Ladies' Detective Agency 01 - The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency Read Free Page B

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