Goo-Sekgweng: where hope springs eternal

| Monday November 1, 2010 00:00

GOO-SEKGWENG: Goo-Sekgweng is in the Tswapong North constituency and is one of the five villages that make up Goo-Tau Ward, the others being Goo-Tau proper, Mokungwana, Matlhakola and Manaledi.

Situated to the south of the long range of the awe-inspiring Tswapong Hills, Goo-Sekgweng is home to approximately 1000 inhabitants whose main source of livelihood is subsistence farming. Indeed, the community is spiritually connected to the hills that stretch eastwards from Lecheng to Lerala. Fervently religious, the people believe that the hills are the abode of their ancestral spirits to whom they look for rain, a good harvest, health, spiritual cleansing and protection from all manner of affliction and misfortune.According to Kgosi Ontibile Ramatakana of Goosekgweng, the people of this village are the descendents of Mapulane, a Mopedi from the Transvaal. Mapulane and his followers settled at Manaledi and then Moremi.

A group of Ama-Ndebele in the area, apparently fleeing from Shaka, had the tendency of killing game drinking in the Selokong River. To stop this and also keep the marauding Ndebele away from the river and other resources in the area, Mapulane dispatched a group of his people under the leadership of his son, Sekgweng, after whom the village was subsequently named, to settle in the area where the village is situate.

Before long, the settlement became a village populated by different tribes, including Bakaa, Batswetla and Bakalanga of the Chibelu clan. Currently, Goo-Sekgweng has four dikgotla (wards), namely, Kgosing, Tshubi, Molefhe and Tswetla.

Kgosi Ramatakana remembers that whenever there was a drought in the past, the community - through its spiritual leaders - would consult the ancestral spirits at specific shrines on the hills. A voice would speak, often reprimanding the community for its sins - by commission or omission - for which the drought was punishment.

The voice would intone instructions of rituals the community must perform in repentance and - more significantly - to propitiate the gods. Rain, plenty of it, would follow. For good effect, the dismembered voice would issue a code of conduct for each member of the community to hold inviolate.

Today, Kgosi Ramatakana is worried that although the link between the people and their ancestral spirits still holds, it is not as firm as it was in the past. Daniel Letsomane of the General Foundation Apostolic Church says it is critical for people to understand that there should be a link between the culture of the worshippers and his religion.

Like Pastor Mangena Mokone who left the Methodist Church in South Africa and formed the Ethiopia Church in 1892, Letsomane says for the Christian church to resonate with proselytes, it must take their religious beliefs and cultural values into consideration.

Seventy-year old Batsogile Mhaladi says the Tswapong Hills have saved the lives many people in various ways. People fled to the hills for refuge in times of war, she says. It is still common for people to go to the hills for the restoration of their health by following specific prescriptions. If the sick person is going to die, they are told as much, obviating prescriptions. Mhaladi adds wild berries, herbs and fruits abound in the hills for the benefit of the community. With their many natural springs, the Tswapong Hills are a potential tourist attraction. Poba Keobositse points out that there is much grazing on the hills, especially in the dry season.

Much legend accompanies the relationship people here and their ancestral spirits on Tswapong Hills. And taboo. A story is told of a social studies teacher with a rather loose tongue.

Against the advice of his students at a secondary school not far from Goo-Sekgweng, this teacher displayed quite an anti-social attitude towards the venerable ancestral spirits on the Tswapong Hills, dismissing them as the creation of the fertile imagination of idle minds in the community. After giving vent to his rabid blasphemy one day, the teacher suddenly disappeared. When he re-appeared two days later, his cynicism was nowhere to be seen; in its place was an open mind befitting a teacher of social studies. The gods, it is said, had put him through an induction course in civility. 

In another legend, 10 students and their teacher went on a sports trip but perished in a car accident. They came from a school next to Goo- Sekgweng Village. A few days later at the same school, the silence of evening prep was shattered by what must have been a clowder of cats mewing in unison, as though rushing towards the classrooms.

In panic, the students tumbled out of the classrooms through windows and ran. Peace returned to the school only after a burnt offering of a black cow was made to propitiate the ancestral spirits one of whose number was buried where the school was built. The gods had instructed community leaders to perform the ritual of sacrifice.

Yet another story involves the mistake of constructing a road in Tswapong without consulting the ancestral spirits.

The gods showed their disapproval of this disregard of protocol by means of sabotage involving the return of felled trees to the site and constant breaking down of plant. The road company abandoned the project in a hurry.

It is the ploughing season now, and the appropriate rituals for a good harvest have been performed on the seeds. Communities from the neighbouring villages met here on September 1 for the traditional ceremony blessing seeds by priests. This sacred ceremony also involves the slaughtering of a black cow and brewing of sorghum beer. It is at this annual ceremony that farmers are warned of impending thunderstorms, hurricanes and quelea birds, if such disasters appear in the cosmic circles of the year. Although the rains have not come yet, people are busy at work de-stumping their ploughing fields and mending their perimeter fences. The Ministry of Agriculture has almost completed the process of distributing the seeds to the farmers.

Batsogile Mhaladi would have wanted to be at the fields preparing to start ploughing. She regrets that her health has been declining over the past three years, confining her to the village. Mhaladi, who spends most of the time alone, says she never had children of her own. Things took a turn for the worse in 1989 when her husband died. She now depends on the goodwill of relatives whom she occasionally asks to cultivate and plough a part of her field for her.

Mhaladi is entitled to old age pension and the food basket for destitute persons, thanks to the social welfare officers and other authorities in the village.

Because her huts are falling apart, she has been offered alternative accommodation by the VDC in a house just outside her homestead at Goo-Sekgweng. But she says she cannot sleep a wink whenever she tries to relocate to the new house. Much as she appreciates the gesture, she would renovate her huts at the compound where she spent decades with her late husband. She wishes she had a water tap in the compound so that she may have a kitchen garden instead of sitting idle and wallowing in self-pity all day long.

Mhaladi misses the olden days when people would relocate to their farmlands where they would stay until after harvesting around August. But due to increased theft nowadays, people return to the village every evening and go back to the lands the next morning, she says. Kgosi Ramatakana agrees that crime has gone up considerably in his village, especially house breaking, burglary and stocktheft in which even donkeys are targeted for meat. The chief contends that the thieving has more to do with moral decay than poverty.

The state of roads in the Goo-Tau Ward is bad, especially between Matlhakola and Goo-Sekgweng. The result is that public transport is not reliable. The former councillor for the ward, Baatweng Mabihi, who retired in 2009 after 15 years in office, concurs that the road network in the ward needs to be addressed, adding that the situation gets worse in the rain season when some of the roads become impassable.

He says when he first became councillor in 1994, some of the villages in his ward did not have health posts, let alone ambulances. By the time he left, health posts had been built where none had existed, existing ones upgraded, all the five villages had ambulances and the nurses had decent accommodation.

The VDC Chairman of Goo-Sekgweng, Gideon Modikwe Kedikilwe, is worried that the local nurse does not have decent accommodation. Her house, which has neither water nor electricity, is falling apart.

The VDC intends to build five teachers' houses in 2011. Kedikilwe is confident that if the people of Goo-Sekgweng remain united, committed and focused, the community will achieve this goal.

Former councillor Mabihi is happy that unlike in the past, no children are taught under trees. He says as soon as the recession is over, more classrooms and teachers' houses will be built from Lerala to Lecheng. Another project that was approved and will be embarked upon as soon as the economy improves is the Tswapong Sub-District whose headquarters will be at Lerala. In order to facilitate service delivery by bringing services closer to the people, a service centre will be built at Goo-Tau. A hospital will also be built to serve the envisaged Tswapong Sub-District. Currently, Tswapong is served by the hospital in Palapye.

The former councillor says water reticulation, electrification and roads hold the key to development and employment creation in this ward. Shortage of water is indeed a problem here. Mathuso Gaborone, Sekiwa Moana and Motlabaseo Gabatswane the crisis goes back more than 10 years. Only one tap is functional in the village, and even then only at intervals. It is 3pm when the Mmegi team arrives, but the only tap has been dry since 10am. Mogamese Oaitse says people often start queuing up for water at midnight only to get it in the wee hours of the morning.

The villagers find the situation stressful, especially for school-going children who need to bath every morning. They also feel sorry for the children who are doing their final years who, instead of revising, spend upwards of five hours queuing for water. Although bowsers deliver water, the water is never enough. As a result, many villagers, including Ketogetswe Petrus, hire donkey carts or trucks from villages such as Matlhakola and Ramokgoname to bring them water. Petrus is saddled with a 'dry' tap in her compound for which she pays P25.00 per month in rent.

Kgosi Ramatakana says the shortage of water is a drawback even for individuals because it constrains their plans to build decent houses for themselves in the village. Afterall, he adds, the success of most government empowerment schemes depends on the availability of water.

Former councillor Mabihi says Goosekgweng will soon have more than enough water. A water reticulation project should have been concluded in September, but the contractor could not complete the project at the stipulated time. Mahibi says additional boreholes are being drilled at Lecheng which will supply water to Goo-Sekgweng.

Incumbent councillor, Dikakanyo Mojaphiri, says he personally visited Lecheng recently to assess progress on the drilling of boreholes whose water will be carried by pipes to the various villages in the area, including Goo-Sekgweng. He expects the water problem to be a thing of the past in the next two months. Taps, which will be opened only by people with special PIN numbers, will be installed in the villages.

On why no private investment is evident in his ward, Mojaphiri says it got electricity only last year. Besides, there is very little skilled labour in the Goo-Tau, he says.

With its natural fountains and various game species, including birdlife, the councillor hopes the tourism potential of the Tswapong Hills will one day be fully exploited for the benefit of the community and the country at large.