Missing Fatalism

By Lauri Kubuitsile

I live in a fairly large village in the Central District of Botswana on the eastern edge of the country. The village is called Mahalapye, though its real name is Mahalatswe; the modern name, the spelling that seemed more sensible to British tongues. It is named after the normally dry river that runs through it. Mahalapye is not very pretty. It’s not so exciting. We don’t have lions and giraffes passing through. The sunsets are not always glorious. It doesn’t even have a very colourful history having grown from a railway stop where Cecil John Rhodes’s trains from Cape to Cairo (actually Cape to Harare) would refuel. Though it is not the most captivating place, it is a typical Botswana village, it’s home, and I love it. 

Perhaps the nondescript, unexciting way of my village is the reason why when the TV man asked me what I missed about Africa when I was away, I first drew a blank. I was in London having been short-listed for the Caine Prize, a literary prize for African short story writers. The winner had already been decided the night before so the TV man was asking us, the rest of the writers, the losers, other types of questions, our answers meant to be sprinkled around those of the winner, to add local colour about the continent. 

Like so many before him, though the TV man knew Africa was made of lots of different countries,  he hadn’t made the leap that inside of each of those countries would be found so many different types of people and lives and ways of being. Comparing Kenya to Botswana or Nigeria to Lesotho would be like comparing Canada to Mexico or Norway to Spain. Crazy. But like most, he didn’t get that. So he asked me again, “What do you miss most about Africa when you’re away?” 

I hesitated. Africa? Am I meant to say lions and elephants? Sand? Tropical rain forests? Hunger? So I asked- “Do you mean Botswana? Do you mean Mahalapye?” He nodded. But that didn’t help, still I was blank. What did I miss about my dusty, not so exciting, not so beautiful village? What about my home was central for me? Of course my family, but what about the place, the people? What did I long for when I was away? 

By that time I’d been away from home for almost a month. I’d been first to Lagos for a writing workshop, and then to London and I was missing home desperately, but I couldn’t put my finger on one thing I missed concretely. And then I said it. It just came out, and my mouth ran, and my brain tried to keep up and I watched the whole thing as if the person speaking was not actually me. 

“The fatalism,” the woman said, the one who sounded very much like me. 

The TV man was not pleased. “The fatalism?” he asked, his face twisted into a scowl. 

I was sure we’d got the whole thing wrong, but the woman continued as if she had thought about this for some time, when I know for certain she hadn’t. “Yes, the fatalism. There’s something very nice about just accepting that things happen. That’s what I miss.” 

The TV man was still not pleased. He says in a voice with authority, “But fatalism can be a bad thing too.”

The woman accepts that but still sticks by her answer. The TV man, frustrated, moves on. He asks her to describe Africa in one word, she says without thinking, in a way I find very reckless, “Space”.  Again the TV man gives her his look of disapproval and I’m sure she’s messed it up completely. 

The next day I talk to the other writers and find that indeed that woman’s answers were not correct. Africa in one word? Diversity was the correct answer. I ask nothing else for fear I’ll learn the truth about my complete failure. In any case, the TV man will just edit it out, that’s what TV people do when they don’t like certain parts. When they want the piece to reflect their truth.  It’ll be fine.

But later I think further about the answers the woman who was interviewed gave. As I dig around in the crevices of my mind I begin to see that, in fact, she had got my answers correct. 

I grew up in America. America, if nothing else, is a land of people looking for answers. Unanswered questions are not allowed. There is a reason for everything and if you can’t find it you’re just not trying hard enough. America was built on a solid foundation of answers. 

In Botswana, people accept that life sometimes goes wrong. Problems happen. Sometimes things don’t work. Many questions have no answers. Sometimes the outcome you expect is not the one that you’ll get. It’s just the way it is. There’s something very comforting about that for me. It alleviates a lot of responsibility. 

A good example of this type of fatalism in action is death. In America, if you say someone died, people need to know what happened. Something must have gone wrong. A 94 year old woman dies and people will want to know why, who messed up, what caused her death. “She went to the hospital but the oxygen couldn’t save her,” they’d say. It’s okay then. There’s an answer. The oxygen failed to work.  As if death is not a natural part of life. In Botswana, people are allowed to die and no one gets blamed. Death is part of life, something to be accepted because that’s just how it is. No one needs to accept responsibility for messing up. 

Of course occasionally this can be frustrating. “Go tlaa siama” can be comforting or annoying enough for you to want to pull the person’s hair out who’s saying it. Everything will work out is not actually what you want to hear when the water is not working at your house for the third consecutive day. But it can be quite comforting when you’re not sure if the decision you made was the right one. It will work out, it’s out of your hands now. 

I suppose that’s what the TV man doesn’t like. The acceptance of fatalism stops people from fighting for things to go their way. It stops people from building and inventing and creating new ways to stem the effects of nature and bad luck and simple mistakes. For the TV man, the next stop is undoubtedly the downfall of humanity. 

But for me, being free of the heavy burden of right answers allows me to move around, to take chances. Mistakes are okay. Being perfect and immune from the bad side is not something I need to constantly fight for. Not every action requires you to be ready to accept the entire burden of responsibility, so you can be freer to make choices that might mean things don’t work out. I don’t need to search and search for the reason behind everything. Things can just happen, for no reason at all. I don’t need to worry about things I can’t control. I can go forward and accept that sometimes things won’t go my way and that’s fine. 

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Lauri Kubuitsile is a two time winner of The Golden Baobab, Africa's highest prize for children's writing, and a finalist for the 2011 Caine Prize. She is the author of 14 works of fiction. Her most recent In the Spirit of McPhineas Lata and Other Stories is available on Amazon.