About a month ago I snuck into a very exclusive gathering here in Maun – the book club. My friend Monica, our librarian at the centre, had worked her way in and was hosting, so she invited me. Stupidly, I assumed that reading was involved. “What book are you all reading?” I queried. She laughed. “Oh, Rachel, it’s not really about that…”
It is about white expat women getting together, having a few drinks, and trading copies of books they’ve read. There is no discussion of anything that’s been read. It’s more like a traveling library with booze and snacks. And the library is mostly “chick lit” - books by ‘writers’ like Danielle Steele with flaming pink covers and drawings of skinny women in spiky heels who are always after a man. Or men.
I admit, I went out of a sense of something like arrogant curiosity. What do these mostly South African wives of safari guys talk about? They insulate themselves from life here in their big houses with razor wire, snarling Rhodesian ridgebacks (dogs bred to fight lions), and security systems, coming out to take the kids somewhere or shop at the Safari Spar. I couldn’t imagine.
I went early to help Monica cook and set out the books, which travel from hostess to hostess in a set of lopsided cardboard boxes. The more trashy paperbacks I pulled out, the more I wondered what I would have to say in conversation. Then again, if I were to play the voyeur, it didn’t really matter if I were at a loss for words.
It was a small gathering; apparently word had not made it all the way around to the usual suspects. But about half a dozen women pitched up, dressed in sparkly sandals, cropped pants, topped with carefully styled hair. One woman had brought her kids. But she left them in the car to sleep, with the whole vehicle draped in a mosquito net.
We served carrot salad, spicy chickpeas, basmati rice, pakoras, yogurt dip, and sliced cucumbers. It was more food than usually accompanied the evening’s non-bookish banter. As we settled in, talk revolved around three things.
Food. A lot of this was about weight loss. “It just makes sense not to eat carbs and protein together!” “I lost ten kilos on that diet!” “The gluten in wheat is just not good for you!” And on and on. I had another pakora. And another. They’re made with chickpea flour, after all.
Illness. Here I thought I could relate to the tales of malaria. But I couldn’t get a word in. Not that I tried very hard, mind you. But I felt a bit like I was looked through rather than at. I became quieter. Every time I got up my chair edged back from the circle a bit more, and a bit more. Then, we got onto the subject of HIV. The human resources director of a major local safari company – apparently they were not ALL desperate housewives – held court on the costs of caring for all their employees who are positive. “We have to fly them down here to get their medications, and pay for treatment, and we’re overstaffed by 25% to make up for when people are away or sick, it’s just a huge burden and it’s so expensive! It costs money to fly them down here, and you know they’re only making 700 pula a month anyway [about $115], so we have to pay for them to stay here, and the flights…” There were so many things I wanted to say, simmering quietly in my growing anger. ‘THEY’ are human beings, I thought. And what does it say about your profits if you can overstaff by 25% and still make a shitload of money doing it?
Travel. A truck-driving short-haired woman in boy’s sandals and cargo shorts talked about her upcoming trip to the family farm in South Africa. And a deeply tanned woman in a white miniskirt had just returned from three weeks in Argentina, after having spent the holidays in the Cape before that. Her flights were late getting in, so apparently she did the unthinkable. “I just got my bags and I WALKED OUT of the airport! I mean, you don’t DO that!” She and her husband stayed at a lodge set up mostly for people who wanted to come and hunt birds. They were surrounded by fields of sunflowers – planted, well, to attract birds. I wish she’d stuck to the birds, because her discourse on race relations in the former Spanish colony was even more sickening than the notion of growing gorgeous flowers so birds could be shot. “It’s so much more harmonious than here. I mean, they all speak the same language, it’s one culture, everyone’s white. Or at least not really black.” Silently choking, I pushed back even further. How does someone actually think like that, and then decide it’s ok to let it come out of her mouth? The obliteration and subjugation of indigenous cultures in Latin (case in point) America was no less brutal than it was here. And the idea that speaking Spanish was just naturally what everyone did, well, the parallels with Afrikaans must have utterly escaped her.
But the shopping in Buenos Aires is brilliant, apparently, and oh, it was delightful to hear about how much red meat and wine she consumed. I guess we were back to food after all.
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