Please note: this report contains four footnotes, which, when clicked on, will advance you to the end where you can read them and then return to the same point in the report.
II. "I like my village because the people are very peaceful and prevent soil erosion."
Another surprising and profoundly rewarding aspect of my life here has been walking. Jaunts to the school and store, sure--any out-of-doors activity, including what Basotho call "going up and down," is necessarily imbued with the landscape's beauty. But more importantly, hikes.
Toward the start of my Lesotho stint I had the good fortune of finally deciding to read a decade-old confirmation present, Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire, and found a rousing moment of revelation in his declaration that "a man on foot, on horseback, or on bicycle will see more, feel more, enjoy more in one mile than the motorized tourists can in a hundred miles." With this simple truism and a like-minded and navigatorily skilled Jenny leading the way, we began to occupy our weekends at St. Rodrigue--during which most teachers, a modestly privileged class, hightail it out of the sticks for the city lights of Maseru--by going on long, rambling walks through the mountains, dongas, fields and forests within a ten-mile radius of our home.
And it's been amazing. Before Lesotho, I didn't have anything against nature and hiking exactly, but the thought of them was likely to elicit ho-hum expectations of wood chip trails and PVC information signs . Not so here: my understanding of these concepts has been fundamentally transformed. When we want to walk, we simply pick a destination, identify the most tentative of routes for getting there, and pack enough food for the day with the vital aim of getting back before sundown. I think the difference is in the sense of freedom, possibility.
I know that, on leaving, some of my fondest memories of Lesotho will be from these walks. Lying in my underwear on the sun-cooked shore of a secluded river near Setleketseng, lazing and swimming with Huckleberry Finn abandon. Reading King Leopold's Ghost with insistent but marginally literate, distinctive-smelling herdboys in one of their old camps. Wading through frigid, chest-deep donga water with James and Alex from Grinnell Corps: Namibia in our quest for the source of the Makhalaneng. The diversity of terrain is impressive: you can scurry up the scrub brush of a North Dakota-like butte only to find that the other side is a sheer rocky cliff, then return via a North Woods cluster of conifers, or a sandy-soiled deciduous forest, or the terraced red earth of a cornfield before sloshing your way home through the vaguely Amazonian donga--a sprig of wormwood stuffed up your nose all the while for good measure. Hiking has also been a good forum for bonding with housemates. Both Jenny and Renee and I have had mountain- or waterfall-climbing moments where we've had to help each other up hand in hand--the kind of experience a corporate exec pays hundreds of dollars to give her employees at a trust fall seminar.
But let's backtrack a minute. The herdboy is a phenomenon in Lesotho that bears some explanation. Often used interchangeably with shepherd, the word refers to the legion of blanketed "boys"--usually between the ages of seven and 40--charged with watching over the country's desultory cattle, goats and sheep and asking people WHAT IS THE TIME? For a visual, think of Tusken Raiders, the desert sandpeople from Star Wars. Wrapped in long blankets, known to don ski masks even in the heat of December, and never to be found without a trademark molamo--the stick used for dancing, walking, beating--herdboys fit this appearance pretty closely (donkeys, incidentally, provide a pitch-perfect sandperson sound). To me, there's a difference in connotation between herdboy and shepherd--illuminated by Jenny's incisive point that the Christmas story is markedly altered, arguably improved by the substitution of one word for the other. It thus may be more productive to think of these men as cowboys, roaming the Wild West of Lesotho.
Similarities Between Herdboys and Cowboys
- they have to watch over animals
- they cover their faces from dust
- they sleep under the stars (sometimes)
- sometimes they enact vigilante justice
Differences Between Herdboys and Cowboys
- no horses for herdboys
- herdboys carry boom boxes
- Kid Rock never wrote a song about herdboys
- Barack Obama's father was a herdboy
In either case, it's a pretty tough life.
