14 Mar 2007
Lobatse is a one-horse town. An hour’s drive from Botswana’s capital Gaborone, it offers the following highlights: a mini-shopping mall, a hospital, a mental institution, a colonial hotel and the High Court.
A few days before our meeting, Unity Dow has moved from Gaborone to Lobatse. She welcomes me to her huge new house, next to her place of work, the High Court. Apart from a coffee table and some chairs, the living room is empty. A pity. I would have loved to check out her library, so see what it says about the owner. Because not only is 47-year old Dow Botswana’s most famous judge, she’s also a staunch feminist and an acclaimed novelist.
‘Dow the judge’ is extremely cautious about the press. Late last year she presided over one of the most expensive and widely publicised cases in the history of Botswana, in which a group of Bushmen after four year of court battle won the right to keep the land of their ancestors in the Kalahari. Dow added drama to the spectacle by lashing out at the various main actors for being just a bit too intimate with the press.
The fact that I want to see her as ‘Dow the writer’ makes her more accommodating (she doesn’t want to talk about the Bushmen case). But no matter the circumstances, she’ll always see an interview as an duel, which you must remain as invincible as possible. “I always walk the media tightrope between protecting my job as a judge and promoting my work as a writer,” she says.
Socially speaking Lobatse may be the pits, its lethargy does feed the muse. “Lobatse will make you write,” says Dow, who produced most of her work in Lobatse when she lived there earlier. “Before I was appointed judge in 1998 I ran a women’s centre. Being a judge has a total different rhythm to being a practicing attorney. Everything is nicely packaged and organised. You get a green file, a yellow file, a date for the hearing, a reading day. The chaos happens some place else. It’s a rhythm I wasn’t used to at all. So how will you relieve the monotony? What are you going to do with your time? You can water your garden, but after a while…”
So she decided to write. She writes to escape the daily routine, the dozens of cases on her desk. “I write for the same reason other people play pool or go to the cinema. For me writing is not work at all. I don’t see it as a chore, I see it as a pleasure, as a break from my regular work, which is judging.”
Over the last six years Dow has published four novels, all entirely different. Her debut Far and Beyon’ deals with Aids and relationships; Screaming of the Innocent is about a muti murder; in her personal favourite Juggling Truths she recounts growing up in the sixties; and her most recent work The Heavens May Fall is set in and around the court rooms, full of flawed, cowardly men and oppressed, brave women.
Dow immediately denies that the stories are based on real events or people. “They are not stories that happened; they could have happened.”
Then, as if she realises that she could be slightly more forthcoming she clarifies: “Of course they are influenced by what I know as an attorney and what I know as a judge. I know the pace of cross-examination, I know the rhythm. And the issues are very true. The constant clash between customary law and received law, and how they are resolved are very much part of practicing law here.”
Unity Dow grew up in the village of Mochudi. Her mother, a seamstress, could only read some Setswana. Her father was more literate. “But not sufficiently to inspire anyone to read or write,” says Dow. “But I just loved reading and books. I used to go to the local library, smaller than this room, and read there.”
Although reading may not have been their priority, her parents did value education. Herding goats instead of attending class was not an option, nor was quitting school prematurely. “I come from a family of seven, including one cousin. And apart from my youngest brother we all have university degrees, which is very peculiar for where I come from.”
Still, writing novels doesn’t follow logically from studying law. Botswana with a population of 1,7 million is hardly a literary beehive. But then, Dow wasn’t your average Tswana. She was a stubborn non-conformist with huge aspiration. She had studied in Edinburgh; she had foreign friends; she was often invited to international conferences; she had married (and divorced) an American; and her current partner is German.
Writing was a calling, an attempt to transcend Botswana’s limitations. It was a way to see her words and messages spread in all directions and get a wider audience. She leans back. “We all tell stories. Some do it in two minutes, others feel they have to write them down. For me it was also a combination of the work I did in the women’s center and the stories of the people, which stuck in my brain for a long time.”
She pauses to drink from her lemonade. “Before crime became too bad I often used to give people a lift. I remember these two women. One was talking all the time about her new house, how great it was, how she just moved in, and how she had waited so long. The other one kept congratulating her. Then I dropped them off at that house. It was the poorest place you can ever imagine. I’m intrigued by that, how people see things.”
There was also the influence of traditional story telling. Unity’s grandmother was a master. Frequently cousins came to visit, and after the evening meal the whole extended family would sit around the fire or in the lapa, trying to impress each other with their narrative skills.
“Often you’d hear the same stories”, remembers Dow. “But it’s all about how you tell them and lengthen them, how you sing the song in them, the words you use. And there was always a message behind them. We laughed at each other for being bad story tellers. I was ok, not great.”
But as a writer she was a natural. She never re-writes. Once she has started she cannot stop. Hence she has two computers, one for work and one for her fiction, so her court work doesn’t suffer from her urge to write.
As the interview progresses, her tone changes from suspicious to more open. But as soon as I mention the word feminism, she clams up again. “Yes, I’m a feminist,” she says. Silence. Followed by snappy answers to questions about the importance of feminism in her work (“The stories are in my head”), feminism as inspiration (“I don’t know. Why don’t I write about trains?”), the flawed men in her novels (“I’m sure there are great men out there. Maybe they haven’t inspired me yet”).
Another long silence after a question about what she tries to achieve with her writing. “I don’t know,” she says.
The air co hums.
Eventually, she lowers her protective shield somewhat. “Look, there are three main things. First of all I finished law school in 1983, and 1985 was the year of the Nairobi Women’s Conference, which I didn’t attend, but certainly the energy from that influenced me. Two, I was the only female law student when I studied law in Swaziland. And then also I was married to an American and involved in a case [about the nationality of my three children] for five years. After that I couldn’t go and practice regular law, and find that fulfilling.”
So instead she became the voice of the poor and oppressed in her village Mochudi. “At the time I was only lawyer living in that village. All kinds of people came to my house with all kinds of problems. Many would never afford my fees if they came to my office. I did a lot of work for them, not just women. It was only later that I specialised in women and child support.”
After eight years of activism she decided to accept the offer to become a judge - and left a gaping hole. “There were seven or eight of us involved in the women’s movement at that time. Nobody picked it up. Young women don’t really want to be associated with women’s’ issues. They feel it taints them as a professional.”
And what happened to the woman’s centre? “The center collapsed,” she says. “And now I want something to eat and drink.”
Heroes/influences:
Mother and father; Nelson Mandela and Seretse Khama (“not that I wake at night and think: these people are my heroes”); Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee; To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee; The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy; The Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri.