The conversation arose from a cartoon done by Billy Chiepe to show what happened at the recent special congress of the Botswana National Front (BNF) in Molepolole. Correctly, Rhoda Sekgororoane, the vice president of the women's caucus, says Billy's work shows Kathleen Letshabo as a bull being castrated.
It already sounds vile because I do know Kathleen personally, and I know the personal pain that she suffered not from the cartoon but from the involvement of her children in the political campaign against her at Molepolole. Allow me not to repeat the details.
I sense that Billy is sincere in his argument that he only borrowed from the Set swana idiom to reflect a political situation. In this instance, he had to show the pain that came through when Kathleen was roundly defeated at Molepolole.
Yes, he drew a bull losing its balls to a pair of scissors! I was mildly offended in contrast to the Monitor staff who questioned the journalistic integrity of Billy's comment.
I read cartoons as comment, and I avoid reading my personal political interpretation into the work of other artists because I pretend to be an artist of sorts myself. I should also be a good journalist.
It is like the way that a surgeon looks at a body when he is about to operate. If he spent too much time 'feeling' for the patient the operation would never happen. You feel for the patient through effective discharge of your professional duty. There is no point in feeling if you cannot operate, if you wish.
Back to the subject! I see why the women might impute gender comment into Billy's depiction of the events at Molepolole. It is their job.
But I also see how Billy arrives at the logic that the readers would best understand him if he uses Setswana idiom to reflect on the Molepolole congress.
The problem, I suspect, is that the reader - and I here refer to all of us and not Rhoda alone - is that we interpret things outside of their ideological context.
Women, I believe, are as much a part of the workers' struggle against imperialism and feudalism as are the men.
The bull and the kraal are a scenario that is reflective of feudal relations of production.
Batswana understand that best because they are, essentially, cow people. That artist who is in touch with his people will understand that and use that cultural reference point to make his own personal statement.
When the gender movement fails to respect the cultural reality of its immediate surroundings, and it borrows carelessly from America and Europe, it runs the risk of reading English into Setswana.
So, even when Billy simply wants to say that 'you cannot have two bulls in the kraal' the genderists see something else. Yes, the pair of scissors represent the painful emasculation of the bull. Men, rather than women, should be the ones to be offended by that process, in the same way as they would be irritated by homosexuality.
I suspect that the women are more offended, not by the depiction of emasculation, which they perform on a day-to-day basis without flinching, but by the thought that it could possibly happen to them.
I would never have depicted the situation at Molepolole in the way that Billy did. I would have found it rather crude and 'insensitive' in agreement with Rhoda's assessment.
However, I would also have found it equally curious, and a subject not for unguided emotional response but deliberate reflection.
Sadly, most of our newspapers are headed in the direction of filth and dirt, so the readers who still keep a straight conscience will react negatively to a comment that, on the surface, appears to follow that trend.
I don't blame Rhoda. I don't blame Billy.
