Neighbouring houses burn together.
‘Welcome home!’ Lorato and Oratile burst out simultaneously, in English, chuckling to themselves.
We had just pulled into the Legaes’ yard after the hour-long drive from the airport in the capital. It had been a quiet trip; the family seldom spoke when they were in a car together, and I had a great deal to take in, travelling down the familiar highway and winding back into the village after two years away. The women’s spontaneous welcome burst the bubble of silence. As if on cue, children came tumbling out of doors, the youngest running full tilt for the car, the teenagers sauntering with studied nonchalance.
The yard had changed little since my last visit. It was an expansive plot, with a huddle of structures at its centre, gravitating around a square, paved courtyard behind a low wall – the lelwapa. Oratile’s older sister, Kelebogile, was seated there on a plastic chair, grinning affably as we arrived. A rectangular two-and-a-half-roomed house stood on one side, perpendicular to its predecessor, the main six-room building. In front of the larger house, and across from the smaller one, stood the isong or outdoor kitchen, also framed by a low brick wall and covered by a roof of corrugated iron perched on wooden stilts cut for the purpose. Oratile’s and Kelebogile’s eldest brother, Modiri, sat on a low wooden chair near the fire there, tending an enamel teapot in the coals – he was famously fond of Five Roses tea, a predilection we shared. The fourth side of the lelwapa faced the road, and we parked in front of it. The space had been roughly paved in rescued chunks of concrete for the cars of the yard; the cars themselves had multiplied, and grown more dilapidated, since my last visit.
The yard sat near a dried-up riverbed, not far from the centre of the village. The neighbourhood, or ward, was known and named for the tendency of springs to burst suddenly out of the clay earth. The shallow village dam was a short walk away, just near the village kgotla, or customary court; two primary schools and a junior high stood within ten minutes’ walk. The train tracks threaded through the village nearby, paralleled by the highway a little farther on; behind them stood the modest, craggy hills from which the village took its name.
By the time I arrived for fieldwork in late 2011, I had been a visitor to this yard on and off for seven years – dating back to the times I walked Lorato and her neighbours ‘halfway’ from the orphan care project nearby. I planned to stay briefly, mostly out of courtesy, while I found my feet. Little did I know that I would be spending most of the year in this yard, or that – for all its unanticipated frictions – it would become home.
In Part I, against this backdrop, I sketch the geographies of Tswana relatedness. I begin with the matrix of places that constitute the Tswana gae, or home – a common framing of kin space largely underplayed by ethnographic work on the Tswana household (see, e.g., Klaits Reference Klaits2010: 102; Morton Reference Morton2007) – and the practices of staying, movement, and work that identify and integrate those spaces over time. In Chapter 1, I explore the ways those practices produce, delimit, and refigure kinship, in part by producing dikgang – issues, conflicts, and crises – around the relative nearness and distance of kin. In Chapter 2, I look at building and the spatio-temporalities of making-for-oneself (go itirela), which requires navigating similar dikgang, the acquisition and successful management of which prove crucial to personhood. And finally, in Chapter 3, I examine the spatio-temporal dynamics of governmental and non-governmental programming launched in response to AIDS, and analyse the effects these programmes have had on the space and time of kin-making and self-making alike.
Ko Gae: House and Home
I seldom slept in. It was usually impossible. There were chickens crowing, cars starting, children shouting, and buckets clattering from early in the morning. But one Saturday morning, not long after my arrival in the field, my sleep went uninterrupted until the gathering heat set the corrugated iron roof ticking as it stretched, sometime past nine o’clock. I woke in what was otherwise an uncanny silence.
I emerged from my room, stretching and curious, into the lelwapa. It was not yet mid-morning, but the low-walled courtyard had already been swept, and the stitched sacks and blankets that had been dragged out for the children to sleep on the night before tidied away. Morning tea had already been boiled and drunk, its dregs left in cups scattered around the stoep, the sheltered veranda by the front door of the main house.
It was no small feat for the yard to be so thoroughly unpeopled. Four generations were intermittently in residence, from the elderly couple who had founded the household to their seven children, 11 grandchildren, and one greatgrandchild, making a total of 21 (plus me) – usually between 11 and 18 of us were there at any one time. It was a large household, but then most of the yards in the village housed three generations. Typically, the house was teeming: with children playing or cooking, people sitting and chatting in the lelwapa, the men tinkering with vehicles in the yard, the women sweeping or mopping or laundering. But that morning, there was no one to be seen.
