Sunset in Old Naledi

By Shepherd Motelebane Motelebane

Sunset came and the fiery twilight spread in the western horizon around Kgale Hills. Her shack was some three kilometers to the south-east of the hills in the township of Old Naledi, and because it did not have windows, she would not have seen the beauty of the hills basking in the shafts of red and purple and crimson. In any event, she could not have seen that magnificent scenery because it was only then that she was waking up from her sleep.

The name given to her by her parents back home in Mmathethe was Tlhalefang, but here in the city of Gaborone, she called herself Suzie. The shack she lived in was rented from an old widow. There were several other shacks in the yard which were also rented out and occupied by other girls.

Suzie stretched her arms and yawned as she removed the cover from her naked body. Her last customer always got a bonus and as such was brought to her shack for the same amount as he would have paid in the bush or a car. The customer was also allowed to spend as much time as he wished, within what she considered reasonable. This time’s customer had been particularly good, repeatedly delighting her until he had left in a hurry for work that morning. She had been still until she heard the engine of his car roar to life and drive away and then she had fallen into a deep, serene and sated sleep.

Her cellphone rang and she heard the ringtone as if it was from afar as she slowly awakened. The ringtone came closer and closer until it jolted her from her sleep. She reached for the phone under her pillow and pressed the answer button. Her eyes were still closed.

“Hello Suzie.”

“Salim,” she answered, her voice sleepy.

“You sound groggy. Are you still sleeping?” Salim asked, his voice soft and cheerful.

“Your call just snapped me out of a nice deep sleep,” she said, still lying flat on the bed.

“I am sorry.” He allowed a pause to pass before continuing. “Look baby, I would like to come to see you right now. OK?”

A short spell of silence enveloped both of them. “As I said I just woke up, so I will need time to get out of bed and prepare. Have a bath, you know? Come and see me a little later. OK, love?” Suzie said, using the word love deliberately, knowing just how much he liked to hear her call him that.

“OK baby.” His voice carried a little glee in it. “Look, I bought you a nice pair of jeans and some airtime. I will see you later although I do not know the exact time as I have some things to do.”

“I will be waiting,” Suzie said, a smile on her face as she heard the call end.

Suzie liked Salim, her regular Indian customer, because he made her feel good about herself. He made her feel wanted. She also liked him because he bought her things but still paid for her services. Above all, he gave her what felt like love, albeit there were times when he seemed aloof or to be pondering on some unanswered question.   

She rolled on her newly acquired Sealy mattress bed, which took up most of the space in the shack. The bed had been bought from a furniture store at the city centre on thirty-six months lay-bye and delivered the day before yesterday. She was proud of her achievement. She giggled as she recalled that Salim had to lie to the furniture people that she worked at his clothes store in the African Mall. Otherwise she could not have acquired the bed. Even so, the lie from Salim did not come for free. He had insisted on being her first customer that very night so that he would be the first one on the bed. She had protested, as such an arrangement would not be good for her business, but Salim had been adamant.

She had managed to sell the old creaking single bed she had been using. Suzie rolled on her bed once again and smiled with pleasure. Today she felt lazy to get up and go to work. She also felt a bit sore because her last customer was well endowed and perhaps she had been a bit too generous.

Her work ethic, however, was strong and so she resolved to get up and prepare for work but first she closed her eyes and allowed her mind to fall free, relishing the tranquility and embracing the waltz into stillness. It was at this point that she was gripped by an inexplicable wave of exhilaration that spread through her entire being. She remained so for several minutes savoring the moment. Outside, night was falling. The streetlights went on in the major streets of the shantytown, leaving the alleyways which comprised the larger part of the township dark.                                              

Suzie lay on her new bed in the darkness of her shack. She felt as though her whole life was centered on that moment with its deep emotions. It was strange that she should feel happy because she hadn’t in a long time. Not that she had been sad. No. Just that she had not felt either emotion in its true sense since the day she had left home after a bitter exchange with her mother. She had left home angry and sad and hadn’t told her mother where she was going. Such had been her life, purposeful yet emotionless.

