Sekgoma�s house, Serowe (4)
Sandy Grant | Wednesday January 27, 2016 15:24
But let me explain. In its 23-29 January issue, the Weekend Post included a full page article titled, ‘Khama’s Serowe Ghost House Now Heritage Site’. Accompanying the article was a large scale unaccredited photo of a building which was described in three bullet statements as *‘House refurbished, revamped at tune of P100,000. *This is where Sir Seretse Khama was born in 1921. *It was listed under the 100 National Monuments. Unfortunately the ghost house as shown had not been refurbished, it was not the house where Seretse was born and it was not, as such, listed as one of the 100 National Monuments. So how did such an extraordinary blunder occur? In my heritage column of 6th January I made the first of three comments on Mmegi’s recent report that the President had attended and spoken at the opening of the renovated building owned by Kgosi Sekgoma in which Seretse was reputedly born. This comment, which I refer to as Sekgoma (1) was not, for reasons unknown, included in Mmegi’s internet version. The following week, the 13th I contributed Sekgoma (2) in which I reacted to the President’s comment that Serowe should never have allowed the historic District Commissioner’s house there to be demolished and that similar buildings must be safeguarded and cherished. To accompany my contribution, I included, for obvious reasons, a photo I had taken in 1981 of the historic LMS mission buildings in Serowe with the caption, ’The old LMS mission house, Thathaganyane which was left to rot and is now no more.’
Unfortunately, Mmegi’s internet version reproduced this photo but, again for reasons unknown, with an altered caption which now stated, ‘Sekgoma II’s, house, Serowe’. I assume at this stage, that the Weekend Post, wanting to follow up the original story but having no photo, asked Mmegi to provide the one which I had just provided. Mmegi obviously did so but seemingly without suggesting that Weekend Post should first find out from me who it should credit, and perhaps pay. In the event, it didn’t do so and the large-scale photo was reproduced with no credit. Because matters some time ago at Mmegi were becoming too muddled, I began to provide credits for photos and other material only when others were involved.
I had to assume that people interested in any other photo would ask Mmegi for its provenance. But there then followed my third comment on Sekgoma’s house (20.1.16) which was accompanied by the floor plan of his very distinctive small house. When seeing this, Weekend Post must have realised that it had got things horribly wrong because the house that they had described had no possible similarity with the one in the photo they had used.
Next week, in Sekgoma (5) I will report if Weekend Post had agreed (or not) that its disregard of professional ethics in this instance fully warranted a token payment to myself of P500.