On the other side of the road was the beginning of the plain that stretched out into the Kalahari. It was featureless land, cluttered with low thorn trees, on the branches of which there perched the hornbills and the fluttering molopes, with their long, trailing tail feathers. It was a world that seemed to have no end, and that, I think, is what made Africa in those days so different. There was no end to it. A man could walk, or ride, forever, and he would never get anywhere.
I am sixty now, and I do not think God wants me to live much longer. Perhaps there will be a few years more, but I doubt it; I saw Dr Moffat at the Dutch Reformed Hospital in Mochudi who listened to my chest. He could tell that I had been a miner, just by listening, and he shook his head and said that the mines have many different ways of hurting a man. As he spoke, I remembered a song which the Sotho miners used to sing. They sang: “The mines eat men. Even when you have left them, the mines may still be eating you.” We all knew this was true. You could be killed by falling rock or you could be killed years later, when going underground was just a memory, or even a bad dream that visited you at night. The mines would come back for their payment, just as they were coming back for me now. So I was not surprised by what Dr Moffat said.
Some people cannot bear news like that. They think they must live forever, and they cry and wail when they realise that their time is coming. I do not feel that, and I did not weep at that news which the doctor gave me. The only thing that makes me sad is that I shall be leaving Africa when I die. I love Africa, which is my mother and my father. When I am dead, I shall miss the smell of Africa, because they say that where you go, wherever that may be, there is no smell and no taste.
I’m not saying that I’m a brave man—I’m not—but I really don’t seem to mind this news I have been given. I can look back over my sixty years and think of everything that I have seen and of how I started with nothing and ended up with almost two hundred cattle. And I have a good daughter, a loyal daughter, who looks after me well and makes me tea while I sit here in the sun and look out to the hills in the distance. When you see these hills from a distance, they are blue; as all the distances in this country are. We are far from the sea here, with Angola and Namibia between us and the coast, and yet we have this great empty ocean of blue above us and around us. No sailor could be lonelier than a man standing in the middle of our land, with the miles and miles of blue about him.
I have never seen the sea, although a man I worked with in the mines once invited me to his place down in Zululand. He told me that it had green hills that reached down to the Indian Ocean and that he could look out of his doorway and see ships in the distance. He said that the women in his village brewed the best beer in the country and that a man could sit in the sun there for many years and never do anything except make children and drink maize beer. He said that if I went with him, he might be able to get me a wife and that they might overlook the fact that I was not a Zulu—if I was prepared to pay the father enough money for the girl.
But why should I want to go to Zululand? Why should I ever want anything but to live in Botswana, and to marry a Tswana girl? I said to him that Zululand sounded fine, but that every man has a map in his heart of his own country and that the heart will never allow you to forget this map. I told him that in Botswana we did not have the green hills that he had in his place, nor the sea, but we had the Kalahari and land that stretched farther than one could imagine. I told him that if a man is born in a dry place, then although he may dream of rain, he does not want too much, and that he will not mind the sun that beats down and down. So I never went with him to Zululand and I never saw the sea, ever. But that has not made me unhappy, not once.
So I sit here now, quite near the end, and think of everything that has happened to me. Not a day passes, though, that my mind does not go to God and to thoughts of what it will be like to die. I am not frightened of this, because I do not mind pain, and the pain that I feel is really quite bearable. They gave me pills—large white ones—and they told me to take these if the pain in my chest became too great. But these pills make me sleepy, and I prefer to be awake. So I think of God and wonder what he will say to me when I stand before him.
Some people think of God as a white man, which is an idea which the missionaries brought with them all those years ago and which seems to have stuck in people’s mind. I do not think this is so, because there is no difference between white men and black men; we are all the same; we are just people. And God was here anyway, before the missionaries came. We called him by a different name, then, and he did not live over at the Jews’ place; he lived here in Africa, in the rocks, in the sky, in places where we knew he liked to be. When you died, you went somewhere else, and God would have been there too, but you would not be able to get specially close to him. Why should he want that?
We have a story in Botswana about two children, a brother and sister, who are taken up to heaven by a whirlwind and find that heaven is full of beautiful white cattle. That is how I like to think of it, and I hope that it is true. I hope that when I die I find myself in a place where there are cattle like that, who have sweet breath, and who are all about me. If that is what awaits me, then I am happy to go tomorrow, or even now, right at this moment. I should like to say goodbye to Precious, though, and to hold my daughter’s hand as I went. That would be a happy way to go.
I LOVE our country, and I am proud to be a Motswana. There’s no other country in Africa that can hold its head up as we can. We have no political prisoners, and never have had any. We have democracy. We have been careful. The Bank of Botswana is full of money, from our diamonds. We owe nothing.
