kittens, expats, and that tricky thing we call 'race'

It's spring, and the jacarandas are in full bloom.

Imagine Gaborone, which is otherwise pretty dry and dusty in these waiting-for-the-rains days, decorated with these. The beautiful purple blossoms fall off the trees by the hundreds, and make the ground rather pretty.

It was actually raining pretty steadily as I began to write this entry on Thursday evening. It began to thunder and lightning, but only a bit of rain fell, and I had figured that was it. Then it turned into the first real rain of the 'rainy' season -- at least, it felt real to me. I don't remember it raining on Friday, but we did have another little storm in the middle of the day on Saturday.

I took the day off today on Thursday. In other words, no meetings, no time spent trying to arrange meetings (at least, not intentionally), and no typing of notes from prior meetings. No reading of academic books or AIDS-related anything. Just a ham & egg sandwich before jumping in the car and heading to Otse.

Otse is south of Gaborone, about halfway down the road to Lobatse. This map will give you a sense of area. Otse is home to Otse Peak, the highest point in Botswana. You can see the hill from a long way off. A certain point of the hill -- or perhaps a separate hill? -- is known as Baratani, 'the lovers'. The story is something along these lines: boy and girl fall in love; marriages are arranged otherwise; boy and girl run away and throw themselves off cliff. One isn't, I'm told, supposed to climb Baratani, but I don't know if the extends to the entire hill.

I wasn't there to climb the hill, however. A friend of mine is staying in Otse with a friend of hers, and I went down to see them both. The first friend has a cat, and the cat had kittens about two months ago. The kittens are now ready to leave their mother, and one has been reserved for me. I hadn't actually seen the kittens since they were a few weeks old, and I wanted to see what they were like.

Here are some pictures I took in Otse. There are also a couple of pictures of Gabs in the set, by way of contrast. I'm afraid I didn't actually get any shots of the kittens, but believe me when I say they are adorable. I really do want to take the kitten reserved for me, but there are a few problems I have to work out: 1) I need to run this by my landlords; 2) I need to figure out what I would do with the kitten while I'm away over the holidays; 3) I need to think about where I'm going to live...

Which brings me to this: I'm considering moving out to Gabane. (Look at the map again, and look directly west of Gabs.) You can see that it's not very far from the city, but it really feels like a village. The benefits of moving out there include: 1) my everyday setswana would probably improve because I'd have more cause to use it; 2) it would give me a sense of what centralized public health programmes feel like for people who live outside the capital; 3) it's on the road to Kanye, which is another of my formal field sites; 4) rent is likely to be cheaper.

I am chafing a bit in my one-room cottage, though the internet access is a mighty perk. Giving up the cottage in mid-December would also mean I wasn't wasting a month's worth of rent. The other strange thing is that I somehow feel more relaxed -- markedly more relaxed -- when I'm down in Otse. I can't make sense of that, really -- I've never really considered myself a 'city girl', but I've also never considered myself a 'backwoods girl', either.

Why not move to Otse? For one, one friend is currently trying to do just that, and is having a devil of a time finding a suitable place. Second, there's already a small number of established makhoa in Otse, and I don't want to move into that. Gabane apparently has a few expats, so I wouldn't stick out like a sore thumb. (Been there, done that au petit Togo.) At the same time, they're not expats I already know, so there's not that temptation of some kind of immediate makhoa consociation.

I was observing this phenomenon last night at a braai last night. The host is British, but he’s friendly with a number of Batswana, particularly (but not exclusively) through a Motswana woman he met through the British Council. There were probably an even number of Batswana and expats at the braai, with more women than men in both groups. That said, the expats (mostly American) tended to be talking to other expats in the kitchen or on the balcony, while the (mostly female) Batswana tended to stay in the living room, doing most of the dancing when there was something amenable to them playing on the stereo.

This got under my skin. It also reminded me of something the guy I met in a bar a few weeks ago said to me: that, unlike what he observed in the U.S., black and white people can hang out together in Botswana. What kept nagging at my mind last night was: To what degree is this seeming segregation a product of American racial attitudes? In other words, to what degree does your average American abroad expect or anticipate racial segregation in social settings?

I wound up doing a lot of dancing – not only because I love to dance, but because it was a way of hanging out with the Batswana women, some of whom I had met before and some of whom I had not. They tended to speak to each other in Setswana most of the time, but they weren’t unfriendly. That said, the very frank sort of “So, tell me all about yourself!” didn’t really seem, intuitively, like a generally workable approach. Instead, I tried to follow their dancing, and asked about the setswana lyrics to the songs, and looked at pictures of her relatives one woman had stored on her phone. I think the highlight of the night was that I remembered (and could reasonably perform) a dance that the woman who works at the British Council had taught me at the last braai.

It’s a tricky thing: Expats are (to varying degrees and with some qualifications) socioculturally and linguistically accessible to me, and they are often connected to the institutions that most interest me. Some of them are fellow researchers. Some of them –- some more than others -- I find, for lack of a better term, sympa. That said, I don’t want to fall into the expat socialization trap (or, as I refer to it above, immediate makhoa consociation).

The most interesting conversation I had last night was with two young men – I’m old enough to call them young men, damn it – who are both students at UB. One had overheard an expat woman in the kitchen expressing the opinion that she couldn’t make friends with any Batswana guys her age because “they all want [her].” The two guys were, I thought, understandably indignant about "being put into this box." (I felt pretty embarrassed by it, myself.) I suggested that this could possibly have something to do with this woman’s experience of race in the U.S., and... what? Uncritical and uncriticized conceptualizations of African sexuality and masculinity? Some combination of unadulterated racism and youthful arrogance? These are the attitudes that make me mutter that colonialism isn't dead. Gayatri Spivak, where are you when I need you

Both of these guys have spent some time in France, and we had a really, really interesting conversation about cross-cultural interaction, assumptions and experiences of ‘difference’, and how anthropology fits into this. I gave my little spiel about funding for American scholarship abroad as a product of postwar politics. I also found myself struggling to explain (for not the first time) racial and economic stratification in the U.S., and it's relationship to the demographic characteristics of Americans likely to study abroad. The two men made some very good points about anthropology's historical contribution to the codification and maintenance of cultural and political 'difference'. I can't say I didn't find this discomfiting, but I also found it amusing, and I'm learning to regard discomfiture as a good sign.

So, all that to suggest that moving myself and my kitten to Gabane might ease my tense feelings about makhoa consociation. It might also, in part by being a smaller pool of people, help me figure out how to get to know Batswana.