The Screaming of the Innocent

Unity Dow

The author of The Screaming of the Innocent (2003) concerns herself ‘elsewhere’ also with women’s and children’s rights (in her professional and intellectual capacity as a judge in the High Court of Botswana). What this novel shows in its unforgettable, harrowing narrative is that Unity Dow has a deep passion for justice and can convey her concern for those who suffer from its absence with quite compelling vividness. That the text is ‘accessible’ does not mean that it lacks resonance and power; its perspective is candidly feminist, but the deep knowledge of the workings of her society and the profound indignation that fuels the author’s account are simply not dismissible as any form of mere political correctness. Indeed, the cutting sarcasm that colours so many descriptions in this text conveys an anger that many in this society may feel but that few, one surmises, would dare to express as trenchantly and publicly as Dow does here.

The topic addressed in the text is an ugly and terrible one: the kidnapping and ritual murder of children (particularly and more commonly girls) by adults (usually men), for the purpose of making what in Botswana is known as dipheko and in South Africa as muti — i.e., potent ‘medicine’ that will supposedly allow the murderer/s and his/their customer/s to achieve difficult ends such as success in business, promotion, or the death of a rival. Although the text focuses on a single case and particularly on one of the three main perpetrators of such a murder, Dow emphasizes that (unlike, say, the aberrant behaviour of Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs — of which many readers will have seen the film) the horrific act is possible because misogyny of a profound and implacable kind is embedded in the society. It is carried by superstitious panic, and its most evil and extreme manifestations (as in these dipheko murders) are covered up by a huge web of systemic corruption and ruthless greed.

Dow’s text works with a number of balancing power binaries, but in no crudely obvious way. One of these juxtapositions in the text places the urban, successful, prosperous section of this society next to the simple, ‘forgotten’ outposts of rural Botswana. The following passage broadly describes the latter setting:

The villages shared a clinic, a primary school, a wildlife office and a bore hole. Once a month, a big government truck rolled into the villages, and the drivers distributed food to pregnant women and children younger than five. Sometimes the bore hole broke down, in which case men brought in water in huge containers. Except for one or two rickety old trucks, the only vehicles that entered the village were government ones, called ‘BX’es because of their registration plates. The villagers relied on the ‘BX’es to take them in and out of the village. (43)

In contrast with this poverty and seeming dependence, we are shown the bureaucracies of the legal, health and police systems of the land. The power binaries are starkly hierarchical — but Dow complicates (or, as I suggested above, ‘balances’) them to some extent because the lowly villagers are by no means depicted as merely passive, overawed victims of the mighty and the bureaucratically entrenched members of their society. They are articulate in protest and at least partly (if belatedly) effective in resistance to victimization (64; 76). Hence the title The Screaming of the Innocent vividly evokes a refusal to ‘go quietly’, to be silenced (as well as exploited and harmed) by the powers that be.

One scene where such village resistance is illustrated, occurs in chapter 7 — it is set just after the family group (including the murdered girl’s mother) is yet again dismissed by the police with a cock-and-bull story:

The tired, anguished family had stood up to leave. As they’d reached the door, Molatsi Kakang [Neo’s mother] had looked back and used her deep, sad eyes to arrest the detective sergeant’s attention. In a soft voice, she’d said, ‘Man of government, as you go about your job, just remember: I haven’t lost a goat, and my cow hasn’t been hit by a car. My daughter was killed — by people who expected you’d do nothing about it. Are you going to let them get away with it, as has been the case every time they’ve killed?’

A hush had descended over the office as Molatsi had turned, tears streaming down her face, to follow her defeated relatives. (65)

Neo Kakang, the “impala girl” (7) who is killed by four men (with a fifth, a government minister, turning up as another ‘customer’), leaves her indelible mark (both physical and psychological) on several of her killers. The awfulness of her murderers and her innocent victimhood are both further balanced by the courage and enterprise of the small group of young women (and one young man) who take up the cause of exposing the crime, its perpetrators, and those who protected them — five years after the case had seemingly been successfully covered up. The villainy of the chief perpetrator is depicted (in the opening pages of the novel, especially) with truly chilling vividness. As he sits ogling the intended victim (Neo, at play with her friends), he has his youngest legitimate child in his luxury car with him. We learn that this “good man” with his dark secret, “good husband”, “good lover” (to his mistress/es) and “good father” spoils his little daughter by grotesquely overfeeding her (1-4). Dow subtly balances this type of ‘fathering’ by giving us a glimpse of the very different family background of the novel’s chief heroine, Amantle Bokaa. “Of course she must go to school. I, too, agree”, the father of this large and poor family had (unexpectedly) stated at a family gathering (when Amantle was seven), affirming that this one, evidently gifted child of theirs (a girl to boot), simply had to be given an education. To do so would be to “help her meet the new wind”, he said (35). Amantle is no bluestocking, though, but a young woman of enormous vitality, with a capacity both for caring and for taking risks. Consequently, “when amazing things happened, she didn’t run away, as most people would: She became intrigued and involved” (101).

