My scholarship dreams finally came true and I'll be leaving Gaborone soon for Watertown, Connecticut. So, as a little prelude to an upcoming blog series, 'Adventures in Watertown,' I present my alpha and omega- Gaborone. We'll start off this journey with an essay from my English class...
A City of Poets.
Though
I’ve lived here all my life, I only began to take Gaborone seriously last year.
Things like thinking up a venue for a second date can do that to you,
especially when you finally score that date two years after the first one. You’re
probably wondering why it took two whole years for such a mystery to reoccur,
but it took two years because I’m the type of person who would call a date a
mystery. In any case, we were supposed to go out for ice-cream again but somehow
ended up at Mugg & Bean. Why the absence of ice-cream suddenly prompted me
to start loving a city I cannot say for sure. What I like to assume is that
love of a city comes easy with love of another person. Which is precisely why
I’ve never thought that Spain or Paris are any more special than Gaborone;
those cities just happened to have more poets to romanticize them.
I
have a lot of friends who think the opposite. That a quaint, anti-picturesque
city like Gaborone could provoke any feelings of red, pink and maroon is an
absurdity that they would never accept. Gaborone, they claim, is not a city for
artists and bohemians. Hemingway and Fitzgerald flocked to Paris. Hughes and
Plath had their honeymoon in Spain. In
short, they say, “what excitement could be found in a city that values beer
over wine?” But I think such a line of reasoning is narrow-minded madness: what
excitement could not be found in a
city that values beer over wine?
Gaborone
is home to soul-people with hair as frenzied as the words on their lips. Many
are of course starved and hungry artists. These are either university students
with dreams as plentiful as their cigarettes or non-graduates with raspy voices
that loudly whisper anti-government sentiments. I’ve been told multiple times
that over half the guys at the University of Botswana are about to drop a
mixtape. Half of that half, along with their more sensible female R&B
counterparts, are among the greatest spoken word poets on the continent. Every
month or so they meet up at the National Museum to show each other bits and
pieces of their very being in an event called ‘Poet’s Passport.’ Gaborone is
small enough for such intimacy to be long-lasting. I haven’t shared myself for
months but I haven’t forgotten and been forgotten by my soul-people.
So
why is Gaborone so colourless for me right now?
Let’s end with the beginning: after my second mystery I got a third date. Then a forth. Maybe even a fifth. It was around this time especially that the marvel of Gaborone started blossoming before me. I started learning the combi routes and my Setswana speaking became earnest, sincere. My reading and writing became reflective of my background- my actual background. I was happy. Which made sense: in a city of poets, a man with a muse is a king. That I came to lose my crown so soon was nothing dramatic. I simply watched her fly off to another continent from the ground at the airport.
And
it’s almost amusing how quickly Gaborone came and went. Just like her.
