Meeting M'e Mpho and getting started

This photo of M’e Mpho, one of the first I ever made of her, was always her favorite. Made on film, developed and printed by me in the darkroom at the University of Lesotho, it shows her standing in the doorway at the University Guest House, wearing her old straw Basotho hat. 

I was startled out of my reverie by a soft, mellifluous voice saying something in the language of this place. I spun around to see a solid, golden-brown woman less than five feet tall under a pointed straw hat, as rooted to the earth as if she’d grown out of it. M’e Mpho was going to become my best friend, my collaborator, my teacher, my guide, and one of the most important figures in my life, but I didn’t know that yet. 

“Is it so, you come from America?” she asked. I nodded. “They tell me you stay in my house two weeks, maybe more, and they find a place for you to stay-stay.” 

“This is your house?” I was confused.

“I work here eleven years. When you stay in my house, I help you,” she explained, nodding. “Yes. I do everything so you can stay here nicely, yes,” she concluded.

“Where do you sleep?” I asked, still uncertain of the arrangement. 

“Up there,” she lifted her gaze toward the pink hummocks, the yellow hills, “yes, with many children. We are thirteen in that little stone house of one room. So long I work here, we are not sleeping with hunger.” 

Slow on the uptake, clinging to my first impression, I proclaimed, “Your country is very beautiful!” 

“Is it?” she followed my gaze thoughtfully. It was the first of many times M’e Mpho would correct, by gentle understatement, my naive and superficial pronouncements. 

Just then Buncombe arrived: brusque, British and sardonic, with the characteristic ruddy cheeks and red nose of an alcoholic. As we strode uphill from the university compound to the bar in the village, he explained he was acting head of the English department, shocked to learn only last week that his request for a Fulbrighter had been granted. “I filed the request as a joke,” he laughed. “No one in their right mind would choose to come here. But our theatre man is going off to get his PhD in Leeds, and I was expected to take over his job on top of my own, which is fucking impossible. You can give a guest lecture here and there, and we might find you a class to teach, but mostly you’ll be in charge of the two theatre groups, and good luck to you. This isn’t Uganda or Nigeria, you know.” 

“You mean theatre isn’t part of the culture of Lesotho?” I asked, dumb as a post. 

“Not what Wole Soyinka would call theatre,” he sniffed. “They do improvisational stuff, all of it in Sesotho, so you’re going to have to learn the language to work with them. I’ve been trying to learn it for a decade and I’m nowhere. But I am a man with a brilliant future behind me.”  

A balloon full of question marks was floating over my head, but we stepped out of the sunlight through a strong whiff of urine, ducking low-hanging thatch, into a dark, smoky room where I was the only woman and Buncombe and I the only people of European descent. He ordered two quarts of beer and thought I was joking when I said I can’t drink because of migraines. 

“Two quarts of beer for me and a Coke for the new professor of theatre!” he announced to the room. Glasses raised and clinked, there was a masculine volley of approval or welcome, and then Buncombe spun his attention in my direction, lowered his voice, and demanded, “Who are you and how did you end up in this arsehole of the universe?”