RAMPHOLO MOLEFHE’s crazy bus ride to Selibe-Phikwe gives him a peek into the lives of commuters, miners, revellers and men in uniform
Sixty-three passengers seated and O standing’ the loud sign behind the driver’s seat announces.
It is month-end. The woman bus conductor boasts that she will take standing passengers because, ‘ ke batla go a go casha’, as she puts it jovially.
Thankfully, I calculated when I left home at seven o’clock in the morning that I would take a window seat on the right in order to avoid the midday sun and the traffic down the belly of the bus.
The bus was crawling with all manner of vendors selling anything from Hungry Lion chicken to sunglasses and ‘metsi a mosepele’. We were in mobile Little Lagos, minus the stench of the open drains and the Big Madames transporting live chickens into the depths of the Nigerian hinterlands.
I was quiet happy with the girl who slumbered onto my left shoulder in much the same way as my mother, I am told, had met my father in some taxi in old Mafikeng.
I did my best to concentrate on one of the most enlightening bits of reading I had done in ages, Leon Trotsky’s ‘Art and Revolution’.
Trotsky, perhaps next to Vladimir Lenin, distinguishes himself as one without whom the successive revolutions of 1905 and 1917 that did away with tzardom and bourgeois democracy in the Soviet Union could have been successful.
He argues that despite the general expectation that art will be expected, by dictate of history, to reflect the social relations of the time, and perhaps the spirit of ‘the revolution’, the party has no role in prescribing for the artists what he should reflect upon.
Trotsky believes that art, like every other science, has its own internal laws, on the basis of which it will be judged.
Needless to say, he is contemptuous of what he perceives as the usurpation of the Soviet state by the bureaucrats of Stalin’s administration who not only set the revolution back, but also attempted to use the arts to promote the decadent culture of the renegade government.
The white volunteer type who sat in front of me also seemed to have been stuck into some kind of novel when she was not warding off advances from the vendors at Mahalapye and Palapye. They seemed to take a particular interest in her sandals, which she had put on the seat next to her before she stuffed her ears with the earphones that disappeared into her handbag.
The bus no longer stops at the shopping mall where I had hoped to pick up a fruit, juice and some mineral water, which I opted against in Gaborone for fear that my rather unpredictable bladder would give trouble, especially that there are no toilets on the bus.
I persevered until the bus came to a halt at the Selibe Phikwe bus rank. I was completely disoriented. Not wanting to look like the proverbial village idiot, I swiftly sauntered towards what looked like the center of town…without my walking stick, which I had left in Gaborone.
The stick would have been a liability especially because I was carrying a bag, in addition to a laptop, which would make me a prime target for marauding thugs, if I had dared to travel the previous night.
The daytime is no safer these days anyway. I would gauge the cost of living at Phikwe by ordering a beer at the Coop bar. The bottle store was teeming with intimidating patrons whose faces read: “Enter at your own risk”.
The woman dragged her tired face, stomach and boobs all over the floor, doing her best to implant the fear of god into anybody who might attempt to cross her path. I would have felt safer in the face of a herd of stampeding buffaloes.
It was only 12:30 and I wondered what the town would look like at 12 midnight. The one thing I was certain about was that I would not be around to want to see.
My eyes stealthily surveyed the town center. I called Gaborone to report that I had arrived, and that the whole town was drunk.
I am no mean imbiber myself, so the report elicited bountiful laughter from the other end of the phone. I suspect the person was thinking: “E le gore wena o ba bona jang ka o tshwana le bone”?
I was hell bent on making the best of the working afternoon. With my limp, I would not achieve my goal of sending at least one story to The Sunday Standard before the evening deadline if I carried the laptop and the other bag around.
Taxi, take me to the nearest lodge, I thought. I then asked to be directed to the BCL and the Mine Workers Union offices.
I was looking for an update on current industrial relations at the mine.
