Hoarding habits: More is sooo More

Thulaganyo Jankey | Tuesday March 29, 2022 06:00

It always ends with me being wife-marched (which is a female, non-GBV-infused equivalent of frog-marched) to the storeroom to ‘do something about it’. For me ‘doing something about it’ involves picking a few items and throwing them out to basically create space for other collectibles during the course of the year. Makes sense? It doesn’t if you are not made of hoarding bones.

I come from a long line of hoarders. My father was a hoarder. Two uncles on my mother’s side were hoarders. My four cousins are hoarders. So there’s a rich history of hoarding that runs the whole garment of my extended family. On a hoarder scale of one to five most of my relatives would score around seven. I was coming on nicely and used to find it hilarious that people kept all sorts of odds and ends which should be at the Pilane Landfill. In fact, most of these relatives seemed to be staying in a landfill and I could not shake the feeling that they were actually high-class tramps. At a personal level I thought the hoarding bug was truly expunged from my family when most of these relatives went to heaven and joined the angels (well, hopefully).

I believed that I was on track only to find the track had been swept off the right course by the floods and I didn’t know. That is until I decided to build a storeroom. That is when things went beyond south. That wretched storeroom! As soon as the last brick was cast it was downhill all the way. Every little thing I came across was something to be treasured and taken home and stuffed in the storeroom. Murphy’s First Law of Storerooms goes something like this: once you have a storeroom everything looks like treasure to be picked and taken home to be smothered Samsonic love.

Remember Samson was that Biblical character who was so smitten with love to the point of letting out a major secret to a lady called Delilah. I am not a compulsive buyer or an enthusiastic shopper, but clearly once an object has made it past the fortress walls of my home, it thinks itself safe for generations to come. And with good reason: I struggle to chuck stuff out, in case I might need it one day. Or in some way I manage to offend the person who gave it to me. The danger of scorpions and snakes and other creatures living rent-free in the midst of my treasure is always lurking like a wolf near a mangled sheep.

So you can imagine the visit to the storeroom is a tricky undertaking and I was sweating like a gypsy with a mortgage.

What tumbled out of the hallowed Hoarding Cabinet is stuff for a Ripley’s Believe It or Not episode. There were several moth-eaten books. I have this thing of treating books as sacred objects. There were several ‘How To’ books of things that were declared obsolete decades ago. There was a rock hard tube of glue.

There was also a love letter I had written to an old flame, which I didn’t have the courage to deliver. There was yet another love letter from a lady that was sent specifically to break my heart, in fact to pulverise the little broken pieces of my heart. It left me in a sombre mood and also wondering how I had kept it for so long in the first place. I think hoarding is either a tragic flaw on an individual’s genetic makeup or borders on criminality and the government must make up its mind about whether this is an infraction on any penal code statutes whatever those things are called.

I think it would help some of us who are petrified of the law. Imagine standing in the dock and the magistrate saying something like ‘In the case of T. Jankey versus the People of the Republic of Botswana’. Now that is a lot of people to ‘versus’. Since the population is two million that means I would be against 1,999,999 people.

Egad! An average hardworking Motswana needs these types of persuasions so that he does not come to any self-harm through such dangerous habits like hoarding.

On TV you see our long-lost relatives in developed countries being taken through a programme to remove hoarder molecules from their systems. The Hoarders are one humongous family that transcends borders and continents. Perhaps one day the TV experts will descend in Africa and I will enroll. Hopefully this will happen before I extend the storeroom. I pray!

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