The sad tale of the limbless African mall beggar

GREG KELEBONYE
Staff Writer | Monday November 1, 2010 00:00

His distraught mother could not understand why fate would choose her for its cruel joke and gave the boy a name that expressed how she felt: the child was a shock; something that she could never have been prepared to see.

It was something that her son would have to live with, and something about which he would never get answers when he would ask why it had to be him. And he has over the years, especially as a child when he would see other children play and he could not, or when other children made fun of him.

Doctors call this rare condition phocomelia. Those who have it though, have to learn to live with it, and they need help. Without help though, living a decent life is but a dream for Ndlovu.

The Mmathubudukwane-born man who is really mainly a torso, has become a landmark at Gaborone's African Mall. Come rain or winter, Ndlovu sits here alone, quietly, hoping that a Good Samaritan will pass by and throw him a few coins or buy him food. Many times as on this day, he sits on the veranda of Pep Store. 

A few metres from where he sits is a stack of boxes and an old table. 'This is where I sleep. What I do at night is roll out the boxes and go to sleep. That is if it is not raining. If rain comes I take my boxes and make a place to sleep under the shop's veranda,' he says, his face as straight as a Nazi soldier. His eyes though tell a story about his suffering and the many strange things he has seen while he '40 winks' under the boxes at night.

'I have seen thieves break into shops and people doing really strange things. I guess they either didn't see me, or ignored me because they know I am a cripple,' he says.

He is resigned to seeing the bizarre things that happen at night and will crawl out of the box wrappings at the crack of dawn to take his place on the shop veranda and keep what he saw to himself.

He does not recall when he started asking for alms at this place except that it is a long time ago. ' I can only recall that I was here during the apartheid years, long before Mandela became president, ' he says simply. 

Apartheid, the type of racial discrimination practised by white South Africa ended in 1994 with the first 'rainbow elections' that ushered a recently released-from-prison Nelson Mandela into the presidency.

Ndlovu has only gone as far as standard two. ' I come from a poor family. My mother could not afford to send me to school, but by God's grace she managed to get me into a school in South Africa'.

At the time no school in Botswana had teachers trained to deal with his disability. Ndlovu uses the little handless stumps to eat, bathe and dress - mostly using his chin as a support.

'I have my baths in public toilets, but often people mock me or simply bully me, but what can I do?' he asks rhetorically.

For all that this man has in the place of legs and arms is just two stumps where hands should have been, a stump where there would have been a right leg and a cruelly deformed foot that looks like a seal's flipper, where his left leg and foot would have been.  Were it not for the customised artificial legs that he received from Bamalete Lutheran Hospital in Ramotswa, he would have to crawl on his belly.

Ndlovu claims that his mother is still alive, but that she is too old to take care of him.  ' She can't even take care of herself, and would rather I find a way of survival myself,' he says. In a bid to survive he has paid numerous visits to the social services department and every time he has been chased away like a cur, he says. 'I have lost count of the times I have been to the offices in Mochudi. Other than failing to assist me some of those people have been very unkind.

I remember an officer at the department telling me that she did not fashion my birth and that I should stop bothering her,' he says, discharging short belaboured bursts of ironic laughter.  The reason why they will not help him is because he does not have a national identity card. 'My mother is originally from Sikwane, but was married in South Africa. It is just that the officers are not giving my matter attention,' he says, that stiff far-away look back again.

Perhaps the officers have gotten used to seeing him and do not see him as a priority, he surmises. Perhaps also that is the attitude of many who pass-by him at the shop veranda on a daily basis. 'It is not often that I get anything from these people. Usually it is strangers who give me food and money,' he says.

Not even the churches have tried to assist him. The Seventh Day Adventist church, Dutch reformed, Methodist, New Season Ministries, Lutheran to name but a few are all within walking distance of the man. Nor have those of other faiths. Similarly none of the more than 30 shops and restaurant owners or managers at African Mall appears to have been touched by the plight of this limbless man.

The attitude of the great majority of these people might be summarised in the answer given by an Asian manager at Pie-time, which is less than 40 metres from the spot that Ndlovu occupies:

' I can't give him pie. Otherwise I would have to give to everyone. There are poor people everywhere.' Those that may not have a disdainful attitude towards the man have nonetheless given him no more than a glimpse: ' I have only been here for a month and have not thought about the man you're talking about' was the curt answer given by a manager at Pep Store when asked if the store had ever considered giving the man a cheap blanket, especially given our painfully cold winters.

With the society treating him like an outcast, Ndlovu can only wait for death's visitation, he says. But he hopes that comes after he sees President Ian Khama, who he hopes may help make his remaining years worth living. 

Meanwhile he will continue to sit at the shop veranda, gazing into the distant nothing, his thoughts racing, but none of them achievable.