a day. They are getting big so they should do some of the chores.” “Do you know some people, friends perhaps, who had problems with maids staying in and all the like?” 286

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“We had a family friend. They had maids staying in but what they did was have two maids. One who did the cleaning and the cooking, and one who was younger to watch the children. They gave them alternative weekends off. One maid stayed in for two weeks, and then she had two weekends off, while the other maid came in to work over the weekends. So there was no question of boyfriends and relations coming into the premises.” “In general, is that an issue?” “I’ve heard about it being an issue, but it hasn’t directly concerned me. My maid is living in with me here in Botswana because she doesn’t have any other place to live. But I give her time off. There is no question of bringing people into the premises.” “I know that the domain of hiring maids is the domain of the woman. Does a woman take into consideration her partner when making a choice of maid? I mean in every sense of the word.” “I’ll just go back to Nigeria, where I have always had somebody who is either related or not related, but I’ve also had people who were not related to me at all, whom I’ve chosen as maids. In my whole time of bringing up my children, I’ve had Nigerians as maids. There was a time when it was very popular and easy to get maids from eastern Nigeria. I’ve had maids from eastern Nigeria, and I’ve had maids who were neither my husband’s nor my relations. “Before I left Nigeria for Lesotho, I was very much around the house. My job was demanding but not as demanding as it is today. Maybe I wouldn’t do the same thing today. At the time it really didn’t matter to me. I just needed a hardworking young person, who came and worked and got paid. So what was probably important to me was honesty.” “Are you familiar with cases, even in Nigeria, where maids have come in and eventually taken over the house from the madam?” “Gosh! My line of thinking is totally different. If I have a husband and a maid comes in and there is an issue, I have no issue with the maid. The issue is about my husband and me, honestly. I don’t believe in third parties. There is a fundamental difficulty between the two of you before a third party can look into any kind of hole, so instead of hitting at the symptoms, go look for the cause. “That is my perspective. When the two primary parties lay the blame on a third party, they are going for a soft target, but they must know that something else went wrong first. So it is unfortunate that we just tend to lay blame on soft targets. If things are solid, no matter how attractive or tempting a maid is, how could she possibly unseat me vis-à-vis my husband? If you have a solid relationship, you know it will never be an issue. So the problem is not the maid, it’s the relationship.” 287

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“What are criteria for solidness?” “Oh, I think honesty, an open, communicating relationship.” “Here Zimbabwean maids are seen as hardworking but thieves. Do you have experiences with maids like that?” “I think the Zimbabweans can be likened to the Nigerians in Nigeria. The girl who came from eastern Nigeria, I will never forget. She could cook. She could clean. She could work. She did everything you asked of her, 100 per cent. But then the day she hit, she hit hard. She stole big. “I think you let down your guards, as they lure you into a false sense of confidence and trust. Initially, you know you are taking a Nigerian and that Nigerians steal. But they get you to the point where you start thinking of them as an exception. She was doing everything, running everything. We were in the habit of locking our bedroom. Gradually we did not lock it. She stayed and stayed and one good day, she picked up all my jewellery and vanished! “Later on we found it was some kind of racket involving the people who supplied us with the maid. They would send them off to families in the city with instructions to work their way into the confidence of employers, then to strike hard and vanish. They would take a girl who stole in Abuja to potential employers in Lagos and pretend the girl had just arrived from the village.” “So it’s a whole racket?” “Cartel, it was a racket.” “Do you have similar rackets in Lesotho?” “I’ve not heard. Apart from the Basotho, I’ve not heard of any other nationality working there as house helps. What I found out, in working with Basotho house helps is that – again it has to do with the politics and the history of this whole southern African region – while there was a Master – the boss is the boss, and the maid the maid, and this is really engraved in the culture –, if somebody chooses to be a maid, they want to be a maid. That’s what they want to be. They do their job very well. They clean, they do everything that they need to do. Their work is to be a maid. “I don’t know about the Zimbabweans, but in Nigeria, the average Nigerian doesn’t want to be a maid. They just use it as a stepping stone. You don’t have people who first say, ‘Ok! I will be a maid. I’m going to use this to raise my children, everything.’ Maybe it’s there now. But overall, people want to move on to better things. But in Lesotho, you find people who just want to be a maid. ‘I’ll stay a maid and raise my children as a maid.’ And wishing they could be other things than maids but, ‘I’m going to stay doing what I do and do it the best I can.’” 288

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“For how long were you in Lesotho?” “Four years.” “What would you say are the attitudes of the Basotho towards three types of foreigners – Africans from other countries, whites, and Asians?” “I will start with the Asians. They hate the Asians. But they have a history with the Asians where at one point one of their leaders took some kind of money from China to give Chinese people Basotho citizenship. So they had hundreds, they gave some kind of millions. Anyway, that’s according to the grapevine. Since I’ve not seen, I cannot confirm or prove that particular story. “So they have lots of Chinese who own shops in villages, everywhere. And Lesotho is a Free Trade Zone, so there are lots of factories. Everything that is for the export market and most of these Free Trade Zones have been joined by the big American companies, the Asians, who now leave Asia to come and settle there where labour is next to nothing. So there’s been a lot of unfair treatment of the Basotho. They feel exploited by the Chinese who are just the middlemen in the process. The real owners are in the United States. It’s what they don’t know. So there’s a lot of hostility towards Chinese. “And proof is what happened in 1998. As soon as there is any unrest, they just go burning Chinese shops even if it has nothing to do with Chinese. I heard that a woman went into a Chinese shop with a baby on her back and the baby maybe pulled something from the shelves and she did not realise it. So as she was walking out, the guard there said she had stolen, and they beat her until she died. “The Basotho call the place Mabiseng, some place right there in Maseru. The child took a little thing worth R2 or something and the woman did not even know. And they beat her to death. So there is a lot of hostility against Asians. They cannot distinguish who is Chinese, Korean... So long as you look that way you need to work to make them know you are different. Otherwise that’s how they treat them.” Dr Mrs Yorigbo shook her head disapprovingly. “For the black Africans, it’s the same. It’s like they see you come there and hustle and then if you turn around and you are insulting them, they will be hostile towards you. I was brought in, and they knew I was on contract. My family would not stay there. I was going to go. Part of my duty was to try to transfer skills to a Basotho who could take over from me if it’s not possible for somebody else to come. “But still there is some hostility, unless you talk with them. So the few people who know how I came in treated me differently. But on the road, you look just like any other Makwerekwere who is hustling. So they insult 289

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you, they treat you badly. It comes with the chances and everything you take in life. I think it’s just part of it. I didn’t take it badly. I usually took it as an opportunity to educate them. “Then for the whites, again the Basotho, they have a lot of anger towards the Boers – the Afrikaners. So until you talk, they won’t know you are not an Afrikaner. Every white person they see, they think he is an Afrikaner and thus guilty until he or she can prove otherwise. So American, English, unless you talk, unless you’ve been in the community for long and they know you, you are Afrikaner by default. “And they really like people who can speak their language. If you are not Basotho and you can greet them in their language and try to communicate, it really tempers them down – something the Afrikaners don’t do. Other people – expatriates – try to learn the language – the basic greetings –, but not the Afrikaners. So it kind of distinguishes them a little bit. “Other than that, in 1999 they blamed a lot of their troubles on South Africa invading them and causing turmoil and so on. And it created a lot of hate towards South Africans. To the point where we in our NGO even told the American tourists not to wear shorts. ‘If you wear shorts, they think you are a Boer. And you know, they will shoot you with stones, they will tell you to go back to your country, leave us in our poverty.’ “So in a way, I feel there is reason for hostility to every particular group. There is no blanket reason, but like anywhere else in the world, white people get preferential treatment, whether we like it or not. They don’t question them as much. They don’t doubt them as much. If something happens, it behoves you the black to prove yourself. Meanwhile the white person needs to really be stupid to be caught.” “Do you think in the eyes of the Basotho there is a difference between whites who are not Boers, that there is a certain hierarchy of whites from Europe and America?” “I don’t think in Lesotho they make that distinction much. I didn’t see it, or even hear of it, or perceive it in any way.” “Along the same lines, here in Botswana people believe very strongly that foreigners in general have a lot of TLC – Tender Loving Care –, unlike the local men who haven’t and who do not assume their responsibilities. And they say amongst the foreigners on top are the Lekgoa who have got the most TLC. At the bottom are the Asians who don’t care for anybody. Next to Lekgoa you have Makwerekwere who are good. I don’t know whether in Lesotho you have such classifications as well?” “Not that I can think of. It is not something I had noticed or heard mentioned, not really. I don’t know how many Basotho have to deal with Lekgoa in general. But there was a big thing about, oh the Makwerekweres 290

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are taking their girls because they are nicer to them, they provide for them, they take care of them. In southern Africa, women have been the heads of families and do everything. Then all of a sudden they get this Makwerekwere man who is willing to reverse the rule and take care of them. Meanwhile the typical southern African man either gets retrenched from the mines, sits there in low self-esteem, or becomes a wife abuser or an alcoholic. You meet this Makwerekwere who is instead working and takes care of you and feels responsible for you.” “How would you compare those experiences or those attitudes with your understanding of Nigeria and such relationships?” “I think in Nigeria it’s the reverse. Women just sit and wait for some man to take care of them. That’s the expectation. That’s my impression, that a lot of women just sit and wait for a man to take care of them. In Lesotho women were out there doing things for themselves and taking care of men. It was the reverse of Nigeria. In Nigeria, a lot of women expect men to take care of them.” “What do you think accounts for those different attitudes?” “Oh, I think it’s just cultural. It’s going to change one day. Culture changes. It’s just that it takes time for things to happen, for people to realise that it can be changed or it has to change. Now in Nigeria with the economic situation and poverty, people are realising that cultural needs have to change. That it needs to be both parties contributing to help each other to help the family. So already, things are changing. In southern Africa, the more men become empowered, the greater the likelihood there will be a mid point.” Dr Nanny commented. “Maybe it is economic also, in the sense that the economic history here, as you put it, is one where men went away to the mines. So women learnt to fend for themselves and got used to that, and many times they also provide for the men. In Nigeria, there’s very little industrialisation, so men have always been in the neighbourhood. So the dominant pattern remains. Is it something like that?” Dr Mrs Yorigbo agreed. “Yes, and also in Nigeria, the men are educated. In Lesotho the men are not that educated. I don’t know about Botswana, but in Lesotho because of going to the mines, you just become a herd boy on the average. You did a bit of schooling, and as soon as you were height and size for the mines, you went through the process, went up to the mines. “There is no problem of girl education in Lesotho. All the girls are educated. So the girls stayed behind, went to school, went abroad, studied, came back and then, you see a situation where – and not that it is important in any way – a man is not the head of the family because women marry 291

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down or don’t marry at all. But in my mind I find it very difficult that I have a Masters degree and I just go out and marry somebody who is a driver, because we need to have common grounds of conversation, common life experiences, common focuses in terms of bringing up children. I find it to be so divergent. They need to focus on boy education.” “Girls are overly educated?” “It’s just that Africa is a man’s world. So the Prime Minister has to be a man. Ministers have to be men and so on, but the technicians, the people who matter, who really have the technical expertise of what needs to happen, they are all women.” “Ok, do you have any questions of your own?” It was rare for Dr Nanny to ask this question. The only reason I could think of for her doing it now was because this was her last scheduled interview before her return to the USA. “No, I wish you luck with your work.” “Thank you.”

