Echoes of Mokgoro Hill

In the shadow of Mokgoro Hill, the land baked under an unrelenting sun, and the wind whispered as though it had secrets it would never tell. The village of Serowe was a place where time walked slowly, and nothing ever happened. Until something did.

Dineo was born under a moon so full it seemed to bulge with the weight of unfinished stories. The midwife swore she cried with her eyes open. As Dineo grew, she learned that she could feel the shape of things before they happened. Not in clear visions like the movies showed. No. They came as fragments, a chill at the wrong hour, a bird landing where it shouldn’t, the taste of dust when no wind blew.

Her mother called it nonsense. Her grandmother called it the gift. Dineo simply learned to live with it.

At sixteen, she had warned the young herder, Pako, not to cross the flooded stream. He laughed and did it anyway. They buried him three days later. After that, the villagers started to avoid her. Children watched her from behind trees. Men lowered their voices when she walked by.

Dineo had long accepted that her gift was as inconvenient as it was mysterious. Once, she had told old Mma Setlhare not to plant her beans so early. The woman had scoffed, declaring, “What can a girl who has never married know of the land?” The rains came late, the beans shrivelled, and Mma Setlhare passed Dineo in the village square with her mouth drawn tight like an unused drawstring bag.

There was also the time she dreamt the headman’s prized rooster would lose its voice. The next morning, as the sun burned orange over Serowe, the great bird opened its beak and let out a pitiful, strangled cough instead of its usual crow. For weeks the villagers teased the headman relentlessly, calling him “Father of the Whispering Rooster.” Dineo had said nothing. She never explained. The wind had spoken, and the wind was never wrong.

Dineo stayed. Sewing bright cloth by the open window. Listening to the wind speak.

Then Thabo came.

Thabo was not from Serowe. He wore brown leather shoes that made soft, determined sounds in the dust. His laugh cracked through the dry air like summer rain. No one knew why he had come to live among them. The women speculated wildly. Dineo did not speculate. She watched him in the way she watched the sky before a storm.

Their first conversation was nothing. A simple greeting by the market stalls. But something shifted inside her chest in a way she did not know how to name.

They began to meet by accident, then by habit, then by unspoken arrangement. They talked about books, music, politics. They argued about nothing and everything.

One afternoon by the dry riverbed, they had their most ridiculous argument yet: whether a mango or a guava tree gave better shade. Dineo called mango trees greedy with their heavy leaves, Thabo claimed guava trees were stingy and mean. The debate went nowhere, as most of their debates did. When Thabo stood abruptly to prove his point and caught his foot in a root, landing awkwardly on his elbow, Dineo stared at him a beat too long before letting out a small, sharp laugh. He dusted himself off with an injured sort of pride, muttering, “The tree must have agreed with you.” She said nothing, though the corners of her mouth betrayed her. The wind shifted, but for once, carried no warning.

Dineo never told Thabo about the thing inside her that knew. The thing that had already whispered his name before he said it.

One evening, as the sun fell soft and low, Dineo felt the sharp edge of it, a premonition. Not of death or disaster, but of leaving. Of distance. Thabo would go. The wind told her he would go. She hated it.

The next day, Thabo came to her with restless energy. “I’ve been offered something back in Gaborone. A job. I wasn’t going to take it. But then I thought… what if I did?”

Dineo stared at him. Her throat was dry. This was the moment. The stone about to fall.

“Go,” she said, smiling in a way that cost her everything. “You should go.”

He searched her face for something. A reason to stay. She gave him none.

Thabo left at sunrise. The village returned to its slow rhythm. Dineo returned to her sewing, her walking, her silent waiting. The ache inside her settled like a second skin.

Weeks passed. Months. The wind spoke of other things.

After Thabo left, Dineo surprised herself by feeling less broken than furious. She swept the dust from her doorstep with unnecessary force, muttering things the ancestors would pretend not to hear. She had not waited for him, not really. But still, the insult stung. He had left without believing she was worth the stay. What followed was an almost comedic parade of suitors, not because she lacked admirers, but because the wind carried word of her beauty in a way the villagers ignored when speaking of her strangeness.

The first was Kabelo, a tall cattle farmer who flexed his shoulders whenever he spoke. Dineo, irritated by his booming voice and habit of talking only about himself, stirred the air one morning just enough to knock his prized straw hat into the community pit latrine. Kabelo left Serowe soon after, convinced the ancestors had cursed him for his arrogance. The second, Olebogeng, brought her mangoes every day. Dineo smiled politely and whispered to the wind. By the next week, every mango he touched spoiled to soft, sour mush before he could offer it. He, too, gave up and vanished.

The third, Kagiso, proved immune to her tricks. A wiry, soft spoken man with uneven teeth and an odd way of humming when nervous, he arrived at her gate with a single shriveled guava. “It survived the drought I thought you’d might appreciate that,” he said with a shrug. presenting the guava as if it were a mere representation of himself. Dineo stared at the fruit, then at him. Then burst out in laughter . Kagiso did not push, did not boast. He simply waited. And as she reached out to take the guava, Dineo realised, with a flicker of unexpected warmth, that she had been waiting too not just for Thabo, but for a sign that her anger did not have to decide everything.

Many more months had gone by, and the customery marriage preparations were the only sounds her mother uttered to any willing soul.

One morning, Dineo stepped outside to hang her cloth. There, standing awkwardly by her gate, was Thabo. The same brown shoes, dusty and worn.

“I couldn’t,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck. “I couldn’t stay away.”

Dineo did not move. The cloth slipped from her hand and floated to the ground like a silent gasp.

The wind stilled, as if waiting.

And in that breathless space between yes and no, between certainty and hope, Dineo smiled not because she had known, but because for once she had not.

To Be Continued…