In ancient times, Batswana lived in small settlements comprising fairly large families: a man and his wives, with his uncles and younger brothers and their wives, and their children and grandchildren. Such were the Bakwena of Kgabo who, in about 1600 or earlier, broke from their parent group at Rantateng on the Crocodile River in South Africa, moved westward into Botswana, and settled at Dithejwane, near the modern town of Molepolole. They may then have numbered about a hundred to two hundred persons.
The major villages of Botswana (now towns in their own right), Molepolole, Kanye, Mochudi, Maun, and Serowe, for example, may be described as “capitals” of tribally owned land. These capital villages are the homes of the original Tswana parent groups—Bakwena in Molepolole, Bangwaketse in Kanye, Bakgatla in Mochudi, Batawana in Maun, and Bangwato in Serowe. Many of the lesser villages are homes to foreigners who, historically, placed themselves under a parent group for protection and were given land to establish themselves on their parent-groups’ boundaries. Such villages are numerous and include, around Gaborone for example, Gabane, home to a breakaway group of Balete, Manyana (Bahurutshe), Thamaga and Moshupa (Bakgatla bagaManaana), Mmankgodi (Balete), and Bokaa (Bakaa).
Traditionally, Batswana moved their capitals frequently, seeking better water, grazing, and, during troubled times, defensive positions. The same is true of the Bangwaketse and others who were constantly on the move during this period. However, since about 1885, there have been no major group movements.
All the villages, large and small, are formed by a number of divisions (metse), each comprising aggregates of greater and lesser wards (makgotla). The senior division, usually placed fairly centrally and on higher ground, is known as kgosing, or “Place of the Chief,” and comprises a number of lesser wards. Other divisions, each comprising a greater or lesser number of wards, surround kgosing. Each division is normally headed by a direct descendant of the founding father of the group. Thus, Molepolole has five divisions, kgosing headed by the kgosi, a direct descendant of Kgabo, and four others headed by descendants of Kgabo’s sons.
In the past, the kgosi, advised by his uncles and in consultation with his people, governed the group and its area, including all the foreigners settled in it. He administered justice, made decisions respecting group affairs, accepted foreign groups, and directed where and under whom they should live. Today, local administration in the villages, and indeed in each tribal area surrounding its capital village, is drastically changed, divided between an elected district council, a land board, and the kgosi. Dikgosi remain in charge of customary courts and are responsible for certain tribal affairs; but district councils now deal with most local administration, while land boards supervise land allocation.
While these villages were still small, their fields were close by, and the cattle were kept in large herds, moving from one place with a surface water source to another. As villages grew in size, so fields spread further from them and cattle had to be herded in more distant areas. Families began to have three homes, in the village, at their fields, and at a distant cattle post—the place where their cattle herds were based and watered. When the rains began, women moved to their fields to till and plant, returning only after the harvest; while men and boys looked after the cattle.
To a large extent, the traditional system continues, although some people have settled permanently at their fields and cattle posts. As paid employment increases, many people now work in commerce, industry, and government service, often employing a foreman and herders at their cattle posts, while the elderly remain in the villages looking after children attending school.
The cycle of traditional life is driven by the seasons and, principally, by the advent of the annual rains—crops and food supply are critically dependent upon rainfall. Although rain may sometimes fall in September, typically, plowing of the fields will wait until the “proper” rains fall in October or even November. Men will plow the fields using a single-furrow metal plow drawn by two to four oxen or a team of donkeys. Increasingly, however, either through government financial support or as a commercial transaction, some farmers hire a tractor to do their plowing for them. Aside from a very few large-scale commercial farmers there are some traditional farmers who own their own tractors.
