Shashe

 As we are all aware, the rock hewn churches of Lalibela in Ethiopia, are a micro version of the Holy Land. And Gaza, in the Holy Land, is burning right now! One wonders who this King Lalibela was. How did he manage to employ "angels" to carry out the hewing at night, while humans labored during the day? Is it perhaps the Holy Land that was settled by people who originated from Lalibela, thereby rendering the Holy Land a copy of Lalibela and not the other way around? The burial of King Tutankhamun was a bold statement "Here lies a Khurutshe (Russian)!" The gold (zolota) mask needs no further explanation. What some may have missed are the golden baboons in the tomb. The baboon is the totem of Bakhurutshe. And so the last Pharaoh in the line of Pharaohs from whom the Jews are descended was a Khurutshe (Russian). And these Pharaohs were then expelled, onwards to Palestine. The god Nana Sin took over from there to guide them to the "promised" land. It seems to...

I am not going to call him a Motswana, even though his ancestors were here in Botswana, thousands of years before the country was known as Botswana. I am going to call him what he was - NKHWA. Son of the soil, progenitor of us all. He died in 2021, more than two years ago, but he still remains unburied because his birthplace has been declared a game reserve by a heartless government. He wished to be buried there, in that "Game Reserve". His family, rightly wishes to fulfil his wishes by burying him in the "game reserve". And the rest of us "Batswana" are watching and seemingly enjoying it. How can we allow a government which claims to have been elected by the majority of us, to treat the remains of one of us the way this government is doing in the case of Rre Gaotlhobogwe? It's not as though no one is being buried in the Central Kalahari  Game Reserve (CKGR)  any more. There are people who had to go to court and won their case to remain in the CKGR. Wh...

 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.