Predictably and somewhat justifiably, the students--brave in so many other ways--are generally terrified of these oft-leering men (who've got a lot of down time and live by an all-girls' boarding school), and so thoroughly disapprove of our walking-as-recreation pursuits. "The shepherds, they will throw rocks at you!" girls regularly warn, citing the herders' impressive knack for hitting a moving target in what, judging by a passage from Obama's 1995 memoir, seems to be a pan-African concern:
"Passing one of the [Mathare, Kenya] slum's open air markets, I saw a row of small boys wave to the train. I waved back, and heard Keiza's voice, speaking in Luo, behind me. Bernard yanked on my shirt.
"'She says you should keep your head inside. Those boys will throw stones at you.'"
Overwhelmingly, our encounters with men and women while walking have been positive, or at least innocuous--people may ask for sweets, or want to know "where from," or helpfully, direct us to our destination when lost. There was this one time, however . . .
I've told this story so many times it's now kind of a performance, but here's an attempt to put it on paper:
Jenny and I had the ambitious plan for one of her last weekends here in November to climb the majestic, twin-peaked Thabana-li-Mele--a mountain whose base is more than ten miles away but whose tops you can see clearly, rising above the rest, from most parts of St. Rodrigue. Previous fellows had done this in the past--there and back in a day, it's reported--but our expected pace was not to be so lightning quick, and we wanted a way to get closer to the base on a Friday before heading for the summit on Saturday. Our solution was to stay at the dirt-biking guest lodge in Ha Ramabanta: home to M'e' Moleboheng, electricity, a mysterious Peace Corps volunteer known as Mosa, and a paved road from which it would be easy to catch a lift to the mountain's foot in the morning.
My knowledge of Ramabanta was as substantively bankrupt as a bowl of bare papa, and Jenny knew precious little more, so we spent the week leading up to our hike asking if any of our students from that area were going home on Friday--they could lead us on the trail. We got no bites, though, and when the ritually truncated Friday school day came to a halt at one, we headed off across the mountains alone, some vague oral directions from local teachers our only guide.
The walk started off beautifully: the summer sun glowing down on us as we left the main road, conversing and decompressing from the school week. After an hour or two over rocky fields our path descended a cliff to the muddy banks of the Makhalaneng, and we took our shoes off, tied up our bags to wade across. The stones in the riverbed were slippery, so it took a while; once across I went swimming. Ramabanta lay a mountain or two beyond, by our reckoning, and though the sun was still high it was also slowly descending, so we soon trudged on.
A ways up the first mountain we saw a couple of herdboys: nothing unusual. But then, keng nthoe--blue uniforms? High schoolers in our part of Lesotho are helpfully color-coded: maroon for Masentle, green for St. John's, blue for St. Rodrigue, and so forth. In the early mornings, if you're up talking on the hill we go to for cell phone reception, you can sometimes see the small blue figures of students moving across the mountains, hustling without watches from upwards of four miles away to their 7:00 morning study. When you pass a village with the bright blue flags of student sweaters draped on its fences and laundry lines, you can assume people will know you. And that was the case here. The familiar form A's, curiously reticent about their involvement with herdboys (it's a love-hate relationship), were heading home to Ramabanta after all, and happy to have company.
So we walked together to the top of the mountain. There we found a series of spray-painted red arrows on rocks: an assuring sign of tourism afoot. Jenny and the girls had a conversation at this point I didn't closely follow--whether to go with the arrows or not. The girls were concerned about getting home before dark and said another way was shorter; I cast my vote in support of local knowledge. Decisions like this sometimes have an epic, Lord of the Rings feel, and Tolkien, born in Bloemfontein, is said to have been inspired by the Drakensbergs. Very well. We shall go through the Mines of Morija!
The walk thence maintained a Tolkien-esque feel: brisk, purposeful, silent as the setting sun. We were making good progress, cutting through the bushes at a meditative clip when one of the girls said with a hush, "Get down." I obliged, chuckling at the thought of rock-throwing fears, until I saw the grave look on Jenny's face.
"They say it's an initiation school," she said.
A blank look from me.
Doubtless recalling the many times she'd already chided me for retaining so little of George Drake's Southern African history class, she explained: "A circumcision school. They'll attack people who've seen them."
