Ladies' Detective Agency 01 - The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency (4 page)

“You go back home to your wife,” he said.
“If a man leaves his wife too long, she starts to make trouble for him.
Believe me. Go back and give her more children.”

So I left the
mines, secretly, like a thief, and came back to Botswana in 1960. I cannot tell
you how full my heart was when I crossed the border back into Botswana and left
South Africa behind me forever. In that place I had felt every day that I might
die. Danger and sorrow hung over Johannesburg like a cloud, and I could never
be happy there. In Botswana it was different. There were no policemen with
dogs; there were no
totsis
with knives, waiting to rob you; you did
not wake up every morning to a wailing siren calling you down into the hot
earth. There were not the same great crowds of men, all from some distant
place, all sickening for home, all wanting to be somewhere else. I had left a
prison—a great, groaning prison, under the sunlight.

When I came
home that time, and got off the bus at Mochudi, and saw the
kopje
and
the chief’s place and the goats, I just stood and cried. A man came up to
me—a man I did not know—and he put his hand on my shoulder and
asked me whether I was just back from the mines. I told him that I was, and he
just nodded and left his hand there until I had stopped weeping. Then he smiled
and walked away. He had seen my wife coming for me, and he did not want to
interfere with the homecoming of a husband.

I had taken this wife three
years earlier, although we had seen very little of one another since the
marriage. I came back from Johannesburg once a year, for one month, and this
was all the life we had had together. After my last trip she had become
pregnant, and my little girl had been born while I was still away. Now I was to
see her, and my wife had brought her to meet me off the bus. She stood there,
with the child in her arms, the child who was more valuable to me than all the
gold taken out of those mines in Johannesburg. This was my first-born, and my
only child, my girl, my Precious Ramotswe.

Precious was like her
mother, who was a good fat woman. She played in the yard outside the house and
laughed when I picked her up. I had a cow that gave good milk, and I kept this
nearby for Precious. We gave her plenty of syrup too, and eggs every day. My
wife put Vaseline on her skin, and polished it, so that she shone. They said
she was the most beautiful child in Bechuanaland and women would come from
miles away to look at her and hold her.

Then my wife, the mother of
Precious, died. We were living just outside Mochudi then, and she used to go
from our place to visit an aunt of hers who lived over the railway line near
the Francistown Road. She carried food there, as that aunt was too old to look
after herself and she only had one son there, who was sick with sufuba and
could not walk very far.

I don’t know how it happened. Some
people said that it was because there was a storm brewing up and there was
lightning that she may have run without looking where she was going. But she
was on the railway line when the train from Bulawayo came down and hit her. The
engine driver was very sorry, but he had not seen her at all, which was
probably true.

My cousin came to look after Precious. She made her
clothes, took her to school and cooked our meals. I was a sad man, and I
thought: Now there is nothing left for you in this life but Precious and your
cattle. In my sorrow, I went out to the cattle post to see how my cattle were,
and to pay the herd boys. I had more cattle now, and I had even thought of
buying a store. But I decided to wait, and to let Precious buy a store once I
was dead. Besides, the dust from the mines had ruined my chest, and I could not
walk fast or lift things.

One day I was on my way back from the cattle
post and I had reached the main road that led from Francistown to Gaborone. It
was a hot day, and I was sitting under a tree by the roadside, waiting for the
bus that would go that way later on. I fell asleep from the heat, and was woken
by the sound of a car drawing up.

It was a large car, an American car,
I think, and there was a man sitting in the back. The driver came up to me and
spoke to me in Setswana, although the number plate of the car was from South
Africa. The driver said that there was a leak in the radiator and did I know
where they might find some water. As it happened, there was a cattle-watering
tank along the track to my cattle post, and so I went with the driver and we
filled a can with water.

When we came back to put the water in the
radiator, the man who had been sitting in the back had got out and was standing
looking at me. He smiled, to show that he was grateful for my help, and I
smiled back. Then I realised that I knew who this man was, and that it was the
man who managed all those mines in Johannesburg—one of Mr
Oppenheimer’s men.

I went over to this man and told him who I
was. I told him that I was Ramotswe, who had worked in his mines, and I was
sorry that I had had to leave early, but that it had been because of
circumstances beyond my control.

He laughed, and said that it was good
of me to have worked in the mines for so many years. He said I could ride back
in his car and that he would take me to Mochudi.

So I arrived back in
Mochudi in that car and this important man came into my house. He saw Precious
and told me that she was a very fine child. Then, after he had drunk some tea,
he looked at his watch.

“I must go back now,” he said.
“I have to get back to Johannesburg.”

I said that his wife
would be angry if he was not back in time for the food she had cooked him. He
said this would probably be so.

We walked outside. Mr
Oppenheimer’s man reached into his pocket and took out a wallet. I turned
away while he opened it; I did not want money from him, but he insisted. He
said I had been one of Mr Oppenheimer’s people and Mr Oppenheimer liked
to look after his people. He then gave me two hundred rands, and I said that I
would use it to buy a bull, since I had just lost one.

He was pleased
with this. I told him to go in peace and he said that I should stay in peace.
So we left one another and I never saw my friend again, although he is always
there, in my heart.

