Batswana Must Gain From McCall's Movie

Talking Musika
RAMPHOLO MOLEFHE | Monday August 6, 2007 00:00

I suppose the elections will have to be postponed again next year when the executive will be organising the next BOMU awards, this time not for the 2007 reasons given, but this time on account of precedence.

Ke gore 'we postponed the elections last year, so why don't we postpone them again this year, and then next year and the after, and then the year after that...iyoo. Hae?
The other day I ran to the Gaborone West offices of this McCall Smith movie, not because I really give a damn about American movies, but because the bioscope would have given me an opportunity to speak to the legendary John Kani.

Thulani had told me that he stayed at Falcon Crest, just a stone's throw away from the Mmegi offices. He met Kani at the Game City shopping centre on the south side of Gaborone.

I had met Kani in several of his movies and plays, among them The Island and When Morena Comes to Jo'burg.  I believed that I should talk to Kani about Africans in the movie world and his own successes and trials in the entertainment business.
I am entitled to it. I was born in Lovedale and so he is, in a sense my homeboy.  I am a citizen of Shoshong because that is where my grandfather was born in 1886.
I am a citizen of Tonota where my people live. 

I have every right to ask Kani questions about the acting business, because the people of Botswana have in any case paid P30 million for me to at least enjoy that right if nothing else. I happen to be a journalist of some repute, having won a prize for my column 'Tantjie' and for 'Talking Musika with Chumza' when journalism was still an enviable profession.

I have a right to talk to John Kani as a journalist in good standing, and as a citizen by descent and a South African by captivity of the borders of the British Empire.
When I want to talk to John Kani, I should not have to seek permission from some little flunkey Boer girl who tells me: 'It is up to him.  I cannot tell you where he is for the sake of his privacy and his security'.

 
What the hell?
I spent the better part of my life fighting to create a better South Africa and Botswana precisely in order to promote dialogue among the Africans who had been held hostage to British Protectionism and apartheid.
And now, having paid P30 million, I still have to seek permission from some white girl in order to speak to John Kani!  Bloody hell.
Now I hear that the best of our actors have been taken in as 'extras' at a rate of P100 or $15 a day.

Every other thing and being has been imported from South Africa.
Apart from the cabinet ministers who are scrounging for a piece of the action, there appears to be very little if anything that is coming to Batswana by way of material benefit.

Instead, a good number of our policemen have been committed to the shooting places where this Ramotswe movie is being shot.
They must protect the Batswana from the P30 million that they have invested in the movie!
Eros in Tlokweng has benefited by way of a cardboard wall and some payment to the proprietors.

I am told that there has been some shooting in Kgale view, and nobody can really tell me how much Batswana gained financially and professionally from that business.
And now the key people at Debswana and Gabs FM appear to be the only direct beneficiaries of Botswana's investment in this Hollywood comes to the desert. Uhu.
It is about time that Botswana got rid of this 'second to South Africa' mentality. It is also about time that the Batswana should demand what should come to them in return for this massive investment of P30 million that could otherwise have been invested in a national theatre or a statutory Botswana Cultural Council.