Mating Page 9

  I should have been a better person toward her. I was blocked. She had one of your true heart-shaped faces. I loved her teeth. She was a perfect representative of whatever size she was, all in proportion, what have you. Was she possibly originally southern? Because there was an effluvium of flirtation about her, even though she wasn’t doing it: all she was doing was being miserable and hatching some deluded plan. She would have been one of the girls in my high school with nine hundred cashmere sweaters, cashmeres coming out of her closet like Kleenex. I never asked Denoon if she was southern. Status in my high school came from how infrequently you wore the same clothes, and especially how infrequently you wore the same sweaters. In my humble opinion life shouldn’t be more painful than it has to be. I remember all the desperate improvisations and camouflages it took to disguise the dreadful brevity of the little cycle of clothes I had to wear. This still has the capacity to freeze my heart.

  What was Denoon, by the way? I wondered: what class, what background? Denoon was just an Irish surname to me, and there were no particular indicia glaring at me. Of course a nice thing for him was that as a celestial intellectual he was now hors class. I had to remind myself that the information I wanted was not obtainable by staring.

  It was time to resume.

  A FARCE WRITTEN IN HUMAN BLOOD:

  THE DESTRUCTION OF AFRICA ACCELERATED

  BY HER BENEFACTORS, PRESENT COMPANY

  NOT EXCEPTED

  ACT TWO

  DENOON:

  Now I know very well if I say the word socialism I’m talking about a commodity that’s fairly popular in some quarters hereabouts. Understandably.

  A CLAQUE OF YOUTH FROM THE BOTSWANA SOCIAL FRONT:

  Hyah hyah!

  Semiparodic rendering of the cry Hear hear as heard in the Parliament of Botswana.

  DENOON:

  Ehé. But just because I was so uncomplimentary about what capitalism is doing to Africa I hasten to not leave the impression I embrace socialism as a remedy, just in the event anyone here might think that.

  A MARXIST, ISAAC MBAAKE, YOUTH SECRETARY OF THE BOTSWANA SOCIAL FRONT:

  Never mind, because we all know what you are for. You are for suigenerism, so you must never suppose you can be surprising to us. He finished with his famous hacking laugh, a trademark.

  A SWEDE:

  I think no one was interrupting until now, isn’t it? I think we can all put questions in good time.…

  DENOON:

  No, it’s fine, it’s just all right. I know Isaac. We’re comrades. He wouldn’t say it, but I say it. Interruption is just all right, but in moderation, comrades.

  Ehé. First I always say I am not the enemy of any system per se. I collect systems. I am an agnostic about systems, but I love them. What I say is we should ask the same questions of every system we consider. What are its fruits, number one, and two or even possibly number one, How much compulsion of individuals is required in order to keep it working.

  Voilà, here was the famous voice, a bass baritone with a beautiful grain to it, as advertised. What an asset! But even better was that he seemed to have no idea what he had. When I alluded to it for the first time, down the line, it barely detained him. He was pleased enough and he did remember that there were people who had said something like what I was saying, but even as I was complimenting him his mind was moving on to something else. There are actors who have magnificent voices, but it means nothing because you know that they know how beautiful their voices are: Stuart Whitman is one. When they talk it’s as though they have their voice on a leash, like a borzoi they’re taking to the dog show.

  There was more about having the right attitude to systems. There was for example a great book called Guild Socialism Restated, not that he was a guild socialist.… People should be pluralists and take what was good from one system if it passed certain tests.… All systems are ensembles or mosaics.

  What he was doing was well-intentioned but pro forma. He stayed too long with this.

  DENOON:

  So then, just to balance my books, I want to give the five most serious objections to the socialist remedy for Africa, but by socialism I mean what the comrades mean—the orthodox model you find in Cuba or East Germany or Burma or that you had until lately in Guinea. I think this was the area where he lost everyone with a pun about Cuban socialism being social cubism.

  But he would not get to it. He was too proleptic and too ingratiating. The comrades were supposed to be glad that there were only five objections, whereas he had given nine objections to capitalism. He thought it was nine. Then everybody was to remember that if socialism came to Africa, it would be to an Africa already three quarters integrated into the world capitalist system, the point being that making socialism was not like going to a desert island with your best friends and starting de novo. He was driving us mad with caveats. And by the way did the comrades know that Karl Marx had never set foot in a factory?

  DENOON:

  Every student who writes for UBScope ends his or her article with FORWARD WITH SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM in big letters.

  But then the article writers go forward into the civil service, never to be heard from on this subject again, except to keep a certain flame burning in their hearts and maybe to vote for Botswana Social Front sometimes, for Boso.

