At the gate I meet an ancient old man. Despite the heat, he is wearing a uniform made of wool, army green in colour, buttoned tightly up to his neck. He carries a knobkerrie and a torch and wears his flat hat with pride. He sits on a wooden stool in front of a small guard’s house. He is the watchman for the school. Impressive in theory, but I doubted how effective he would be up against real life thieves.
“Dumela, Rra,” I say, practicing my newly acquired Setswana.
“Dumela, Mma,” he replies smiling.
“Ke ya motseng.” I tell him that I’m going to the village.
“Eh, go siame.”
I step out the gate and start walking. I want to see everything, experience everything. I spot a crashed car parked in the yard near the school in front of a square cement house with no paint. A bright purple and blue lilac breasted roller sits high on the telephone line waiting to fly out and snatch a passing insect, while a pied crow with its bold white and black markings squawks at me as I pass it sitting on the edge of a dustbin. I hear someone chopping wood. I smell a wood fire in the distance. Everything is strange and wonderful and new.
I walk on and I see some children up ahead playing catch with a tennis ball on the dusty lane. When one sees me he turns and points. “Lekgoa!” he shouts in a sing-song voice.
Soon his friends, five or six in number, join in. “Lekgoa!! Lekgoa!!” they sing at me, dancing, smiling, pointing.
Lekgoa- the one spit from the sea. Grammatically, in the noun class reserved for things, not people. A white person. A white thing.
I continue to walk as my smile wanes and soon disappears altogether. The children follow me shouting their mantra. Parents come out and stare. A small girl, maybe three or four, with hair made into long antenna sprouting skyward from her head, rushes forward and touches my arm, running away quick as light, her laugh tinged with an edge of fear. Another touches my hair, just a finger, barely perceptible.
I am no longer me. I am a colour. An abnormal. No one cares what book I’m reading, if I like volleyball, what my sister’s name is, if I like olives. I am not clever or dull. I am not funny or quiet. I have neither good fashion sense or the ability to grow orchids. I am only the white person. Flat, one dimensional. So different, like an animal in the zoo. Expect anything and expect nothing. She is the lekgoa.
Years now are gone. For some reason not exactly clear, I chose never to go home to the icy cold land of my childhood. Seventeen years later and I’m still a lekgoa. Fighting the differences exhausted me. “I am like you” I shouted for years without relief, in ways both verbal and not. I fought every way I could find. My arsenal finally depleted - I gave up.
I’m not sure what I’ve settled on. I know I am white. I know others are black. I know where you are in terms of latitude and longitude will decide what that means. I know what it feels like to be the “abnormal”, an abnormal that I can’t hide away from, that greets others before I speak, that fills their minds with a pile of preconceived ideas that often have little to do with me but will effect me nonetheless. I’ve accepted that I can do nothing about all that, I can only adjust my mind to find a way through it all.
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