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I

fell in love with the name Daisy Zambezi the first time I heard it. The soothing sound it made when pronounced reminded me of my favourite lullaby as a child. The name belonged to Dr Daisy Zambezi Moyo, a Zimbabwean lecturer at Patrice Lumumba University in Harare. She was the last employer of maids we interviewed. Dr Nanny met her by accident at the airport as she was waiting for her delayed flight back to the USA via Johannesburg. Dr Moyo had come to Gaborone to attend a conference on ‘Domestic Violence’ and was on her way to another in Cape Town on ‘Rights of the African Woman: From Sister Talk to Sister Work.’ Dr Nanny insisted they have tea. She started by introducing herself and regretting not being informed about the conference which had just ended. Then they had a longish discussion on the crisis in Zimbabwe – who was right and who was wrong – before finally zeroing in on the maids issue. Did Dr Moyo have any experiences to share? When she said she did, Dr Nanny signalled me to turn on the tape recorder. Dr Moyo started and spoke like a tape recording, pausing only once, having understood exactly what Dr Nanny wanted to know. “Allow me to put my reactions to maids in perspective by outlining a few things about my life,” Dr Moyo began. “I have been treated as a maid, as free domestic labour. So generally, I sympathise with maids and do not like them abused. At the same time, I realise that maids steal, lie, cheat, and do other undesirable things. So abuse is not a one-way street. If anything, employers live in fear of maids who hide behind perceived or assumed powerlessness but are capable of hurting employers. I therefore find myself with some cognitive dissonance as an employer who previously felt and still feels that maids are abused. Employers live in fear of house break-ins orchestrated by maids. Maids might abuse employers’ children and for married women have affairs with husbands.” This was music to Dr Nanny’s ears. She was clearly absorbed. She asked if Dr Moyo wanted more tea, but she said no, opting for a Windhoek lager instead, which was brought instantly.

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“My family moved from being fortunate to being unfortunate when I was a child,” she resumed after a sip. “My father worked for the National Railways and we basically lived well compared to other kids in my village. I lived with my father in Bulawayo when I started school. Although we could afford a maid and had maids on and off, I learnt to take care of myself early because I lived with my father and we had no maid in Bulawayo. I could cook and wash my uniform when I was in Grade 1. Granted, I did not do a good job but everyone assumed it was done and done well enough. “When we had maids, they were treated as part of the family. They ate what we ate, and I shared the same blankets with them as the only girl then. However, when my father went into exile because of the politics of liberation, we were left in a tough situation. Way back then no one, especially our relatives, thought he would come back. He was right at the warfront as a fighter, having turned down the safer option of teaching in a refugee camp, although, in truth, the camps were also targets of Smith’s attacks. “Anyway, because there were seven of us then, things were pretty tough. I am talking one meal a day, complimented by traditional roots, and complicated by no school and no clothes. “When my father returned with a limb missing and a nervous condition, things continued to be tough. So much had gone wrong it was hard to patch thing up and move on. During the dissident troubles we moved to Harare partly to run away but also so my father could be closer to medical care. “At that time another relative ran away from the small town where he worked because of the political situation and came to Harare. This relative was more affluent than we were. Because I babysat all my siblings from my mother’s fourth pregnancy to the seventh, I am by all accounts ‘good with children.’ So this relative’s wife used to call me to live with them during the holidays to help her maid raise their youngest son, who by the way is the same age as my youngest brother. Later I lived with this household when my parents moved out of town after my father was fed up with limping nervously around Harare with war veteran claims to which nobody paid any attention. So while doing my A Levels, I spent part of my holidays with this family where essentially I was treated as a maid. “Despite being at a critical stage in my secondary education, I couldn’t study because there was always a lot of work to be done. The suburban home had to be kept spotless and the baby clean and well fed and the nappies changed regularly. In the evening I could not study because the woman wanted to save electricity, so she insisted on me resting then.” Dr Moyo dwelled on the word resting, to emphasise her point. Then she related the abuse she experienced, saw, and heard. 294

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“We did not eat well. The relative’s biological children had the right to eat first and if there was something left over, we could eat. Stale bread and tea usually had to suffice as lunch for us. At times we were given sweet potato and tea for lunch. Despite my poor background, even this was considered bad food if eaten as a meal.” A good storyteller, Dr Moyo enjoyed her own story, one of someone who had made it despite life’s frustrations. Dr Nanny made a sign to me to ensure that the tape was running. I could see she didn’t want to miss a word. Fortunately, South African Airways flight 33 was delayed indefinitely, something about a storm and visibility problems in Johannesburg that made it difficult for planes to land and take off. I didn’t know much about researchers, but I could tell Dr Nanny was a lucky one. “Often there was no rest,” Dr Moyo went on. “When we rested, especially in the afternoon, the kids would report it and we could get into trouble. Although I was never insulted directly because of the kinship relations at play, I was shouted at together with the maid, if for instance a breadcrumb was found on the table, or even on the floor. I mean it literally. When I look back, this woman must have had some problems of her own either at home with her husband or at work. We were a soft target on which she released stress.” Dr Nanny nodded understandingly. “Despite two geysers in the house, the geyser to the main bathroom and the kitchen was switched off to save electricity. If we wanted hot bath water we had to ask for it from the woman of the house from the geyser in the main bedroom. This was possible only when she was around. Otherwise she kept the main bedroom locked and it was a no go area. Only the paid maid cleaned it. I kept off it.” Dr Nanny nodded in understanding. “Sugar, soap, toothpaste and other such things like that were kept locked away and she inspected her groceries cabinet at random to see if any tins, packets or bottles might have gone missing. The woman of the house refilled the sugar basin in person or sent her children to do it. To this day I never figured out exactly where she kept it, but I know it was in the cupboards in the bedroom in which I slept. They were locked all the time except for one part where I kept my clothes. Anyway, I was never curious to find out. “Inspections filled me with a lot of anxiety because if anything went wrong, the shouting was ceaseless – never directed at me because there was no way I could steal anything because my parents would not have it, but I was part of the domestic labour force, so if the maid was shouted 295

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at, I got it too. I was detached and disinterested though, because I saw my being there as a temporary measure and an accident of kinship. I was convinced that one day I would be my own person, and I thus worked hard academically in spite of it all.” She looked up at Dr Nanny and me, as if to say, ‘And it has come to pass.’ At that point, I couldn’t help whispering a little prayer to St. Jude, patron saint for desperate cases, to help me out as well. I wanted to be as useful as this Dr Daisy Zambezi Moyo, who not only reminded me of my childhood lullabies, but also of my own travails. Dr Moyo continued, “Despite the fact that the main maid lived in, we were never allowed to sit in the lounge, or to watch TV. Generally, I did not like being at the receiving end of this attitude and behaviour. Although this particular paid maid stayed for quite some time with this family, she was fired after she abused the phone. “I thought at the time that they had been rough with her from the get go and for no apparent reason. As a result, I wanted to never treat my maids as dirt. I try to be fair but firm. If work is done humanly well, I do not care about other things.” She smiled, before proceeding to tell us her experiences with and fears of maids as an employer. “Generally, my maids clean and do laundry only.” She stressed the word only. “My brother and I do the cooking. When it comes to washing, we use a machine so that the maid only irons.”Again she stressed only. “At the moment though, washing is by hand and there is no ironing because there is no electricity where we live. Before I moved to the house, I lived in a flat. Maids came as part-timers either twice a week or once. Basically, they get breakfast at their own convenient time and lunch with us. “Despite all this, I have had thieves. They pilfer small things at first and bigger ones with time. When it starts, you feel, ‘Well this is small, so there is no need to be mad.’ But small get big and bigger. I am talking sugar, salt, maize meal, sort of going faster than normal but you are not quite sure. Later, bits of clothing, maybe one sock, then both. I have had money disappearing in the form of loose change, and the final straw was when a maid disappeared with my favourite Estee Lauder perfume and then 50USD. “Still I did not fire her when the perfume disappeared because I had just returned from South Africa and I thought it was possible I had forgotten it there. I did not think that someone could be so stupid as to steal something like that. I was wrong because at my friend’s house where she also worked, and where my friend and her husband buy meat in bulk, she stole frozen meat. And my friend reported that she came to her house wearing some rather up market perfume and she wondered where she got it. 296