While the soil is still damp, seeds for sorghum, maize, groundnuts, or pumpkins will be planted and protected as far as possible from birds and animals until harvesting in April or May. Looking after the fields and harvesting the crop is the task of women. Often, in the fields, there will be a carefully prepared area where the crop is winnowed before being carried back to the village for storage in special storage bins called sefalana. These come in many different shapes and forms, but basically they are made with branches and wooden staves plastered with mud and mounted on large stones to keep them off the ground. Most people make a practice of giving a small part of their crop to the kgosi and/or their local church as a token of thanks for the safe gathering of the harvest.
Botswana is not self-sufficient in food production (more than 80 percent of what is consumed in the country is imported). This is partly attributable to the risks involved in dry-land farming. A series of successive droughts are not uncommon and peasant farmers cannot continue to absorb the costs of annual crop failures. Increasingly they turn to the formal economy, seeking paid work, diminishing still further the quantity of food grown in the country.
Good rains at the right time are obviously critical to the success of any harvest, and so it is not surprising that rain is central to the traditions of all agriculturalists. In Setswana the word for rain is Pula, and an indication of the importance of rain is reflected in the fact that all public speeches end with that word called out as an exclamation: “Pula!” In Botswana, individuals or tribes (for example the Hambukushu, who live around the panhandle of the Okavango Delta) who are believed to have the ability to cause rain are regarded with special respect. Rain shrines are sometimes encountered in the bush. Typically such a shrine will be in an isolated and remote place, in a ravine or a rocky outcrop, for example, and can be easily missed by the casual eye. Usually the wax from four or five candles will be seen in a rough circle on some stones; on a stone in the center of the circle will be shards of broken pottery and a collection of small coins of low denomination. The money represents a gift, and the broken pottery underlines the spiritual link with ancestors whose intercession is sought to help bring rain. Sometimes on a low, isolated hilltop one will encounter a carefully laid bonfire as much as four or five feet high (about one and a half meters). It may sit there for years awaiting the next time the local inhabitants feel the need to ask their ancestors for assistance in making rain. It will be lit, and the belief is that the rising smoke will take the requests for help to their proper destination.
As a pastoral people, Batswana hold cattle to be of special importance. Traditionally cattle distribution was controlled entirely by the availability of surface water or the presence of hand-dug wells, usually located at the edge of pans. In this way cattle numbers were held in check due to limitation of the water resource. Since the 1930s, however, borehole-drilling technology has been available, and with deep boreholes penetrating ancient groundwater, vast tracts of wilderness were opened up as ranching land. So it was that cattle posts (the place where a man will drill his borehole, locate his staff, and keep his cattle) have proliferated across the former unoccupied wilderness of the Kalahari. Hand-dug wells were used to find water in suitable places at about 20 to 30 feet (about 7 to 10 meters), and early boreholes needed to be drilled from 150 to 450 feet (50 to 150 meters).
With water more widely available, cattle numbers rose dramatically and reached such a level that, at independence, the beef industry was seen as the only hope for economic development (diamonds not then having been discovered). In the 1980s, for example, it was widely held that cattle outnumbered people by about four to one!
Today, it is increasingly difficult to find unoccupied areas where groundwater is available. As would-be ranchers are forced ever further into the Kalahari, it is being found that not only are traveling times and distances from towns getting longer, but the groundwater is much deeper, often more than 1000 feet (350 meters), and drilling the boreholes is very much more expensive.
Today there are government rules about locating new boreholes—each must be more than 5 miles (8 km) and sometimes 9 miles (17 km) from any other borehole—and a prospective rancher will need permission from the local Land Board to use a selected area of land. Then all he has to do is find the money for a borehole; if he is successful in hitting water he has a cattle post, and to this point he will move his cattle.
Cattle posts are not fenced, and the animals range free, sometimes under the eye of a herder (Modisa, pl. Badisa), sometimes unattended. There are few places in Botswana today, outside national parks, game reserves, or wildlife management areas, where large predatory mammals offer any significant threat to the encroachment of cattle. Badisa are responsible not only for watering the animals every day, or every second day, but also for placing them in a kraal at night (depending on which part of the country), maintaining the water pump, monitoring fuel used, and, most importantly of all, accounting for every single animal to the owner when he makes his irregular visits to the cattle post.