But things were bad in the past. Before we built our country we had to go off to South Africa to work. We went to the mines, just as people did from Lesotho and Mozambique and Malawi and all those countries. The mines sucked our men in and left the old men and the children at home. We dug for gold and diamonds and made those white men rich. They built their big houses, with their walls and their cars. And we dug down below them and brought out the rock on which they built it all.
I went to the mines when I was eighteen. We were the Bechuanaland Protectorate then, and the British ran our country, to protect us from the Boers (or that is what they said). There was a Commissioner down in Mafikeng, over the border into South Africa, and he would come up the road and speak to the chiefs. He would say: “You do this thing; you do that thing.” And the chiefs all obeyed him because they knew that if they did not he would have them deposed. But some of them were clever, and while the British said “You do this,” they would say “Yes, yes, sir, I will do that” and all the time, behind their backs, they did the other thing or they just pretended to do something. So for many years, nothing at all happened. It was a good system of government, because most people want nothing to happen. That is the problem with governments these days. They want to do things all the time; they are always very busy thinking of what things they can do next. That is not what people want. People want to be left alone to look after their cattle.
We had left Mahalapye by then, and gone to live in Mochudi, where my mother’s people lived. I liked Mochudi, and would have been happy to stay there, but my father said I should go to the mines, as his lands were not good enough to support me and a wife. We did not have many cattle, and we grew just enough crops to keep us through the year. So when the recruiting truck came from over the border I went to them and they put me on a scale and listened to my chest and made me run up and down a ladder for ten minutes. Then a man said that I would be a good miner and they made me write my name on a piece of paper. They asked me the name of my chief and asked me whether I had ever been in any trouble with the police. That was all.
I went off on the truck the next day. I had one trunk, which my father had bought for me at the Indian Store. I only had one pair of shoes, but I had a spare shirt and some spare trousers. These were all the things I had, apart from some biltong which my mother had made for me. I loaded my trunk on top of the truck and then all the families who had come to say goodbye started to sing. The women cried and we waved goodbye. Young men always try not to cry or look sad, but I knew that within us all our hearts were cold.
It took twelve hours to reach Johannesburg, as the roads were rough in those days and if the truck went too fast it could break an axle. We travelled through the Western Transvaal, through the heat, cooped up in the truck like cattle. Every hour, the driver would stop and come round to the back and pass out canteens of water which they filled at each town we went through. You were allowed the canteen for a few seconds only, and in that time you had to take as much water as you could. Men who were on their second or third contract knew all about this, and they had bottles of water which they would share if you were desperate. We were all Batswana together, and a man would not see a fellow Motswana suffer.
The older men were about the younger ones. They told them that now that they had signed on for the mines, they were no longer boys. They told us that we would see things in Johannesburg which we could never have imagined existing, and that if we were weak, or stupid, or if we did not work hard enough, our life from now on would be nothing but suffering. They told us that we would see cruelty and wickedness, but that if we stuck with other Batswana and did what we were told by the older men, we would survive. I thought that perhaps they were exaggerating. I remembered the older boys telling us about the initiation school that we all had to go to and warning us of what lay ahead of us. They said all this to frighten us, and the reality was quite different. But these men spoke the absolute truth. What lay ahead of us was exactly what they had predicted, and even worse.
In Johannesburg they spent two weeks training us. We were all quite fit and strong, but nobody could be sent down the mines until he had been made even stronger. So they took us to a building which they had heated with steam and they made us jump up and down onto benches for four hours each day. This was too much for some men, who collapsed, and had to be hauled back to their feet, but somehow I survived it and passed on to the next part of our training. They told us how we would be taken down into the mines and about the work we would be expected to do. They talked to us about safety, and how the rock could fall and crush us if we were careless. They carried in a man with no legs and put him down on a table and made us listen to him as he told us what had happened to him.
They taught us Funagalo, which is the language used for giving orders underground. It is a strange language. The Zulus laugh when they hear it, because there are so many Zulu words in it but it is not Zulu. It is a language which is good for telling people what to do. There are many words for push, take, shove, carry, load, and no words for love, or happiness, or the sounds which birds make in the morning.
Then we went down to the shafts and were shown what to do. They put us in cages, beneath great wheels, and these cages shot down as fast as hawks falling upon their prey. They had trains down there—small trains—and they put us on these and took us to the end of long, dark tunnels, which were filled with green rock and dust. My job was to load rock after it had been blasted, and I did this for seven hours a day. I grew strong, but all the time there was dust, dust, dust.
