Shashe

 I recently read a line or two of an article in one of the newspapers, about Mochudi residents wanting to have a modern hospital built for them to replace the old Deborah Retief Memorial Hospital. Even if Gaborone (and its numerous hospitals) did not exist just 50 Km south of Mochudi, the people of Mochudi would be better off than the people of Nata currently are, because Mahalapye Hospital is nearer to Mochudi than Nyangabwe Hospital in Francistown or Maun Hospital is to Nata.  It seems that Barwa simply can't understand that Botswana is not for them alone, such that whatever developments have taken place in GaMmangwato, have to be replicated in Kgatleng or Kweneng, or wherever else there is a "principal tribe" regardless of how congested such developments become, to the complete exclusion of other parts of the country. It is time all developments ceased in the notorious South East quadrant of the country until those developments have been replicated in the other three q...

 On 29 November last year I posted under the heading "Who are the Ialians?", that I speculated that the French were responsible for skinning animals. If they are indeed the workgroup that skinned animals, then they are Baganda, a tribal group found mainly in Uganda. You see, the Kalanga word for hide/skin/leather is "ganda". You could write a book on the word "ganda" because like most Kalanga words, it can be split further into its components - gaa, meaning "ice" and "nda", whose meaning I am not too sure about. But that is a topic for another day.  In leather processing there is something called "fleshing". In Kalanga this would be "ku pala". The effect of Sumerian language influence on the Kalanga language resulted in the letter "l" transitioning to the letter "r". The Shona language spoken in Zimbabwe, is just such a metamorphosed form of Kalanga. And so the Kalanga "ku pala" becomes ...

 In view of the promised constitutional review, it has been necessary to assess the British definition of the word "tribe". The Tribal Territories Act of 1933 (TT Act) does not actually define a tribe. It "separately" defines Bamangwato tribe, Bakwena tribe etc, as "the tribe of which Khama (iii) is the chief, the tribe of which Sechele is the chief, etc. respectively. What I would like those who understand the law to clarify is this: Since the TT Act does not prescribe how a succession if any, from chief Khama (iii) or from chief Sechele should occur, and since those chiefs and all the people of whom they were chiefs are now dead, is the TT Act still operative? On what "tribes" is our current constitution based, now that the people used to define "tribes" in the 1933 Act are dead?