Place of Reeds
by Caitlin Davies
(Jonathan Ball)
Caitlin Davies and Ronald Ridge met and fell in love when they were both students at Clark University in Massachusetts. She was from London and he was from northern Botswana. When they each returned home they planned to get together in the future. She took an education course and then was employed as an overseas teacher, eventually being placed at a junior secondary school in Maun, Ron’s hometown. They immediately began living together.
Caitlin wanted to be different. She wanted to integrate, to learn Setswana, to become part of Ron’s extended family and be accepted by them. Ron’s father was a South African, his mother a Bayeyi, but he was an only child. He had fathered a daughter, Alice, before he went to study abroad. Eventually Ron and Caitlin got married, she became a citizen of Botswana, they acquired land on a peninsula in the Thamalakane river near a historic bridge, and built a house there together.
In between, they spent a few years at Sowa Pan, where he got a job and Alice joined them (and where Caitlin wrote her first novel, Jamestown Blues, a child’s view of a sterile new town).
Caitlin, as her life changed, went through periods of work and unemployment. From secondary school teacher she shifted to journalism, for The Voice, for Mmegi and as editor of the Okavango Observer. She also worked for Women Against Rape in Maun and completed a survey on rape. Her critical journalism landed her in conflict with the authorities. She found herself in court on three occasions: for publishing a report in her newspaper about the MaWestern gang and its predations, a story deemed false and “likely to cause fear and alarm”, though the process of having her day in court was drawn out; for contempt of court after writing an article about “battered wife syndrome”, concerning the first case in Botswana in which a woman had experienced repeated violence and finally killed her spouse; and, Caitlin’s own story of being assaulted and raped in her home with her infant daughter Ruby there.
Place of Reeds is not the normal “expatriate in Africa” memoir. It transcends this genre in its depth of concern for Botswana, its extensive dialogue, subtle humour and the degree of its commitment. Davies became a Motswana, and Place of Reeds is the story of her 12 years in Botswana, but certainly not all of it, as her respect for people and places has caused her to hold back.
The “cultural conflict” in which she found herself is gently described, but rarely analysed. If she were to write again, 20 years from now, about her time in Botswana, we would probably have a very different tale. How much was she a victim and how much a survivor? The story we have now is worth reading; it is well written and engrossing, even down to the small details that are beautifully included.