The Great 1925 Indaba in Gaborone and the Bakgatla demonstrate rare skills
Sandy Grant | Wednesday May 6, 2015 14:59
From the photos which Schapera later took of the 1928 initiates (to be Machama) all of whom were similarly attired, it would appear that those eight young men were also Kgatla initiates.
But the Indaba held by the Prince of Wales in Gaborone took place in 1925, a year in which there was no bogwera in Mochudi.
The probability therefore has to be that the eight had all been initiated as Madima in 1922 and that all wore the spectacular ‘traditional’ accoutrements or accessories which had been invented by Isang for this particular occasion.
They all wear the wildebeest mane headgear which was to be worn so spectacularly by later initiates until it was commandeered by Kgosi Linchwe in 1975 as an essential element of royal regalia. And has subsequently been transformed into the most distinctive of all badges of office.
It remains unclear how the Dikgosi of the Bakwena, the Bangwaketse, the Bakgatla and the Batlokwa could have agreed that those eight Bakgatla should represent them and how the eight oxen were selected.
Cattle specialists may have a hard look at those oxen and speculate about their origin and type. Would they have been the dipatsa cattle which were nicked in thousands by the Bakgatla from the Boers during the South African War of 1899-1902? When first seeing this photo, we may take it as a doddle that these eight young men, as a team, should be leading those enormous oxen as in a standard parade.
What kinds of training and what kinds of skill were needed in order to pull of a trick of this kind? By the looks of it, one of these oxen needed only to express impatience and its leader would have been skewered.
It follows that this could not have been something that was specially performed for this one occasion – it was something that those eight were accustomed to doing, just as they were accustomed to riding those beasts.
We may wonder why and how such extraordinary skills with such enormous animals could have been so quickly lost. Bakgatla were still riding oxen in the late 1950s. But for some still unknown reason, the practice came to a sudden end. Possibly it was related to the rapid demise of the ox waggon which necessitated the use of highly trained animals.
When ox wagons were abandoned in favour of tractors in the mid 1970s, that training came to an end. It would appear though, that change did not occur simultaneously and that different factors were involved.
Little is known about the riding of oxen in the past and how widespread was the practice - it being a topic which to date has had little appeal for researchers of culture. But with so much stress now being placed on cultural revival, it may be that someone, perhaps in the BDF, might start thinking about the way that the riding of oxen could take the centrepiece in some future Boipuso programme.