Ngakaagae - my learned friend part 2

| Friday January 14, 2011 00:00

 

Blue shirt. Dark blue suit. Tie. Every now and then the phone rings and he considers it, frowning in feigned annoyance. He apologizes and picks it up.

When he is done, he apologises again, with a sudden wide smile that is as wide as it is sudden. The hightened excitement of the end-of-year festive season seems to have slightly rubbed off him.

He orders a can of coke and the President Hotel waiter pauses as if in shock. When the lady leaves he looks at the table and turns serious, almost wistful. There is something 'just another guy' about Ngakaagae. His liking for the cola drink expresses itself in dramatic weird, 'there are days when I just stop, mid-sentence when writing something, and rush downstairs to the hawkers by the front of AG Chambers to buy a can, and just stand there and drink it. Satisfying'.

He is a football fan. To be more specific, he never misses a Manchester United game. Whenever he gets a chance, he kicks a ball about the yard, alone. He often strums a guitar and loves music. His dream is to own a fleet of beasty motorbikes. And the Coca Cola is something developed when he was still a teenager and just won't go away.

Looking at the table. 'I need to quit this thing,' he says, like a confession of sorts. Suddenly the chief prosecutor of the DPP, the face of the fiercely independent - almost rebellious DPP - the creative striker of a deadly partnership with another hard-nut to crack legal mind, Matshwenyego Phuthego, in that tough Nchindo game, who waded into the murky Nchindo corruption case moshpit and came out slightly victorious.

This man is concerned about the serious matter of his seeming addiction to Coca cola.

Ngakaagae has a childlike look, a somewhat shy disposition, that matches his almost obsessive studiousness.

Later, when we sit in the lounge of their house in Gaborone Block 8, Mma Ngakaagae declares: 'To me he is not a lawyer or a public figure' smiling at him more like a mother to a son. 'He is my cuddly bear,' she adds. Slightly shy, Ngakaagae looks at his wife, he smiles shyly like a teenage boy.

But Ngakaage learnt a long time ago, that fighters do not need to be loud. They can prove themselves in the fight.  A late bloomer, Ngakaagae the young boy was not the biggest 'man' around the Mowana Community Secondary School yard. And late-90s Mowana was not exactly a heaven for small built boys, especially those with funny features.

'My head was considered too big' he laughs. Ngakaagae often found that he had to defend himself and fights were common. However when he reached Madiba, two things happened that turned the tables on his abusers.

Firstly, he reached a spurt of physical growth, and secondly, he discovered Karate. In the afternoon, he would cross the railway line to the Railway Club where young men trained. Ngakaagae joined Karate as more of a convenience since his friends were already members of the club. It enabled him to spend time with his friends. But most importantly, he realised as time went on that 'it was keeping a few guys away,' he recalls laughing.  But Karate developed his discipline, a trait which, he says, he retains to this day. However, by the time he completed Form 5, he had quit Karate largely because of the flawed advice of some of his fellow Christians who saw the learning of such 'deadly' skills as evil.

'It was the wrong approach but as a Christian trying to find his own feet you learn to listen to those who have been at it for a while,' says Ngakaagae. It was the music that kept him at church, to which he had been forced by his older sister Gloria. But while hanging around there, 'the Christian message got even deeper'.

While Christianity pulled him from Karate it offered some other pursuit, music. 'Once you got hooked, got to the message, you begin to take it seriously,' he says. At Madiba he joined the debating club and started his jousts with the art of argument. Not that he was planning to be a lawyer then. 'I didn't even know I wanted to be a lawyer. At the time I just enjoyed debating,' he adds.

It was at that time that the young man had his fair share of youthful experimentation. He tasted beer.One night, while they were on a trip to a debating tournament in Bobonong, he encountered the challenge of peer pressure.

On the night before the tournament began, the young men, led by those who were a bit more adventurous and rebellious, went out to buy alcohol. Ngakaagae, being one of the more straight students, thought it would be the time to abandon his 'clean' image. He wanted to, above all, prove to the others that indeed he was not just another 'good' boy.

On their way back from the bars, the drinkers opened their can and took swigs. But Ngakaagae hugged his, pondering the next step. Fearing that he might be exposed for what he was, a quack among imbibers, he popped his Black Label can and started to take reluctant sips.

'It did taste like what you would expect of something that people would enjoy like that,' he says. However, as beauty experts would tell you, public image trumps comfort. To project pleasure he had to take the pain.

'I just contorted my face and kept taking my little sips, trying to project a face of enjoyment,' he recalls, laughing.

The beer drinkers skipped the fence and walked back into the school. However, the young men, unbeknownst to them, had been discovered by the head boy. Instead of taking the most serious measure against the delinquents such as reporting them to the school authorities, the head boy took Ngakaagae aside and gave him a tongue lashing.He shudders at the thought of the possible consequences.

'He told me straight. He cut through my tough boy faade and exposed me for the young good boy I was,' he adds.

After the straight talking, and the head boy was gone, Ngakaagae's conscience started churning.  'I imagined what my parents' reaction would have been if they were to hear that I was caught... drinking?' he asks, in disbelief.He shakes his head as if the matter is still before him.  However, it was  not long before Madiba was over. He did well in his final examinations which set him up for life at the University of Botswana in Gaborone. It is at University, amidst the challenges of pleasure seeking adventures all around him, that Ngakaagae would find the strength to define who he would be; an independent, sure-footed, non-conformist - and most importantly - unapologetically Christian.