Some of the mines were more dangerous than others, and we all knew which these were. In a safe mine you hardly ever see the stretchers underground. In a dangerous one, though, the stretchers are often out, and you see men being carried up in the cages, crying with pain, or, worse still, silent under the heavy red blankets. We all knew that the only way to survive was to get into a crew where the men had what everybody called rock sense. This was something which every good miner had. He had to be able to see what the rock was doing—what it was feeling—and to know when new supports were needed. If one or two men in a crew did not know this, then it did not matter how good the others were. The rock would come down and it fell on good miners and bad.
There was another thing which affected your chances of survival, and this was the sort of white miner you had. The white miners were put in charge of the teams, but many of them had very little to do. If a team was good, then the boss boy knew exactly what to do and how to do it. The white miner would pretend to give the orders, but he knew that it would be the boss boy who really got the work done. But a stupid white miner—and there were plenty of those—would drive his team too hard. He would shout and hit the men if he thought they were not working quickly enough and this could be very dangerous. Yet when the rock came down, the white miner would never be there; he would be back down the tunnel with the other white miners, waiting for us to report that the work had been finished.
It was not unusual for a white miner to beat his men if he got into a temper. They were not meant to, but the shift bosses always turned a blind eye and let them get on with it. Yet we were never allowed to hit back, no matter how undeserved the blows. If you hit a white miner, you were finished. The mine police would be waiting for you at the top of the shaft and you could spend a year or two in prison.
They kept us apart, because that is how they worked, these white men. The Swazis were all in one gang, and the Zulus in another, and the Malawians in another. And so on. Everybody was with his people, and had to obey the boss boy. If you didn’t, and the boss boy said that a man was making trouble, they would send him home or arrange for the police to beat him until he started to be reasonable again.
We were all afraid of the Zulus, although I had that friend who was a kind Zulu. The Zulus thought they were better than any of us and sometimes they called us women. If there was a fight, it was almost always the Zulus or the Basotho, but never the Batswana. We did not like fighting. Once a drunk Motswana wandered into a Zulu hostel by mistake on a Saturday night. They beat him with sjamboks and left him lying on the road to be run over. Fortunately a police van saw him and rescued him, or he would have been killed. All for wandering into the wrong hostel.
I worked for years in those mines, and I saved all my money. Other men spent it on town women, and drink, and on fancy clothes. I bought nothing, not even a gramophone. I sent the money home to the Standard Bank and then I bought cattle with it. Each year I bought a few cows, and gave them to my cousin to look after. They had calves, and slowly my herd got bigger.
I would have stayed in the mines, I suppose, had I not witnessed a terrible thing. It happened after I had been there for fifteen years. I had then been given a much better job, as an assistant to a blaster. They would not give us blasting tickets, as that was a job that the white men kept for themselves, but I was given the job of carrying explosives for a blaster and helping him with the fuses. This was a good job, and I liked the man I worked for.
He had left something in a tunnel once—his tin can in which he carried his sandwiches—and he had asked me to fetch it. So I went off down the tunnel where he had been working and looked for this can. The tunnel was lit by bulbs which were attached to the roof all the way along, so it was quite safe to walk along it. But you still had to be careful, because here and there were great galleries which had been blasted out of the rock. These could be two hundred feet deep, and they opened out from the sides of the tunnel to drop down to another working level, like underground quarries. Men fell into these galleries from time to time, and it was always their fault. They were not looking where they were walking, or were walking along an unlit tunnel when the batteries in their helmet lights were weak. Sometimes a man just walked over the edge for no reason at all, or because he was unhappy and did not want to live anymore. You could never tell; there are many sadnesses in the hearts of men who are far away from their countries.
I turned a corner in this tunnel and found myself in a round chamber. There was a gallery at the end of this, and there was a warning sign. Four men were standing at the edge of this, and they were holding another man by his arms and legs. As I came round the corner, they lifted him and threw him forwards, over the edge and into the dark. The man screamed, in Xhosa, and I heard what he said. He said something about a child, but I did not catch it all as I am not very good at Xhosa. Then he was gone.
I stood where I was. The men had not seen me yet, but one turned round and shouted out in Zulu. Then they began to run towards me. I turned round and ran back along the tunnel. I knew that if they caught me I would follow their victim into the gallery. It was not a race I could let myself lose.
Although I got away, I knew that those men had seen me and that I would be killed. I had seen their murder and could be a witness, and so I knew that I could not stay in the mines.
I spoke to the blaster. He was a good man and he listened to me carefully when I told him that I would have to go. There was no other white man I could have spoken to like that, but he understood.
Still, he tried to persuade me to go to the police.
“Tell them what you saw,” he said in Afrikaans. “Tell them. They can catch these Zulus and hang them.”
“I don’t know who these men are. They’ll catch me first. I am going home to my place.”
He looked at me and nodded. Then he took my hand and shook it, which is the first time a white man had done that to me. So I called him my brother, which is the first time I had done that to a white man.
“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.
