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A Question of Power
Bessie Head
(First published 1974)
It was sunset when she arrived back at her hut in the central part of Motabeng. Someone had removed the dead owl from the doorstep, otherwise the area in which she lived was deserted at this time of the year. The women of the village were away at their lands, gathering in the summer harvest of corn. They would be back towards the end of the month, and she knew that one of her friends, Thoko, who usually supplied her with tit-bits of village gossip, would bring over a gift of watermelon and pumpkin. Elizabeth had lived for over two rainy seasons in Motabeng and the beginning of the rainy season always seemed a magical time to her. Women gathered up their possessions in a big bundle of cloth, heaved it on top of their heads, slung a hoe over their shoulders and set out with long, firm, determined strides to their lands.
'We are going to plough,' they said.
She could only stare after them, wistfully. It was not a part of her life; so many aspects of village life escaped her. And yet, it was one thing to walk into a greengrocer's shop in a town and pick up neatly wrapped parcels of potatoes, tomatoes and onions; it was another to hold Thoko's pumpkin, which she had produced with her own hands. Whoever cared about farmers in a town? Why, if vegetables came out of a machine, it was one and the same thing to a town dweller. They were just there, ready made. But here, it was Thoko and the ploughing season and one and a half dozen high dramas in a bush life, shrouded in mystery. She had once asked Thoko is she could accompany her to her lands during the school holidays, to plough, and Thoko had looked at her with wide, shocked eyes.
'A foreigner like you would die in one day, it's so dangerous,' she had protested. 'Do you know what happened to me when I was pulling the plough? A great big Mamba snake jumped out of the ground and ran over my body; tsweeee, like lightning! I dropped dead on the ground with shock. The cattle jumped high in the air! In the night the jackals come and cry around the hut. They want the meat which we hang up in the trees. Then there is a great wild cat, like a leopard. We are afraid to rest and fall asleep under the trees. He comes around softly and with one smash of his paw cracks open our skulls and eats our brains. He always puts the skin back nicely over the eaten part and when we find people dead like that, we know the wild cat is about...'
These gruesome details of life in the bush made Elizabeth shudder from end to end. She cancelled totally the idea of being that kind of farmer who earned her year's supply of food in breakneck battles with dangerous wild animals. But a great wonder about the soil and the food it produced had been aroused. The slowly drifting closeness to the soil was increased by living in a mud hut. It was like living with the trees and insects right indoors, because there was no sharp distinction between the circling mud walls of a hut and the earth outside. And the roof always smelt of mouldy grass, and all kinds of insects made their homes in the grass roof and calmly deposited their droppings on the bed, chair, table and floor.
So she spent most of the holidays of the rainy season taking long walks across Motabeng village with the small boy, absorbed by the sky which had turned itself into a huge back-drop for the swaying, swirling movements of the desert rain. Sometimes the rain fell in soft, glistening streams over the village, shot through with sunlight, and all the roofs of the mud huts changed to pure gold. Sometimes the horizon rain came sweeping over Motabeng in one enormous white-packed cumulus cloud driven by high wind and suddenly emptied itself in one violent, terrific and deafening roar over the village. It seemed to heighten and deepen the rambling labyrinth of her inner life, which, like the sky of Motabeng in the summer time, swayed and swirled with subterranean upheavals. In moments of vast, expansive peace like that evening, she liked to imagine that she was gathering all the threads of life together and holding them in her hands. There was an added touch of sound, solid sanity through that one, almost day-long contact with the family life of the man, Eugene. She put the small boy to sleep on his mattress on the floor and sat on the bed, broodingly sipping a cup of tea, reflecting, shut in briefly, on her own self. There was a half-eager stirring in her. The practical genius of the Eugene man excited her interest. It was so broad and impersonal, so free and unconcerned and such a sharp contrast to the nightmares which had propelled her own breakdown that she ran and re-ran the events of the day over and over in her mind, with a simple, child-like joy.
But seemingly happiness of any kind was not her immediate programme. The hard conflict of good and evil in arid terrain crashed down into her consciousness as soon as she closed her eyes in the dark. There was Medusa. She was smiling, mockingly. She held a plate of food in her hands and, offering it to Elizabeth, said: 'Are you sick? Eat this food.'
Elizabeth accepted the plate. As she raised a spoonful of the food to her mouth, Medusa snatched away the plate and yapped:
'Don't eat too much. You're too fat.'
Her second-in-command, Sello in the brown suit, nodded his head. There was a mean expression in his eyes. Detached from it all sat Sello the monk. It was against him that she was to slowly develop a deep, black rage. He was clearly using her as a focus for his observations of Medusa and Sello of the brown suit. He sat there staring at them fixedly, unmovingly, without any censure. There was no one to censure Medusa the way the poor of Africa had walked in and censured both Sello and Elizabeth. Yet she claimed those people as her people. Why were they not there to sort out the moral logic of her deeds, to offer comments on questions of good or evil? Medusa was simply given a wide, free field to display her major preoccupations, the main priority of which was the elimination of Elizabeth. She had a lot more thunderbolts in reserve, none as painful and deadly as her first blast, but each time they hit her Elizabeth would topple over, collapse and remain in bed for two days on end. Even if she wanted to, she could not retaliate in any way. She had no flashes of lightning, bolts, powers of the spirit or anything like that. There was just this loosely knit, shuffling ambiguous mass which was her personality. Was that why she was so easy to kill on almost any occasion? She followed Sello's reasoning up to a certain point, but later came to the conclusion that, like Medusa, he too wanted to eliminate her. Of one thing she was sure, his initial presentation of constructive goodness in images and pictures had been a put-together whole of observations and tentative feelers he had put out towards the souls of others. He had presented it to Elizabeth as a form of teaching, deliberately manipulating the words and gestures of the people who had approached her. As soon as Medusa entered the picture, he became oblivious to everything but the arguments he conducted with his own tortured heart. His line of reasoning went something like this:
'Oh, she's meant everything to me. The future is unthinkable without her, and yet the relationship has run its full course and this is the end of it. There might be a loop-hole somewhere, something I can latch on to, to make the relationship evolve into something new and so perpetuate it. There's something disturbing me; a part of my present evolution is African, and I hear the beginning s of a great symphony, a complete statement for the future about the dignity of man, where none is high and none is low but all are equal. The difficulty here is that it hasn't yet swelled up to a loud and conscious declaration of the African future. We are a rising civilisation. The surface of life here is narrow, stifling and full of petty prejudice. It is a world with the power to turn in on itself and keep its own secrets. That was the kind of world we operated in in the dark times, so narrow, so exclusive, so shut in that scavengers arose and ate whatever was in sight, leaving nothing over for the ordinary man. Did I care a damn? I was top-class royalty in those days and so was she. Let the ordinary man be my teacher this time and see what he has to say. Ah, you see, it's more terrible in Africa than anywhere else. They don't give a damn for my status as spiritual superman. There's no such thing as the superman here, that is, if I'm living as a man I'm human and fallible like everyone else. People who have been despised for so long know evil at its roots. Let me work out my ties to her along human and fallible lines. As for my mystical madonna, I dare not even look at her or else I am lost. Let me take a portion of the darkness and a portion of the light and combine it into the form of a woman I might still love....'