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“There are also media reports in Zimbabwe, where maids arrange with thieves to have employers’ houses cleaned by thieves, their boyfriends or friends. Thieves use maids as scouts to suss out what the house looks like, what is where, the employers’ movements, and so on. “So we all live in fear of maids. It’s hard to know your maid and vouch for her. The use of reference letters does not help much because they can be written by anyone including members of a gang.” Dr Nanny nodded her acknowledgement. “Maids lie,” Dr Moyo continued, accepting a mint from Dr Nanny, but then passing it onto me when she realised mint and lager are not good bedfellows. “These lies are connected to the previous point and are handy as a defence when accusations of theft are levelled against them. They have many soapy stories for when they ask for time off or miss work. Always a sad story of chronic sickness in the family, death, or some other ill fortune of such intricate detail that you could shed tears. Granted, with the scourge of AIDS this is possible. “The surprising thing is for most of us we do not visit all our sick relatives nor attend all funerals.” She stressed the word all. “It is simply not possible at the rate people are dying. “The last thief I had while at the flat used this tactic well. She even used these stories to borrow money from my friend and me so we could not fire her. After giving someone an advance, you want to get your money’s worth in labour so she reasoned. She pretended that as the poor person she claimed to be, she could not pay back the advance except by rendering service through labour. It sort of worked really. She was rather good at human psychology. And it was tiring keeping up with her little plots.” She laughed a disciplined laugh, tinged with both anger and admiration. “I had maids who brought their children to work. I felt compromised. On the one hand I subscribe to feminist ideology that calls for child friendly work environments for parents with children, but of course it’s not easy when I am the employer. At the same time, I think it’s good for my own beliefs to be tested. Between you and me it’s all a load of bullshit. It’s hard to take one’s children to work.” Dr Nanny frowned, then smiled, but Dr Moyo looked serious. “I had a maid once who refused to eat, preferring to take the food home. Again this is difficult. If for instance there are three pieces of meat, is it logical that she will take only that, when she has two or more children and possibly a husband with whom she needs to share that food, and especially when she knows there is more food in the fridge in my house? 297

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“Therein lays an opportunity to steal. She did this with other snacks like popcorn. She did not last. We parted amicably. I initiated the breakup. Do not get me wrong, I sympathise and get the logic. Most mothers feel uneasy to eat relatively well when their children are starving. But I ask myself why it should be me paying for the nation’s poverty when I pay taxes and contribute to social security funds that are wasted away by men in power without vision.” She eyed Dr Nanny from the corners of her glasses. “There are unspoken problems which I deduce sometimes. In my case, I think most maids take a look at me and think, ‘She is young and does not come across like a typical madam, so why give her any respect?’ I also think because of a small age difference between the maids and myself – a good number have been slightly older –, they tend to be patronising. One called me ‘mainini,’ meaning mother’s young sister, or it could also mean one’s young sister “This ageism drives me nuts. Maininis are people with whom one has joking relations! Anyway in the cultural context we are in, it is better than the maid addressing me as Madam, which sounds white, racist, cold and mean. It’s politically incorrect for me. “I definitely do not want to be on a first name basis with maids. It reduces the authority in the relationship, I mean my authority. I have never discussed this openly with any of my maids, though. I think it is improper to even talk about it. Some have called me ‘Ms Daisy Zambezi Moyo.’ I find this also a little ‘hoity toity,’ a bit too English. In some households, maids address the female owner as Mama, meaning mother, which would be inappropriate in my case, because I am not a mother and not old enough to be their mothers. In any case, the word mother seems to be used for women who are wives, which I am not. So I tend to miss an opportunity to stamp my authority.” Dr Moyo spoke as if she had reflected a lot on these things and was just waiting for an opportunity to air her opinion. I wondered what she would have done, had Dr Nanny not come along. Then I imagined that with all those conferences she attends, she must have the opportunity to air her views often. “My current maid is a live in maid. She is a month old at work and calls me Sisi Daisy. This means older sister Daisy. I am trying to get used to it. My siblings call me Daisy. They do not prefix my name with anything which shows birth order or seniority. As I said, I do not want to be on a first name basis with maids. They would use that. I still feel a little uncomfortable because I do not seem to be able to find an acceptable appellation which bears witness to my authority without making me sound like an imperialist.” Dr Moyo looked concerned. 298

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“There are other problems which are also widely reported in Zimbabwe, namely that maids end up in relationships with the men of the house. Theories abound as to why this is the case. Some say that men love women to work for them and to do their bidding. So the story goes that where maids do most of the housework, men are attracted to them. Thus in Zimbabwe in many households, married women do not allow maids in the main bedroom which they clean themselves. There is also controversy regarding maids washing underwear or arranging it. Personally, I wash my own as do other people with whom I live. “I cannot tell for sure if this is founded in truth as I am not married. A friend I referred to earlier told me that the maid we shared went to her flat well dressed and made up. When we compared notes, it seems she dressed down when she came to my house and up when she went to hers. Well, I have no husband, so maybe baiting the husband was the idea. The man was not interested apparently.” And she must not have been interested in Dr Moyo’s brothers, I thought. “The problem of men having affairs with maids is so prevalent, at least according to media accounts. An ex-maid wrote a good play, which was adopted for a well received TV series. It was called Nzungu Muriva, meaning ‘rat bait.’ The play explored the tricky, potentially sexual situations in which maids find themselves. Also, how maids seduce vulnerable employers. In the play, the woman of the house ended up in an affair with her husband’s chauffeur.” Dr Moyo chuckled. “Maids have complained that their uniforms – sold in shops in town – are ugly, saying they are loose and straight dresses meant to make them unattractive so they don’t compete with the madams. The uniforms come with a headscarf and an apron. They are made of cheap cotton. This makes them cheap, which is fine for me, because it is employers who buy the uniforms. This is also cheap for manufacturers, I think. My current maid has two, more because I think she has to save her clothes. She has not complained.” Dr Moyo stopped to catch her breath, and accepted another Windhoek lager, on condition that Dr Nanny agree to share the can with her. “To go round all these problems some people rely on distant relatives who cannot steal because they would not have anywhere to hide. Also, relatives ordinarily are less likely to brazenly have a relationship with one’s husband, but it is not impossible. “I do not like employing relatives because it creates problems in the kinship system when the maid goes home to report some real or imagined injustice inflicted by the employer. It’s compromising. The village ends up knowing that you live in a house with this or that gadget which might sound opulent to them. It invites envy.” 299

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Dr Nanny found this point too interesting to miss, as she jotted something down in her little notebook. “Although in Zimbabwe maids’ wages are regulated somewhat and they have a trade union, the wages are still low,” Dr Moyo remarked. “No one can look after a family on that much. Most people pay less than the set levels anyway. So many maids combine housework with other things like informal market trade, such as vending vegetables. The returns are low however, given the high number of players and the low volumes in the sector, and especially the current political and economic crisis. “In a desperate quest to make ends meet, some maids increasingly combine housework with prostitution or multiple partner survival strategies, having a number of boyfriends and venturing even further afield sexually. Many have poor parents to look after and children also. This might also explain the theft.” I couldn’t help thinking that Dr Nanny looked like a student sitting in class. “So far I have referred to female domestics,” Dr Moyo continued, seemingly in love with every word she uttered. “The men are equally as bad, and I have a colleague who has had the nastiest experiences with them. My own experience is limited to one guy who was looking after my house as it was being built. He is younger than I in age but older culturally in that he is married with two children. He is a head of household. He always ran this by me when we had differences and when at first I tried to be an understanding employer. I have since given him a piece of my mind and he knows where he stands with me. “Anyway, he took stuff from my grounds. Let me tell you about it. He suggested I have a vegetable garden. I agreed. He wanted to be paid for preparing the garden. I agreed. I supplied the seeds for seedlings. I paid for the water and supplied the manure and the pesticides. In total there were 12 beds of rape and cabbage. He chose these because they mature early and would give higher returns. However this guy just sold the vegetables when they ripened, and I would often find myself with no vegetables for my small household! “When I complained, at first I think he wondered whether I actually relied on those vegetables or was mocking low income people who eat only vegetables, as opposed to higher income people who can afford meat. I found this annoying because I eat and love vegetables, especially fresh ones from my own garden. When the vegetables kept disappearing, I put my foot down and forbade him to sell the vegetables without my tacit permission. 300

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“With that, he stopped watering the garden and the vegetables eventually died. Granted there were too many vegetables for just me and my brother, and this guy, but I did not want him selling for his benefit at 100 per cent profit at a price to me, especially when some of my own relatives went without vegetables because they could not afford them! Again, why should I feed the nation?” She looked at Dr Nanny as if expecting an answer. Dr Moyo continued. “After that experience, I surmised that theft is a way of getting even where there is inequality. Domestics think that their employers have more than they need, so they help themselves through theft. Theft from the point of view of the employer and a survival strategy or sort of ‘enforced sharing,’ I suppose, from the point of view of the maid. Given that many of them come from peasant and poor working class backgrounds, a house in the suburbs is impressive. In Zimbabwe poverty is getting worse so the poor are slipping into deeper and deeper holes of misery. “Many in Zimbabwe, in my opinion anyway, appreciate that one has to work hard to achieve upward social mobility. If opportunities are closed on the work front, one has to steal or cut corners to get by or improve oneself. Theft is also part of the history of domestic service. It was ok then for blacks to steal from whites because we all said whites have a lot of money. Today, it hurts us because we are victims. I think we need a new way of explaining this trend.” Again, Dr Nanny jotted something in her little notebook. “I also think there is a lot of otherising between employers and maids. I try to talk to my maid so I understand who she is and what her dreams are, but sometimes I lose it, especially when she does not perform to satisfaction,” Dr Moyo continued. “I think it is important to appreciate what these maids’ attitudes towards work are because their attitudes determine how they perform. I think many Zimbabweans see domestic work as work for desperados. Many hope it is temporary and use it to accumulate as much as possible and then leave for greener pastures! Besides, in Zimbabwe it is not respectable work when done locally, but ok when done in the UK of course! Although with the crisis, the gates of the UK are closing fast, and Botswana and South Africa offer viable regional alternatives to flooding Zimbabweans… Let me end here. It’s your research, after all.” “Please don’t stop, I’m sure you’ve more to share,” Dr Nanny pleaded. “Let’s have lunch if the flight is delayed further. We could drive back to town, have something to eat, and even if we miss flying today, there is always tomorrow.” 301

