 |
Southwest of St. Rodrigue stands Thaba Motlejoa, a three-peaked mountain shaped like the ridge of a spork. I've spent a lot of sunsets on the mountain's Western prong, looking out over Lesotho's lowlands as the leaning light casts canyons in relief. From my perch I can hear pockets of cowbells, irregular like the first drops of rain on a tin roof. I can also see pretty far. Among the ingeniously terraced terrain below, one elliptical plot lays conspicuously devoid of agriculture. If I squint hard, I can pretend that I see gracefully curving concentric circles etched into the fallow field, the back curve of a track. When they were fresh, the track's whitewashed lanes seemed to hover a few inches above the red earth, but that was before the rains.
When the project of building a track was first presented, I balked. As darkening twilight hastened the end of another staff meeting, our school's Sportsmaster mentioned nonchalantly that St. Rodrigue would be hosting the first round of regional track and field competitions and that the track would therefore need to be renovated.
"We have a track?" I asked.
What we had, it turned out, was the elliptical plot of land, a gift from the chief, where a track could be built. By hand. When the staff meeting broke up, I quickly sought out Ntate Sam, a fellow foreigner and generally reliable voice of reason.
"Build a track? Seriously?" I asked smiling, confident that Sam had also appraised the proposal as ludicrous.
"No problem," Sam replied with his standard self-assurance. "Tracks are easy. All we have to do is dig the lane lines into the ground."
I asked how big the track would be, hoping that once all the facts were laid out Sam would join me in renouncing the feasibility of the enterprise.
"400 meters," Sam answered, surprised at my ignorance. "I thought you ran track, chico."
"How many lanes?"
"Eight."
"That's two miles worth of digging! That's impossible!" I pleaded.
Sam considered this assertion for a minute and then informed me that "the mind always resists."
What do you say to that?
Thus it was that St. Rodrigue welcomed the onset of crisp fall weather by transforming from a high school into a forced labor camp. Classes were cancelled for a full week as the entire student body made the daily trek up to the athletics ground to either work on the track or cheer on their laboring classmates. Ntate Sam and Ntate Mokone, the two male Science teachers at St. Rods, relished the challenge of engineering the track's curves and set to their geometric calculations with a zeal normally reserved for razzing each other.
Ntate Mokone is a native of Lesotho, whereas Sam hails from Zimbabwe. In Mokone's eyes, Sam's Zimbabwean origin makes him more African than the rest of St. Rods staff, which consists entirely of Basotho and the two upstart Americans. Perhaps it's the fact that Sam's relatives fought in the civil war that overthrew Rhodesia's white colonial government or the fact that Lesotho's intensely mountainous terrain makes it anomalous to the Southern African landscape embodied by Zimbabwe, but for whatever reason, whenever Sam walks into the staff room Mokone snaps a salute and shouts "African!" Sam responds in kind by addressing Mokone as "Negro Puro," drawing on the Spanish he acquired during a four-year stint as a chemistry graduate student in Cuba. A typical exchange between the two goes as follows:
(Sam strolls into staffroom. Mokone sees him and immediately stands at attention)
Mokone: African! How is it today?!
Sam: Africano, you've got to thank your gods and ancestors. There is enough sunshine today to warm your brain.
Mokone: I am hearing insults! My brother, you have opened a BIG can full of worms!
Sam: Yes, I have opened a can and I am going to pour insecticide on the worms.
Mokone: Aha! Sam! When you are a stranger and you come among the indigenous, you must be humble and ask which is the way to town. Otherwise you wander into the woods where the lions eat the homo sapiens!
Sam sought work in Lesotho as a way to extricate himself from Zimbabwe's crumbling economy and to avoid Robert Mugabe's persecution of the intelligentsia. Despite his increased earning potential and relative security in Lesotho, I could tell that Sam felt overqualified for the position of high school teacher and longed to be back in a lab. I got my first glimpse of this sentiment when my father came to visit. As soon as Sam learned that my dad was a professor, his eyes lit up and he talked to my pops at length about his graduate studies. Later that day, Sam came over to my house with a copy of his Thesis, so he and my dad could continue their conversation. I received another hint of Sam's intellectual yearning when I noticed how excited Sam became as he developed a formula for determining how to stagger the track's starting line.
Once Sam and Mokone felt satisfied that they had calculated and measured the track to perfection, we set about putting stakes in the ground and stringing them together so that the students could see where to dig the lane lines. I was given the job of pounding the stakes into the ground. I failed miserably. I had been given a mallet to aid me in the pounding process, but the head was not affixed to the handle. As a result, the mallet's head continually spun on impact and delivered zero Newtons of force to the stake. Mokone noticed my struggles and relieved me of the mallet. Using the bark from a nearby stick, Mokone quickly fashioned shims to hold the mallet head in place. "These tools are too African for you," Mokone joked.