  I am saying that people who say socialism and nothing but socialism are using that as a pretext for doing nothing—and, worse, in the meantime they are reaping the fruits that fall to them as a class to whom capitalism directs its benefits even as it drives the mass of the people into worse misery than before.

  And I am saying that if by magic one day the streets turn into rivers of fists and the people themselves come to the guys who today are shouting Forward with Scientific Socialism and rouse them from their desks and say The day has come, then, I am saying, you will have reached the first stage of a calamity.

  Because your socialism is a rhetorical solution to real problems.

  Now I’ll tell you why.

  Thank god, I thought. I felt for him because up to now he had been having trouble getting the right level of discourse going. One problem was that he had too much to say. Also I could tell he liked the idea of proceeding by having enemies, manipulating people into goodnatured enmity toward him. I was on to him. Also showing through, I thought, was that he liked the people he was trying to jockey into antagonistic self-definitions. Also he was dealing with a very mixed group and was essentially uninterested in communicating with the most sophisticated members of it, for the obvious reason that their minds were already made up—yet he needed to retain their respect and was resorting to little tricks of allusion to show that he was only using some portion of what he knew or could say. It was the youth he was going for, but there were pitfalls in that. One danger was his seeming to talk down to them. Either because they were young or because they were Africans they had a less extended set of political referents to hang things on, or a different set, I should say. His speech pattern was adapting toward African English. Anybody who denies you talk more slowly and deliberately when you speak English to Africans is lying. The fact is that the English they learn in school is a very deliberately enunciated English, with the consonants stressed. You know this and yet you still feel like you’re condescending when you do it, and you sweat. A final thing he was struggling with that was apparent to me was the conviction that he had all the answers. He had thought these questions into the ground. This wasn’t manifesting as arrogance but as an unsuppressible certainty, which can be just as irritating. There is some degree of hindsight in all this analysis, I admit, but most of it came to me in bits at the time, even if it was reinforced when I discussed it with Nelson later.

  MBAAKE:

  Ehé, so now we must just perish whilst makhoa dispute about which way we must live.

  DENOON:

  Just what I’m saying—you are perishing now, not you personally but many of your countrymen, and waiting for socialism is not the way to stop perishing. />
  Again he was detouring. It was a reprise about capitalism, having to do with the fact that the white West or the market system, whichever, was taking down the forests of West Africa at the rate of five percent a year,and this was nursing the drought that was throttling everyone in the south. I could imagine Denoon starting an appearance by saying Hello, first may I digress? which I told him.

  DENOON:

  There is no socialism without water. He let this sink in, the intent being to show that somehow capitalism in its application to west and southern Africa was like a pincers, leading to desiccation. It was not carefully crafted. I could have done better. It was a confused amalgam of market-driven deforestation on the one hand and borehole pump peddling in the south on the other. So the white West says Ah, drought, then here—buy some borehole pumps and we will even loan or give you the rigs to drill with, and take your cattle deeper and deeper into the Kalahari and go destroy the grasses there, and in the meantime put in a wellfield in Lobatse and pump out the last fossil water in that part of the country so that construction can resume and more people can be accommodated on land that is turning into a husk. Ah, and in the meantime keep buying more and more diesel from us to run your pumps, thank you very much.

  Nobody is saying to wait and watch. The reverse is what I’m saying. You, we, must look immediately around and see how we can stop being destroyed as of now.

  By the way, Karl Marx was a lakhoa, if I recall. And unfortunately in his scheme, which many of you prefer to cling to, the natural world is only a factor of production and is inexhaustible. Now—

  A VOICE:

  So you must hurry and catechize us as to vernacular development, isn’t it? So that we may be saved in time.

  DENOON:

  Oh god grimly. I haven’t used the phrase vernacular development since 1968. And I am not here to catechize anybody on that or on any scheme to save the third world or the world overall. Not tonight. Tonight there will be no exercise in hubristics.

  But I just want to say I could feel another involution coming. I felt like joining Boso on the spot. This man needed editing. I wanted to scream at him to give us the five sins of socialism or sit down.

  But I just want to say that if you are bystanding waiting for the dispute between capitalist makhoa and socialist makhoa to come to a victory for one side he was now talking practically pure para-African-English and not realizing it, then please stop waiting for that. Because capitalism has already won. The world capitalist republic is here. Mother Russia is in debt to the great banks, more so every day, not to mention Mother Poland. The market is coming! the market is coming! one might say. Socialism is decomposing.

  Ah, but the argument goes on, of course: in the universities.