Only at long-established or older cattle posts will the owner have built a conventional house. At most places there will only be a traditional hut, or sometimes a caravan. Occasionally owners bring a portable generator with them; otherwise there is no electricity and no running water. The modisa will live in huts with his family. Unless he is a member of the owner’s family he will almost certainly be from a tribe considered to be very much lower on the social scale. In many parts of the country Bushmen, or San, are employed as badisa and will invariably have many of their extended family with them. A 1991 survey showed, in one part of the country, that finding twenty to forty San on a single cattle post was not uncommon: in one case over 120 individuals were found, only a few of whom were actually employed and received any remuneration.
Payment for employees at cattle posts is not controlled by legislation and is typically very low—probably now between $5 and $20 a month—but employees and their families are entitled to free consumption of the milk, and to the flesh of any animals that die. In one survey a Bushman herder, smiling knowingly as he looked at his questioner, said, “You know, it is surprising what happens to a cow when you put a plastic bag over its head!”
The pervasiveness of cattle in the culture explains the importance and popularity of meat, but milk and milk products are equally valued. For example, a staple of the cattle post diet is soured milk, called madila. Milk is collected and soured, and the semisolids poured into a salvaged fine-weave sack, which is hung for some days while the whey weeps. The end product is very popular and enjoyed throughout the country. In towns the product is available commercially.
Traditionally, cattle are thought of in the same way as a bank account, and the desire is to have as many animals as possible. It is considered extremely bad form, therefore, to ask a man how many cattle he has: this is akin to asking a man from the West how much he has in the bank. Any reply you get will be hesitant, vague, equivocal, or wrong! If the family needs money, and the man agrees to the expenditure, cows will be sold to raise the necessary cash.
Not every Motswana (a person from Botswana) can afford to have cattle, but almost all in the rural areas have goats, which are often referred to as the poor man’s cattle. Goat will be eaten much more frequently than beef. Herding goats, as with herding cattle, has become increasingly difficult to manage as the demands of the national educational system mop up potential young herders and take them off to school. Some groups have solved this problem in a rather ingenious way: taking puppies from their mother at the earliest possible moment, the young dogs are raised with goats so that, by the time the dogs are grown, they appear to think of themselves as goats. Goats are always corralled at night, the dogs with them, and on the following morning, when released to graze, dogs and goats travel as one. Should one see such a free-ranging group, approach with caution, for the dogs will be vicious in their defense of the herd, protecting them during the day and traveling back with them to the homestead in the evening.
In the rural villages, and in the countryside generally, visitors may well see animals being regarded and treated in a way with which they are unfamiliar, and may well view the experience negatively. Dogs are generally kept for hunting, will accompany their owner into the bush, and will, with luck, help to start, chase, and corner a hare or a small antelope. The dogs will get some of the offal and are otherwise fed on whatever scraps are to be found. Often they simply starve to death, and the sight of these emaciated creatures limping around a village is not easy to bear.
Horses and donkeys are hobbled and left to roam free. Often front legs are tied so closely together that the animal cannot move except by a series of hops, making progress very slow. Some people will wean a calf from its mother by pushing a porcupine quill into the soft flesh of the calf’s nose, thereby preventing it from suckling. Values and attitudes are different, and whatever one might feel it is as well to respect those differences.
Thanks largely to the endeavors of missionaries in the nineteenth century, Botswana today is nominally a Christian country. There is complete religious freedom, and there are many different communities, including Anglican, Roman Catholic, Methodist, Dutch Reformed Church, Lutheran, United Free Church of Scotland, Seventh Day Adventist, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and Baha’i. In addition there are many independent African Churches, foremost among which is the ZCC (Zionist Christian Church).
