A lost plaque

Sandy Grant | Wednesday January 8, 2014 16:17

In the event, I left without knowing if it did or didn't but at least I had enjoyed a most rewarding chat with the Principal who promised to try and discover if one still existed or had ever existed.

Plaque hunting might seem to be a particularly undemanding and un-vexatious kind of quest. Getting access to any institution, however, usually means explaining to a security guard why one is visiting and where one intends to go. 

Two problems immediately arise if this means explaining that the visit is to check whether a plaque does or does not exist. The first of these problems is that no security guard is likely to have the faintest idea what is a plaque. 

The second problem is that the security guard might well latch on to the notion if there is a possibility that a plaque - whatever this might be - is no longer there, why bother looking for it?

Sometime during the past year, I was confronted by just this kind of problem when trying to check on the old plaque at the TB Clinic in Extension 12 in Gaborone.  This time around, the security guards were happy to let me go to check at the place where I had previously taken a photo of the plaque.  As I feared, it had gone. But just in case, my memory was playing tricks I wandered around to see if there could possibly be alternative places where it might have been.

A nurse, sister or whatever, watching my erratic search through a window eventually emerged to question my right to be there and stressed that I should first have sought the permission of the Permanent Secretary. 

Personally I believe that Permanent Secretaries have more important things to do than having to respond to absurd applications of this kind but there seemed little point debating the matter. The old plaque had gone for good and with it had gone a vitally important artefact for those concerned with Gaborone and its modern history.

It is a widely held belief that prior to the establishment on the new capital, there was virtually nothing between the railway station and the Village.

But here was the evidence that the  British Administration, which is so routinely lambasted for having done nothing to develop the place had, in fact, established this particular clinic during the 1950s!

 The fact that it was officially opened by Lady Liesching is now more or less irrelevant - she being merely the wife of Sir Percivale Liesching, an unappealing bnut nevertheless key official in the Commonwealth Secretariat Office in London during the long lasting Seretse-Ruth marriage saga.  Perhaps the person who removed the plaque felt that Liesching deserved to have his name removed from the wall or, more probably had never even heard of him.

 So let him go! The trouble is that a simple,  seemingly irrelevant plaque, as in this case, can represent an extremely important part of history and when its gone, a great chunk of known history inevitably goes with it.