She allowed herself to be drawn deeper into the quiet, into a profound connection with herself and the sensations grew stronger, demanding alertness. It was at this point that she began to hear sounds and recall smells of childhood which brought recollections. Clear memories that had such strength about them so that it were as though she re-lived those moments of past years. She felt and smelled the rain that had poured on her as she had searched for her parents’ goats. Her nose suffocated at the putrid smell of the school latrines. She felt the pain of blows from the school bully and her mother and her father and her uncles and her cousins who replicated the loathing shown towards her in her household. The sensations and the strange elation gripped her body and remained with her for a while.

She also felt a strong longing for her mother’s love, those times when she would rock her on her lap and sing a lullaby for her when she wanted her to sleep or whisper in her ear, “Hush my baby, mama loves you.” When she was in distress and she wanted her to be calm. She recalled that once her mother had loved her before the madness that drove her away began. It was a longing that was there without any relish or regret. She was glad that now she had found her footing in the city. She no longer felt lost and abandoned. The city was now her home.

 She lay so for a long time, drifting on a cloud, walking into a valley of greenness and magnificent rivers, birdsongs and endless carpets of flowers of many colours. Then there was nothing but a deep silence, windless and without warmth or coldness. A stillness that was at the same time intense and soothing.

Outside, the dark shadows that embraced the alleyways deepened as time took root into the night. Usually around this time Old Naledi became busy as shebeen queens served their patrons and girls donned in clothes that showed flesh moved into the city as did the boys on their night forages for a house to hit in the city’s rich suburbs. Children played in the streets under the streetlights and school-going girls also sat under streetlights and plaited their hair. Drunks staggered home and business thrived at the shopping complex, particularly at the two bars and the supermarket owned by Mohammed the Indian.

A drunk stumbled out of one of the bars hurling insults at an unseen enemy. The drunk was a tall and huge man. He continued shouting his insults until he reached an alleyway and disappeared into the dark.

The voices of the children playing under the streetlight outside came to Suzie as if from afar, faint at first but gradually grew strong and loud and the stillness and silence faded as the din of excitement came closer. She rolled on her bed, lay flat on her back and opened her eyes. After moments of staring at the tin roof of her shack, she jumped out of bed and her fingers groped in the dark in search of the box of matches next to the paraffin lamp she always kept on a small table in the corner a meter or so from her bed. She found the matches. She lifted the glass hood of her lamp and lit the lamp and then light illuminated the room. At that same time, someone knocked at the door.

“Girl, it’s time! Are you not going to work today? Upgrade, remember?” a voice shouted from outside.

“I will be rolling soon Kelly,” she shouted back.

“Let’s hook up at Gaborone West later, right?” Kelly said.

“I am expecting Salim’s call. You know how he is like. But if there is no issue, Gaborone West it is.”

She heard the footsteps go away. Kelly was one of the girls in the yard and she and Suzie got together when they found time to. Suzie chuckled when she recalled the day they had begun to use the word upgrade. It was a word that they had sworn would be their catapult out of Old Naledi to a better township like Gaborone West or Broadhurst where the violence was rarer and the rooms had electricity. The motto was that they had to upgrade their lives from the shantytown.

Outside night deepened and the children gradually began to move off the streets and into their houses. A group of children on their way home saw a drunken huge man staggering out of a dark alley and they scattered in all direction but regrouped when the man entered the lit street and lurched into another dark alley. Ultimately the streets became quite from the din of the children.

Suzie had finished washing and was now delicately applying make-up on her face while watching herself in a piece of broken mirror against the dim light of the paraffin lamp. Hers was a beautiful face, light in complexion and strangely East Asian, an issue that had set her father against her mother. Her doubtful parentage had acted against her till the day she ran away from home. Her father always loudly wondered how from the loins of a Mongwaketse could spring a Chinese.

She stared at herself in the mirror and was satisfied. She opened the door of her shack, lifted the bowl in which she had been bathing and went to empty it in the street. She went back, put away the bowl, took her handbag, blew out the lamp, locked the door and stepped out. She came across the landlady at the gate by the standpipe. She was fetching water.

“Dumela, mmagwe Tumi,” Suzie conveyed her greeting.

“Dumela, my child,” the landlady responded with her usual warm but brief smile. “It is night now, be careful; you know how dangerous this place is.”

“I will, Mmagwe Tumi. I will walk in the light,” Suzie said and smiled. Her smile was easy and bright so that it made her beautiful face look even more so. This way she seemed to always be happy, which hid how she really felt.