Despite the prevalence of formal religions, animist thinking is pervasive and the practice widespread. Before the advent of Christianity, Batswana already had the concept of a supreme being whom they called Modimo. This entity is seen as all-powerful, all-prevailing, awesome, and thus somewhat remote, distant, and not directly approachable—interestingly, in many ways, not dissimilar to the idea of a “super chief.” It is because of the remoteness of this entity that ancestors are seen as being so important, for they play the role of intercessors: messengers who take the pleas and requests of ordinary people to a spirit that controls all destiny.
We have already seen that rain shrines are places in the bush where pleas for rain are made, but evidence for the huge importance of ancestors is everywhere to be seen. The Batlokwa, for example (a Tswana tribe whose tribal lands and capital village abut the city of Gaborone) bury their elderly dead within the courtyard of the family residence and, after the passage of some weeks, will build a hut over the grave. In this way it is sought to keep ancestors closer to the family and to events that shape its well-being: thus they will be in a better position to understand the family’s difficulties and will know how best to help find a solution.
Ancestors are never far from the mind of even the Motswana: good harvests are acknowledged by a donation to the church and to the chief; occasionally traditional beer will be poured over the trunk of a tree out in the fields or on a corner fence post of a field; where there has been much misfortune in a short period of time a pot containing food might be buried in a field or near the home.
For similar reasons, graves are revered. Among many older people it is believed that if one dreams of a dead person it is necessary to go to that person’s grave, remove a pinch of soil from it, and either put the soil into bath water or sprinkle it into drinking water that will be used by the family.
Part of what makes Botswana such a fascinating country, and the Batswana such interesting people, is the simultaneous and parallel presence of two very different worlds: the old, traditional way of life, and the modern, Western style. The boundaries between these two worlds are often blurred, and sometimes both are evident at the same time. It is quite likely, for example, that an observer will see a young pregnant Motswana girl walking along the street in the very shadow of the towering, glass-fronted office blocks, passing between the smart expensive cars, aiming for the newly deposited clay on a termite tunnel or a termite mound, and pinching a little of it between her fingers before eating it in the belief that it will clean her womb and strengthen her baby.
Among older people, there are still in use thousands of cautionary or advisory phrases, known in Setswana as moila: visitors would probably recognize them as “taboos.” The young are no longer interested, and unrecorded moila are rapidly being forgotten, but the older generation will still share them with you. They are very much like Western superstitions, and it is easy to believe that they have the same original purpose: to help in the acculturation of the young and to protect people from harm. For example, one may not go to the hut next door after dark to borrow salt; one may not go to the hut next door after dark to get some fire; a menstruating woman may not walk across a newly planted field; black pots must never be passed behind a person at a fire; pots by the fire must never be touched by the foot … and so on.
It is easy to understand how, in any society, being fat might be taken as a sign of wealth and good health, and it was no less so in Botswana—large buttocks, breasts, and bellies added up to a picture of admired obesity. Today, while young Batswana women strive to keep their slim and shapely figures older generations are still admiring the “woman of traditional build,” as Alexander McCall Smith described it. Indeed, so deeply ingrained in the body of tradition is this idea that there is a Setswana word to describe it: mohumagadi, referring particularly to the wife of a chief who, ideally and reflecting the wealth and status of her husband, should be fat and therefore healthy.
By far the most widely known or remembered of Tswana traditions are the institutions of Lobola (bride wealth), Bogwera, and Bojale. Lobola is discussed at length in Chapter 5. Bogwera and Bojale are the initiation rites through which young men and women once had to pass in order to attain full adult status. To understand these ceremonies more clearly, it is necessary first to understand the regimental organization of a tribe.
