Near where the women once slapped and wrung the laundry, lives a Python. I heard of her at a picnic, days before I set up on Woman’s rock to paint. She comes out of her home under the rock during these winter months to sunbathe. Although innocent of eating babies and livestock, she provokes stories of deadly Python encounters like the story of the missing truck driver who stopped to pee. A policemen found his truck idling on the roadside and went to investigate. The feet of the truck driver were found protruding from the mouth of an enormous snake. The moral, said the story teller is not to pee under low hanging branches.I set up my easel on a crest of barren rock. The air was clear and bright and one could see the gentle curve of the horizon as if standing on the deck of a ship looking out to sea. From here I could see the Python should she come. In a moment of distraction, I would miss the first glimpse of her behind a rock. Silently she slid to me, condemned by god to make tracks like a river in the sand. She bit me over the kidney and threw her first coil over my shoulder to trap my arms. I fell from her weight and as we rolled she wrapped me up like cable on a spool. Her coils trapped my arms before I could reach for my pocket knife to saw at her side. She tightened her grip each time I exhaled. Her mouth opened, her jaw unhinged to put me inside her, the course lubricated with hideous quantities of mucous.
I never saw the snake, but fear of her fired my imagination like kerosene. I began to paint in earnest, wondering how I could use the willies to make a good picture. The distant horizon was placed high on the panel with a stroke of turquoise tempered by ochre. For thorn trees a few green dots were scattered across the plane and a knife on edge made blades of dry grass. I imagined the Python below my feet, huge and turning. Woman’s Rock was drawn like her side pushing up through the flat plane. To my right a man appeared on a rise of rock a hundred feet away and he called and waved as if I knew him. I returned the wave and continued to work. He paused and watched and looked around. Soon, two young men came up on my left. The older man also advanced. I was alarmed by being approached from two sides. My adrenal glands gave a squirt and I imagined a knife. They spoke to me in Setswana and I said that I only spoke English. To this, the older man said through broken teeth, “Five Pula, drink”. Pula are the local currency, so either he was asking me to give him money for a drink or he was offering to buy my water. Optimistically, I offered the water. Wrong, he wanted the money. The other men were still and watched with interest. I patted my pockets and said “no Pula”. He did not look happy and he did not back away, but continued the negotiation and brought the price down to “two Pula”. One of the younger men kept a heavy pair of pruning sheers on his shoulder. I saw the bludgeoning. The other held his body obliquely to mine and kept one hand in his wind breaker. A memory of being mugged on the Brooklyn Bridge came to mind. Something was needed to keep this engagement positive. I had a very showy new camera hanging from the easel, a big red back pack at my feet and I’d just been to the cash machine, so I offered them my lunch. They took all but one cookie, which I made a show of keeping to maintain the pretense that we were sharing and having a spontaneous picnic. The men sat to eat and I squatted with them. I was scared but also angry at losing my peanut butter and jelly sandwich. If only they’d asked nicely! Slightly amused by the vehemence with which I defend good manners, I kept the tone light and told them of my friendship with Rre Motsewabeng, the farmer who owns Woman’s Rock. With this information the tone seemed to change. Was it that they could not rob and injure me because I was no longer alone and anonymous? Or were they relieved, no longer apprehensive of me, a stranger, since I had proven a local connection? Fear of the unknown, the Python, made it difficult to understand.

Fifty years ago I religiously watched re-runs of Tarzan the Ape Man and the star, Johnnie Weismuller, presided over my initiation to exotic Africa. Unlike the recent tongue and cheek incarnations, Weismuller’s Tarzan was sincere. On Saturday afternoons we moved expeditiously through the jungle swinging on a network of vines. Our physical prowess was matched by our profound practical knowledge. For information we read the forest floor and conversed with elephants and chimps. Our intimacy with the environment was unsurpassed and together as super-primal-men we patrolled the jungle and enforced the natural law. Once we witnessed a fiendish native execution. To the wild beat of sweaty drummers, native villains bent and tied two adjacent saplings to the ground to form overlapping arches. Next, they hung a victim upside down in the heart-shaped crotch, one leg lashed to each young tree. The drums reached an unsustainable fury and stopped. A machete rose in the frame. It fell, severing the ropes that bound the saplings ripping the man in half. Cruelty like this was not in the natural order of things, so Tarzan and I called the elephants and directed them to trample the fiends. Africa was my manliness.