And with little warning the girls, still crouched to hide themselves, began bounding up the bushy mountain we'd just been skirting around. I tried to follow, dodging branches and thorns in what could only very generously be called a path, but Jenny was behind me and it soon became impossible to keep both her and the girls in sight. As the students rounded a bend in the route ahead, one of them paused and turned to look at me. "Ntate Bryan," she solemnly intoned. "They are dangerous."
I did not see her again.
Leaving Jenny and me, understandably rattled, somewhere in the thick of a thorny non-path that may or may not lead to Ramabanta, with the threat of vengeful circumcising men at our heels and the ominously receding sun o'er our heads. Jooe! We quickly weighed our options and, with a rough guess at Ramabanta's direction, began to make like the girls and run.
This was painful but productive for a few minutes--until our tangled head-high cover gave way to a vast mountainside of open grass. With little else to do, we plowed on, but this felt doomed from the start. Sure enough, a shirtless, stick-shaking ntate soon emerged from the valley below and began tracking us up the hill. We kept our weary legs working. He, his dogs, and now another man had no problem closing the gap between us, however, and when they were within ten feet we finally turned around to face the inevitable, open palms raised in submission.
Sesotho, if I may be culturally insensitive for a moment, sometimes sounds like a food processor. In this case, an angry, stick-wielding food processor. Our ensuing conversation thus goes something as follows:
"Bo ntate, khotso. We just want to go to Ramabanta."
BLENDER SOUNDS BLENDER SOUNDS! [They take our bags and dictate that we lie prostrate to the ground.] BLENDER SOUNDS!
"But ntate, kho--"
BLENDER SOUNDS! [We get down and they begin rifling through Jenny's bag as the discordantly friendly dogs circle us. I take a mental inventory of my own possessions and whether there's anything I absolutely couldn't bear to part with. They find Jenny's camera.]
"No photo. We were only walking."
BLENDER SOUNDS. [They make me scroll through the photos of the day and beyond, and Jenny whispers to avoid at all costs running into her shots of St Rod's traditional Sesotho culture celebration. After a few minutes they seem satisfied, so I rise to leave.]
BLENDER SOUNDS BLENDER SOUNDS BLENDER SOUNDS!
[I get back down.]
"Bo ntate, le kopa chelete?" Jenny offers.
[They turn to each other.] BLENDER SOUNDS. [No other response.]
Continuing to toss around various combinations of the Sesotho words for peace, Ramabanta, photo and money, Jenny and I persisted with this line of negotiation for a frustrating number of minutes. It was frightening, lying rooted to the ground and being shouted at, but the men seemed intent neither on harming us nor listening to much anything we had to say. Finally, a man who knew some English emerged from the woodwork. He clarified that we had been treading where no one ought tread; we in turn explained our honest intentions and offers of apology.
He looked a little hesitant.
"50 rand each," he said, pointing to himself and his associates.
Without much thought, we forked over the cash. Then, flashing a smile, he half-bowed to us, said sanctimoniously, "You are forgiven," and disappeared with the other two men as quickly as he had come.
Jenny and I lay quiet, seated on the grass a minute or so longer before our heart rates slowed and the true gravity of our situation hit us. 150 rand was the equivalent of 300 break time fat cakes. These men were armed with nothing more than sticks. And that money sure as Ha Tlali wasn't going to the Greater Ramabanta Youth Development Trust. A minor sense of embarrassment and indignation washed over me. We got hosed, Jenny. We got hosed.
But the night beckoned. So relieved of our booty, we still faced the problems of encroaching twilight and getting to Ramabanta. Luckily, a little walking brought us to a more mainstream road on the other side of the mountain, then a surprise reunion with our absentee student trail guides. The girls explained that if they had been caught by the initiation school, the price would have been 1000 rand, 10 bags of sorghum, or a cow--an unthinkable sum for them. They asked Jenny to take their photo. We were glad they escaped, and strolled together into Ramabanta while there was still ambient light left in the sky.
