Naheng: The World Where Intimacy Between Men Transcends Monolithic Politics of Sexuality In Lesotho

The world is a stage and all the men and women in Maseru are merely players, Shakespeare once said. Or at least, Mofolo-pere, the writer on a horse, the Mosotho version of him. Everyone in this town is acting. In Mokhotlong, where I grew up, no one there is an actor. The people there are too poor for costumes anyways. They are honest, hardworking people who say what they mean and mean what they say. I wonder how Maseru would be observed under Mofolo-pere’s pen. Do you thinketh it wouldeth still be a tragedy-eth?  Come observe it with me in the cool shade of the trees at Ou La La Café where I like sitting in my lunch hour with my coffee to listen to the birds, to the 4+1s, to the private (that’s what they think) conversations, the city breathing its last, tired breaths for the day after housing its flock of pretenders. The men at Ou La La, all they talk about is politics, yapping and yapping and indulging in the false glimmer of their failed political aspirations. Everyone is a pundit once  the second can of Milk Stout kicks in.

I have been living in this town for seven years now, and the tragedy is still the same. I was sitting in the faerie glen of the Parisian-Maseru-ian paradise that Ou La La promised (yet another carefully curated stage, you might observe), when I overheard one of these men open their mouths to say, ‘I don’t think this gayism thing is a Mosotho thing, it’s not in our culture.” I’m sure Mofolo-pere would approve of the glib invention of the word ‘gay-ism’ too. On hearing him utter this, I put my coffee down, but not too hard that it spilled out of the cup. Coffee is a godly nectar that should not have any of its drops wasted on loud, short men.

I have always wondered why when a group of men are gathered, the discussion always turns towards gays. As a straight, cultured man myself, this paradox befuddles me. What is culture? The pants these men wear, almost ripping at the seams from eating public sector money, was, at some point, not part of our ‘culture’. Is there some monolithic Basotho culture I am not aware of, and who dictates it? These men’s wives bending over in front of their gym trainers at Lehakoe is more Basotho culture than kotos or tšeeas. And what are these men doing when their wives are bending over for muscly hunks in the sweaty halls of mokorotlo-shaped  gyms—I know what you’re thinking, I can take it there if you want—you might ask? Well, I have spent time enough in this town to know that after 9pm, these same men are bending over for someone else, and it’s the furthest  thing from a woman.

God bless the children of this country who have no role to play except being themselves. Untainted they are by the deeds of this town. If you put a child on a stage, they will confuse the stage lights and curtains for an interrogation room. And they will tell you the truth, no matter what aspect of their lives you ask them on. In the verdant Mokhotlong hills, my childhood had none of these subterfuges and masks. None of these pressures to categorize yourself as this label or that; gay or straight, rich or poor. Those days were their own unique slice of heaven, something delicious you could put in a bottle and sell (FOR FREE).

 I would wake up before the roosters started crowing to go to herd. I hated herding, hated it the way most people hate maths at school. But looking back, I suppose, in the same manner you finally discover something tolerable about a subject you hate, I appreciated the fact that the pastures could often feel like their own world separate from my life at home. Those early mornings were precious to behold, the sun simmering beneath the hills, only moments away from rising. I wouldn’t call the other boys I herded with my friends per se, but we herded together. We were boys together, thrown into the quiet wilderness of the rolling hills of Mokhotlong. We talked about everything.

One game we liked playing was Lieitopo, a board game made of squares where we would use halved peach pips as dice. You could only move out from your home ‘base’, with its cows (these were represented by stones) if you got ‘fours’, that is, if all your pips landed on their backs when you threw them, or Eight Op, if they all landed on their hollow sides. Eight Op was the highest achievement. Some boys, when they got it, would run around, or talk smack to each other like, “Ke tla u phinyetsa!—I will fart on you!”   We could get so caught up in that world-in-the fields so much that our real cows would get mixed together, or mix with other cows,  resulting in beatings whenever some villager, or the owners of the cows themselves, happened to pass by to see the anarchic results of our negligence.

But those were the days I understood what harmony really meant. It meant being comfortable in your own body, and being at peace with your own natural instincts. An inability, and perhaps, a freedom, from rushing towards any definitive answers or labels. Usually on these specific days there would only be a few of us, compared to the larger group that had inhabited the pastures on busier days. Slow days were also often hot days, where to speak to the next person meant feeling his breath on your face, his smile, his sun-bleached smell sitting in your nostrils like something solid. Our daytime activity seemed to have emerged from these slow, quiet days. If someone asks you right now why you are blinking, you don’t even remember making a conscious decision to do it, it is an instinctual and natural action. And that was how it would start.

