The trouble with Botswana: A poet speaks
Correspondent | Friday July 15, 2016 11:24
What is the greatest trouble with Botswana? No, it’s not corruption, as Chinua Achebe said of Nigeria; no, that’s still largely an elite disease, containable within the very dystopia contours of the peculiar workings of political system itself-specially the rule of law.
The rise of a leftist conscience in political life may as yet save the day. No, it’s not youth unemployment-at least not in the immediate future. Right now this is still a grave threat to the political establishment, and BDP and Government Enclave are not Botswana.
They can all go tomorrow, spectacularly unlamented, and birds will still sing in the trees. The trouble with Botswana right now is lack of sociological imagination; a problem of education and the mind.
We’ve developed a culture that posits anonymity of intellectual life, and that is dangerous, in fact it’s worse than a culture that postulates anonymity of authority.
Concealment of intellectual life and in fact, its banishment from public space has resulted in hallucinatory visions that work against anticipation and hope in public life. Our minds are incapable of adapting themselves to potentiality. At the same time our minds are adept at rapidly adapting themselves to necessity. Such a mind-set cannot accomplish anything.
This explains the wastefulness of resources and talent in this country. Our problem is that we have no idea what we should do with our culture. We do not know how to assign culture its proper place within the economy of life and the nation.
We must first liberate intellectual thought from the sway of authority. Second we must confer legitimacy on the concept of freedom. Third, we must evolve a national oracle of convention that speaks to our peculiar needs as a people.
This is precisely what Paramount Chief Kgafela Kgafela of Bakgatla has been trying to do. It’s not easy for the ordinary African to adapt to authority that arises from reason alone. His ontological and cosmic worlds, and some of their more positive ritualism, must be accommodated.
As things stand, it is hard to formulate authentic laws that people can really respect. Even the politicians break the silly laws they enact with monotonous regularity because they are alien. If politicians poke fun at their own work how do they expect ordinary citizens to behave?
This is the irony of our desperation, a demonic irony that makes it hard to know who we really are. To the ordinary Motswana the allegation that the culture he’d only yesterday been very proud of is no longer alive, or that his culture must be gutted because it is incapable of self-analysis and a new organisation, that the education and art that he reveres is empty of ideas and meaningless, that his language is archaic and incapable of functioning as a grit through which he can see and interpret his world, and the exhortation that he should capitulate his total mind to a foreign culture is always received with cynical calm and laughter-and consequently ignored.
The result is that there really is no communication between the rulers and the ruled in this country. The conflict between the nature of culture and the possibilities for its continuance means that courageous new attitudes are suspect and more often than not, unworkable.
On the other hand this cultural rebellion breeds incipient degeneration in modernity, in the imported models aborting them. The awful result is wanton directionless. The sensuous cult of dynamics between the two cultures is lost and chaos ensues.
This explains why we are so lost as a nation and a people; and this we accomplished in only 50 years, a most singular accomplishment-not even the famed Titanic went down so fast, and it’s a terrible shame. How many will not agree with me we are a classic case of hell in session?
I travel around Botswana and everywhere I visit the country is shrouded in the most frustrating mental images-images of that dreadful art: the oxymoronic paradox-chaotic harmony, pyrrhic victories, silent violence, nervous conditions, irritable silence, insecure prosperity, criminal efficiency, savage modernity, irreverent religiosity, and irredentist nationalisms-a most veritable dystopic monstrosity.
The terror of it all is the disturbing fact that there does appear to be a terrible beauty behind these things, a beauty of the human mind. It is a mind-boggling experience.
I’m still convinced the definition of Botswana cannot be anything but a mental image, an intellectual concept-a chimera of indefinable artifices.
The horror of it, it would appear, is that to many an ordinary Motswana, this world of beautiful people and majestic animals is still a closed world; a world of fantasy, terror, wonder and all sorts of ill-forebodings. It is also a world of magic and tragic encounters. Only Basarwa seem to have managed to conquer and apprehend this world.
Most Batswana do not understand it at all. They don’t even think it necessary to understand it. They are just happy to take what they want from it and leave its mysteries to idle conjecture and blind wonderment. Thousands and thousands of Batswana only live on the margins of this world, and for this I blame our education system.
Batswana’s perception of Botswana is not different from the way they look at the animal kingdom. Many of these people will tell you the most amazing things about wild animals. Just about every person I know thinks frogs, for instance, are, by nature, a serious threat to human health.
Many Batswana youths think it is necessary to kill a frog every time they come across the poor creature. Many Batswana will tell you just about every snake in the bush is so poisonous it ought not to live at all. Just about every Motswana male I know will not rest until he’s killed any snake that by some misfortune ends up sneaking into his hut. Ever since I was a kid I was told to be wary of footpaths frequented by chameleons-when a chameleon looks at you there’s no way you can ever escape madness, there’s no way you can live for long.
Thousands of Batswana are mighty convinced a monitor lizard is quite capable of eating your brains out with its long flicking tongue.
Get bitten by a gecko, and you’re doomed to laugh till you die. Many people believe the stripe-bellied sand snake brings any person who sees it good luck but that does not stop them killing it for no reason at all.
The attitude is simple: “Okay now that I’ve seen you thanks very much for all the luck that you bring me. Now it’s time for you to die, you sly, sneaking, dangerous thing!” What endangers all these harmless animals are simple fears, misunderstandings and misinterpretations deeply embedded in our cultural mores and belief systems.
Many people have similar attitudes to Botswana as a country. We fear, misunderstand and misinterpret it because at some conceptual level, Botswana is still a world closed to us. We do not understand it. We do not know it. It remains a mythical universe.