CHAPTER
THREE

LESSONS ABOUT BOYS AND GOATS

O
BED RAMOTSWE installed his cousin in a room at the
back of the small house he had built for himself at the edge of the village
when he had returned from the mines. He had originally planned this as a
storeroom, in which to keep his tin trunks and spare blankets and the supplies
of paraffin he used for cooking, but there was room for these elsewhere. With
the addition of a bed and a small cupboard, and with a coat of whitewash
applied to the walls, the room was soon fit for occupation. From the point of
view of the cousin, it was luxury almost beyond imagination; after the
departure of her husband, six years previously, she had returned to live with
her mother and her grandmother and had been required to sleep in a room which
had only three walls, one of which did not quite reach the roof. They had
treated her with quiet contempt, being old-fashioned people, who believed that
a woman who was left by her husband would almost always have deserved her fate.
They had to take her in, of course, but it was duty, rather than affection,
which opened their door to her.

Her husband had left her because she
was barren, a fate which was almost inevitable for the childless woman. She had
spent what little money she had on consultations with traditional healers, one
of whom had promised her that she would conceive within months of his
attentions. He had administered a variety of herbs and powdered barks and, when
these did not work, he had turned to charms. Several of the potions had made
her ill, and one had almost killed her, which was not surprising, given its
contents, but the barrenness remained and she knew that her husband was losing
patience. Shortly after he left, he wrote to her from Lobatse and told
her—proudly—that his new wife was pregnant. Then, a year and a half
later, there came a short letter with a photograph of his child. No money was
sent, and that was the last time she heard from him.

Now, holding
Precious in her arms, standing in her own room with its four stout, whitewashed
walls, her happiness was complete. She allowed Precious, now four, to sleep
with her in her bed, lying awake at night for long hours to listen to the
child’s breathing. She stroked her skin, held the tiny hand between her
fingers, and marvelled at the completeness of the child’s body. When
Precious slept during the afternoon, in the heat, she would sit beside her,
knitting and sewing tiny jackets and socks in bright reds and blues, and brush
flies away from the sleeping child.

Obed, too, was content. He gave his
cousin money each week to buy food for the household and a little extra each
month for herself. She husbanded resources well, and there was always money
left over, which she spent on something for Precious. He never had occasion to
reprove her, or to find fault in her upbringing of his daughter. Everything was
perfect.

The cousin wanted Precious to be clever. She had had little
education herself, but had struggled at reading, and persisted, and now she
sensed the possibilities for change. There was a political party, now, which
women could join, although some men grumbled about this and said it was asking
for trouble. Women were beginning to speak amongst themselves about their lot.
Nobody challenged men openly, of course, but when women spoke now amongst
themselves, there were whispers, and looks exchanged. She thought of her own
life; of the early marriage to a man she had barely met, and of the shame of
her inability to bear children. She remembered the years of living in the room
with three walls, and the tasks which had been imposed upon her, unpaid. One
day, women would be able to sound their own voice, perhaps, and would point out
what was wrong. But they would need to be able to read to do that.

She
started by teaching Precious to count. They counted goats and cattle. They
counted boys playing in the dust. They counted trees, giving each tree a name:
crooked one; one with no leaves; one where mopani worms like to hide; one where
no bird will go. Then she said: “If we chop down the tree which looks
like an old man, then how many trees are there left?” She made Precious
remember lists of things—the names of members of the family, the names of
cattle her grandfather had owned, the names of the chiefs. Sometimes they sat
outside the store nearby, the Small Upright General Dealer, and waited for a
car or a truck to bump its way past on the pothole-pitted road. The cousin
would call out the number on the registration plate and Precious would have to
remember it the next day when she was asked, and perhaps even the day after
that. They also played a variety of Kim’s Game, in which the cousin would
load a basket-work tray with familiar objects and a blanket would then be
draped over it and one object removed.

“What has been taken from
the tray?”

“An old marula pip, all gnarled and chewed
up.”

“And what else?”

“Nothing.”

She was never wrong, this child who watched
everybody and everything with her wide, solemn eyes. And slowly, without
anybody ever having intended this, the qualities of curiosity and awareness
were nurtured in the child’s mind.

By the time Precious went to
school at the age of six, she knew her alphabet, her numbers up to two hundred,
and she could recite the entire first chapter of the Book of Genesis in the
Setswana translation. She had also learnt a few words of English, and could
declaim all four verses of an English poem about ships and the sea. The teacher
was impressed and complimented the cousin on what she had done. This was
virtually the first praise that she had ever received for any task she had
performed; Obed had thanked her, and done so often, and generously, but it had
not occurred to him to praise her, because in his view she was just doing her
duty as a woman and there was nothing special about that.

“We are
the ones who first ploughed the earth when Modise (God) made it,” ran an
old Setswana poem. “We were the ones who made the food. We are the ones
who look after the men when they are little boys, when they are young men, and
when they are old and about to die. We are always there. But we are just women,
and nobody sees us.”

Lessons About Boys

Mma
Ramotswe thought: God put us on this earth. We were all Africans then, in the
beginning, because man started in Kenya, as Dr Leakey and his Daddy have
proved. So, if one thinks carefully about it, we are all brothers and sisters,
and yet everywhere you look, what do you see? Fighting, fighting, fighting.
Rich people killing poor people; poor people killing rich people. Everywhere,
except Botswana. That’s thanks to Sir Seretse Khama, who was a good man,
who invented Botswana and made it a good place. She still cried for him
sometimes, when she thought of him in his last illness and all those clever
doctors in London saying to the Government: “We’re sorry but we
cannot cure your President.”