In days gone by every Tswana tribe maintained a system of so-called age regiments (mephato), and every member of the tribe belonged to one. There were separate regiments for men and women and they were called upon from time to time for services to the tribe as a whole; defense, big public works (such as building schools or small dams) or large-scale hunts being good examples of their former use. A regiment would be formed every few years at the command of the chief, would be led by a royal, and would include all the young men or women who had not yet been initiated and who were usually between the ages of sixteen and twenty years. The number of men in a regiment would depend on the size of the tribe and might include anything from fifty to several hundred individuals. The name given to the regiment would identify its members ever afterward, and it would help to create a strong feeling of unity and solidarity. Regiments were an effective means of binding together members of the tribe in a manner that cut across village, ward, and family ties and engendered tribal unity.
The rules for women’s regiments were much less rigid and the requirements much less stringent than for men. Often there was no formal gathering: women simply took on the name of the regiment given to their male age cohort and would not be recognized as belonging to any such regiment until called upon by the Chief to perform some specific task.
Initiation ceremonies took place for whole regiments at a time. These ceremonies for young people (Bogwera for boys and Bojale for girls) are, for the most part, no longer part of tribal life in Botswana, although the Bakgatla, who live in Mochudi, a town some twenty-four miles (forty kilometers) north of Gaborone, still claim to undertake the ceremony. (The last known event took place in 1990 and involved 1,200 boys and young men). In one form or another it may also be continued by the Balete and the Batlokwa, both of which tribes live fairly close to the capital. Early missionaries considered it an evil institution, and did all in their power to suppress it. Progressive chiefs thought that it interfered with the advancement of education and religion, and helped to engineer its demise.
In essence, a male regiment would set up a camp in a remote or secluded place and be away from all villages for as much as three months. Under pain of death participants were forbidden to divulge any of the secrets of the ceremony to women or noninitiates, who were not even allowed to approach the regiment’s camp. In the camp, the boys were first circumcised, then, in the days and weeks that followed, they were taught secret songs that exhorted them to honor and obey the Chief and the tribe; to honor, value, and respect cattle and so to look after them carefully; to attend the Kgotla regularly and to ensure that its fire never went out; to honor and obey older people; and more. There was also instruction in sex, on the duty to procreate, and on the rights, obligations, and duties of marriage. Isaac Schapera, whose Handbook of Tswana Law and Custom was compiled in the 1930s, also records that the young men were subjected to semi-starvation, considerable discomfort, torture, and strenuous hunting expeditions, all with the purpose of hardening them into men.
A man who had not passed through Bogwera was not considered a man, whatever his actual age. As such, he would not have been allowed to sit or eat with other men or to take part in tribal discussions; nor would he have been allowed to marry, and he would have been regarded with contempt by the women.
Today, the ceremony of Bogwera, where it takes place, is in a much-attenuated form. Hunting, following what game can be found, moving camp from time to time, and understanding through instruction by the elders on what is expected of them as men, remains an important part. Circumcision has been completely abandoned, secrecy is no longer stressed and, especially for the modern youth, it is not even considered necessary either to pass through the rites or to belong to a regiment.
Bojale, the women’s equivalent ceremony to Bogwera, is practiced by only a few tribes today and, compared to the past, is conducted in a much-modified form. Never, however, did it involve female genital mutilation although, long ago, the Bakgatla did mark the passing of this important rite of passage by a small branding on the inner part of the right thigh, close to the vulva. This is no longer done today. Instruction consisted of time spent in the bush being lectured by older women on matters concerning womanhood, domestic and agricultural duties, sex, and behavior toward men. Finally, after a wash in a nearby river, the women might parade before their chief and be given a regimental name.
It is doubtful that any of the modern young women working in the corporate offices of Botswana’s big companies would have participated in Bojale.
RELIGIOUS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS
In many cases, if the date of a holiday falls on a weekend, the following Monday is a holiday.
| January 1 and 2 | New Year |
| March/April | Good Friday, Easter Saturday, Easter Sunday, and Easter Monday |
| May/June | Ascension Day |
| May 1 | Labor Day |
| July 1 | Sir Seretse Khama Day |
| July 17 | President’s Day |
| September 30 | Botswana Day |
| December 25 | Christmas Day |
| December 26 | Boxing Day |