Today, it has more than trebled at over two million! Implicit, is that the overwhelming majority of Batswana don’t know how this baby named Boipuso, was sired and mothered, and why Batswana need to be upbeat, sing and dance, every time the 30th September, the day this baby first tugged at the mother’s breast dawns. Independence isn’t like Christmas, the birth of Christ when the son of God was born; it is the birth of our own child! Our child, born for a singular purpose. Do we know what the singular purpose was that this child, Independence, was born? The statement of one of the illustrious sons of Africa, Kwame Nkrumah, that ‘Africans had the right to govern or misgovern themselves,’ is often misunderstood. What Nkrumah tried to convey to all with a modicum of intelligence, was that demand for African independence was non-negotiable!
Now, assuming all Batswana who were around; Batswana who laboured and witnessed the birth of the child, Independence, are all still alive, something we know is preposterous, except hypothetically, we can rightly say more than two-thirds of Batswana are verily uninformed who this child, Independence, is, why it was premeditatedly born and why we must be jubilant and ready to spend millions and millions of pula, to celebrate its birthday! It isn’t right that we take everything for granted, particularly when it’s an event that speaks to our very heritage, our creative history. Armed with adequate knowledge of history, I daresay Batswana would celebrate the event with greater pomp and proper nostalgic sense. Batswana would appreciate why the feasting, often excessive, may be called for; they would appreciate why they are what they are, where they are and whether they could be much better and more advanced than they are currently, without Independence. A newborn baby is of course nursed, nurtured, schooled and trained to be a better human than the parents; it’s guided and trained to live a better and more prestigious life than that of the ancestors. Anthropologists inform us, our ancestors probably lived in caves, survived on wild berries, tubers, roots and ground honey; they were hunter-gatherers. Since then human life has been on an upward trajectory, egged by the divine command ringing in their collective ear, ‘Thou shall live by the sweat of thy brow!’ The command has energised humans and made the species seek to grow greater, better and prouder! Botswana attained Independence when more than half her counterparts on the continent had already done so. Initially, she did well by opting for democracy, a modern, dynamic system of government.
