According to a recent survey, some parents in the area lack even basic literacy, resulting in their children, some as young as six years, being the driving force of prosperity on many farms and cattle ranches.It is mind-boggling how such a reprehensible practice is possible in 21st Century Botswana, a country that has prided itself on being multi-racial and democratic right from the inception of the Republic in the mid-1960s. Yet it is rampant and systematic, the masters of the beastly order being people of a specific race that was always associated with the erstwhile heresy of apartheid.
Minister Peter Siele and the district's traditional leadership acknowledged the existence of this loathsome horror in tones almost of one referring to a curse from the gods before whom mortals are a hopeless lot. The recent report also reveals an escalation in school dropouts that is linked to this abomination of desolation on Afrikaner farms, mention of which is anathema in insouciantly multi-racial Botswana. A similar silence is expected, almost enforced, when it comes to how tragic the school hostel system for so-called Rural Area Dwellers, among whom Basarwa are preponderant, has become a convenience for the sexual appetites of the young scions of the farmers.