I thought about what Mokone had said as I went to town on the stakes. These tools are too African for you. Mokone had used "African" as a synonym for dysfunctional, and to a certain extent the equation seemed apt. The buses to and from Maseru broke down incessantly. Of St. Rodrigue's two generators, one refused to run and the other set the school computer on fire. Yet, Mokone himself was African, and if I had to select one word to describe him it would be resourceful. Same story with Sam, the exile who kept himself in high spirits by busting everybody's chops all the time. I hoped that if in the future some aspect of life in St. Rods became African, I would be African enough to handle it.
Once the girls had finished digging the track's lanes, the next step was to "paint" the lines by pouring a lime solution into the trenches. A thorough search of the school turned up a chunk of lime the size of my fist. This ended up being less than two miles worth. Staring at the partially painted track, one of the teachers had the idea of going around to all the schools blackboard trays and collecting the chalk dust to use in place of lime. Resourceful. This suggestion drew loud protests from the students, who consider chalk dust something of a delicacy. Eventually, the girls' school pride overcame their appetites, and they conceded that having a sparkling new track was worth the sacrifice. As soon as the teachers had mixed up a 50-gallon batch of 12 Molar chalk-water, the girls used watering cans from their agriculture plots to begin applying the solution to the track. After two days of African sunshine, the lane lines had baked so dry and white that it hurt your eyes to look at them.
It didn't take long for our pristine track to begin receiving hard use. On the morning of our home meet, the opposing teams surprised no one by showing up egregiously late. Our visitors did succeed in catching me off guard, however, when they celebrated their arrival by driving their minibuses out onto our track and doing doughnuts at breakneck speed. I cringed as I saw my students diving for cover and lamented the ruts in our long jump runway. Then I realized I was being super lame and got in on the bus-dodging action. When the races got underway, the St. Rods girls quickly established their dominance in both the running and cheering departments. Our athletes' home-field advantage wasn't limited to their frantic fans; they also benefitted from their familiarity with the grueling uphill climb coming into the home straight.
We teachers had a pretty good idea of who our standout runners would be based on everyone's performance in practice. St. Rods garnered a surprise win, however, when a Form A student shook up the world in the 400. Since the student was only an eighth grader and in her first year at St. Rods, some of the teachers didn't even know her name. Unlike my colleagues, I immediately recognized the victor as Mathuso, a recent addition to my Form A Math and Literature classes. Mathuso missed the first six weeks of classes, because she had to secure a scholarship before she could afford school fees. Both of Mathuso parents died of AIDS while she was in primary school.
In class, whenever my students came forward to hand in their homework I made a point of thanking each one by name. I figured it was a good way to keep everyone's name straight and also an opportunity to make sure that, in a class of forty students, everyone got a daily dose of personal attention. Eventually, the thanking got so routine that most of the girls returned my gratitude with shy smiles, if they responded at all. Not Mathuso. Every day, all year long, when I thanked Mathuso for handing in her homework she gave a wide grin, looked me in the eyes and said, "You're welcome, sir." Mathuso brought the same grace to the track. As Mathuso continued to advance easily through the qualifying rounds, I began noticing her demeanor on the starting line. While runners to her left and right picked at their uniforms and twitched with nerves, Mathuso, smiling slightly and suffused with calm, would simply survey the scenery until the time came for her to dominate.
The track season culminated at the National meet, held in Maseru inside the monolithic Setsoto Stadium. Compared to the dirt tracks our girls competed on during regional competitions, Setsoto stadium might as well have been the Collosium. It featured a rubberized asphalt track, towering stands, and thousands of roaring spectators. Despite the grandeur of the arena, Mathuso remained a picture of serenity as she toed the starting line. She ran one of the most courageous races I have ever seen.
Although Mathuso's poise and warmth are unique, her status as a double orphan is, tragically, not that uncommon. The AIDS epidemic in Lesotho has grown steadily worse during the past two decades, and the government's respone to this harsh reality, while a far cry from Thabo Mbeki's shameful denial of AIDS statistics, remains ill-conceived and poorly executed. By the government's own admission,
"AIDS interventions currently employed were based on limited strategic analysis and mainly directed by the perceived goals and objectives of individual implementing organizations. Furthermore, they had limited national strategic direction and were inadequately coordinated. Current policy and the legislative environment are supportive of HIV and AIDS [prevention], but some of the basic policies and legislature have not been enacted."
Although the government's inept handling of the AIDS epidemic clearly presents cause for concern, I don't want to dwell on it here. Paul Theroux once wrote, "the point about Africa is not that it is hideously governed-anyone can see that-but that its people have learned survival skills and thrive in spite of their governments." I feel like Western media coverage of Africa focuses so completely on venal officials and their asinine policies that a patina of corruption obscures our view of the continent and its people. I visited a lot of African villages and not once did I feel the air reverberating with the concussions from a distant Big Man beating his chest. The people I met were not cowed. When I think back on my time in Lesotho, all I remember are images of joy, visions of Mathuso toeing the line while Ntate Sam dances in the stands.
Aside from helping St. Rodrigue students with their school work, my main goal in coming to Lesotho was to gain insight into how one segment of the African populace lives. I feel like I accomplished that goal. I learned that "lives" is a misnomer. Thrives is more like it.
|
|