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Dr Moyo told her not to worry. “I don’t have much more to say, only rather embarrassing maids’ stories, which I’m uncomfortable sharing with a stranger.” This made Dr Nanny all the keener and she kept pushing until Dr Moyo finally yielded. “Ok,” Dr Moyo started, reluctantly. “Briefly, some time back, I hired a 26 year old mother of one through an employment agency. She had a bad smell. I put it down to poor hygiene and thought, ‘Well, I am a feminist, I should empower other sisters – from Sister talk to Sister work,’ know what I mean?” Dr Nanny nodded. “So I got into talking mode, gently talking about hygiene, female hygiene – read my lips, underwear, etc. The smell persisted. After some time, it dawned on me that this woman had a sexually transmitted malaise of some sort, which she did not want treated because she goes to a sect which has faith healing. “It got so bad that a brother who was visiting complained. Imagine a smell like rotten flesh! I discovered, quite by accident, a bottle of holy water in the bathroom. If I say I went ballistic, it’s an understatement. Anyway, I did not want to fire her, not that she was good – couldn’t clean a thing, was lazy, and ate like a whole battalion of soldiers. She seemed to enjoy the fact that there were just the two of us, so she could eat as much as she wanted. “I felt sorry for her. She had gone through a pity party telling me all her woes – a failed marriage to a soldier then in the DRC, a baby, poverty, ill health, etc.! The ill health bit, I suspected HIV infection, but still that is no reason to fire anyone if she is marginally reasonable. I was moved of course. When I asked colleagues, I was told that ‘holy water’ is also used to cook food to cleanse the innards! My food! She had to go! And she was fired.” Dr Moyo crushed the can of Windhoek lager in her hand. “You must know that in Harare Holy Water is taken from a stream into which sewage is discharged! Besides, banks of the stream are home to some homeless people. Imagine what it means. I was shocked and thought that maybe I was naive, maybe I sympathise too much with poorer persons – I know what it feels like, having been there too.” Dr Nanny reassured her, “I understand. You did your best for her.” Dr Moyo continued, “The one after that was not a live in. She spent the day and went to her husband after I got back from work. She came with her baby, again because I had Mother Teresa’s spirit in me. ‘Help others, feel sorry,’ it told me. The baby was malnourished, for all intents and purposes. Again, there was a long tale of the mother-in-law giving 302

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directives about feeding solids. Basically, she said no solids until the baby is 2 years! I said, ‘I will get you arrested if you don’t feed the baby something substantial to complement breast milk.’ The baby howled all the time. According to Zimbabwean laws, you can get arrested for child neglect, not that anyone has ever been. “I took to buying baby fruit and peanut butter for the baby’s porridge. Surprising thing was the peanut butter never lasted two weeks, a 750 ml jar. Luckily, at baby clinic the nurses imposed observed feeding, meaning a trip to the clinic daily to feed the baby as they watched. So the baby had to feed properly. But it was my food. Later I discovered that baby nappies were being washed at my house, with my water, my soap even, when we had water shortages – meaning this woman was saving water at her house, by taking advantage of my water. After a confrontation, she admitted that because I have a car, she did not think I had any trouble fetching water. I did not like to be taken for granted. I had to use African traditional speak to reach out to her about not washing baby things just anywhere…” Dr Moyo heaved a sigh of exhaustion. “I got tired and asked my mum to get me maids from my village or its environs. I have had two so far. One left because she passed her O Levels and had to go to Teacher’s College after I pulled strings. The one after that is still with me. Girls from my village are best because they are shameable – I can report them to their parents. I can also go out of my way to do something for the parents. It’s bribery but it works. I hate it though, but I need stability – can’t be looking for maids all my life. Anyway, maids can make you go mad. I do want to help and support other women, but how can I possibly fill an ocean with my little droplets of water? Sisterhood is good, structural changes a categorical imperative…” Just then the loudspeakers at the Sir Seretse Khama International Airport came alive, announcing the arrival of the South African Airways flight number 32 from Johannesburg and calling on passengers to go through departure formalities. Dr Moyo stood up, saying, “Sorry, got to go.” “Until next time, I hope,” said Dr Nanny, embracing her. She insisted that Dr Moyo come to the USA to give some lectures at her and sister universities. Dr Moyo must really have impressed her, for this was the first time I had witnessed her openly invite another scholar to visit and talk on the same subject she herself was researching. Parting between Dr Winter-Bottom Nanny and me was not easy. We had grown close working together, and I had come to love sitting in at these interviews, almost unnoticed, taking mental notes, sometimes jotting 303

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in the notebook she insisted I carry with me, imbibing all I heard, and enjoying the body language at play, between Dr Nanny and those she interviewed. The plane eventually took off, leaving me feeling terribly empty, as I had grown very fond of Dr Nanny. How would I cope on my own, transcribing tapes of interviews? I knew it was not going to be fun, but I had committed myself beyond turning back.

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Chapter Thirty Six

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D

r Winter-Bottom Nanny was away for a long time. I had fulfilled my contract with her, by transcribing and sending via email the interviews, just as I had promised before she left. Satisfied with the work, she had paid me handsomely via the Western Union electronic money transfer service. It was the biggest amount of money I had ever handled. I proceeded to see how best I could invest it, only to run into difficulties, with my Zimbabwean boyfriend, Noway, and with a Motswana guy. I’m too scared to mention his name. Exactly four years and six months after she left, I got a surprise phone call from Dr Nanny, saying she was in Gaborone on a restitution visit. She had an autographed copy of her book for me, and could I meet her at the Gaborone Cactus Hotel at 6 pm? ‘Of course,’ I screamed with excitement. I wanted to see her new baby, the one I had helped to midwife. Indeed, I was overjoyed to receive a signed copy of Burdens of Womanhood: Being an Underling at the Margins, which I couldn’t wait to read, curious as I was, to see what she had made of my and the other accounts I had dutifully helped her gather and painfully transcribed verbatim. Although Dr Nanny had told me that repetitive questioning was ‘the soul of ethnography,’ I was dying to know what she had been able to make of material collected through the boring practice of having everybody reply to the same set of questions. Dr Nanny could see excitement inscribed on my face when she handed me 2000USD as my share of what she termed ‘the generous royalties’ she had been paid in advance for her book by her publishers. I didn’t understand much about royalties, but I was pleased with the doors of possibilities that the money instantly opened up for me. “With this money, I’m heading straight for Mimboland,” I told her, amid hugs of appreciation. “With Noway, I hope,” said Dr Nanny, hungry for news. “Noway is history.” She took a seat. “Tell,” she said, like a master gossip. “Story long, and time short,” I tried to wriggle out.

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But Dr Nanny was her old stubborn self. “I’m in a hurry to go nowhere,” she said, with a concrete look of you-seem-to-have-forgotten-the-patientresearcher-that-I-am on her face. I gave in. “Then be ready to stay up all night,” I told her. She asked me to come with her to the poolside, where she ordered drinks, switched off her cell phone, and asked me to do the same. “Now tell,” she said, switching on her tape recorder. “No taping this one,” I warned. She switched off the recorder. And I began… As I remember telling you several years ago, I met Noway on my way to Zambia. And the reason I was going to Zambia was to look for secondhand clothes to sell in Gaborone. But I didn’t know that in Botswana, foreigners are not allowed to do that line of business. On going to Zambia, I forgot my residence permit, and at the border I had problems with the immigration authorities. I tried to phone some of my friends to copy my permit and fax it to me, but I couldn’t reach them in time to continue my journey. One of the Immigration Officers took me to a lodge where I could stay the night. I hadn’t a budget for that, so I had to use the money I brought for buying things from Zambia. I was looking for somebody to phone back to Gaborone, when I met Noway. I asked him where I could phone, and he offered to take me there. I phoned Paul who faxed me the papers. I was supposed to report to the Immigration Office in the morning at 8 o’clock. But Noway said, ‘No, don’t go back because those people there are going to give you hell, better just avoid them.’ And I followed his advice. The next day Noway came with a young boy, and they invited me for braai, but I said I was too tired to eat. They came again the following day. He asked me to sleep to be in a state to return to Gaborone, having advised me against continuing to Zambia, and against going back to the Immigration Office. Anyway, that’s how I came to know Noway. We travelled back to Gaborone together, in the company car they were using, and they dropped me off and we exchanged phone numbers. From time to time he was coming to check on me, and eventually this led to a relationship. In the beginning, he was a nice person, but he was staying with another lady I didn’t know about, but we will come to that. He would come and check on me. I was staying with Christians, and they would not allow me to see him, so we usually talked over the fence where I was staying. 306

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After some time, Paul advised, ‘Why can’t you just talk to him and just try to see?’ So I tried to see, and from the beginning he was fine. Relationshipwise he was ok, but his problem was financial management. He was also married, which he didn’t disclose to me. Instead, he told me, ‘I was married but I am divorced.’ He let me know about his kids. We used to visit them in Zimbabwe. And I didn’t know he was communicating with the wife all the time, although they were not living together. During my stay with him, we came to the point whereby he was putting a lot of pressure on me to take care of his kids, asking me to give him money. It is true he was very helpful as a man. He was hardworking. He was a cool person. But as time went on, it was almost two years, I began to ask, ‘Where are we heading? Is there anything promising about this relationship?’ And all he would say was, ‘Yeah, I will think about it.’ I remember asking his sister one day, ‘Your brother is so serious with me. I want to know why. Is he getting married to me or what?’ The sister said, ‘No, Noway is married and he is not divorced.’ I was so hurt, but I told myself, ‘Ok that is fine, that is the situation.’ I asked him, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ He said he wanted to do it without me knowing. Then I said, ‘I am giving you one year. If you can do your divorce papers within this period, it is fine, but if you don’t, I am quitting.’ We stayed on for one year plus, and he tried to put papers together, but I could see he was not pushing these papers. Then I said, ‘Papers or no papers, if you want to be with me, divorce and marry me. If you want to be with your wife, then go out of my life.’ He kept on saying, ‘I will, I will, I will.’ One day he told me, all of a sudden, ‘I am quitting my job.’ I said, ‘Why quit your job? That job is so secure. Why do you want to leave the job?’ What he said did not make sense to me. But he didn’t listen. He went ahead and put in a resignation letter and resigned and they gave him a package of twenty three thousand Pula. The cheque came to me and we went and cashed it together. I told him, ‘You keep this money because houses are cheap in Zimbabwe. You can buy a house for five thousand and then with the rest of the money you can do business, since you don’t want to work.’ So I left him with the money, but it didn’t take long before the money was finished. He didn’t buy the house when he went home to Zimbabwe. All he returned with was a van of mangoes. 307

