Jack Mapanje

The Carwash, Clifton Moor, York

When Mukisa shelved his post

as assistant chef at the students

cafeteria on Chirunga campus, he

told us and his mum up country

he was flying to Nairobi for an

advanced course in catering; five

years later, he walked into my

Leeds University office anxious

about the protests and riots for

multiparty politics back home;

stammering as he recounted how

he’d managed to enter Leeds for

a PhD degree in catering, after

Nairobi, he said he often became

a night cabby to survive; I stayed

put and recalled his lucrative career

as a young pioneer recruit nailing

his president’s political rebels from

Nairobi, London, Toronto and other

world cities. But fifteen years on

yesterday, did I not chance upon

Mukisa at Tesco’s car park: could

he wash and wax my filthy car;

his price was the most competitive

in town, he avowed. I took him on,

then asked what had become of his

gainful task as a night cabby hunting

his leader’s enemies with his Leeds

PhD degree in catering; he gazed

at me past his goggles, kicked his

bucket, and fixed my car with his

Polish mates fretting beside him.

*

First Lobatse International Beef Festival

When Barolong’s verse refused to come, he

dreamt up another way of beating the muse;

with Lobatse still capital of the finest beef

in the land, he recalled the beer, wine, brandy,

whisky festivals he had known – the bud for

Lobatse beef carnival began to push. But we

understood the seminal seed to be Barolong’s

subterranean dread of the painful global blood-

letting festivals of human carnage he could

not decrypt – the European, Arab, African,

Asian and other wars where father butchers

son butchers brother butchers uncle butchers

sister butchers this butchers that butchers

sometimes ta-ta-ta and boom! ‘Allahu Akbar!’

Glory be, why doesn’t someone for once think

Lobatse beef fest instead? So Barolong told

a friend to tell friends to tell clans of friends,

local plus overseas clients of Botswana beef,

to bring boxes of ice cubes with their choicest

whiskies, brandies, gins, wines, beers, softies

to Lobatse Town Park – that’s why Tiro, Dee

and I drove there; and as Tiro wildly inveigled

every kid in sight to his creative writing project,

guys roamed the gardens, while others snug

in goatskin stools, camping chairs, blankets,

kept on talking, drinking, laughing, picking

delectable chunks of sirloin, rump, t-bone steaks

to braai here, there, everywhere; meanwhile

Barolong treated the tradition-inclined to top

tripe and offal, niftily fried at the kgotla, served

with basmati rice, or delicately cooked pap. So,

as dancers’ rattles, body-and-head-gear shook

to the thump-clap rhythm of drums, feet and

hands at the park’s mini stadium, as they leapt

in praise of their chiefs, before jazz guitars and

saxophones seized the arena, everybody kept on

braaing, chewing, arguing, drinking, laughing

into sunset – thanking God, Badimo, Barolong

for the first festival of the finest Lobatse beef!

*

Greetings from Grandpa
(for Joseph, Daniel, Nathan & Co)


You said I should write
you a teeny-weeny poem,
a poem that’s easy to recite
to Alexandra and Ethan;
I am sending you a poem
that relates and leaps like
the pelican on Okavango
Delta, leaping from green
water lilies to brown floats,
a poem which springs like
the sly monkeys of Gaborone
screeching from tree branch
to rooftop, a poem which
rings bells day and night,
here, there, everywhere like
the lead-cows of The Village;
tomorrow I will send you
a wee poem which rumbles
like the lion or roars like
father-drums, a wee poem
that quivers and smokes
like the muscles of Batswana
dancers bouncing at their
brides’ wedding jamboree.
 

9 Imagining Home

11 Surviving Freedom in Sunderland

12 Lu’s Home Delivery (Welwyn Garden City)

13 The Carwash, Clifton Moor, York

15 Princess Alexandra Smiling (Luxembourg)

17 Some Anglo-Deutsch-Malawi Wedding!

19 Watching Palestinians Being Butchered

20 The Three People I Met in Diaspora

22 Grandpa Travelling Again?

23 Greetings from Grandpa

24 The Three Dikgosi of Gaborone

25 The Rush for Independence Celebrations

26 Load-shedding

27 First Lobatse International Beef Festival

29 Farewell to the Mopipi Tree

30 The Note (On Returning Home)

32 Crossing Linthipe Bridge II

34 Balamanja North Beach Revisited

36 Our Anthology of Martyrs Thickens

39 On His Divine Reprieve: A Confession

40 Considering Our Golden Jubilees

42 The White Elephants of Home

44 When Egypt Went Up in Flames

46 Another TV Death So Mean: Libya

47 Somaliland Rebuilding, Hargeysa: An Outsider’s View

49 Saved from Comrade Hippo’s Grace

50 Thanksgiving

51 Now That They Have Brought Athena Down

53 Kalikalanje of Ostrich Forest

78 Notes

‘Given the regime, Mapanje’s satire can seem strangely generous, impressively blending the memory of terror with a sense almost of farce when he considers his captors.’ – Sean O’Brien, Sunday Times [on Skipping Without Ropes]