continues from last week
Without question, Kanye is the jewel amongst the traditional towns. But what a visitor might wish to know is a traditional town. Legal anthropologist, Simon Roberts, supplied the answer when discussing the Bakgatla and Mochudi, “the Kgatla (or Ngwato, Ngwaketse or Kwena) state organisation has a rare simplicity, being imposed directly upon, and operating through, a system of agnatic descent and an age set organisation… this system of administration is reflected at ground level in the residential organisation of the main village…Kgatla society can thus be seen as an ever growing and deepening pyramid …whilst in its simplest form the political and administrative organisation is imposed on the agnatic system like a cloak…” In other words, the physical layout of all the traditional Tswana towns mirrors the social organisation of those tribal societies.
Practically, this meant that the Chief was in the centre, surrounded in order of social priority, by the major wards (families). Around, and outside them were placed the immigrant wards, both major and minor, having their own kgotla and headman. In the 1930s Isaac Schapera noted that Mochudi had five major wards, as it still does, and no less than 57 subsidiary wards (dikgotlana). Many of these came back into wonderful functional life during Kgosi Linchwe’s revival of bogwera between 1975-88, but otherwise most of them are slowly withering away.
Everything changes and what we are now seeing today in the traditional towns is the imposition of yet another cloak, that of the national state organisation, which is being overlaid on top of the cloak of the earlier, still vibrant, but very much reduced tribal state. In Ramotswa, this new form has starling expressed itself with two enormous water towers, which now dominate the town and the landscape for miles around in a manner which has yet to be replicated elsewhere. Driving down Ramotswa’s long main road is to pass one after another, of its major new set pieces, the district council and land board offices, the police station, and stores, and filling stations. Pass the Catholic Mission and its famous St. Conrad’s School, and the road comes to an abrupt, end at the Lutheran Hospital, the usually dry Notwane River and the international border with South Africa.
Turn off this main road and immediately Ramotswa becomes an entrancing maze of attractive close-set housing partly hidden behind miles and miles of green hedging. It looks comfortable, intimate, and self confidently, good. But get to the top of the hill near the hospital, look down and observe one of the oddest sights in the entire country. The eastern limits of Ramotswa’s advance follows a straight line beyond which there is not a single visible building. Just bush. There is no bulge, no sprawl - because the limits are defined by the border, and there is South Africa and here is Botswana.
But in all the old Tswana tribal capitals there are lessons that need to be learnt. Ramotswa is one of many of Botswana’s key melting pots. It was to Ramotswa that the first Indian settlers and traders came from Zeerust and it is Ramotswa that can claim that it was there that Botswana’s racial common sense and a tolerance for others was first born.
The history of Ramotswa, as with Tlokweng, is weird. Three of the Southern Tswana tribes got themselves out of South Africa and into what became modern Botswana before the two distinct instincts of Europeanism put the regressive on one side of the border and the liberal on the other. Both the Lete and the Tlokwa were tossed aside, handed over to Cecil Rhodes’s British South Africa Company and then saved by the failure of Jameson’s attempted putsch on Johannesburg. Both of those towns should acknowledge their indebtedness to his incompetence and stupidity. Few statues are erected of dismal failures – here could be a start.
Move northwards from Ramotswa and come to another of the old tribal capitals, Tlokweng, which also huddles against the international border. A visitor driving here from South Africa might wonder why the border is where it is because there is no hill or river to suggest that such a momentous place has been reached. Passing through that border he/she might assume that the first buildings indicate the outskirts of Gaborone. How will (s)he know that it is only when crossing the bridge over the Notwane River that he has left Tlokweng and arrived in Gaborone?
Tlokweng, is a huge anomaly and to understand better how it came to be there, we might think of the Berlin Wall. The Batlokwa contrived to get themselves on this side of the wall before it was erected, but the land on which they had settled, by agreement with Kgosi Sechele, became part of the painful, complicated, process of accommodation and compromise by which the Bakwena were obliged to cede their land east of the railway (today’s Mogoditshane) in order to save the areas to the west of it. The area settled by the Batlokwa became British South African Company land with the Batlokwa who were living there converted overnight into illegal squatters. But they had one huge asset in their aged, respected Kgosi, Gaborone, because neither the British administration nor the British South Africa Company were prepared to risk the inevitably adverse publicity they would incur by dumping him and to a lesser extent, his tribesman, somewhere in the remote Kweneng.
An extraordinary compromise was reached. Until 1933 the Batlokwa paid the British South Africa Company 150 British pounds as annual rental for the land they occupied. In that year, yet another complicated trade off occurred by which the British South Africa Company ceded its land holding between the Notwane River and the South African border in exchange for specific mineral rights in the Central District. Thereafter, the Batlokwa ceased to be paying squatters and came to provide one of the cornerstones of the new Botswana.
But Tlokweng today? It’s touchy, desperately concerned about its minimal land, its traditions, its identity. In many ways too, it is very odd. Perhaps its oddest feature is that it isn’t called Gaborone whereas somewhere else is so called. It has little to attract a visitor although it does have a wonderful new kgotla, leobo. It is ordinary, much of it along its main road being decidedly ugly, but it is of great interest for anybody wishing to understand how the disparate bits of this country came together to make one whole.