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I asked him, ‘You bought mangoes for twenty three thousand Pula?’ He was tongue tied. ‘I don’t know what happened to the money,’ he said, expecting me to believe him. I let it go. He kept saying we were still together, but there was nothing in his behaviour to show it. I would go to an auction and buy things, and he would take the things and sell them. I told him I didn’t like the lifestyle where he sells house things. ‘It’s not my way.’ He did little to change. We kept on staying together in tension, and we finally changed the house. Then came a time I told him, ‘I am not going to be with you again because of your lifestyle.’ And I started a brickyard, moulding bricks for sale. He decided to join me in the business. I said, ‘If you want to do business with me fine, but I don’t want our relationship because you are not truthful. I discovered the truth about you on my own. So I have to quit you.’ He joined the business. Fighting started. We are doing business. If I am not there he sells and takes the money. And you don’t see what he is doing with the money. Then one day, he went and bought a van, a Toyota Hilux, and he put this van to be panel beaten. He agreed with the mechanics, to pay them so much when the job was halfway through. But after they did the job he didn’t want to pay. And these boys kept on coming and coming and coming. One day, he again sold bricks and didn’t give me the money. I asked, ‘What did you do with it?’ He said, ‘I paid those guys who did my car.’ I said, ‘Ok, no problem.’ The next day these guys, they came again. I said, ‘Why are those boys still coming here? You told me you paid them. Why are they coming as if you still owe them? Haven’t they finished the job?’ When he did no more than mumble something I couldn’t get, I went to the boys and asked noisily, ‘Why are you people still coming here? You have been paid and you haven’t completed your job. Why do you want the rest of the money?’ The guys were surprised. ‘No, he hasn’t paid us.’ I said, ‘Are you serious? He told me he paid you people yesterday, P750.’ The guys insisted they had not been paid. They were threatening to take the engine of the car, if not paid. Noway sat quiet, lips sealed as if with super glue. 308

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‘Are you going to let them take the engine? If you give these boys the engine, where are you going to see it again? They are going to sell it!’ I decided to pay the panel beaters P500 out of my own pocket, yet again. Then he went to Zimbabwe and I opted to take this van to another garage where they completed the panel beating. The engine was fitted and when he came back, he sold the Toyota Hilux for twenty thousand Pula. The money was paid into my account and I cashed it and gave him it, but I never ate a Thebe from that money. When he took the money he said, ‘I am going to start a business.’ ‘Ok, fine,’ I told him. ‘If you can start a business and it is doing well, fine and good. I don’t have a problem with that.’ That is how that money went down the drain. I don’t know what he did or didn’t do. That’s how the money went. I kept quiet. Then he bought a truck. No, he didn’t even buy the truck. He saw a truck, then came to me and said, ‘I have seen a truck but I don’t have money. Could you give me money to deposit for this truck? After I have repaired it and I’m working with it, I will finish paying the owner and then I can pay you bit by bit.’ I said, ‘Fine, I will give you the money.’ I gave him seven thousand Pula. He went and deposited the money for the truck and he took it. He fixed the truck and started running it. The money he took from me he was paying in little droplets only. If I’m not mistaken, he didn’t finish paying the money before the truck started giving him problems and he decided to sell it. That was when I started pressurising him, ‘I have to leave you. I don’t want this lifestyle. I’m leaving you.’ He decided to hide the truck somewhere and then he went and looked for buyers. They came and bought the truck. He sold it for, I think, fifteen thousand, and they gave him a deposit of ten thousand, and he said he was going to Zimbabwe. It was by accident I learnt he had sold the truck. An Indian man came to the house and asked me to tell Noway to come and move the truck. ‘He has already sold that truck. If he doesn’t take it, other guys will come and steal parts from it, and I don’t want to be part of that story,’ said the Indian. I said, ‘Oh, he sold the truck?’ Then that Indian man said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘Ok, fine, I will tell him.’ Then the Indian left. It wasn’t long the person who bought the truck came asking for Noway, saying he wanted to take the truck because he had already deposited ten thousand, and only five thousand was remaining. I said I didn’t know where Noway was. Noway was nowhere. 309

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He eventually collected the truck, but Noway didn’t tell me he sold the truck. I kept quiet for a week, before I asked where the truck was. He said he gave the truck somewhere in order not to worry me, since I was asking him to move. When I passed on the information the two visitors had given me, he just kept quiet, again like someone who had smeared his lips with super glue. The next day in the morning he said he was going to Zimbabwe. He went to Zimbabwe with the ten thousand Pula. He didn’t give me a Thebe. He was in Zimbabwe for a full month and when he came back, the ten thousand was finished. I told him I was moving out. Everything we had in the house – two fridges, beds, wardrobes, a stove, and you name it. I said, ‘Ok, I don’t mind, I will give you all those things. I will start life afresh.’ And I just took my clothes and my shoes, and left. “Good riddance,” interrupted Dr. Nanny. It’s not finished. My O and A Level certificates, he took them and threw them away and I didn’t realise it until much later. I went to the house where I was going to stay on my own, feeling bitter but relieved. After a week, one girl from near where Noway lived saw me and said, ‘Eh Miss, ah how come you throw your certificates away? I saw them in pieces.’ I couldn’t believe it. Certificates are not things to handle carelessly – even mad people know that. The girl said Noway was seen throwing my certificates, and some kids took the plastic paper and were playing with it, and she only saw them after they had been torn. I had taken time to laminate my certificates as the best way of protecting them, having grown up where it was all too common for one to lose years of hard earned qualifications to rats and white ants. I went there and everything was in pieces, all gone. No problem, I told myself, there is nothing I can do about it. I phoned Noway and said, ‘Noway, you decided to destroy my certificates. Why?’ ‘To hell with you,’ was what I got in reply, and he hung up on me. Before we separated, what really hurt me was he was using traditional medicine on me, but I didn’t know. There was a day we sat in the car, and I was thinking how I didn’t really take care of myself. I was too much involved with him to be cautious. I could not go and sit with lady friends anymore. He was behind me just controlling me in a way, like a puppet. I couldn’t say what was going on. My feelings could tell me something wasn’t quite right, but I couldn’t tell. He didn’t want to go anywhere without me, and he didn’t want me to visit people alone. I could feel that this was a life I didn’t like, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell him upfront, 310

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‘I don’t like being with a man all the time, when we are not even married. I’m with you but I’m lonely. You don’t let me mix with others, even ladies.’ So one day, we sat in the car, and I could feel something going wrong with me. When he stepped out of the car, I had the urge to bend down and look under his seat. I don’t even know what made me look, but I saw a round paper. I took the paper, opened it – at times I am not even scared – and saw some strange looking stuff inside. I smelled it, and when he came back I said, ‘What are you doing with traditional medicine here? This, what is it for?’ He was so furious, ‘What were you looking for? These are my things!’ I got angry and I threw it all at him. That was that for that day. But the tension continued, on and on. I kept on saying I didn’t want him again, and he kept on saying he would follow me wherever I moved. One day we sat again in the car, and it occurred to me that I should have searched under my seat as well. I bent down and saw medicine inside a bottle under my seat and showed it to Noway saying, ‘So this is what you are doing? Controlling me with this?’ He looked at me and kept quiet. I got so angry and I threw the bottle at a stone and it broke, its devilish contents scattering. We kept on fighting, and again, I said, ‘I’m leaving you.’ He said, ‘You are not going to leave me, after you’ve made me waste my time with you.’ I said, through my teeth, ‘You also have wasted my time. You didn’t tell me you are married. I don’t want somebody married. Even if I am not getting married, I don’t want to destroy another person’s family, because if I destroy it, that’s what they are going to do to me the next day.’ When the situation was at an apex, he realised I was virtually out of his house. I was building on my plot. “Good riddance?” Dr. Nanny asked this time, rather than assuming anything. Not quite. I was looking for transport to carry water. He used his van and I paid him for transport. He carried water to that place, and I bought food to give the builders. I was looking for a something to share the food amongst the builders when I saw something plastic under the seat of the van. When I pulled it out, I saw my old underwear – my panties –inside a plastic container, smeared with, I knew not what. It smelled terrible, as if they had been steeped in a nauseating dark liquid of unimaginable potency. I said, ‘Noway, why are you doing this to me? You are married. What do you want from me? I stay with you and you don’t help me in any way. If I have a little something, I share it with you, but you, when it’s Christmas you can’t even buy food for us. See how much of me you’ve wasted? You have taken so much from my life.’ Do you want to destroy me? 311

