It’s not so easy to bury our heads in the sand and pretend we don’t see the whole world standing still, cancelling almost everything but breathing, and at the same time collapsing in the realization that we may all be Jon Snows, we know nothing! Well, maybe not nothing per se, because many of us are experts on a 20second hand washing technique guaranteed to keep the bugs away. We’re also becoming quite conversant in the “gatwe re s’ka ra hug’ana” disclaimer, shared before either an elbow bump, a footsie foot kick thing, or the defiant hug in the times of #COVID19. But really, we know nothing.
I think the first thing in exploring just how little we know, is context. Who are we? I would say a great place to start that conversation is to acknowledge where we are. About an eighth of Batswana live in and around Gaborone, and an estimated twentieth of the population lives in Francistown. That is to say the people most excitable about this pandemic, the population who even know that it is a pandemic (because what is the Sesubiya word for pandemic again?!) hardly even comprise a quarter of the nation’s total population. These figures are from as far back as 2011, and I mention this to illustrate exactly how far back the information we have actually is…even for the city slickers. I will not deny that people in peri-urban and rural Botswana know about this virus, the ways it spreads and how to avert it. What I am sure of however, despite this, is that Maun has been struggling with water for I cannot even begin to imagine how many years now, and there are no hand santisers on the shop shelves, so what were we saying about washing hands again?!