Thirty years ago, Phikwe had been the first town to witness a violent confrontation between management and the miners, compelling then Vice President Quett Masire, to attempt arbitration or reconciliation.
In their furor, the miners turned his car on its back. Seretse Khama threatened that had it been himself, he would have ordered the miners shot.
A similar confrontation appeared to be on the cards, at least from what one could pick up from the miners and towns people.
The office was braced for a consultative conference for the following Thursday, (last week), where an update would be given on the results of legal consultation to compel the management to recognise the ‘legitimate’ Mineworkers Union executive in accordance with the latest High Court ruling.
Meanwhile, the management’s favoured executive was also in the process of seeking registration at the registrar’s office in Gaborone.
Presumably, the national conference would also hear a report on the status of the legal case involving four others who had been fired in 2004: Golekanye Magende, Kabelo Oitile, Abel Buka and Kealeboga Keakantse.
Some sitting councilors, formerly employees of the mine, had also been fired in the run up to the 2004 general election, and they also want legal redress.
The town council administration, fearing that turbulent employer – employee relations at the mine would spill over into the general development of Selibe Phikwe, attempted an intervention and failed.
Speaking at May Day celebrations in Gaborone, earlier in the year, Home Affairs Minister, Moeng Pheto, also responsible for labour, said that he and Minerals Minister Charles Tibone had attempted arbitration at the Selibe Phikwe mine in the run up to the 2004 general election.
According to Pheto, ‘at one point it appeared that we were over extending our hand’. The ministers were warned that they should not appear to be interfering with the regular administrative and legal processes.
Says Keakantse: “We have seen effective intervention by ministers of labour in South Africa who are interested in the wellbeing of the national economy. We have seen no results from any intervention that might have been done at ministerial level.”
More recently, some 80 to 100 shift bosses lost their jobs and were promised ‘redeployment’ in the case where vacancies arose.
The miners believe that no such vacancies will appear and that they are being victimised for their enquiries about the implementation of new salary structures agreed between management and the mineworkers union in 2005.
The mine administration, it appears, is hard pressed to employ newly trained miners recently returned from their studies.
I should contact the management, some of whom I pray should be on duty even over the weekend. My attempts to walk the town and seek out management and town council sources are all in vain.
BDF is scheduled to play that Saturday afternoon. By lunch time the casino at Bosele is already bustling with gamblers of all shapes, sizes and ages.
Every third or fourth shop is a bar. It is as if all the bars have one Kwasa Kwasa record blaring loudly enough to kill the miners’ boredom and the pain of little pay.
No wonder all these people from Phikwe yell when they speak. Ga ba ikutlwe.
I listened carefully as the police and immigration workers told their stories about chasing illegal Zimbabweans out of town.
It is a thankless task, they say. Many of them live on the farms of the well to do in Phikwe and the surrounding villages, reveal the workers. Others deliberately have children so that they can claim to be part of the families in those villages. There are some who obediently go, only to reappear a few hours later. Sometimes the townspeople and villagers warn the Zimbabweans of the imminent raids by immigration and other officers of the peace so that they can disappear into the wilderness, out of reach of the government vehicles.
Others simply just sit there with that look in their eyes that says: “You know I will be back tomorrow. So why are you wasting the government’s money to take me to visit my people back home?”
But there is also a village of Setswana speakers on the Zimbabwean side of the border so it is difficult to tell them apart from Batswana, the immigration people say.
The stories multiply.
The Domkrag people were advertising a “Mr” or “Miss BDP” with a hailer and making a noise for every body all over town.
I was warned not no attempt to mix it up with Patricia Majalisa and Splash in the evening at the only place that seemed to have some life at Area One. It’s not safe for cripples, I was warned.
The woman on the club end of this Area One served some mean seswaa of phala with phalatshe, which I had whilst this mad man was trying to sell me a stolen borehole engine.
I knew that it was time to plan my trip back to Gaborone where it is mad but not quiet so crazy. Before I kill someone!
I still feel I owe myself the bigger Phikwe story…
