Anger

It’s hard to know where to begin. If you’re hoping to hear only about the wonders of Africa and the joys of traveling, skip this post. I mean it.

I’ve moved into a new home, and was planning to blog about the place when my new roommates Natalie and Aziz suggested dinner at our nearby kebab joint. Happily and hungrily I agreed, and within minutes we were relaxing on an unassuming patio in the concrete parking lot of a tiny and mostly defunct shopping plaza.

While we sipped our beers and awaited our food a woman quietly crept into a chair in the corner two metres from us and sat, rocking the toddler in her arms as if to comfort herself as much as the child. We didn’t notice her until she half-shrieked at a man who tried to offer her a cup of water, and we turned and saw one of the true faces of Botswana. The woman had been beaten so brutally that her swollen eyes completely blinded her, and blood dripped from a dozen rends in her face. The young boy was physically unhurt, but his mother was the most viciously abused person I’ve ever seen. Her head was bowed, and I could see little of her expression, but the fear she radiated was palpable.

The woman was rightfully inconsolable, and spoke no English that I could tell. None at our table approached her, as she was too terrified, and the restaurant staff’s initial response was simply to offer us a new table inside where her suffering would be out of sight and mind. They seemed not to hear Natalie’s requests for ice and a damp cloth to ease the woman’s swelling. The man with the cup of water spent many minutes attempting to pad her wounds with a towel, which she angrily flung to the concrete. Eventually the restaurant staff called the police and a few people crowded at a distance sharing our helplessness, while others tried talking to the women a little in Setswana, and to the too-helpful man we were beginning to realize was her brutal husband, who was six inches shorter than me and scrawny beyond words.

In ten minutes the police arrived. They casually patted down the man, cuffed him and led him gently into the back of the truck while they coaxed the blinded woman into the front seat. I couldn’t see what happened to the little boy. Procedural issues aside (sending male officers to transport an abused woman!?), the entire official response had such a practiced, nonchalant quality that I am certain of Aziz’s and Natalie’s assertions that the man will be free by morning and the woman, socially and economically dependent, will be back in that home after leaving the hospital.

I know that violence against women happens everywhere in the world, but here it’s so pervasive that even this most vicious of beatings was a non-event to most. In so many ways the modernity of this country seems increasingly a cruel façade. The HIV epidemic that is literally killing this country, about which I’ll write again separately, is another face of the brutality which is simply accepted as a fact of life here, a cultural practice ordained by God and tradition. The foreign-educated and fairly affluent Batswana women with whom I’ve spent some time have nearly boundless contempt for most of the men of their nation, and it’s hard to doubt their reasoning after tonight. From the nearly omnipresent culture of male infidelity that callously accelerates the HIV epidemic, to the (somewhat controversial) laws that automatically transfer a woman’s possessions to her husband at the moment of marriage, there is a tumour of outright barbarism beneath Botswana’s skin of modern industry and democracy. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen.