Let me start with a question that appears on the surface to be ridiculous but turns out upon deep reflection to be much more serious and profound; what is a country? What is this thing that we call a country? What is Botswana? I want to argue a country is more than just a geographical expression. Sounds silly, doesn’t it? No, not if you know what you are talking about. Not when you know something that you really love very much, and certainly not when you get a feeling you have lost that thing. Most of us fail in definitions principally because we trust too much in received knowledge. We are too complacent to think outside the box so to speak. Any truths we didn’t learn at school sound suspicious, seditious even. We trust not our imagination to add more insight into received knowledge, better still, to create more and better knowledge through our own ways of thinking, through our own ways living in, and seeing the world differently every day. A writer on the other hand is always suspicious of intellectual dogma, and most of the time believes not at all the nonsense that passes for education in schools and universities, and this is the sort of thing for which I’m quite notorious.
To me education is the art of competing intellectual truths, nothing more, and nothing less. Only scientific truths, in their wretched stubbornness, always refuse to die; once born, they live forever. Other intellectual truths are not so smug, and I make it my business in my writings to demolish these fragile truths mercilessly. In fact this is the only reason why I write.