Suffice it to say, the electrified trading post and its overpriced low-slung beds were a comfort that night: we slept like rocks. Rocks that aren't being thrown by herdboys. In the morning, an uncharted hike up and down towering Thabana-li-Mele seemed like it might be pushing our luck, so we hitchhiked to the guest lodge at Semongkong instead. There we had a lovely day, swimming in the river, hiking to the spectacular Maletsunyane Falls. The initiation school brush and our original plans for only one night's paid accommodation had left our cash flow severely diminished, however, so we rationed out modest helpings of the only food we could afford and caught a few restive hours of overnight sleep on a picnic table (blankets recommended, ha ea eo for us). Then, on Sunday morning, we boarded a bus that got us as far as our post office and walked the ten odd miles back to the teachers' quarters at St. Rodrigue. Which reminds me of another superlative joy of hiking: returning to your house and lying supine on a cold linoleum kitchen floor, basking in the pleasure of privacy, shade, care package chocolate bars. Appreciating home.
When we returned to school on Monday, it didn't take long for student-to-student rumblings to spill over into one of my pluckier form B's asking me how our weekend had gone. I told the story in some detail to a fully engrossed, ever-growing audience in the schoolyard, the students responding in unison with their usual range of rising ahs and sudden gasps to indicate understanding, surprise. When I finished, the girl who had called me over spoke for the group.
"Ache, Ntate Bryan," she said emphatically. "You need. To stop. This hiking."
Other teachers expressed a more varied set of reactions. The nuns thought it was outrageous that the men had actually taken our money, while Ntate Leseli, who grew up near Ramabanta, took it much more seriously and suggested we were lucky to have gotten off so lightly. We never have figured out exactly how much danger we were in, but it hasn't been for want of opportunity. To this day, students will ask with a teasing smile, "When are you going to Ramabanta?"
My answer is that I've already been. It was one of my best weekends here.
. . .
I began this two-part report in January, holding prefect elections to decide student-teacher liaisons for the new school year. It's now May; a surprise going-away party is planned for me Thursday. Things besides the times have changed, too: jokes about Somali pirates given way to an American hostage crisis, a strange middle-of-the-night assassination attempt on Prime Minister Mosisili staged in Maseru. This sense of escalating violence has even reached our own backyard: three would-be robbers of the Chinese shop in Mpatana, it's reported, were recently beaten to death by an angry mob of villagers with sticks, prompting a redeployment of our feckless district police force to the area. This merely led to a set of two new smiling faces at the bar and our teacher get-togethers, along with the absolutely terrifying sight--recent fellows, imagine and attest--of the fiery, student-smacking M'e' Khakhane staggering drunk out of a teacher party into the dead of night with an AK-47 strapped to her back (we heard gunshots minutes later).
But I'm goin a go out on a limb--erroneously or not--and say what I've said and heard many times before: that Lesotho is an eminently safe country, and these incidents are an exception to the rule. The epigraph to this essay comes from a student composition I've cited over and over this year, and it's true: the people are really peaceful, and they do really prevent soil erosion, or at least talk about it a lot. I love the sense of openness, of heart here. How if I start dancing or singing others will smile and join in, how people in a taxi pass their money passenger-to-passenger up front and back without batting an eye, how kids in the neighborhood somehow feel like ours just because we both live here, how almost anyone is willing to teach me Sesotho. I wish I could stay on for at least another half-year: to keep eating fat cakes, to learn the names of more rivers and villages, to hang onto the form E literature class I'm abandoning a quarter before their decides-your-life testing in October.
It's going to be difficult to leave.
1: Probably a product of the changes Abbey was assailing, and some may argue precipitated.(back)
2: Plain papa is also detested by Basotho. M'e' Augustina, retired primary school teacher and land baroness across the way, feeds it to her herdboys as punishment when they do something wrong, like letting the cows eat up all her cabbages.(back)
3: Turns out there's a comprehensively simpler, altogether different route to Ramabanta that of course would have been a lot easier.(back)
4: I did eventually hike Thabana-li-Mele with Renee, James, and Alex. It was inspiring. There were herdboys at the top.(back)
