Fear disrupts normal life in Mochudi

| Friday August 30, 2013 00:00

 

MOCHUDI: During the day, this principal Bakgatla town is a hive of quotidian activities: pedestrians dot the side of the road waiting for transport out to Gaborone, laundry flutters on washing lines, enterprising women sell sweets and airtime while young men wash cars from makeshift car-wash bays, learning goes on in schools as usual and at the Kgotla the hearing of cases continues. Life is going on.However, fear seems to have permeated the everyday life of some in Mochudi and threatens to imprison them within their households when the sun sets. Families lock themselves inside their houses as soon as it gets dark. Farmlands have been neglected, especially for those who have nobody to accompany them there. Pedestrians who like taking lifts into Gaborone no longer do so on their own because you climb into a stranger's car by yourself at your own risk, some say here.

Parents who have young children at schools have taken to escorting them to and from school. Otherwise the children themselves travel to and from school in groups. Back at home, children can only be sent on errands during the day, and not too far at that, chores that will only take 10 minutes at the most. 'If a child is still not back after 10 minutes, you start craning your neck to see how far he or she might be,' explains a young mother of two.The fear that is crippling some in the village comes from rumours that are troubling both the village leadership and the police, and they refuse to go away. The rumours doing the rounds here are of menacing, faceless men who have tortured the psyche of many a Motswana child for years on end. There are rumours of boraboko - the men accused of skulking around the village on the lookout for children and adults from whom to harvest body parts used for rituals.  For many children elsewhere in Botswana, the threat of boraboko is brandished about by mothers in much the same way they would the bogeyman of a fathers' wrath: to hurry disobedient children along with their chores, to quiet down crying babies and to make fussy children finish their food. For many parents, boraboko are just a weapon to scare children from playing too far from home. But in the Kgatleng District today, the threat of these men, whether real or perceived, is not used in vain. The threat has caused real fear that has gripped both the young and old. Stories abound: Of students lured into cars and of their heroic escapes, of cars with dark-tinted windows and no number-plates that haunt primary school entrances, of men on horse-back galloping after unsuspecting people in wooded pathways.'We have heard these rumours,' says Martha Morebodi, a grandmother who lives on her own in Makakatlela Ward at the far end of the village. 'But we don't know how true they are. Re a boifa. We don't know when it will happen to you or in your area.''We have heard these stories. That some people have escaped from these people, but we don't know the people who have escaped or the people they have escaped from,' James Mokalane, a mechanic, explains. Mokalane says because of these rumours, he has had to make some changes in his life: 'Ga re tsamaye bosigo. If you want to go to the farmlands, you can't go on your own. By the time we get there, everything we own would have disappeared.'

Although these stories abound, when people are pressed on whether there have actually been any victims of boraboko, the explanation is that there have been near-victims who have been able, to use the phrase used often in these narratives, go phsamola, meaning to break free and escape. Take, for example, the story of the young girl that reported to Mochudi police that she had been offered a lift by two men. The girl who says, somewhere on their journey, these men attempted to kill her. Legend in the village is that somehow this girl was able to weasel her way out of this car and escape unscathed. But as one Kgatleng kgosana explains, the little heard story is that the girl later went back to the police to say that her story had been a lie and that she was hoping, with the story, to convince her mother to move her to a different school. The Commander at Mochudi Police Station, Superintendent Simon Sitale, confirms the story. The girl's report is one of five of attempted abductions they have received since April this year.Another story doing the rounds in the village, according to Kgosi Pone, one of the district's magosana, is that of a man who says he was - on three different occasions - chased by men on horseback. Investigations into this case have been completed, says Sitale, but what the police have concluded is that the 'men on horseback' were nothing but boys sent on errands. Sitale confirms too the two reports from Radikolo Junior Secondary School (JSS) students of attempted abductions. For one of the students, the story goes that the boy was given a lift by some men who attempted to kill him. Cut and bleeding, the boy was able to run to the school where teachers called an ambulance for him. Sitale confirms they are investigating such a case but will not say whether the boy had indeed been cut when he arrived at the school.

Information has now surfaced that students at the school are threatening to strike for what they see as the police's lack of urgency in dealing with the case. Sitale says out of the cases they are still investigating, their enquiries thus far show that there is no truth in the majority of them. This is not to mean that the police are not taking the cases seriously, he points out. Infact, he says, they have been so bothered by these rumours and reports that on Wednesday morning this week, the Station Commander held a meeting with magosana of Kgatleng to reassure them that the police are in control. After the school head of Isang Primary School raised concerns about the fear that was gripping pupils at the school, the Station Commander and the Deputy Officer Commanding held a meeting with parents and the pupils late last week to reassure them that the police are 'in full control of the security situation', he says. By Wednesday the police had addressed at least six other schools in the village in an effort to abate the fear that is gripping Mochudi. Boraboko or not, Superintendent Sitale says the great fear gripping the village is unwarranted, and that at any rate, it is the duty of every individual to ensure they are always protected. 'They should not fear anything,' he emphasises. 'We are in full control of the situation. We are doing our best to ensure everyone's safety.' Yet the fear in the village may not necessarily be unjustified. Mochudi has been plagued by disappearances of people who have later resurfaced dead and, many allege, with missing body parts. The most infamous of these is still the 1994 Segametsi Mogomotsi case. Mogomotsi, a 14-year old schoolgirl, went missing from her home and her body was later found with missing private parts. Her disappearance led to riots in the village that spread to nearby Gaborone and prompted government to institute a protracted inquiry that eventually involved Britain's Scotland Yard whose report on the case - for all the trouble - remains unpublicised.

Another case is that of Joyce Pheko who disappeared from Mochudi in 2008 and was found dead on a hilltop. According to media reports at the time, her family believed she was killed for ritual purposes. In 2010, Shadrek Mokobye, a teacher at Seepapitso SSS at far away Kanye, went missing. His body was found in Sebonwane cattle post, a few kilometres from Mochudi. According to media reports, the police and the family gave conflicting accounts, with the police saying Mokobye's body had been badly decomposed when he was found and the family saying intestines were missing from the body. In April this year, the body of a nine-year old boy was discovered by the Notwane River. Some in the village still believe he was murdered and that he was discovered with missing body parts. However, Sitale is adamant that the boy died due to drowning and that his body was intact when it was found. The police and the village's traditional leadership seem to be veering the thin line between dismissing these rumours - based on the evidence on the ground that proves that there is no truth in them and not wanting to alarm the community. To this end, the village's leaders are expected to call a Kgotla meeting in the near future to get to the bottom of the rumours and seek to reassure the community that everything is as it should be.