Shashe

 My friend, one Damien Uwe Hobona, Omang ID 605111108 has asked me to put this notice out for the benefit, as he put it "of madibelatlhopho ". I'll quote him verbatim: "I took a deliberate decision NOT to register for the impending general elections of 30th October 2024. I have now mysteriously lost my national ID card, commonly referred to as Omang card. I strongly suspect that my Omang card was stolen from my wallet while I was asleep, in a locked house. The thief was no common thief! I therefore urge ALL madibelatlhopho to be on the lookout for  my ID during the elections, to ensure that my card DOES NOT VOTE. I repeat my name - Damien Uwe Hobona, Omang 605111108". 

 If you remember the story of how a camel slowly but surely encroached into the tent of a Bedouin, finally kicking the tent owner out, then you will understand how the Kalanga nation foolishly sacrificed their language to the whims of Seretse Khama and his British overlords, finally losing even the right to have their staple food, zengwe or millet available in the shops of Northern Botswana. I recently read yet another infuriating comment from a Tswana bigot. Following Letsile Tebogo's heroic feat at the Paris Olympics, someone referred to us as Botswanans. The Tswana bigot then rudely responded with something like "We are not Botswanans, but Batswana!". I say "Yes, we are Botswanans; not tribal Tswanas but simply people who are native to the country that was wrongly named "Botswana". The war must be taken to the Tswanas if our country is to be saved. The Tswanas adamantly refuse to call places by their correct names because place names are nearly always Ka...

 In this post I use the following abbreviations: ISS Act– Intelligence and Security Service Act. DIS – Directorate of Intelligence and Security. BDP – Botswana Democratic Party. Whenever Minister in the State Presidency, Kabo Morwaeng is quizzed by the press concerning alleged cruelty and other transgressions of the DIS, a spy agency in his ministry, he always defends the spy agency by claiming that it (the DIS) always acts according to the law. I have not heard him say what law, let alone whether such law is permissible under a democratic dispensation such as ours. I therefore can only assume that the law he is referring to is the Intelligence and Security Service (ISS) Act, Chapter 23:02, which Act established the DIS together with all its associated committees, council, community etc.  Given that Minister Morwaeng is a lawyer by training, I have had to look at the ISS Act to gauge the truth or otherwise of his claims. What I found is profoundly shocking. The minister is rig...

Palestine/Israel:   The architects of Apartheid in South Africa insisted that they were implementing an "n" state solution where "n" is the number of independent states. Their "n" was composed of such Bantustans as BophutaTswana, Transkei, Ciskei, KwaZulu etc. We (rightly) vilified them and fought to destroy their unacceptable designs in our continent. Many people died in the process. Today people are advocating for the creation of another "n" state solution with "n=2" in Palestine/Israel. They call it a 2 state solution. Hendrick Vervoed must be dancing in his grave! Botswana: UDC vs IEC I listened to part of the judgement reading. An interesting point made was that if the UDC were granted the right to observe the voter registration, then other political actors (presumably, BDP, BCP etc) would also be so granted. Now this is strange, because the government insists that ONLY the 94 or so Basarwa who sued and won the right to stay in the...

 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...