Like many small cities, there is a statue in the park. In the middle of Gaborone near Parliament, there is a likeness of the first democratically elected president, Sir Seretse Khama. Fortunately for Khama and his young country, diamonds were discovered in Botswana in the late 1960’s only a few years after independence. Khama returned this new wealth to the people by building basic infrastructure and a free educational system. Today, Botswana has a literacy rate near 80% and by African standards, supports a middle-income economy. Botswana was a British Protectorate instead of a colony, so the land was never apportioned to white settlers, but remained in the hands of the original population. Today, the government offers citizens free land, provided it is used for farming or housing within three years of taking ownership.

Forty-five years ago I was sitting in the pew of an Episcopal Church in Kentucky waiting to drop an envelope of cash in the offering plate that was being passed. A picture of an African child with flies was printed on the envelope. The stomach of the boy was round but his limbs were very skinny. His eyes were enormous in his boney face. He sat cross legged on a patch of dirt and looked up at me, as if I were standing above him deciding his fate. Africa was my righteousness.

Botswana is a consumer society. The River Walk Mall in Gaborone offers a good cup of Americano and a quick internet connection. I bought an organic cotton shirt at Woolworths, hiking socks at the Cape Union Mart and the best oranges I’ve ever eaten at the Pick and Pay. At a local fast food restaurant, I had a good piece of chicken for about the cost of a meal at Colonel Sanders. But food isn’t as cheap for the Batswana as it is for working Americans. The minimum wage here is a 50 cents an hour, so a fast food meal would cost a low wage earner a full day of labor.

Thirty years ago I saw a PBS special that presented the African landscape as an epic novel crowded with well-drawn characters. The adventure began with an aerial shot of the open Savannah; abundant game moved across the plane. The camera moved in and I was so close. Right there. I felt as ruthless as the hyena, as graceful as the antelope, as defensive as the water buffalo, as stealthy as the python and as flamboyant as the flamingo. Africa was not a foreign place. It belonged to humanity. It belonged to me. Africa was my heritage. My teenage cousin felt the same and collected plush lions and monkeys for her bed.

Domestic life in Botswana is the usual. There is a solid home-owning middle class that commutes to work five days a week and comes home to feed the kids and goes to bed only to start up again. Unlike the West, however, where homes are segregated by degrees of grandness into neighborhoods of varying degrees of exclusivity, suburbs in Gaborone are mixed income. Very modest homes with swept earth yards are situated next door to…

upscale homes with well tended gardens. This is in part due to the free land policy of the government. As a result the eclectic suburbs give the impression that Botswana is largely a classless society.

Although there is an egalitarian spirit, the majority of home owners believe in the adage that good fences make good neighbors.

The family I am staying with has a small child who is cared for by mom, dad, aunt, uncle, grandma, grand uncle and baby sitter. Even the gardener takes a turn watching over her. This extended family model is typical of Botswana and it is a very sane way to raise children. Paradoxically, homes are walled and guarded, but family networks are extensive and fluid.

The repetitive work of keeping house is the repetitive work of keeping house. But there are interesting difference in the details of keeping an African home. Brooms, for example, have no handles. To use it one bends at the waist and moves across the floor like a gleaner in a Millet painting. But the stiff bristles are very effective on packed earth yards and low nap carpets.

Fifteen years ago there was genocide in Rwanda. I read about the political and social forces behind the killing, but the causes did not stay in my mind as clearly as the effects. I remember the hackings and severed limbs and a river full of bloated corpses bleached white. I remember a building full of people set on fire. Africa was my psychopathology.

Last week a black African man with whom I had a polite conversation, was compelled, after I left his company, to say that all white people care only about money and that they will do anything for it. He wasn’t, I am told, speaking specifically about me, but my presence was enough to elicit this bit of racism.

Ten years ago I started collecting African music both traditional and Pop. Since I was a teenager I’ve listened to all forms of African inspired music like Soul, Jazz and R and B. So collecting African music was a natural direction. When I need a break from painting, I put on a track from Africando or even the wildly sexy, Jamaican homophobe, Buju Banton, and dance with abandon. Africa was my rhythm.

