Grooving their way to fertility or not

Sandy Grant | Wednesday September 2, 2015 15:19

Take Gaborone, for example – bearing in mind that the 50th anniversary is almost on us. Let’s have a quick run through in respect of some of its more important buildings to see how well or poorly informed we happen to be. As a starter, who designed the National Assembly? Hm. Tricky. Try another one.

What about the four initial government office blocks? Or the enormous black and white office blocks that so dominate the government enclave? Awkward. Yes, I suppose so. Let’s make it easier and ask about the Catholic Cathedral which, you may say, is unfair because two locally produced guide books, Alec Campbell’s and Mike Main’s Guide to Greater Gaborone and Patricia Farrow’s Complete City Guide, make no mention of either of the city’s two cathedrals which is a puzzle in itself.  You may therefore prefer to try your luck with the Pula Arch which Campbell/Main ignore whilst Farrow suggests that it was put there in 1966. Other authorities have maintained that it was whimsically erected to celebrate either the tenth or twentieth anniversaries of Independence.

It’s principal interest, however, rests in the fact that no one is really sure. This means, in turn, that your guess is almost bound to be correct. But if the present is beset with so many doubts and uncertainties, how much truer must this be of the long distant past.  Consider this photo for instance of a site in Serowe.  It is claimed by archaeologists, as well as by numerous others that the deeply incised grooves were caused by women sliding down the slope on their bums in an attempt to improve their fertility and hopes of child bearing. For a certainty, this curious practice, if such it was, could never have been allowed by either of the two baruti, Alan Seager or Albert Lock who lived there.

We may conclude therefore that the Neanderthal women or whoever they happened to be, must have been willing to try what today’s women would not even give a thought to doing.  But given their supposed eagerness to submit their lower parts to inevitable physical ruin suggests that the female anatomy then and now is profoundly different. But is there any such evidence? Without it, we must surely conclude that those deeply incised groves had nothing whatsoever to do with fertility or even with women. And that, I am afraid, would leave us, as with Gaborone’s Pula Arch, wondering what it is, how it happened and what was its purpose?