I was perplexed. I stuck my head in the door of the main house. Usually at least a few children could be found on the cement floor of the sitting room, watching the fitful signal on the old TV; but the room was empty. The three adult brothers who lived at home – Modiri, Kagiso, and Tuelo – each had spartan rooms of their own opening off the sitting room, but their doors all stood open, the rooms silent. The three brothers were as different as brothers could be. Modiri, the eldest, by then in his late forties, was a lean, responsible man who kept his own counsel. He had worked in the mines and now ran his own small business, but he was unschooled and illiterate; his great passion was for cattle, and he was skilled at overseeing the family herd. Kagiso was more gregarious and charismatic, and he loved to preach and advise, slipping easily between English and Setswana as he did so. He was always sharply dressed with matching accessories, and had several projects either fledging or failing at any given time. Tuelo, the youngest, was the most hot-headed and irresponsible; he struggled to hold down work and seemed constantly to be pushing people to their limits, although he could also be shy and diffident. He depended on his older brothers, especially Kagiso, whom he took as a sort of mentor. But that Saturday, all three were out. Then again, it was not unusual for them to be absent: they were often away during the week, working or on business of their own, and only really came into the house to sleep.
I passed through to the kitchen at the back of the house, where sometimes the older girls might be found cooking, but there were only empty plates scattered over the rickety cupboard unit, and a tin of sugar standing open on the plastic table.
I left through the back of the kitchen to check the backyard. The segotlo (backyard) of colonial-era Tswana households was customarily a place of safety, refuge, and protection (Comaroff and Comaroff Reference Comaroff and Comaroff1991: 135) – but also of hiding or shame (Livingston Reference Livingston2005: 71, 184) – overseen by the mother of the house. The backyard at home, however, like its neighbours, and like the front yard, opened through a large gate onto the street. It was used for impromptu mechanics’ interventions with family cars and for mixing and storing building materials, and it struck me as the men’s space – although the children sometimes played there, and on hot days we all took advantage of the shade offered by the enormous acacia in the back corner. But there was no one there, either.
I headed back to the two-and-a-half – named for the two bedrooms that stood out on either side of a much smaller, recessed ‘half’ room, each with its own door leading in from a narrow stoep – from which I had emerged, and tapped gently on Kelebogile’s door. Kelebogile was my age-mate, a reserved woman who could be stern and unforgiving when angry but had a quiet generosity and kindness about her too. She was deeply pious and sometimes withdrawn, but could be unexpectedly funny and even playful with me. She stayed just across from the room I shared with Lorato, with her son Tefo, whom I had known since he was an infant. But there was no answer, and her door was locked.
I had been struck by the fact that the women and children were situated around the margins of the houses, with the men – who spent rather less time at home – in the centre; but, at the same time, the women were closer to the lelwapa. Although the colonial-era lelwapa was often linked to the kgotla as a male space (Comaroff and Comaroff Reference Comaroff and Comaroff1991: 137; Kuper Reference Kuper1980: 17), at home it was the women who occupied, used, and oversaw it most frequently – although everyone in the yard used it freely.
Gazing from our shared stoep across at the isong, I finally noticed two enormous cast-iron, three-legged pots steaming over a low fire. The whole family spent a lot of time in the small, ramshackle isong; the children cooked, served, and cleaned dishes there, and we all warmed bathwater, made tea, or just tended the fire and sat around talking on cold nights. But given a cooking project as big as this, someone – probably Mmapula, the elderly matriarch we all called Mma – had to be about. A small, wiry, resilient woman in her sixties, Mmapula was respected as an experienced, fair, and insightful elder, and not only by her family. She was a churchgoer, was widely connected across the village, and was generous of time, energy, and spirit. She also had a sharp, irreverent sense of humour and liked to offer a running commentary of everyone’s shortcomings and her consequent disappointments – usually in a teasing and light-hearted tone, even if there was an edge of truth to it. The door to her room – an extension that opened directly off the stoep, which she shared with rotating sets of her grandchildren and occasionally her youngest daughter as well – was slightly ajar. I pulled up a chair in the lelwapa and waited for her to emerge.
