When Rain Clouds Gather by Bessie Head

Author:Bessie Head
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Botswana
Publisher: For the Benefit of Mr. Kite
Published: 1967-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Eight

Paulina Sebeso awoke early the next morning. She was in a slightly unbalanced mood, and the clear, sparkling light of the heady winter morning added to her intoxication. On the previous day at the wedding party Mma-Millipede had told her certain things that had made her heart drunk with joy. She had had to struggle to concentrate on the details of the tobacco growing project, and Mma-Millipede, noticing this, had added a number of stern warnings: You must above all control yourself, my friend. You must pretend you are interested in the tobacco and give yourself time to study the man. Foreign men need studying, even though I accept Gilbert’s word that he is a good man.

Not long after Paulina had lit her small outdoor fire to make tea and heat washing water, ten other women walked briskly into the yard. Twenty more had been willing to join the tobacco growing project, but they first had to get the permission of their husbands. The ten women who joined Paulina were agog with excitement. They seated themselves around the jutting mud foundation of one of Paulina’s huts and ragged her about not having washed yet, nor made tea.

“Goodness! The tobacco won’t run away,” Paulina said gaily, and she splashed some water into a basin.

It was always like this. Any little thing was an adventure. They were capable of pitching themselves into the hardest, most sustained labour with perhaps the same joy that society women in other parts of the world experience when they organize fêtes or tea parties. No men ever worked harder than Botswana women, for the whole burden of providing food for big families rested with them. It was their sticks that thrashed the corn at harvesting time and their winnowing baskets that filled the air for miles and miles around with the dust of husks, and they often, in addition to broadcasting the seed when the early rains fell, took over the tasks of the men and also ploughed the land with oxen.

As always, when women left their own homes for the day, they took with them their food supplies in the bright checkered cloths, and these they undid now. One of the women stood up and collected small helpings of tea leaves and powdered milk from each bundle, and then both the powdered milk and tea leaves were poured at the same time into the boiling water. By the time Paulina emerged, dressed and washed, with her small daughter, tea was ready and poured. Also a plate of flat, hard sorghum cakes was handed around. Paulina took a few of the cakes off the plate and wrapped them in a cloth and handed this to the child, instructing her, as it was school holidays, to go and spend the day at the home of Mma-Millipede. Then they all drank the tea with clouds of vapour rising up from the mugs into the cold air. Each woman then carefully rinsed her mug and tied it up once again in the checkered cloth.

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