Borankana can teach us a lesson
Bongi D D M Radipati | Tuesday March 24, 2026 08:45
I reckon that nowhere in Botswana is this more evident than in borankana, the traditional dance of our country. This dance is more than just apparel, rhythm, and perspiration. This dance is really a mirror held up to ourselves and our nation. It prompts us to see one of our cultural practices as being both mundane and interesting. It also helps us observe how an ordinary public performance can transform itself into a micro narrative about our nation's soul. Understood this way, even if a particular borankana dance is not a great one qualitatively, for what it represents, it will always be an unforgettable performance.
The traits of borankana are vibrant costumes often in leather, rhythmic footwork, and the energetic movements of its dancers’ hips and upper body. The costumes are often traditional attire overlaid with feathers and beads. During its performance, the dancer's feet are stamped and shuffled to create a dance pattern, which often imitates daily domestic chores such as ploughing, cooking, the movement of livestock, etc. Unlike in typical African traditional dances whose music relies a lot on drums, accompanying the footwork and bodily movements of borankana is music that relies extensively on clapping, women’s vocal melody and harmony, and the percussive sound of rattles.
Borankana is often associated with Bakwena and Bangwaketse tribes of Botswana, although now it is widely dispersed and practiced across all of the country. While the Tswana traditional dance repertoire is ancient, just over 110 years ago, another version of it called borankana or by its lesser known name “phathisi” was invented in the largest Kweneng and Ngwaketse tribal villages. Its principal creators were miners who had returned home to these villages from South African mines. They had used pegs to hold their trousers’ bottoms as they cycled back home. When they arrived at their homes and danced at celebrations, they kept the pegs on their trousers’ bottoms. What was a crude solution soon evolved into an imaginative apparel for a dance. It was not long before the dance had spread throughout Botswana like wildfire. The historical fact of borankana, so simple that it is easy to miss, is that what began as a regional cyclist’s improvisation, has over time, morphed into the signature aesthetic of an entire nation’s traditional dance.
Said tongue in cheek and dismissively, borankana is just a dance like any other: a medium for expressing personal enjoyment. Said with a straight face and seriousness, borankana is a rhythmic heartbeat of Botswana: an equal parts lighthearted representation and a powerful galvanizing force for the humanity that we seek. This gives it a relevance and significance that some artistic expressions can’t match. Anyhow, unlike the majority of other artistic expressions that explain public themes, the essence of borankana is to evoke public themes. Indeed, its essence is the expression of its community’s ideals and values through action and imagery and mirth. In that sense, few public performances can equal borankana in getting under the skin of its dancers while simultaneously getting under the skin of its audience. That is the basic lesson to learn from borankana.
It may be that few cultures have ever put quite as much creativity, energy, and intensity into everyday dance as did Botswana from its earliest borankana days right up to the present. It started as entertainment, social commentary, and some level of sycophancy. It has continued as such to date. Maybe this combination of performance, enlightenment, and ingratiation goes to the heart of its appeal. Significantly, since its earliest iteration, borankana has always walked a tightrope. lt is, in practice, loquacious yet respectful. At times, it borders on the flattery of those in power or those who hold high societal positions - call it sycophancy with a beat and a song and a melody. Yet it always remains not just deeply theatrical but serious in its message. In fact, the message of this performative art is almost always a direct call to some community action. Additionally, even as it entertains and educates us in turn, borankana often holds us spellbound and mesmerized by both its dancers' physicality and their ease in performing publicly. This suggests that for all our avowed reticence, acutely observed, we, Batswana, are not stage shy.
Borankana makes it easy for us to be identified as citizens of Botswana. In it and through it, we pledge our allegiance to this country dramatically in dance, stylistically in traditional costumes, and in honest to goodness songs. Wherever it is, borankana is usually performed sprawled across an open field, which serves as its makeshift venue. Of equal importance to its dancers and the audience is that as its venue is typically a rough and ready one, implicitly it allows its participants to exercise their customary right to move freely within the space of the dance. This is evidence of a level of informality, spontaneity and sparkle that is rare to see in some other artistic performances. In fact, if there were reasons to be wary of a cultural performance such as borankana being so dominant in the public’s imagination and interest, there are more reasons to be grateful for it. Borankana sells us optimism and a wholesome dream of Botswana’s chutzpah. Its largely unpaid dancers, some of whom are really young or beautiful people yet dance with such grace and vitality, perform as if everyone is like them: good looking and fit. Its diverse audience attends the dance in search of a unifying assurance that the promise of Botswana is still attainable. Collectively, these are a manifestation of a strong cultural phenomenon that keeps evolving and reinventing itself as the circumstances of the country change. For one to be moved by the mastery of its dancers and the stylized choreography of the dance, and for one to derive individual pleasure from it, borankana compels one’s acknowledgment that, despite everything and shockingly, its dancers are just amateurs and self taught.
In adopting it as Botswana’s national dance, borankana has been de-tribalized from its origins. Because it demands extreme synchronization and it is held together by its rhythmic patterns, borankana requires group, and artistic cohesion. Since discipline and resilience are its core, borankana is a metaphor for endurance, which is even more relevant in the challenging and unpredictable times we live in right now. These features of Botswana's cultural dance offer us lessons for our private and public lives. They are, therefore, an audio-visual shorthand for our individual identity and national belonging. We ought to be grateful that a band of inventive blue collar fellow citizens, armed with just bicycle pegs, a song in their heads, and a tempo in their limbs, have managed to bequeath to us a form of entertainment and enlightenment. Against expectations, this bequest has stood the test of time for over a century and now defines Batswana as a modernizing yet traditional people. The lesson we must learn from borankana is its continuing communication to us of historical understanding, aesthetic rendition, enlightenment, and entertainment even if that may not have been its original goal.
*Radipati is a regular Mmegi contributor