The story is worth repeating. About 20 years ago, a pair of impecunious guzzlers seeking Christmas happiness stumbled into a woman who used to work as a domestic at the University of Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland.
She ran a shebeen. She trusted that her student friend from the UBLS days wood do good when his senanabeke had been replenished, though there was no certainty that it would ever be. In any case, she made Christmas feel like it ought to, in the days before the omnipotent Presidents prescribed what citizens should wear, eat and drink, and where they should do so, under the watchful eye of anonymous spooks who are just about as omnipresent as the Catholic God.
Actually, one of the most reputable Shebeen queens was as Domkrag as they came. She had opened her window for this reliable customer at the unGodliest wee hours of the morning on the rebound from playing band, or some naive girl’s heartstrings.
Briefly, then, there was nothing particularly incongruous about being Domkrag and being a shebeen queen or minister, or even being president. Actually, the more usual culture was that one should be all shebeen king, Domkrag and president.
Christmas merged with Boxing Day, and where the two days converged, one fellow went out to the back for a pee – or wee-wee as they say at the English medium schools – never to return…not until well after midnight.
The more vigilant guzzler followed to relieve his bladder, and upon hearing human sounds emerging from the bottom of the pit latrine, he raised the alarm.
Fear of falling in, and the smell interfered with the vision of the search team that was curious enough to want to find out the kind of animal it was that made those human noises. Fear of heights, or rather, depths, instructed that the wise option was to go to sleep and resume investigations into the belly of the pit latrine at dawn.
The revelation soon came, that one of the guzzlers who was believed to have departed for home, might very well be the victim of the weight of his wee-wee or willy, causing him to slip ass-first, into that dark and pungent hell hole of that unholy stuff.
In the afternoon of Boxing Day, the man merged from a nearby nook to tell the story of how he had been retrieved from his nightmare by an amiable band of volunteers who dangled him a rope to hold onto while they pulled using a vehicle.
They then applied a car-wash which did very little to extinguish the smell that stuck to him like sweat from khadi.
Asked if he was not cold, he replied: “Yessis mahn, that sh-t is hot. I was up to here in the stuff”. (Yessis should be a street corruption of the more honourable ‘Jesus’).He placed his forefinger at his throat. The audience knew that it should have been at his lower lip, permitting him to take swig or two of the good stuff.
Reliable sources point out that the councillor for ‘Maru-a-Pula’ never got to know about this tragic incident. Nor did Maitshwarelo Dabutha, then, the vociferous and omniscient Member of Parliament for Gaborone North.
Former Mayor of Gaborone and MP for Tlokweng Ramotswa, Matheadira Wellie Seboni, made an issue of service levy and certification of occupants of plots at ‘White City’ and ‘Bontleng’ when it was unthinkable that the opposition parties could represent the capital town at Parliament. He was one of the lone voices that called for water reticulation in the low income environs of Gaborone.
Water reticulation in the Self Help Housing Agency plots and low income neighbourhoods of Gaborone has been an unattainable dream for the working class and jobless residents of those enclaves of the town turned city.
The pit latrines of Gaborone have been a health hazard for all the independence years, also providing a space for baby dumping and breeding of pedigree cockroaches.
The ‘freedom square’ that the politicians visit is only a stones’ throw away from the shebeen at the very belly of the SHHA community. Strangely, the deterioration of the earth and the health risk to children and the elderly arising out of continuing use of the pit latrine system appears nowhere in the rhetoric of the contesting political parties.
The dusty roads are a breeding ground for TB, asthma and other lung diseases.
Typhoid, yellow fever, malaria, bilharzias and intestinal diseases are nurtured in the gullies and lidless ravines that keep waste water and the washerwoman’s garbage.
Since the community taps were closed, the citizens rent out water from the neighbours who are fortunate to have it.
The other fellow visited the bar to announce that his sick wife was sleeping in the shell that remained after the wind took away his roof a few storms ago. There was no ceiling. He and his live-in friend are unemployed and he wanted money for the taxi to take the woman away to a place that had some kind of shelter, any.
At the Maru-a- Pula Botswana Housing Corporation flats, the residents ÔÇô some of them of Asiatic and West African origins ÔÇô park their cars at the entrances into the buildings. The Water Utilities Corporations spreads the bill for the water that their water pipes spill across the residents. One bill rose from P92 to P219 the next month and then to P419 and the pipes are still dripping at Plot 21968.
The most profitable career, particularly at Maru-a-Pula, where that infamous shebeen is located, is prostitution. The downstream industry after prostitution is theft. And then burglary… of cars, the occasional decent house and people. Susan and Thabo do business there.
There is a long tarred road that carries cars from ‘New England’ and the government enclave, past Maru-a-Pula secondary school where the school fees stands at some P18, 000 a term equal to the average household income at SHHA, to their homes in Phakalane. It passes at The Tavern near ‘Middle Star’ where the expatriate prostitutes and their indigenous competition have adopted an aggressive campaign against the international economic recession by marketing their wares both by force and on lay-bye. There, it is difficult for a man to leave the place with his pants on…or off, for that matter.
The Domkrag politicians once visited the place on a weekend to explain why nothing can be done about anything because of the recession. The rumour was that the BNF was still fighting about who to appoint for parliamentary candidacy. They finally arrived to introduce their parliamentary and council candidates two Sundays ago at Maru-a-Pula since they were last seen five years ago. Dumelang Saleshando has been seen in Jinja and Middle Star and on the lamp poles. He probably senses that in light of the chaos at the BNF and the BDP, he is guaranteed a free ride to Parliament.
Gomolemo Motswaledi, the first candidate to flaunt his campaign graffiti on the local kombis, now spends more time at the High Court and the BDP’s disciplinary committees, having been overtaken by Kgomotso Mogami, who has for countless years served as Government Ward councillor after G Mannathoko. She will no doubt lose and be nominated or specially elected to something.
The poor and low income neighbourhoods form a concentration of the electorate without which no candidate will win election, and they are the main target of the politicians who do not find it as easy to gain access to the ‘Tshaba Ntsa’ homes when the owners lock their gates and security systems, allowing their pit bulls to roam the grounds freely when they are at work. There is no point in visiting because the domestic workers and ‘garden boys’ are Zimbabweans.
Previously, the general election was timed to come immediately after the independence celebrations when every ward would be fed cows and Chibuku to the accompaniment of traditional songs and choirs. Even that is now gone for the poor folk. So are the shebeens and the braai stands.
The pit latrines continue to breed vintage cockroaches, and Christmas is just around the corner.