The lelwapa, where I had taken up my waiting, was the geographical centre of the yard and heart of the house, and the space in which much shared family life unfolded. Lelwapa also signifies ‘family’ in Setswana: tlogo ya lelwapa, the head of the lelwapa, is the head of the family; go aga lelwapa, to build a lelwapa, is both to build a house and to build a family. Family members may introduce or refer to one another as ba lwapeng, the people of one’s lelwapa. Many terms that describe family, in other words, are explicitly spatialised from the outset; and they are explicitly located in, or in relation to, the lelwapa. And, as we will see, the lelwapa plays an important role in a variety of events and everyday practices that define, constitute, and delimit family. It is not only the space where family members eat, socialise, and sometimes sleep; it is also where important discussions are held, where visitors are welcomed and fed, where marriage negotiations are conducted, around which parties and weddings are celebrated or funerals observed – and even, in some cases, where people are buried. It is also a space in which grain is dried, laundry washed, games played, and homework finished, and in which long hours are spent braiding hair, gossiping, or simply sitting together. The lelwapa is interchangeably – sometimes simultaneously – public and private; it marks the overlap and indeterminacy between those two categories, and is the space in which they are navigated and distinguished. It is at the heart of the compound, but also in full view of the street; it hosts both the formal greeting of visitors and everyday acts of personal and household hygiene; disagreements internal to the family are settled there, but with dimensions of formality and display that encourage shame. Crucially, it is a space in between – in between the houses and other places of the yard, in between the family and its visitors or passers-by – and it is in this in-between space that most living at home happens. Staying around, crossing, and dwelling in the lelwapa together is one important way of being kin.
At the same time, Batswana are remarkably mobile in their residential patterns, frequently moving long distances to attend school, to stay with and help distant family, or to find work (see Townsend Reference Townsend1997 on men’s migrations over their life courses). In these cases, they might refer to the places they are staying as ko lwapeng – at the lelwapa – even when they have no particular kinship with others living there. Especially when they are away from their natal families, Batswana designate their place of origin as ko gae – loosely, ‘at home’ – a term that might equally refer to a village, a neighbourhood, or a specific yard. The qualitative difference between the terms lelwapa and gae might be understood roughly as the difference between the English terms ‘house’ and ‘home’ – although each is constituted differently from its English counterpart. The primary importance of the lelwapa to Tswana experiences and understandings of kinship comes from the role it plays in anchoring the gae (cf. Morton Reference Morton2007).Footnote 1
As I was contemplating these possibilities from the lelwapa, Mmapula came out of her room, wrapping a heavy wool blanket around her waist. I sat up to greet her, asking where everybody had gone. ‘They’ve gone to the lands. I’m going out to check someone,’ she said, without further explanation. My Setswana was still too childlike for her to bother with long sentences. ‘Watch these pots. Look, like this,’ she added, lifting the heavy lid from one with a wire loop. It was full of broth and bones, a toothy cow jaw and socketed skull having floated to the surface. She slid a long, heavy stick with a short fork at one end into the pot and showed me how to lift and stir. The smell of boiled marrow and rancid flesh was overpowering. ‘I’m coming,’ she added – as Batswana usually say when they are going. And so, shuffling out of the yard, she left me alone with my stinking, bubbling cow heads.
It was already early evening by the time everyone started to filter back into the yard. Mmapula had generalised a little in her description of their whereabouts. Like Mmapula, Kelebogile and Lorato had gone out visiting friends in the village; they came home by mid-afternoon – in time, at any rate, to relieve me of cow head-stirring duty. The brothers Modiri, Kagiso, and Tuelo, and a couple of the boys, had gone out to the cattle post (moraka), three hours’ walk north-west of the village along rough, sandy roads. The family’s cattle roamed widely in search of water and good grazing, the lands they covered being shared and unfenced. The work of finding the herd, watering them, and checking their health was onerous. Kagiso and Tuelo returned at nightfall; Modiri and the boys stayed out for the weekend.
Oratile had gone out to masimo – the lands – with her two girls and her eldest sister’s two sons. Masimo, too, was a three-hour walk away, in roughly the opposite direction from the cattle post, and was a place I had visited frequently. Dipuo, the elderly patriarch of the family, lived there for much of the time I was on fieldwork. The yard at masimo was more developed than at the cattle post; the two dilapidated rondavels facing a rough courtyard had been the family’s primary residence before they built in the village. A covered cooking area nestled against a stout barbed-wire fence anchored by upright logs dug in around the perimeter. Its layout was roughly similar to that of the village residence. A small, thorn-fenced kraal stood just next to the yard, with a larger, more complex one for the goats perhaps 20 metres away. The farmland itself was a ten-minute walk, across a dry riverbed; it generated much of the family’s staple maize or sorghum and beans for the year, plus some to sell besides. Oratile, her eldest daughter Lesego, and Khumo’s eldest son had stayed out there for the weekend, having been called by Dipuo to help him with the goats. The younger two, who had tagged along for company and to help with cooking and in the fields, found their way back well after dark.
This family migration turned out to be typical of weekends, but it was not unchanging. Not everyone left the yard every Saturday, and it wasn’t always the same people going to the same places. Both the men and the women might stay at home to spend a morning doing their laundry; the women might put their efforts into cleaning the house and yard, the men into fixing vehicles, and children might stay home to study or help with these chores. If there were a funeral, wedding, or party to attend and help out with, it would be the focus of the weekend’s journeys, residence, and work.
The family’s movements were not simply interpretable in terms of gender or age, either, although certain patterns were evident. Moraka, for example, was a place primarily for the men and boys. In principle, everyone was welcome, but the women and girls in the yard, including myself, seldom tagged along. (In contrast, my brother – who visited the village once, for a week – was insistently invited out and eventually drawn into helping castrate the young bulls.) Modiri, as the eldest son, went there weekly without fail and was not expected to go anywhere else. Masimo, on the other hand, was the purview first of the elders, and second of the women. In fact, the family owned two masimo, the second over two hours’ drive (or several hours’ bus journey and walk) to the south-west of the village. Mmapula at stayed the distant lands for most of my time with the family. The women, boys, and girls were expected to help at both masimo, and they stayed there at length when they could.
There was also a seasonal aspect to these movements (not unlike that described by Schapera Reference Schapera1940: 27). In months of drought, and through much of the winter, Modiri and any of his available brothers would be out at moraka daily, taking extra food to the cattle and ensuring that the weaker ones had not become bogged down in the viscous mud surrounding their dried-up watering holes. Similarly, throughout the growing year, from the times for sowing through weeding and harvest, the women and children would be expected to attend masimo as often as possible. The children were frequently called by Mmapula to join her at the lands for the duration of their school holidays; during quieter periods, the adult siblings would send out their children on their behalf. There was perhaps never a weekend when no one went either to the lands or to the cattle post; movement out and back was as constant as the work was unrelenting, and everyone at home routinely undertook both (see also Griffiths Reference Griffiths2013: 216–17; Townsend Reference Townsend1997: 420). As a result, family members were often apart, separated and brought together in shifting patterns depending on age, gender, and the work of the season; and the people they stayed and worked with shifted too. In other words, it was not simply through staying and working together in the village lelwapa that the Legae family experienced kinship, but also through staying and working with different subsets of kin at the lands and cattle post, and through being sent to and called for among all three places.Footnote 2
Of course, movement is not only an experience of home or kinship for Batswana. It is a critical element of sociality, and of personhood. It is no coincidence that the informal way of greeting someone in Setswana is to ask ‘Le kae?’ or ‘O kae?’ – ‘Where are you?’ (connoting ‘How are you?’) – often followed by questions about where you are coming from and where you are going (O tswa kae? O ya kae?). Visiting and accompanying people (the latter often described as ‘taking halfway’) and attending events are all major features of Tswana relationships, as we will see in the coming chapters; and each requires movement (Klaits Reference Klaits2010; Livingston Reference Livingston2005; Reference Livingston2012; Schapera Reference Schapera1940: 168). And this is to say nothing of the frequency with which Batswana – especially, but not exclusively, men – may also work or attend school far from their homes, making mobility a critical feature of self-making and the life course. Even now, it is not unusual for a man’s ‘[c]attle, job and family [to be] in three different places’ (Townsend Reference Townsend1997: 416).
