Sampie Prinsloo sells us vegetables. A jovial old-time Boer farmer who dresses the part. Veldskoens and no socks, khaki shorts, skinny legs holding up a belly like a small hillock. A cucumber dangling lazy out of his mouth like a cigar. No hat, just an exuberant bush of dusty hair. He’s also the Republic of Namibia’s most vocal local cheerleader. (“I’m a tough old bastard,” he’d say. “If I can survive forty years in this forsaken place, I can live through President Nujoma.”) Prinsloo was the first white in Karibib to line up for a new driver’s license. His bakkie is festooned with patriotic bumper stickers.
GLORY TO OUR PLAN HEROES.
TO EVERY BIRTH ITS BLOOD.
ONE NATION, ONE NAMIBIA, SOUND YOUR HOOTER.
Once or twice a month, he and his wife pull up to the cattle gate and Prinsloo jams that hooter. Then he gets out and waits. His wife stays in the car. Apparently she doesn’t share his enthusiasm for getting to know the neighbors now that things have changed so much. The boys come running out of the hostel or off the soccer field, springing over to him, and Prinsloo shouts, “Go back and get your money, boys!”
And the boys say, “We’re poor, meneer, very poor boys. We have nothing, meneer, nothing.”
“You think this fruit of the earth is free? You think I’m Communistic?”
And the boys in chorus say: “Not Communistic. Meneer is very generous.”
Prinsloo sighs and cackles and takes his cucumber out of his mouth and spits and shows his golden teeth and then yanks out a box of small carrots and starts tossing them in the air. The boys leap for the carrots. High in the air for those runt carrots. Not because they’re hungry, but because they’re free and this is a game they still enjoy.
Dankie my baas! Dankie my baas!
Eventually, we the teachers walk down the road. We take our time. We are dignified teachers and we will not jump for carrots. No Boer’s monkeys are the teachers. Antoinette carries down her knives. (Prinsloo is also the local knife sharpener.) And we look over the merchandise like discriminating shoppers. Prinsloo watches me put back a pumpkin. What? The United States doesn’t appreciate my vegetables? How about a nice squash for the U S of A? How about green peppers, Brussels sprouts, oranges, corn, spinach, kumquats, lemons, pawpaws, okra, pears, pomegranates, eggplant (aubergine, Obadiah corrects)? Because there is nothing Prinsloo can’t grow. The man grows cotton on the edge of the Namib. We pay our money to his wife, who watches us with small, suspicious eyes behind the dirty windshield. Then we head toward our rooms, our arms now piled high with the bounty of a suddenly miraculously generous earth. It helps that Prinsloo has the only irrigable standing water of any farm along the C-32. Still, he pretends it has less to do with his groundwater levels than his magic hands. Prinsloo’s hands, gnarled, fattish, beet-red.