Dow is good at exhibiting the many kinds of networking that propel different trains of events in her society. One of these networking events is the eerie first meeting of the three main murderers (of little Neo). Two are old cronies; the prosperous businessman Mr Disanka (described above) and Head Man Bokae with his permanent grudge against “women, chiefs, lawyers and parliamentarians” (11). These two rope in - almost hypnotize - a third conspirator, Deputy Headmaster Sebaki, whom they tell that they are in need of an associate with “a heart of stone, a heart of a real man” They will also, we learn much later, bring in a fourth man, so poor that they can blackmail him with a few goats to feed his family, to assist at the killing of the girl.

One of the other informal groups which Dow depicts to contrast with the aforementioned evil conspiracy is the association between the poor villagers (in the area where Neo grew up) and Amantle, who happens to be quartered there for her national service. Even before she makes the fateful discovery — of the murdered girl’s blood-stained clothes — Amantle had endeared herself to the villagers. “You have good manners, my child,” Neo’s mother had told her, “there are some who wouldn’t have cared” (52) — contrasting the young health assistant with the nursing sisters who grudgingly and condescendingly run the clinic in this remote area. The discovery of the box with the incontrovertible evidence that Neo was murdered and not killed by a wild animal, at first arouses only horror in Neo’s grieving mother: “She’d placed her hands over her head, and was pressing and squeezing them, as if she were trying to keep her brains in lest they spill out and she were rendered completely mad” (53). But with Amantle there, the situation is now ripe for pursuing the criminals as well as those who condoned their deed by apathy or actively.

Amantle is the villagers’ link into another enterprising group: Her friend the human rights lawyer Boitumela Kukama and several other strategically well placed, vocal women associated with the latter. Because Amantle has full trust in Boitumelo and knows how committed the latter is to human rights issues, she can simply phone her (to Gaborone) with a whole list of rather unorthodox requests and demands (103). In a conversation with one of the other young lawyers involved, Boitumelo defends what she does as follows (a passage that displays her priorities and the kind of social environment she finds herself in):

 ... it’s just that our area of interest hasn’t been classified as criminal law — yet! I think wife beating’s a crime, as is marital rape! As is refusing to care for your offspring! As is abuse of power! As is closing women out of the army and customary courts! As are many other discriminatory practices no one wants to even name, let alone tackle! (133)

In a whole chapter (18) Dow shows how, at a top-level government meeting, the powers that be in Botswana respond to the crisis brought about by the grisly discovery of Neo’s bloodstained clothes and by the remote villagers’ consequent ‘rebellion’. (They have a history of civic disobedience and disrespect for the inept and corrupt local police force, and have this time taken the two nursing sisters at the clinic hostage to ensure that their demand for a proper murder enquiry be met.) At the high-powered meeting in the city, the police chief candidly acknowledges one strand of corruption: “We all know that people who murder for dipheko use [it] to harm the people who try to find out the truth. The police were afraid of dying or going insane. Of course, behind these killings there’s always a big man or men: powerful people  ... [who influence] police investigations” (146). Dow mercilessly exposes all the power rivalries and petty jealousies that are undercurrents at this type of event, where the dominant personality is the new minister of safety and security, Mr Mading. Only at the end of the chapter do we learn that his unexpected readiness to meet and negotiate with the villagers (rather than using strong-arm tactics) was in fact ‘engineered’ by Amantle and her friends’ clever, behind-the-scenes negotiations with him.

Once her lawyer friends show up, Amantle’s confidence wobbles a little (she is, after all, very young herself); “She’d hoped Boitumelo would arrive charged with the desire to help develop the script (159)”. This ‘development’ does happen, though, as the group strategises in preparation for the villagers’ meeting with the big shots — to ensure that the murder investigation will be re-opened. That the problem here is, nevertheless, of much larger dimensions than the single case of Neo, is re-emphasised at this point by Amantle’s friend Daniel (also doing his national service at a nearby village): “Have you considered,” he asks, “[that] there’s a ring of ritual murderers who operate countrywide and sell human parts to a secret clientele?” (171).

Dow’s novel could be said to have two devastating twists in the denouement, but it would be churlish to reveal what these are to those who have yet to read the text. Combining, as she does so successfully, two traditional types of novel — the adventure/quest story and the detective story — Dow has put these forms of narrative to brilliant use in a text that, beneath and beyond the surface excitements of the plot, powerfully conveys a deep, humane anger and perhaps (implicitly) a warning to the seemingly unassailable abusers of the innocent.



12 January 2003

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