It was cold in Gaborone, Botswana one December morning of ' It was a Saturday, which meant the day was non-working, and it was taboo to talk work in that poor little, rich city tucked away in deep Africa. This made the meat lean and allowed Botswana beef to carry the status that it did; much before mad cow disease and many other international protocols put paid to such free-range cattle being allowed to reach Western tables without their certificate of origins next to them!
The more energetic of the expats and the younger locals who were more urban than their older cousins headed to the small Gaborone Golf Course and teed off, postponing their date with beers and wines till evening.
Drinking laws were lax and drink-and-drive laws did not exist. So, for the merrymakers, driving home in the middle of the night or early hours after guzzling alcohol was not a problem. On late Friday evenings, if you were on the road you were there at your own peril and come Saturday mornings you would see cars parked on top of traffic circles or simply smashed by the roadside with their owners possibly in emergency wards. It was on one of those typical Saturdays in the winter month of July that I ventured out to the Gaborone Sun Hotel, a colonial edifice in the middle of town, to meet an entrepreneur to discuss his project.
I had first met him many years ago at a party with his then girlfriend and now wife. He had mentioned he was looking to set up a coffin manufacturing business. To give a choice in death, he offered to design the coffins and make sure customers could approve them - even lie in them to make sure of the fit - before they paid and then came back into them for that final journey. So, in true Pharaoh fashion, young and old alike flocked to him to have their coffins made in their lifetimes.
By the time we met again at the Gaborone Sun Hotel that cold Saturday morning in December, he had prospered and made his coffin making-cum-funeral parlour concept into a full-fledged business offering the whole package from burial grounds, coffin design and manufacture, dressing the body, informing relatives and arranging the wake, the church service and the post-funeral party. Funerals are big affairs in Africa and he made them bigger, more slick and better organised.