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I was so angry I didn’t even know what to do with the plastic and the panties. I said, ‘Noway, I just want you to go. This thing is too much. I can see that now.’ I left the panties there with that medicine and I said, ‘Noway, I don’t want you to come to my house. You go to your house. I want you out of my life.’ The next thing, he wanted to kill me. So I was escaping, sleeping in somebody’s house here today and there tomorrow. Concerned, some of my friends advised me to report to the Police, which I did. The Police acted very fast, and they made sure they called him and warned him to keep off me. But everyday he was threatening to kill me and kill himself, forcing me to keep begging to sleep here and there with friends, as I was too scared to sleep alone. I was so skinny some Police people said, ‘Go back home to your country.’ I said, ‘Yes, I can go back home, but I have invested here and grown up here. I don’t want to depend on my parents. They are getting old and they should depend on me now.’ I said going back home does not happen overnight, because I have been here for so long. It’s not a one day thing. I couldn’t understand why Noway wanted to kill me. Everything we bought I had given to him. If the issue was property, he could have divorced to marry me, since I had given him so much. If really he was seeing that I was something to him, he could have divorced and married me. He was separated from his wife, but he didn’t want to divorce and he didn’t want to go back to her either. I said he could not be playing such tricks between two women. I refused to be part of it. The Police were coming late at night to check on me, in the morning as well. Finally, he left abruptly and went to Maun where he is presently working. And that is the end of my story with Noway. There is no doubt he wanted me, but he was somebody who suffered from indecision. He didn’t know how to put things together. He was a genuine person, though his financial management was not good. He was somebody who can really assist you well, but I couldn’t forgive him for hiding from me the fact that he was married, and for not deciding whether he wanted a future with me or with his wife. I told myself, ‘I am not going to have another man. I am not going to have a relationship because it is too depressing.’ It was so traumatic. I was saying, ‘My life with men is unnatural. I’m not going to have a man again, ever.’ All the time he was threatening me, I was absenting from my bricklaying work and also from the building of my house which meant so much to 312

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me. Even when I managed to go to work, he would send guys to come and take the machine, to destroy the business, and to spy on me. I couldn’t understand why he would want to take machines that I had bought with my own money and without a single Thebe from him. Eyes wet with tears, I would ask God how he could let such things happen to me. What was my crime? My business was going down. My sweat was wasted. My money was disappearing. My will was weakened. Yet I grew in determination.

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Chapter Thirty Seven

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I

t wasn’t easy but I kept on trying and I got used to the builders without the presence of a man. I was determined not to go with any man, determined to close the chapter of getting married or even making a child with a man. Where I rented a room, I knew the family from way back when I used to go around doing hair. They were good people. I needed the security they could offer, as it wasn’t good for me to stay in an isolated place, given the problems with Noway. It was still possible for him to send people to do something, even if he wasn’t there to do it himself. That is the reason why, much to my regret today, I discontinued building on my plot, the one I had sweated so much to acquire. I sold the uncompleted house to a Nigerian man. His specialty was buying incomplete houses and completing them for sale to foreigners hungering to feel at home. My own ambitions of owning a house were shattered. I didn’t have a house. I didn’t have a boyfriend. I didn’t want one. I didn’t even have friends. I just had me. If I felt the urge to feel at home, I would go to Mimboland meetings, even as the stranger I was fast becoming to fellow Mimbolanders. One day when I was coming back from work, I met the landlady’s daughter. This time there was also the landlady’s son, whom I had never met, but I knew he had a baby with one lady. I knew the baby because she was always coming around with the landlady’s daughter. The sister introduced me to this man saying I was a Mimbolander. The man was curious to know how a Mimbolander had come to be staying in the village with the locals. The sister explained that I was a tenant, and he talked to me nicely like a normal person. He said he had studied in Canada with people from Mimboland and Ghana and he shared experiences. Fine, after that I went and slept. The next day I went to work. On coming back I met that same man at the gate and he chatted with me and said, ‘Can I have your phone number?’ I said, ‘Sure, no problem.’ I gave him my phone number. He was staying in the yard, but I didn’t know. I only knew him when the sister introduced him and said, ‘This is our brother. He is working in Pikwe.’ I remember saying, ‘Oh, this is Naomi’s father?’

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Francis B. Nyamnjoh

‘Yes,’ she replied smiling. ‘This is your friend’s father.’ So I gave him my cell phone number and he left. He disappeared without a word. He just disappeared. Because he was somebody I didn’t know well, I didn’t pay much attention. Only much later will I return again and again to this encounter, thinking how weird. It was after some two weeks, when I went and bought something from Game City and was coming back, that somebody phoned me, ‘Hi Immaculate, how are you?’ I said, ‘Fine, who is speaking?’ And then he called his name. ‘Which Philip?’ I asked. He said, ‘I met you in Gaborone, at my parents’ place. I took your number but I was so busy, that’s why I didn’t phone you.’ And I said, ‘Oh, sure, no problem…’ We just chatted and said, ‘How is work?’ ‘How is business?’ and it ended there. After two months, he emerged at home, like a mushroom, and began monitoring me. One day, I met him again when I was coming and he said, ‘Why do you live this lifestyle, Immaculate? You go to work, and after work you come home. You cannot even come and sit with my sisters, though they are your friends. Why do you live and how do you manage to cope with such a lonely lifestyle?’ I said it was my style and that I it wasn’t difficult for me. Then he started saying things, how he had been watching me but I wasn’t seeing him. I didn’t know he was coming there. In March he finally came home. He packed his things from Pikwe and came home. He was not working. The price of diamonds was falling throughout the world, because of the economic crisis, and also because of cheaper diamonds from warzones flooding the market, and the mining company had decided to lay off people massively. He had worked in the mines for eleven years, but that didn’t seem long enough to save his job. He came home and then he started coming to my room. When he came to my room he would just stand near the door. I would offer him a sit. ‘Sit on the chair.’ ‘No.’ ‘Sit on the bed.’ ‘No.’ ‘What is wrong?’ He would just stand there and talk. He would ask me a few questions for some ten to fifteen minutes, then go. Strange man! I was like, why is somebody, a grownup, behaving like this? Soon he started telling me, ‘I want a blanket.’ He kept on repeating it, ‘I want a blanket.’ 316

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I saw him as somebody... funny – bizarre. I took it as a joke, as I couldn’t understand what he meant by, ‘I want a blanket.’ I asked myself, ‘Ah you say you have been in Botswana for a long time, how come you don’t know blanket?’ So I sent an SMS to a friend, ‘What is meant in Botswana when a man says I want a blanket?’ ‘That man is asking for sex!’ was the answer I got back. I thought, ‘Oh is that how he should approach me?’ Ok, fine. This guy was drinking so much. Day in and day out you could see him sitting in the yard drinking. When I went to work, he would be sitting in the yard drinking Chibuku, sorghum beer. When I returned, I could tell that people had sat there drinking because I saw all the empty plastic containers of Chibuku. They sat all day making nonsense of the new President’s outcry and crusade against alcohol, which he held responsible for road accidents, untimely deaths and social ills. They said the President could increase taxes as many times as he wanted and tax them out of modern beer and wine as he liked. Chibuku would always be there for them. I wasn’t as hard on drinking as the President, as I would have an occasional beer myself, but I hated Philip and his friends wasting their lives away in alcohol, which he understood. And that is why when he sensed I was coming back from work, he would disappear. He didn’t want me to know he was idle and drinking, even if he blamed his drinking on having been laid off. He kept on with this blanket thing for a month. So one day I told him, ‘You know what? Your lifestyle is so different from mine, and I don’t want to give you even a casual blanket. I like sex, but good sex. I don’t want that type of sex like I am selling my body. I don’t want it if it is not good. I prefer to stay without. Your life is so different from mine.’ So he kept on like that, trying to convince me. He could stay like a week, then a short message would come, ‘When you give?’ Just like that. He went on and on, and I kept on refusing. Chapter 38 One day, I realised I slept but without sleeping. All my heart was about this guy. But it wasn’t at all natural infatuation. No, it was not like that. I realised something was going on with me, in my mind. I realised that the moment I get those feelings, I don’t think about any other person. No interest for anyone else. My mind was focused on Philip, but I thought maybe I was transforming myself, changing from denial to a positive position. 317

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This thing went on for a week and I realised I even used my phone to SMS this guy, ‘Please come. So sorry. Didn’t mean to hurt you. I was just saying things…’ Then he stopped communicating with me. He stopped abruptly. And I started begging him. ‘Please, sorry. I will give you the blanket. Please, I’m begging. I didn’t mean to hurt you…’ People are there to bear witness to what I am saying to you. I would be talking and even during the day crying, crying for him to come and have his blanket. He got a job with the main opposition party, which was yet to win an election ever since it starting opposing at independence some 34 years ago. As soon as he got the job, his friends ceased calling Philip Philip, and started referring to him only as Comrade. I kept sending him SMS after SMS. ‘Why are you doing this? Please, you are hurting me, really hurting me. Where am I going wrong? Didn’t mean to hurt you. Want to tell you how I feel about what you asked from me…’ If he bothered to reply, he would say, ‘Problem is I accepted you and you rejected me just like that.’ This meant he was doing this to me because I rejected him when he accepted me. I would say, ‘Sorry, can you come?’ But he wasn’t coming. He was driving me mad with whatever charm he was using on me. I would sit at work, fantasising about him. I would wake up at 4:30 in the morning, and feel his presence, making love to me like no man has done before. Yet, my desire would remain unquenched, and reluctantly, I would prepare and go to work, only to daydream the whole day. My craving for him would lead me to his office, and I would see him sitting alone, not working. If it was lunchtime, I could ask a friend to go there, and she would come back and say, ‘It is true, I saw him sitting alone, focused. It was real, but not normal.’ I would talk to him and shed tears. And he wouldn’t answer. That thing he was using on me became so strong that there was a night he realised I could kill myself. He simply sent a message and said, ‘Be cautious of the killer thing.’ I said, ‘But what are you doing to me and why?’ I said, ‘If you want me, change your behaviour and I will give in to you.’ He didn’t even talk and I was invoking heaven and earth, challenging good and bad, and pretending I loved him so much. He knew I didn’t love him, but he used that thing on me to make me lose my bearings. 318