Thanks to those monstrous modern taboos and rules of life imported from outside, Botswana is still largely seen as a white man’s world. It is a world from which people are happy to take what they need. But its ontological foundation is a mystery they don’t care much for. It is a world they only know in terms of images. It is something like a movie. It is a world of happenings, a world of endless events. It is a dramatic world.
The ordinary Motswana feels only secure within a moral code that is dead, or dying. He lives by a linguistic code that is dead, or dying. He worships in a shrine that is dead, or dying.
He’s captive in a moral world that is beyond his conception, a world that is beyond his comprehension-what he calls the white man’s world, Botshelo jwa sekgoa. It is a world that treats him as an outcast, a perpetual outsider.
The ordinary Motswana lives his life in a world made for white people. He claims nativity with the soil, with his geographical place but the world he lives in remains a foreign space.
He does not understand all the games taking place in this world. He does not understand all the events taking place in this world. It is a world of magic and wonderment.
When things go well it is a world of enchantment. When things don’t go well, it immediately becomes a world of terror and great misfortunes. There’s great enjoyment when a son comes home driving a Mercedes Benz.
The moment a white man takes back the car because the son has failed to pay up the loan for one reason or the other, then there is immediately a great deal of confusion, suspicion and anxiety. If the son gets involved in an accident for one reason or the other, and he dies what follows is something else. The bewildered family immediately withdraws from the modern world. All of a sudden their son has been bewitched. They retreat into the dead world of their ancestors.
They run away from the white man’s world. The world of the ancestors is a dead world because after spending four years at a third–rate university, the ordinary Motswana claims he doesn’t understand it.
He’s too civilised to understand it, too westernised to go back to it. But go back to it he will if a great misfortune pays an unexpected visit. So it too is a closed world.
If, however, the harassed son manages to keep his car, buys another one, say a sports car, and pays off the mortgage to his city house, then the son becomes a small god. The whole family worships him.
The whole village starts piling all its little troubles on his back. This can go on till the poor fellow dies. But what happens if a bad investment pushes him off track?
What happens if it turns out all this wealth was acquired through dishonest means, through the eyes of envy, impatience and misunderstanding by the son? The whole family, the whole village, deserts the poor fellow. They retreat, laughing and shaking their bewildered heads, into the dead world of their ancestors! Who did he think he was, behaving like a white man! Well, you can imagine what happens if the poor guy manages to keep his wealth but all of a sudden he goes mad for one reason or another-and this is not uncommon.
Truth of the matter is no human being can ever belong comfortably to a world that only truly exists in classroom textbooks.
We were talking about wild animals. Every time a Motswana sees a huge snake slithering around his hut, his kraal, his car, his farm, his shop, his lover, his relative, his neighbourhood, he sees nothing but evil. At sight, every such snake instantly becomes evil incarnate. It must die.
If it runs away-aha! The devil knew what he was doing! Why run away? It surely must die. If it is so cornered, say in a small hut, that it has no option but to fight-aha! The devil knows what he’s doing. The bloody thing must surely die! It’s okay to kill the snake but not for the snake’s venom to kill the raging attacker. Many Batswana hurt Botswana in similar ways. Botswana retaliates in similar fashion. Modernity is a terrible thing. An ignorant person will tell you black mambas are always slinking around with the malicious intent of biting them.
Many believe they work in league with their sworn enemies to harm them. These ignoramuses are not just uneducated villagers. They include leading politicians, prominent lawyers and university professors.
There can never be harmony between the world of the snouted cobra and a university don who believes his divorced wife is planning his death-unless the poor snake stays permanently out of the poor professor’s way.
These fears, mistrusts, suspicions and misunderstandings are very prevalent in parts of the country where there’s great exploitation, pervasive intrusion into local lives, especially by foreign business, and corrupt relationships between politicians and outside agents of modernity, and this includes all the enclaves of modernity outside towns and cities. I cannot think of a more uneasy relationship. Of course, most features of modern life are completely harmless, and disproportionately beneficial to local communities. But they suffer from the same bad perceptions as those that are harmful.
Only seven out of the country’s 70 snake speciess are poisonous enough to kill a human being. But the potential threat of the seven deadly species is enough to spell catastrophe to the remaining harmless majority. The same fate befalls our nation.
Let me explain. Botswana is monstrously huge compared to its small number of people. By nature the majority of Batswana proper have small appetites.
By far the most unscrupulous hoarders and corrupters are foreigners. The ordinary Motswana hates such huge appetites. But he’s constrained by his humility to express his disgust.
It’s impolite to look into the gorging mouth of your visitor, even if the greedy fellow is eating you out of home and house.
The white man, the Chinaman, the Indian, and Nigerian has no such qualms. He comes, he sees what he can get, and he conquers. The moment the goose stops laying eggs, he smooches down south, to see what he can peak from the South African miracle. He’ll kick Batswana out of his country if they start eating too much, taking jobs from his children or running all businesses.
The ordinary Motswana can never do that. It’s shameful conduct to even insult your guest. So the white man can kick me out of Russia but he’s free to get into Botswana, prodigiously feed his appetite, get gorgeously bloated and corpulent, call me names, tell me how I should go about the whole business of living, start writing about my life, become an authority on my culture, teach me my language, teach me table manners, and just run the show as he likes.
He likes the mysteriousness of the Motswana attitude. It’s a simplicity that both fascinates and appals him. But he’s too smart to look too strongly and too deeply into things.
He knows he cannot stay long, he knows he shouldn’t stay long. He eats as fast as he can. And he makes sure he makes as few friends as possible, always at Government Enclave.
It’s impolite to talk too much. He manufactures his own sub-culture for the duration of his residence. The moment things start looking bleak, he quietly disappears, like a thief in the night. Is this the way to build a nation?
(To be continued next week)
*Teedzani Thapelo is a Botswana novelist, historian, poet, essayist, biographer, short story writer, travelogue and author