Shashe

 Our country’s name, Botswana, meaning “land of the Tswanas” needs to be changed if future inter-tribal strife is to be avoided. The name was given to the newly independent republic in 1966 by the then minority Tswana speaking tribes against massive protestations of the rest of the population. For obvious reasons I cannot send this contribution to the ongoing Constitutional review exercise.  I sincerely hope that this open contribution to the review exercise, while not original in substance, will somehow come to the notice of the Constitutional Review Commission nonetheless. 1. The boundaries of our country were conceived, not by colonial Britain, but by the Anunnaki, when man was created. The British merely transferred the concept from paper to the land. 2. The point of reference was Shashe, now called Mapungubwe hill. The mighty Shashe river was named after the hill, because its confluence with the Limpopo river is directly opposite the hill. 3. If the Anunnaki envisaged an ...

An argument has been advanced that by banning the teaching of all indigenous [I’ll use that word here] languages except Setswana in 1971, President Seretse Khama was motivated by the desire to unite the new nation. Let’s assume, without conceding, that indeed that was his motive. One conclusion we can immediately draw is that Khama was in fact acknowledging that the act of naming our republic “Botswana” had not united the new nation, because some people continued to uphold their cultural identities which were distinct from those of the Setswana speaking people. At this point, if Seretse Khama was a unifier, he would have sought to give the republic an identity that all its inhabitants welcomed rather than impose the Setswana language on everybody. The easiest such identity was a neutral name; a name drawn from a river, a desert, a mountain/hill or some other physical feature of the new republic. Note that practically all countries in our part of Africa, on attaining independence or fre...