  All I am saying is that the conversion of Russia is happening behind the backs of the generals and commissars. It has happened.

  Moans and hums of disapproval from the left.

  DENOON:

  But just let me try again to go in order as to socialism.

  Let us say you want to clear away private ownership of productive property and put everything under the state. Well and good, but then you must be prepared to pay five surcharges, very heavy surcharges. These are permanent recurrent costs that never go away. They are intrinsic to your system.

  Also, these are costs not given very much prominence in the literature, or should I say reiterature.

  But to proceed.

  Cost number one is that since you have lost the use of the market, which allocates everything gratis, you must set up a mechanism to allocate things by command. And you must pay people to do that, a lot of people. Historically it has taken somewhere between twenty-five and thirty percent of the total workforce just to do this. You have to remove this large bloc of workers, take them away from productive work, the making of things, just to do this one function, allocating by command, as well as it can be done, which is not very well for the most part. You have to find the people to do this—which is not so easy in Africa, which capitalism is very much but not wholly to blame for—train them, and pay them. And many of them will be among the most talented people in any generation. And they will have to devote their intelligence to this function. So, number one.

  MBAAKE:

  To my comrades pronounced comraids in African English I am reminding that our comrade speaker has said Oh yes, socialism, it is the same as knitting with oars, at one time. You can do it but not for very long at all and the garment leaves something to be desired, he has said. As well, our comrade speaker reading from a card now has said, and not long time ago, not 1968, Oh yes, capitalism is strangling black Africa and socialism must bury her. He has said this.

  DENOON:

  So I did. I said it to provoke. But just let me advance to number two.

  Number two is that under socialism you are going to have to lay aside money to buy technology, ever newer and better technology, from the market states. And forever. Because under socialism unfortunately there is no invention, that is to say innovation. If you ask why this is so, I have to say I can’t tell you. I have guesses about it. But this inventing of new things is very low in all non-market societies, not only in socialism.

  So if you want the latest thing you have to steal it or buy it or do without.

  But at the level of the government, we discover, our rulers would rather not do without, especially if what is on offer is a better kind of weapon. And you can be sure the West is going to keep on creating newer and more gorgeous guns and baubles. I hope we all can see that.

  MBAAKE:

  If you can please say about all these intrinsical troubles about socialism more timeously, so that we can have our voice as well. If you don’t mind to. Because we can say that you are just telling us some claptraps. Because we know that socialism is coming, never mind about what some makhoa tell us. Because Africans have always been socialists, in our villages we were socialists when Karl Marx was not yet born, not even less his grandfather. We are socialists by our blood. Mbaake, rather than continuing to have to stand up to intervene, now went to lean fulltime against the wall.

  BOSO VOICES:

  Hyah, hyah!

  DENOON:

  Well, this is a moment of temptation for me. I could tell.

  I would love to talk about African socialism and was the village a truly socialist institution, ever. I willed him not to.

  Very many untruths have been written on this subject. In my mind I begged him to stick to his checklist. It was partly because I was interested.

  Three is a cost you will never see in a Boso pamphlet and is the cost of suppressing possessive individualism. One could say socialism is an annual, but possessive individualism is an iron perennial. This is a cost superadded to the costs of dealing with general crime, which has not gone away yet in any socialist country. I am referring to the cost of suppressing a novel class of activities designated as economic crimes, such as giving people the death penalty for speculation or hoarding. All crime, but especially this new kind of crime, was supposed to fall away when capitalism was overthrown and the new socialist man was allowed to flourish. But there is no new socialist man, no homo beneficus, and never was. Of course when anyone complained to Lenin about the harsh blows being dealt to his own people his answer was that you could not make an omelet without breaking some eggs. So but now the omelet is cooked and his successors are still breaking eggs. Number three.

  I hope you believe me on this, if on nothing else. Note that I am not saying that making cooperative economic institutions work is impossible because we have to rely on our friend homo economicus to sustain them. Well. I am just saying you can do it, but you have to be wise as serpents.… But now number four.

  Four. Whatever idea you might have—one might have—about giving Botswana a socialist industrial economy, remember that it, and all of Africa, is an agricultural economy. Show me a socialist country and I will show you a net food importer. Even now you, we, are living on gift food from the West. I notice that
Boso is talking about collective farms and ranches. But believe me that the application of socialism—that is, making farmwork into wage labor—has been everywhere a disaster. Industrial socialism is one thing. Socialism in agriculture—the special case of the kibbutz excepted—is nonworkable. The last of the many group ranches set up in Kenya at independence closed down last year. If you choose only one single proposition that I have made tonight to study up and refute, choose that one.