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He kept on pestering me with this thing. If I am going out, if I go with his sisters, it’s fine. If I go alone, I’m not going to sit like I am sitting with you now. I wouldn’t sit. You would see me restless. Once he turns and he doesn’t see me, he starts using that thing. Lunch hour he is using it. When he is at home he never sits outside. He is in his room. And he kept on pestering me. He controlled me so much that he didn’t want me to meet any other person, especially if it was a man. I remember a Mimbolander who came and wanted to see me. I directed him to my workplace, and he came there to greet me. He said he would be leaving on Friday. It was Monday, and I said, ‘It’d be nice to meet and have supper or lunch so we chat before you go.’ We agreed to meet on Thursday. On that Thursday I SMSed Philip and said I was going to meet a Mimbolander, explaining that he was a prominent member of the Mimboland community in Botswana who had since retired back to Mimboland. I said I was going to have supper with him because he was leaving on Friday. He didn’t believe me. He doesn’t even come to have sex with me. So he thought because he is starving me and depriving me from other men, I was lying about dinner, and that I was going to see a man for sex. I took a Kombi. It was a bit late by the time I got to the Station, so I got a taxi. When I reached the robot at Tawoong Junction, there was this oncoming car and this taxi man was supposed to wait. But he entered the road. Luckily he was just entering, so only the head of his car was hit. Otherwise, those cars would have crushed us. As it was, nobody was hurt. We escaped the accident, and he went and dropped me. I paid him. I didn’t even tell the man I was going to meet that I missed an accident on the way. We sat there with other invitees, and he offered to drop me off in his car after the dinner. On the way back, I told him how I missed an accident on the way to the restaurant. No sooner did I finish telling him about the accident than we had another accident. The Mimbolander who was taking me home said, ‘Immaculate, why two accidents the same evening? What is wrong?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’ But I knew it must be Philip using this thing on me. Throughout my outing that evening, he was using it. When we reached home, the Mimbolander said, ‘Immaculate, I can’t stand this, I’m going back.’ He just left me at the gate and drove off. He didn’t even go to see where I was staying. He sped off like someone running for his dear life. I went to my room. I was also panicking. I slept. The next day, I went to work around ten or eleven. I sent this guy an 319

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SMS to say, ‘That place I told you I was going yesterday, I am really worried because I missed an accident when I was going and when I was coming back.’ He sent me a message that said, ‘Don’t worry. One day if you misbehave to me, your life will be cut short. Play around, and your life will be gone.’ And he was serious, dead serious. I could feel that from his SMS. Even the sisters know he meant it. I still have the message on my cell phone, and it still gives me goose pimples when I read it. I store every SMS he sends me. I value my cell phone. I appreciate it, I love it, and I want to have it nearby at all times. I don’t want to stay for one hour away from my cell phone. Even in church where we are forced to switch off, I will put my phone on vibration mode and place it somewhere sensitive enough to feel it. My cell phone is my greatest companion, but it is also my greatest terror. The pain, the bad words, they come through my cell phone. When somebody feels like saying something and he can’t face me, he will say it through the cell phone. It has made me experience too much abuse. Without my cell phone, I think I would have suffered less. All the messages, all those things he has been telling me, they are there in that place, in that phone. When he said that, I told myself, ‘This is where my life is going to end. If I take this thing hot, hot, I’m a dead person. I will go to Mimboland as a corpse.’ I said I must change my attitude. So I changed to save my life. His anger was very abnormal. I don’t think he can stay with a woman, and I remember there was a day the sister said, ‘Immaculate, I don’t know how your relationship with my brother is, but I have come to realise you are the bravest woman I have ever seen, because even we cannot stay with him.’ Even in their house he stays in the room most of the time. If you see him going inside the mother’s house, he is going to bathe or to take food from the kitchen. There are times he will come to my house and tell me, ‘The day you misbehave you are a finished.’ I went to talk to Evodia Skatta. I told her what I was going through, and how I needed to protect myself. ‘I don’t want to die here. I don’t have a boyfriend. I don’t eat anybody’s money. I don’t see somebody’s husband. But this is what I am going through.’ Evodia Skatta said, ‘What?’ As long as he kept using whatever he was using to charm me, he got my money if he wanted it. I never refused. If I didn’t have any, I looked for it. I could even borrow and give to him. He was always saying he was borrowing the money, but he would never pay me back. 320

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He doesn’t take me around in his car, but when he took the car to the garage and it cost two thousand and thirty nine Pula, he took the money from me, and I don’t think I’ll ever get it refunded. He drives from work to check on me and see whether I am working with a person, but he never picks me up after work. He is there only to make sure I am not with somebody. He uses that charm when he wants something from me. If he wants something with me, he can use it the whole night before he comes the next day to ask for it. And I won’t refuse. He owes me nearly six thousand Pula. One day I went out with one of his sisters close to me. When she brought up his name, I confided in her that this guy borrowed money from me and hadn’t paid back. She said he should pay back. I said he would definitely pay the money, but how can you pay what you don’t have? I was trying not to show how hurt I was by the way he was pestering me. When we came back, he knew I had told the sister he owed me, something he didn’t want. In the morning he quickly sent a message and said, ‘Sorry. I have taken too long with your money. I will give you PD cheques you can cash monthly.’ I said, ‘No problem. It’s fine.’ He wrote six cheques. All that paper was P6800. I took the cheques and kept them. Unfortunately for me, June and July I didn’t have my passport, which was in Mimboland for renewal. So I couldn’t go to the bank to check whether or not there was money in his account. On his part, he just kept quiet and he would not say if money was there, and he would not bring anything. June, July, August I didn’t cash. September I took one of the checks to the bank, there was no money. I understood this guy doesn’t have money. He was bluffing. Then I decided not to be taking the cheques to the bank. I sent him a message to say, ‘Why do you let me take those cheques to the bank when you know you don’t have money? This is going to spoil your reputation with the bank and they will refuse you a loan.’ I felt hurt, so I told him, ‘Ok, I am not going to waste time going to the bank, but I will keep the cheques, so when you are ready with the money, let me know.’ He sent a message saying, ‘When the money is ready I will let me know.’ September, October and November came and went, nothing. There was a day when I asked him for the money, and he shouted at me, bullying me for asking. I said, ‘I’m sorry, if you have the money, give it, if you don’t have it I will wait until you do have it.’ On the 15th of December, I know that most companies pay their staff around then. I took those cheques to the bank. I put the first one, money came, the second one and the third one. I was lucky. And when I put the fourth one, they said the signature was not ok. No problem. I was pleased with what I had got. 321

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I went and told Evodia Skatta I had cashed money from that guy’s account. She said, ‘Fine. But, Immaculate, know that this is dangerous. That guy is a retired mine engineer and a Comrade, which means bitter. He doesn’t have money and for you to take such an amount from his account all at once is suicidal.’ I said, ‘Yes, I know I am digging my grave.’ She said, ‘Just send him a message and say you have cashed so much.’ I sent him a message to say I had cashed so much from his account and had two cheques left to cash. What he did was to try to take those two cheques from me, as a way of showing he did not owe me any longer. Before sending the SMS, I had predicted he would behave exactly as he did. I had told Evodia Skatta that he would do everything not to pay the outstanding cheques. So when he behaved as predicted, I said I can work money but money cannot work me. When he came asking for the two cheques, claiming he wanted to balance his accounts to see exactly what was what, I asked him for some time so I could look for the cheques and bring them. When I consulted with Evodia Skatta, she advised me to give him the cheques. She said, ‘He is furious and if you start refusing, it is going to be a problem. Just let him take the cheques.’ I went and gave him the cheques, and he never brought them back. Even as I talk to you, he continues to make life difficult for me. He can stay two months at a time without talking to me, but he is pressing me with that thing. I can’t touch a man. If a man touches me, I run, I panic. I can have interest for sex, but when I think about any other person and not him, the interest goes away. I can’t recall how many times I have told him, ‘Wena, what are you doing that you have destroyed my relationship with men? What do you want from me? You don’t come to me, you don’t associate with me, we can’t sit and talk like normal people, yet you are obsessed with me.’ When I understood what he meant by ‘I want a blanket,’ I talked to him about AIDS. ‘Before AIDS people were dying,’ was his reply. ‘What do you mean before AIDS came, people had been dying? So must you go and die because people have been dying?’ When he continued singing his blanket song, I said, ‘I don’t sleep with a man without a condom.’ When he came the first time to have sex with me, I said, ‘I want a condom. If you don’t use a condom, I’m going to make shout and make so much noise. We are really going to fight.’ I think he used that condom because he was scared of the mother. He doesn’t come to me when the sisters or the mother can see him. He is so scared of the mother. If it wasn’t the fear of his mother, he could have raped me and slept with me without a condom. 322

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If I haven’t moved from where I am staying, it is because I know that if I go and stay on my own, he is going to come there and do anything. Even now, I will be sleeping and I won’t know that this guy is coming. He has never come to my house me knowing. If he says I want to come there he is already at the door, making me startle. When he started using that thing, I could feel there was something different. I could tell he was the one doing it, because he was not the first Botswana man who approached me or wanted to be in love with me. But I never had those feelings for any of them. He turned my mind and my heart to him, and I started feeling this could not be normal. When we made love, it wasn’t great. It was like somebody just comes and lies on top of you. He looked and came across as a lost person. He knew very little about life. I have never seen him with a woman during the day. Even the mother of his child exists only in the photo hanging in his house. Nobody has ever seen her. I investigated. So what could account for the way I was feeling towards him? It certainly wasn’t normal. And he would confirm this by saying, ‘Immaculate, when I started with you, you didn’t want me, and now it’s like you are going crazy about me.’ He knows he is using that thing and I am crazy about him. I would say, ‘Yes, that is true, but you know what you are doing, isn’t it?’ He is so moody, so complicated. He doesn’t sit down like you are sitting now talking with me. He is always up and down. He’s a grown up person, imagine a mine engineer. You enter the house, see his photo, and you say, ‘This is a man.’ But his heart is hell itself. If you dream he is standing near your child, you would rather kill your child than let the child go through what I went through. I would never like any human being to go through that. If I met any child today – I love babies –, and knew the child would go through that, I wouldn’t let it happen. I would do everything to stop it. After we have sex, he can go for three months without talking to me. If we meet, if I meet him face to face, he will just say, ‘Dumela.’ Now I understand what it means to say Botswana men can use women. How can he sleep with me yet treat me like shit? Not once would he give me a lift in his car. He wouldn’t even buy me Fanta or give me water to drink, yet he borrows all my money and refuses to pay back, and gets drunk on Chibuku every day. I have never eaten anything from him for almost two years. The only thing he sent to me was one day at work when he most surprisingly sent me units for P100, only to turn around and say it was a mistake, and that I should pay him back. 323