However, the sort of movement undertaken between lelwapa, moraka, and masimo, its specific temporalities, and the work undertaken in each place integrate them into a specifically familial space – and simultaneously define who and what makes family. The frequency of movement, as well as its regularity, is the first characteristic that sets it apart. There are no other similarly distant spaces to and from which all (or most) members of a family customarily move as often as weekly or in season-specific cycles. The paths between all three places are well worn and the journeys back and forth frequent enough to take on an almost continuous, perpetual quality. This sense of constancy is enhanced by the fact that family members frequently stay at either masimo or moraka (as well as lelwapa) for short, long, and even semi-permanent stretches of time. Batswana organise geography through people and relationships: lands and cattle posts, like yards in the village, are known by the names of the people who stay there – in our case, as kwa ga boLegae, the place of the Legae family.Footnote 3 Staying, with its associated ease of coming and going (both in the vicinity of each place and back and forth to the others), is very rare for anyone but people who are family members, and works to make people kin.
The ways in which these movements and ‘stayings’ are mobilised are also critical to their unique kin orientation. As we have seen above and will see in greater detail in Chapter 1, parents are able to call for and send their children and grandchildren – often over long distances, and even when those children have become adults – among these places, thereby establishing and responding to claims upon one another that reproduce the hierarchies and reciprocities of their relationships (see Klaits Reference Klaits2010: 107, 119). These practices of movement and its mobilisation are linked to the reasons for that movement: namely, obligations to contribute to the family’s work and care. This rationale distinguishes movement among places of the gae from other sorts of work or care undertaken for friends, neighbours, and more distant relatives. While it is certainly deeply linked to kin spatialities (see Klaits Reference Klaits2010: 31–3; Chapter 2), we will return to the question of contributing care in more detail in Part II. For our present purposes, it suffices to say that, taken together, the spatial habits described draw the courtyard the cattle post, and the lands into a coherent space that both defines and is defined by family – the gae.
Many Batswana in the southern areas of the country hold lands and cattle posts (contrary to the account of the north in Morton Reference Morton2007: 165). This landholding is not necessarily a sign of special wealth, although it has ramifications for family prosperity.Footnote 4 Even before the colonial era, Batswana men who married expected to acquire not only a residential plot in the vicinity of their own relatives, but also masimo for their wives to plough and land to graze their cattle; these acquisitions were arranged through ward headmen and chiefs (Schapera Reference Schapera1940: 95, 105). Virtually every family I knew in Dithaba had both lands and a cattle post, as did friends and colleagues elsewhere around the country. Those who didn’t enjoyed – in principle at least – the government-assured right to acquire them for free, much as individuals have a right to free residential land (see also Townsend Reference Townsend1997: 408). Since independence, district land boards and kgotlas have worked together to ensure that citizens can secure residential plots in their home villages and masimo nearby, as well as access to shared grazing on which moraka may be situated. In practice, residential plots have become harder to acquire as the government allows people to apply for plots anywhere in the country, and ameliorates demand by privileging applicants most likely to develop them quickly (a point to which we will return). Plot owners have also begun selling their property privately (see Griffiths Reference Griffiths2013 for more on these trends). However, the ongoing political commitment to protecting access to masimo, moraka, and residential plots underscores the extent to which all are considered basic constitutive elements of the Tswana home.
Property beyond the lelwapa, lands, and cattle posts enjoys no such privilege or integration, in terms of either care or movement. Over the years, Mmapula and Dipuo had built a small house in a nearby town, which they rented out; but neither they, nor anyone else in the family, ever went to visit it, tend to it, or otherwise check on it. Many of the family members were unsure where exactly it was, and I never saw it. While it did generate a meagre, sporadic income, the rental property did not constitute a part of the family’s lived experience of home.
The gae, then, is a divided, multiple, scattered yet bounded place, defined and integrated by the movement, staying, and care work of kin. Regardless of the other places in which one might work, live, or even build, the gae is the place in which one remains and to which one is inevitably drawn back (Geschiere Reference Geschiere2003). But it is not changeless. As we have seen, there may well be more than one masimo or moraka; they are usually far removed from each other, and from the lelwapa; they may be used continuously, infrequently, or perhaps not at all; and, indeed, they may be swapped, sold, acquired, or given away with relative ease. They are also constantly being built and rebuilt (a point to which we will return; see also Morton Reference Morton2007). In this sense, the gae is not only multiple but mutable. The continuous movement of kin between and among the spaces of the gae, to work and stay, therefore becomes critical to sustaining and integrating them over time. And this movement simultaneously binds people and places together and keeps them apart – articulating a tension between closeness and distance that defines not only the gae, but the Tswana family itself.