The sex would often happen beside lone trees, or secluded dongas, or hills we could hide behind free from prying eyes. The first time I entered one of those herd boys, I knew that my penetrating him was tied to a natural cycle as part of Mokhotlong itself as the wind whistling through the trees, or the cows lazily grazing a few feet off, indifferent to the sight of boys, pants below their knees, thrusting in measured rhythms inside each other’s butts.

You might ask yourself  what the rest of the boys were doing when two were having sex. Well, they were watching, and each would wait their own turn. As much as we didn’t use these complicated labels people use nowadays of who was the top and who was the bottom, there were individuals there who would normally prefer being entered, and some who preferred doing the entering. I on the other hand was more flexible. I could find as much pleasure being thrust into, as feeling another boy’s firm buttocks gripping my penis. It didn’t happen every time we went to herd though. As much as our daytime activity had opened a whole new world for us, we never stopped playing Lieitopo, and we never stopped talking about goings on in the village. It was a spontaneous thing that could happen as easily as breathing.

 However, as we became familiar with each other’s bodies, and as the days got hotter and hotter, and slower and slower, the frequency with which it happened increased. I don’t care which side of the bread you like your jam spread on, but there is no feeling, as a man, like feeling another man inside you, or feeling yourself inside him. The only other person that can know a man’s body, and how to pleasure a man, is another man. It is like a gift you give to your brother, someone you share the same blood with—the gift of knowing. The gift of recognition, of being united with your blood-brother through flesh. You might ask what happened at sunset when it was time to take the cows home, and separate from each other for the day. Well, nothing…each day was as normal as any Mokhotlong day, following the next day in a slow succession. The following day, we could even talk about the sex of the day before, smiles as bright as summer itself. When recounting the very prolonged session between the two of them, one in which a boy ejaculated inside the other, and still kept going until his flaccid penis became hard again, he told us proudly, when we inquired about why he kept going:  ‘Khelek! Ka mo etsang! Ne ke sitoa ho emisa. E ne kare sebono sena sa hae se pholla koma ea ka!—I couldn’t stop! I felt like his butt was caressing my dick!’

As I have mentioned, the interesting thing was that I couldn't call any of those boys my friends. Back in the village, we would never hang out with each other, or even talk to each other. I had friends of my own that I could talk to, that I could play with and share in the curiosity of what kind of world lay beyond Mokhotlong. Sometimes we didn’t even need to be that horny to have sex with each other. There is a secret code between all men and boys that draws us to each other—a natural law. Men love other men, it’s a fact as undeniable as the existence of the sun. No one is as happy as a man in the company of other men; for them, women are perceived as by-products of a reproductive need for penetrative sex. GBV rates wouldn’t be as high as they are if men truly loved women the way they love other men. You don’t believe me? Watch the glimmer in your boyfriend's eyes when he calls another man ‘Grootman’ or watch his hyena-like smile at a braai with other men. Watch them in a group of other men watching a group of other men kick a ball around for the latest cup qualifier. Manhood is a constant celebration of itself, its greatest desire is to fuck itself. The men at Ou La La, flexing, performing, flaunting their own masculinity isn’t a performance for the benefit of women, it is a performance conducted for the appeasement of other men.

 I miss those days in the plains. I miss them for their freedom, and existence without any labels, or pressures to define what we were doing, and what we were feeling. We were simply existing without forcing ourselves into any specific boxes. Even calling it ‘sex’ feels somewhat sacrilegious; limiting. Because the truth is, as much as I didn’t feel any romantic feelings for those boys, I did feel tenderness towards them, and still do. Some days, you could lie in the grass with another boy’s head on your shoulder. And that was peace. Harmony. We didn’t have any masks. This was a world we didn’t create ourselves really, but found it already there; little Adams discovering the Garden of Eden, a paradise created by God almighty who understands the secrets gleaming quietly in the shadows of the human heart.

Although, one day, there was an incident where someone from the outside intruded into our paradise. Two of the boys were pumping inside each other as usual, their moans as quiet as mice, when someone happened to walk straight up to the edge of the donga. We all quickly pulled our pants up, and the boy pulled out his penis with a barely perceptible popping sound, a clear liquid running down the other boy’s leg. We disbanded like thieves who were caught stealing peaches. To this day, I don’t remember if that man had seen anything worth writing home about. For all he knew we might just have scurried away because we had been smoking BB, a habit that some of the boys our age in the village had secretly started away from the adults’ disapproving eyes.  We all got back to a safe meeting point, hearts still racing, but it wasn’t the man we discussed, or the potential of what he could have done if he’d seen us. It was this: one of the boys was upset that the man’s interruption meant that he didn’t have his turn. We promised him that he would get it later that day. But eventually, sunset approached, and it was soon time to drive the cows home. I can’t remember if that boy finally got his turn, if he had snuck away in secret with another one to finish what hadn’t been finished.