Shashe

 The Patriot on Sunday newspaper of 11th December 2022 reported that Botswana has won the bid to host the 18th session of the Inter-Governmental Committee Convention for Safeguarding the Intangible, Cultural Heritage in a year’s time. The report further states that the Minister of Youth, Gender, Sport, and Culture announcing this at a press conference, said that the convention’s aim is to safeguard oral traditions and expressions, performing arts, etc. The report shocked me. How does a country that has outlawed the use of what was the most widely spoken language when the European colonialists arrived here in the late nineteenth century, the Ikalanga language, even get considered as a possible venue to host such a cultural convention? And it is not just Ikalanga language that is being eliminated from the national cultural endowment.  Before the arrival of Europeans Ikalanga was the most widely spoken language, for the simple reason that virtually all the different tribes had ev...

 The extent to which access to CORRECT information is denied to citizens in Botswana is astounding. At the last census, to the question on "language normally used at home" I answered "Kalanga". The enumerator over ruled me and wrote "Setswana". Now the results of that census are going to be used to partly determine how district administration is configured. Lies...Lies...and nothing but Lies! The recently "promoted" districts have not been published in any map to accompany the Government gazette in which they are described. The coordinate system used to describe the new districts is so complicated that not even the Department of Surveys and mapping will tell you the name of the system, let alone show you how to convert the coordinates so supplied to simple longitude and latitude. In short, the Government gazette describing the new administrative districts is completely inexplicable even to graduates like me!  Democracy is denied when people are d...

 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...

 It is reported that the Botswana Defence Force (BDF) has demoted a female soldier for appearing "naked" on page 3 of a tabloid newspaper. This punishment, in my view fits the description of gender-based violence (GBV). Not only that, it completely lacks intelligence to back it up. A woman's body is one of the most effective, deadly weapons in any hostile environment, such as during war. The lady who appeared on page 3 (I did not see it) deserves to be promoted and posted to military intelligence. The boss who demoted her deserves to be demoted or fired as a military dumb-dumb. When men display their beautiful army-toned bodies, such as former president Ian Khama used to do on the ropes and obstacle course, they get huge praises and ululations. But when a woman displays her army-toned beautiful, deadly body she gets dissed and demoted; this can't be right. Please double promote that lady now.  

Following the enactment of the anti floor-crossing law, Lediretse Molake went to great lengths to show why, in his opinion, the law is unconstitutional. Lay people like me read Molake's contribution. We then waited with baited breadth to read what the opposition political collective, or the bevy of powerful lawyers in the opposition parties would say to either buttress or rebuff Lediretse Molake's views. Indeed I expected the opposition parties to either take the government to court, or at the very least to put out a statement explaining why such a move would have no prospects for success in a court of law. Nothing of the sort crossed my path. Admittedly, there may have been some discussions in social media, to which I do not subscribe, but a statement in the newspaper would have been a way of reaching the widest possible readership. Since the publishing of Molake's article, I have been convinced that other politically active or aware entities would one day put the record s...

I wonder if the envisaged constitutional review encompasses possible change of our country's name. It is really hard to understand how non-Tswana tribes have been able to tolerate the Tribalist name of our country "Botswana" for so long. It is even more surprising when you consider that the Tswana tribes, who originally comprised of only a handful of Anunnaki workgroup types - BangwaAto; BangwaKhwizi; BaKuina are essentially foreigners in this country - they being former residents of Nkami ruins near Bulawayo in Zimbabwe. Every time a non-Tswana raises the subject of Tswana hegemony in our country, the Tswana threaten "Rwanda-like" genocide to cow us down. Why should we care if the Tswana resort to "Rwanda-like" genocide? Why should we continue to let the Tswana deny the rest of the tribes their cultural identities? Why should we continue to allow the Tswana to deny us even the use of our languages in the air waves at tax payer's expense when we co...