This tension becomes even clearer in light of the ways that gae are connected and reproduced. By custom, a Motswana has only one gae: either one’s parents’ home (including their lelwapa, masimo, and moraka); or, in the case of a married woman, her husband’s parents’ home. In practice, however, even married women often speak of their parents’ home as ko gae, emphasising its link with their place of origin. When Mmapula took us to visit the yard in which she grew up, now uninhabited, she explained simply, ‘Ke ko gae’ – this is home. Mmapula’s identification with two gae suggests the ways in which the movement of women in particular serves to connect different gae with each other, while also keeping them apart (even now, married women are often discouraged from returning to their natal homes). Rather than simply splitting or fragmenting, the gae slowly but surely multiplies and expands. And in this expansion, as new malwapa (courtyards/families) are built and magae are both entangled with and separated from each other, the spatialities of wards and villages are structured, sustained, and extended – which is perhaps one reason why ko gae can also refer to wards and villages.
Figure 3 Masimo – rondavels at the lands.
In his colonial-era account, Schapera warned of the ‘disintegrating tendencies of frequent separation’ (Reference Schapera1940: 178) – here, in the context of labour migration – and suggested that ‘real intimacy and sympathetic understanding are often lacking’ as a result, such that ‘home life … does not really exist’ (ibid.: 173). In many ways, similar conclusions are echoed in contemporary discourse around AIDS and family breakdown. I suggest, however, that separation and movement are as much integrative as disintegrative. Tswana kinship spatialities generate dikgang (‘issues’ of risk, conflict, and irresolution); but rather than destroying home life, these dikgang seem to enable the negotiation of balance between closeness, distance, and movement that sustains and reproduces the Tswana family, especially its intergenerational relationships. In Chapter 1, I examine this possibility and its gendered dimensions.
Tefo’s Beating
Tefo’s voice came in a sudden and surprised cry from behind the closed door, followed by steady sobbing. From the broad slapping sound that punctuated his wailing, I gathered that his mother Kelebogile had taken a pata-pata, or flip-flop, to him. As she beat him she challenged him with scarcely controlled fury: ‘Why do you like to go up and down so much, eh? Why don’t you listen?’
I sat uncomfortably in the lelwapa, trying not to wince. Everyone else in the yard went about their usual business: Modiri sat drinking tea, leaning back in his wooden chair; Mmapula sat on the stoep with her feet out, chatting with Oratile. Lesego and Tshepo darted efficiently between the pot on the fire outside and the kitchen in the back of the house, carrying chopped vegetables or maize meal or utensils, moving with a little more alacrity than usual. There was a studied avoidance of the beating happening behind the thin door of Kelebogile and Tefo’s room.
I leaned over to Boipelo, Tefo’s older cousin,Footnote 1 and asked what had happened. ‘Ah, Tefo is always going up and down, his mother’s been telling him for days that it’s not okay,’ she explained. ‘Every afternoon he takes long to come home from school, then goes out to play with the neighbours, or he goes to the shop. He comes late. When she calls him he is far, she can’t send him for things.’
‘But a shoe?’ I asked, discomfited.
Boipelo laughed self-consciously, as she often did when I said or asked things that were inadvertently naïve or eccentric. ‘Tefo doesn’t listen. It’s a problem [kgang]. It’s not good that she’s beating him in the room,’ she said, reflecting a moment. While the children were not beaten often, when they were, it was almost always out in the lelwapa or the yard. ‘But you see that she didn’t lock the door. So it’s safe. Any of us could go in at any time.’ The pata-pata didn’t seem to be of concern.
‘Why doesn’t he run away, if the door’s unlocked?’ I asked, with Tefo’s cries beginning to wane with exhaustion.
‘He can’t,’ she answered simply, as if it were an obvious impossibility.
