When Rain Clouds Gather by Bessie Head

Makhaya found his own kind of transformation in this enchanting world. It wasn't a new freedom that he silently worked toward but a putting together of the scattered fragments of his life into a coherent and disciplined whole. Partly life in the bush was like this. In order to make life endurable you had to quiet down everything inside you, and what you had in the end was a prison and you called this your life. It was almost too easy for Makhaya to slip into this new life. For one thing he wanted it, and for another he had started on this road, two years previously in a South African prison, the end aim in mind being a disciplined life. But the Botswana prison was so beautiful that Makhaya was inclined to make a religion out of everything found in Golema Mmidi.

Makhaya crosses the Botswanan border late in the night, fleeing from a life of violence and anger in South Africa that is only vaguely alluded to. He is adrift, and possibly dangerous, but some see in the force of his personality a hope worth cultivating: Makhaya becomes the assistant to a white Briton named Gilbert Balfour, who has dreams of reinvigorating the lives of ordinary Botswanans by teaching them new and advanced methods of agriculture. In this effort Makhaya and Gilbert are challenged by a jealous chieftain named Matenge, locked in a battle with his more powerful brother Sekoto. But they have many allies, too, like the wise elders Dinorego and Mma-Millipede, and the headstrong Paulina, who has fallen in love with the mercurial Makhaya.

In many ways When Rain Clouds Gather is a very didactic novel, though perhaps not as didactic as I expected from the way it begins. It lays out a clear vision for the future of Africa, one grounded in these new agricultural techniques, a vision that is, for the lack of a better word, technocratic. Head, who was a South African who wrote in exile in Botswana, depicts Botswana as a nation ripe for this kind of progress, unlike South Africa, where white supremacy and racial suppression still rule the day. In Botswana, the chief adversary of progress is not white supremacy but tribalism, both in the sense of old tribal enmities and a devotion to old ways. Matenge is the avatar of this "tribalism," a black African who exploits such feelings for personal power. As a result, When Rain Clouds Gather has an interesting and unusual racial politic, exemplified in the alliance between Gilbert and Makhaya--the white egghead and the charismatic black African, who acts as a conduit between Gilbert and the common people. Gilbert, in the middle of the novel, even marries Dinorego's beautiful daughter Maria, and the racial difference in the marriage is treated as unremarkable. (Which is a little wild, considering that the novel is set specifically in Botswana's year-long transition to full independence from England.)

What keeps When Rain Clouds Gather from being too didactic is the character of Makhaya. Head describes him as a refugee whose inner life is a turmoil; he churns with anger and resentment about the things he has experienced and seen--most of which are only hinted at--but who is able, through superhuman self control, to choose a life of optimism and generosity. We are told Makhaya went to prison for being found with the plans for a bomb in his pocket, something that seems unimaginable; but we are led to understand that Makhaya in white-controlled South Africa and Makhaya in Botswana are truly different people. Head never lets us see the ultimate results of Gilbert's agricultural schemes, which are hastened by a drought that decimates the area's cattle, but there is something in Makhaya that makes us believe that his mere presence can bring forth new life. Whatever quality this might be, it is the same quality that makes him frightening and a little dangerous.

With the addition of Botswana, my "countries read" list is up to 68! Nice!