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."