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Botswana men can really make a woman feel cheap. When the mother discovered that Philip was interested in me, she started with her own medicine, but I didn’t know. He is tying me down and the mother is sending things to the sisters who are my friends. They pretend they are my friends but when it comes to that section they are not exactly on my side. It took time for me to reach the conclusion that they are using things on me. They visit me, I bring food and we eat, we talk together nicely, then they go. On day I realised this guy when he sees me he is running away. If I meet him early in the morning when I go to carry water, he doesn’t talk to me. ‘Why are you not talking to me?’ No answer. He is queer, and naughty. He went on and on and on and on, using his thing on me. He knew as well that his mother was using something on me, but I didn’t know. I was the only one kept in the dark. The mother brought a girl for him to marry, a Botswana girl, very beautiful. He turned her down, and both the mother and the girl thought it was because of me. So the girl too went and looked for her own muti to use against me, believing as she did that I was in the way of her heart’s desire. They and their inner circles trusted harmful traditional doctors so much. They went from one to the other, always shopping for ever more opportunities to harm. It became worse when I became skinny. I was not sleeping, and this guy was having too many debts. He would stay up using that thing on me, softening me up so he could borrow from me to settle his debts without any intention of paying me back. So, as he is sitting up, all he is doing is using that thing on me. What! I decided to talk to Angel, the generous friend of mine we used to visit, whom you interviewed at length. Angel was pleased to see me after so many years. I had lots of explaining to do, about why I had kept away for so many years. How I could have been in Gaborone all this while and not passed by to say hello. I was a wicked person, she said, half jokingly, refusing to accept what she termed my ‘flimsy excuse’ that I had dumped my problems enough on her doorstep. When I accepted my mistake and apologised, she opened the door of her generous heart to the problem that had brought me back to her. I told her everything, from A to Z, from Noway to Philip. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ I concluded. She said she didn’t know anyone who could help. She used to know a Sangoma from Malawi, but that was years ago, and the man had since moved on. 324

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I had come full circle, to be contemplating visiting the very Sangomas I used to reject when I first came to Botswana. Even without a Sangoma, Angel was a great help. Listening and doing her best to console me was soothing. I could buy units for a hundred Pula for my cell phone, and I would talk to Angel and cry until the money finished. Every day I spoke with her, but I didn’t share my troubles with any Mimbolander, apart from Evodia Skatta and Paul Mufon. Nobody else knew what I was going through. Every morning I was crying, daytime I am crying, even my workers at times would say, ‘Are you sick? What is wrong?’ I said, ‘No, I’m just missing home.’ How did I come to know for sure they were using medicine on me? Although Angel said she couldn’t help me when I took my story to her, she couldn’t bear me crying the way I did when I was on the phone. So she remembered this other lady she had heard about from someone at work. Upon finding out, she got this woman’s number. The lady was an herbalist. Angel explained to her what I was going through, and the woman said she would check and get back to Angel with her findings. After a couple of days, the woman came back to her. ‘I can see this guy’s mother doesn’t want that girl, but the guy wants her bad,’ she told Angel. ‘He is using medicine to make sure she doesn’t go to another man. Why I don’t know. I can see the guy is not really a serious person, so why he is doing this, I can’t say. ‘But unfortunately I can’t help. I am just an herbalist. I can’t help.’ She can see, but she doesn’t throw bones. She can dream something, but she can’t cure beyond her herbs. She said, ‘I won’t lie to you. I can’t help that girl. Her problem is a big problem.’ When I heard this, I felt six feet deep. Imagine a traditional doctor saying she can’t help. I phoned Angel morning, afternoon, and evening, telling her what I am going through, and getting all the consolation she could afford. She was really helpful to a friend in need and a friend indeed. She was much more of a cushion than I could have hoped for from any of my Mimboland brothers or sisters. One day Angel called me to share something positive. The woman herbalist had called to say a patient had come her way who needed a serious traditional doctor and was ready to pay for her to invite somebody from Mozambique. The man had come and was treating that person and others. If Angel liked, she could ask her friend to come and meet this powerful traditional doctor who could heal what was beyond herbs. So Angel called to let me know. 325

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I went to see this doctor, who asked for the details of the guy using this thing on me. I wrote down the names, phone number and residential area of Philip, everything, and described his build and workplace and handed all this to the doctor, who asked me to go and wait for him. As luck would have it, word went around Gaborone about this important medicine man in town, and people flooded there seeking his cure, magic and blessings. Amongst them, Philip. When he came, the medicine man was able to identify him from the details he gave of himself. He was coming to fortify his grip on me. The doctor asked him to go and bring his mum. The mother came. The doctor consulted his bones, looked at them and said, ‘I can see you are bewitching a foreigner in your yard. Why are you sending your daughters to be throwing poisonous things in her house? They go there and pretend they love her but they are eating with her only to eat her up. Why are you bewitching her?’ The mother said, ‘I didn’t want to kill her. I was just trying to separate her from my son.’ The doctor said, ‘Why are you trying to separate her? If your son doesn’t want the girl he will leave her, but your son too is using something on her. The same person you are using things on to get her away, your son is using things to keep a hold on her, and she can’t do anything. She can’t go to any other person. Your son makes that girl sit there the whole day, even weekends. She can’t go anywhere. She goes to work and comes back or to the shops, but nothing more. Is that the life a human being should live? Why are you being wicked to this foreign girl? What has she done to deserve a fate worse than death?’ Then the doctor tried to talk to Philip to stop using this thing he was using on me. ‘Why are you using this thing? You are not ready for marriage the way we see you. You are not even a friendly man. You are not a jovial person. You don’t want to sit with that girl your mother doesn’t want, why can’t you leave her to go her way in peace?’ That, my sister, is what I have been going through. I have never had a good life. I don’t know the cause of this curse. Maybe it’s my weakness that when I am with you I feel I should treat you the way I want myself to be treated. I don’t know whether it is because of that, that men tend to take advantage of me or what. Angel and the herbalist have been a great support. Last week I told them I would love to go home for a while to renew communion with family, friends and the land of my birth. 326

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I told them I needed a breath of fresh air, a sign of life from this strange and stifling condition of living like a dead girl walking. They encouraged me and prayed for the means to come my way to make this journey possible. ‘Greet your parents and eat lots of herbs from the tropical rainforest,’ the herbalist told me, smiling her satisfaction with knowledge of the charming natural environment of my country. ‘You’ll need all the energy you can muster to overcome the forces that hinder the good life for you.’ Now that you’ve surprised me so delightfully when I least expected, I am going right after this to book a flight and buy a ticket to Mimboland. After thirteen years of a life tortured by worries, I want to rediscover what it means to socialise without having to look behind my back. I want to be able to talk freely and feel like a human being again. At 33, I feel the joys of womanhood passing me by. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t be wishing this, given the brutal pride of power gone wild back home, but my traumas here have drained me. I have gone through too much. As my mother would say, if you see a rat running towards fire, know it is being chased by something even more terrifying. I need time to regain my dignity, even if it means my hands and legs are going to be broken by the blows of excited rifles and batons. I need family, friends. I need people and places I knew. I need to reconnect to feel human again.

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Nyamnjoh, B.. Intimate Strangers, Langaa RPCIG, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Copyright © 2010. Langaa RPCIG. All rights reserved. Nyamnjoh, B.. Intimate Strangers, Langaa RPCIG, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,

“Intimate Strangers is both an engaging story of a stranger in a strange land, and a feast of revealing observations that link matters such as xenophobia and race relations to the intimacies of sex, romance, friendship, and betrayal. Brimming with humour, humanity, and cross-cultural curiosity, this book leads the reader through a fascinating set of encounters that provide a vivid and convincing portrait of contemporary life in a modern southern African society.” James Ferguson, Professor of Anthropology, Stanford University, USA Intimate Strangers tells the story of the everyday tensions of maids and madams in ways that bring together different worlds and explore various dimensions of servitude and mobility. Immaculate travels to a foreign land only to find her fiancé refusing to marry her. Operating from the margins of society, through her own ingenuity and an encounter with researcher Dr Winter-Bottom Nanny, she is able to earn some money. Will she remain at the margins or graduate into DUST – Diamond University of Science and Technology? Immaculate learns how maids struggle to make ends meet and madams wrestle to keep them in their employ. Resolved to make her disappointments blessings, she perseveres until she can take no more. Francis B. Nyamnjoh has taught Sociology, Anthropology and Communication Studies at universities in Cameroon, Botswana and South Africa, and served as Head of Publications with the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), Dakar, Senegal. He is currently Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Cover: Abidemi Olowonira Langaa Research & Publishing Common Initiative Group P.O. Box 902 Mankon Bamenda North West Region

Nyamnjoh, B.. Intimate Strangers, Langaa RPCIG, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Francis B. Nyamnjoh

Copyright © 2010. Langaa RPCIG. All rights reserved.

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INTIMATE STRANGERS

“Don’t be deceived by Immaculate, a key voice in Francis Nyamnjoh’s Intimate Strangers. At first glance, her observations about the country in which she’s called makwerekwere are open-eyed, light-hearted, going with the flow. Beneath the flow of her experiences, Nyamnjoh has created a darkly hilarious, incisive, and brilliant commentary on what it means to be known – and unknown – in contemporary Southern Africa. The novel is crafted with precision, wit, and a delicacy that exposes your own heart even as it suggests – with simplicity and elegance –- new ways of seeing the familiar.” Jane Bennett, Director, African Gender Institute, University of Cape Town, South Africa