She liked it when the old lady showed care. She often wondered whether the landlady knew what business she was in because her face never let on anything. Once in her rare time with some of the girls in the yard she had posed the question to them. They had said they wondered about the same thing.

She walked down the street in short fast steps. She wore tight blue jeans that suited her slender body. The jeans had a low waist without loops for the belt and would expose her red G-String when she bent over, which was the whole purpose. She was wearing a small red crop-top, which hung just below her firm breasts and exposed the navel of her flat belly.

Everybody agreed that Suzie was a beautiful woman. Even her father had grudgingly admitted it and secretly hoped that she would find a husband quickly so he could enjoy the bride price. Her running away had left him moaning and frothing at the mouth with anger.

Suzie continued her walk down the street, enjoying the cool breeze that hit her gently on her exposed back. Then, as if from nowhere, an image of her mother came to her. An angry picture, as her mother was often annoyed with her for no reason she could easily find. Granted she was not a model child, having fallen pregnant and dropped out of school at the age of sixteen. Her father had been beside himself with anger and her mother had acted as fuel would to fire, blaming her for everything at the slightest provocation, actually blaming her for the whole family misfortune. Asking her if she would feed the extra mouth of the bastard she carried in her belly. It was unbearable. But fate had been merciful and the child was stillborn.

The anger of her parents had not died, but merely subsided. In time it grew again in intensity. Her father was impatient with the fact that no man seemed interested in marrying her and so her mother’s tirades began. For five years she lived through their rage and hate. It was only about seven months ago that she realized it, that her mother fueled her father’s anger and hate towards her in order to keep him from questioning her parentage and thereby her fidelity. Suzie had left home.

That night as she walked down the street, her mother’s anger contorted face tormenting her mind, she felt, for the first time, a need to cry. She felt tension in her body and a lump in her throat. Hot tears shot out of her eyes as she turned, out of habit rather than awareness, into the alley she usually used as a short cut to the main road where she would catch a taxi.

Suddenly she fell to the ground as the drunk, still shouting obscenities, bumped into her. As Suzie crashed to the ground, the drunk became beside himself with rage and hurled his huge body on top of her.

“They have sent you after me, right? The bastards at the bar?” he shouted in his stupor.

When Suzie hit the ground her head bumped on a rock and dizziness enveloped her. She welcomed it as her mother’s angry face abruptly faded from her mind.

The drunk stood up, lifting Suzie as he did so and with a final heave threw her against the hedge of the yard on the right side of the alley. Satisfied with the throw, he staggered out of the alley into the street, paused for a short while and went up the street.

Suzie’s body hit the hedge and bounced back to the ground hitting it with a loud thud. She felt no pain. Instead she felt herself drifting into the quietness that had earlier drawn her into its serenity. Again she walked into a valley of such greenness and beauty where in the horizon lay a rainbow of hues so deep and exquisite. Then there was bird song and the hum of streams so gentle and the sound of water falling, lapping on rocks; a lullaby that drew her into an intense sense of sleepiness and her mother’s voice was saying go to sleep my baby. There was care in it. There was love in it.

Then there was silence.

***

Two days later, a notice in the Daily News said, “Members of the public are asked to come and identify the body of a young woman which lies at the Princess Marina Hospital mortuary. She was found dead in Old Naledi on the morning of the 23rd April 2004. The police are looking for any information in connection with her murder, and say that the only person who knew her was an old woman who rented her a shack. She knew her only as Suzie and had never asked for her surname and where she came from. Members of the public are urged to help in this matter…”

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Shepherd Motelebane Motelebane is a Motswana born in Soweto, Johannesburg. His home village is Serowe where he has a homestead, though he has spent the better part of his life living in Gaborone. A Social Worker by profession, Shepherd studied for a Bachelor of Social work at the University of Botswana. He is now retired and has started working full time on creative writing. He is a published poet with several poems published in three separate poetry anthologies in Botswana, edited by Barolong Seboni among other editors. He also ran a column in The Midweek Sun called “The Poet” for about two years. Furthermore, two of his poems won a poetry competition conducted by Mmegi Publishing House for two consecutive years. He has published some short stories with Kutlwano and is currently working on a short story and a novella.