Today, “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” opened in Gaborone. Now Africans can watch the movie and together with Americans, Europeans, Asians, and everyone else go to the exotic world of Hogwarts.

I grew up on this farm. I was not educated so I went to work in the mines of South Africa. The working conditions were very oppressive and the hours were very long. They did not give me a contract or a pension and they did not allow people to leave. I got out because I fell sick and could not work any more. So I came home to farm.

I’m a poor farmer who sells goats to people. Success with goats depends on rain and live stock disease. It’s bad now because I lost 50 goats to “heart water” disease. The World Cup will be in Johannesburg next year and I had hoped to profit from a big demand for meat, but now I don’t have so many goats and I am disappointed.

I believe in farming and that it is my way to contribute to our society and culture. For example, when I sell thirty goats, ten each to three people, it is enough stock for these people to begin farming. Making people self sufficient is the best way forward for our culture and I’m proud of this work. I know what I am doing and I know what direction I want to go. But I’m disappointed in the government since they do not recognize my contribution. It’s unfair, since they subsidize commercial farms, but not someone like me. The least they could do is fence my land and pay for shots for the animals.

The surface of Southern Africa is hatched with walls. From the air Johannesburg looks like a circuit board in which every choice bit is surrounded by a barrier that requires an access code. In Gaborone, the capital of Botswana and my current home, the growing suburbs are collections of enclosures whose walls and gates hint at the life inside. The basic city wall is made of concrete block and a few homeowners employ it without elaboration.

But many people in my neighborhood select a less minimal design and choose colorful, articulated walls, which divide the African sun into displays of light and shadow.

Organic pattern worked within the grid of the wall is common, suggesting that the life within the compound is exuberant yet ordered.

And walls emblazoned with prominent designs gesture to the street, confirming that statements of bold individuality are welcome in public life.

Gates seem to speak of status and amazingly no two are alike. The grandest are steel and decorated with medallions like the brass buttons on a Captains chest.

One of rusty chain link, however, which surrounds an ornate house that was abandoned during its construction, tells of high hopes and false starts.

But no matter how elegant or common, the city walls all speak the same doubt, “Are you trustworthy?” As a result a foreigner like me, who can not accurately access the level of threat, is apprehensive in this culture of fences and gates. It’s interesting how architecture can create a state of mind.

But it’s a different story inside the walls, at least within the walls of the family home where I am staying. Here the garden within the walls is as busy, diverse and generous as the people who live here.

The row of calla lilies is bracketed by a classical bust and a display of African pots, which are apt bookends for a worldly, African family.

Even the neighborhood strays know this is a warm spot, and huddle on a log every winter morning near the lemon and papaya trees to catch the first heat of the sun.

Outside Gaborone in the semi-arid farmland northwest of the city, the gates and walls are equally imaginative, but here creativity is driven by scarcity.

Stock fences on traditional farms are made from bushes whose thorns are like needles of bone. Dragged into place by teams of donkeys, arranged in lines and overlapped to maximize the tangle, the thorn fence is impenetrable by all but the most inspired flagellant.

The gates are a fantastic mix of forms and surfaces. Rusty bed springs, gray metal scraps, tan vines, brown sticks, orange cord, green hose and shiny bicycle parts are pressed, woven flat and hinged onto trees and posts.

I think these gates are very beautiful. It’s problematic for me, an affluent American, to gush about the aesthetic value of objects which have sprung from poverty. It would be more relevant to consider these gates as indicators of the economic peril of third world subsistence farmers like Rre Motsewabang Motsewabang who created them. But the visual brilliance of the gate pictured above – the alignment of crenulated edges of sheet metal to form a rhythm of teeth and eyes and the selection of twin, forked posts which gesture like long-separated sisters tossing their hands in the air before an embrace, is hard to ignore. This gate opens not only for goats. It is also a passage between aesthetics and economics. Like the wall and gate in the city which indicates the individuality and status of the people within its perimeter, the thorn fence and scavenged farm gate tell the tale of creativity bounded by limited resources.