Botswana's correct name is "Republic of Shashe". Please correct it.

 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 Africa criss-crossed by national boundaries in the future, then they most likely expected the country that they conceived to be named “Shashe”, because Shashe means “home of the King”.

4. The British named our country “Bechuanaland”, i.e. land of the Bakhwana. The “ch-“ in the name was pronounced as in the word echo (reflecting sound against a wall). The Tswanas however, deliberately mispronounced the “ch-“, to make it sound as in the word “change”. Resultantly, the Tswanas’ mispronunciation rendered “Bakhwanaland” as “Batswanaland”, i.e. their own land!

5. Changing our country’s name from Botswana to Shashe would therefore not only make everybody within it to feel included, but ln all probability, would also be an act of reverting to the country’s original name: see point number 3 above.

Let us now analyse and justify each of the above points.

Point  number 1.

The map of our country represents the male sexual organ of human anatomy. The river Limpopo, which borders our country on the south east, and just brushes against Mapungubwe hill on the South African side, was named with our country’s map in mind; the Kalanga word “mpombo” refers to the seam that runs under the human penis. Interestingly, the British called the Limpopo River – the Crocodile River. Therefore someone else other than the British called the river Limpopo. That “someone” spoke Kalanga and had clearly conceived the map of our country. It had to be the Anunnaki!

Point number 2.

In the universal language from which Kalanga arose, “Sha” means abode, and “She” means King. Shashe therefore means “Kings abode” or simply, palace. The English words “shanty” and “shenanigan” are direct transliterations of the Kalanga words “sha-nti”, meaning “tree home” and “she ndi ani kene” meaning “who is the king, by the way?” respectively. The Tswana word “moshate” is a clever sidestep from “Shashe”. The reason for sidestepping was exactly the same as for the word “Sebina”. Shashe strictly meant home of King Anu, and therefore could not be used to mean the abode of any mortal “king”. So speakers of the Sumerian language, the Tswanas, sidestepped Shashe to Moshate in reference to the home of any mortal “king”. The events that are described in Albert Malikongwa’s “Mitetembelo ye baka Madandume” as having taken place at Shashe, are known in Kalanga folk lore as dating back to the very origin of humanity. Therefore Shashe must be Mapungubwe hill!

Point number 3.

The Anunnaki did not name our country Shashe, because no other country existed at the time. But they conceived of our boundaries, and were aware that humanity referred to Mapungubwe hill as Shashe. It was likely therefore that when other countries came into being, the “penis” would inherit the name of the hill, just as the river on the opposite bank of the Limpopo had already done!

Point number 4.

In Kalanga “nthu” means “a person”. A person who is small in stature is called “nkhwana”. By “shathu” we mean “an axe”. By “shakhwana” we mean “a small axe”. The “Bakhwana” (small people) are an actual people in what is today South Africa’s Northern Cape Province, which province used to be part of what the British called “British Bechuanaland”.

Point number 5.

The currently ongoing Constitutional review exercise presents a golden opportunity for the Tswana group of tribes to correct the wrongs that they did to the rest of the Kalanga nation, of which they are a part, by accepting a name change for our country from the discriminatory “Botswana” to the universal and arguably original name “Shashe”.