Not yet ten, Tefo was clever and a little shy, and when no one was looking, he delighted in quietly showing off to me things he had learned or skills he had picked up. He was close to and protective of his mother, and was generally quick to do as he was bidden. But he was restless, too, and gregarious, with a mischievous streak; he had an ample share of the stubborn contrariness so familiar to me from his mother and her siblings (a trait we had in common and which we jokingly referenced as evidence of our relatedness). Tefo was not the only child to be beaten for ‘going up and down’; it was an accusation frequently levelled – both jokingly and disparagingly – among the adults at home as well. In Botswana, movement presents the possibility of both mundane and mystical danger: car, bus, and combi-van accidents are frequent and often fatal (MVA 2018; see also Livingston Reference Livingston2019), and witchcraft can be worked on the traces of people’s movements, including their footprints (Comaroff and Comaroff Reference Comaroff and Comaroff2001: 275). But beatings and chastisements were seldom framed explicitly in terms of concern for safety. More often children were scolded, and adults teased, either for moving too much in the wrong ways or for being in the wrong places at the wrong times.
On the way home from school, Tefo often went to play football with friends for a while, or he would pass by Kagiso’s shop, or stop to play at the neighbours’ house – instead of coming home directly to change out of his school uniform, so that it could be washed for the following day. Uniforms were expensive, and generally the Legae children had only one or two changes of uniform for the week; they had to be washed daily and kept carefully so as not to wear out. Tefo’s peregrinations not only delayed the laundry but ran extra risk of putting holes in his already faded trousers and shirt. Even if he did come home to change his clothes, he often roved so far afield afterwards that his mother could not call him back to send him for anything – mobile phone units, bread, things from the neighbours, or other simple items she might need. Calling (go bitsa) and sending (go roma) are crucial means of expressing intergenerational relatedness and hierarchy for Batswana: adults frequently exercise the right to call children for help, or to account, and to send them on errands; and children are expected to (and mostly do) respond immediately and without complaint.Footnote 2 Indeed, the two words perhaps most commonly used by adults when speaking to children were tlakwano and tsamaya – come here, and go. The phrase o a bidiwa, you are called, was commonplace, and children were often sent to others with that message. These instructions were less common among peers and inappropriate for use with elders, but were commonplace with children and adults younger than the speaker; they served to articulate a relationship of power and responsibility in which elders were entitled to direct the movement of their juniors. In this sense, Tefo’s absences challenged his relationship with his mother – by making it difficult for her to look after him (keeping him well dressed and clean) and by making it difficult for him to be called for and sent by her, as befitted his responsibilities as her child. It was this risk of destabilisation – a kgang that unsettled appropriate intergenerational relationships, rather than one of personal safety – that Tefo ran when ‘going up and down’.
Tefo followed his mother around like a shadow for perhaps two days after the beating. He sat on the ground next to her chair, went in and out of the bedroom whenever she did, and followed her around the yard. By the second day she had become annoyed. She snapped at him: ‘Hei! What do you want here [mo go nna, lit. in my place]? Go!’ She raised her hand at him threateningly. Initially he refused to budge, but soon he was moving around the yard more freely; within a day or so, he was playing with the neighbours in the lane again.
In this episode, I suggest, Tefo and his mother were negotiating the central difficulty presented by competing imperatives of closeness and distance in the spatialities of the Tswana family: finding the appropriate balance. Strain, tension, and outright conflict – dikgang – emerged when this balance was upset, either because kin were too far from or too close to one another, were not moving (or available to be moved) in the right ways at the right times, were in one another’s spaces at inopportune moments, or were otherwise ‘out of place’. It was a kgang that beset and threatened appropriate intergenerational relationships and hierarchies in particular, and through which intergenerational relationships were mediated in turn. This disordering of people, place, and generational relationships could be managed only by drawing closeness, distance, and movement back into appropriate balance – often with the threat of violence. It was a similar process of disordering and reordering space, and the intergenerational roles attached to it, that was at work when Mmapula’s husband Dipuo’s feet swelled up.
Mending Ntate’s Ways
It was early evening, and Dipuo had come in from the lands unexpectedly. He sat on the low wooden chair in the corner of the lelwapa he favoured, near the room where the old woman and the children slept. He hung his hat on the back of the chair, pulled off his shoes and socks, and was rubbing one foot absent-mindedly. His feet and ankles were swollen, thick and round – unsurprising for a man in his mid-seventies having just walked several miles in the heat, I supposed. Then he stretched back into the hard chair and spent the rest of the evening calling and sending the boys on various errands, or upbraiding them for some overlooked chore or some ill-mannered comment.
He stayed at home for a number of days, which was decidedly unusual. We seldom saw him at home for longer than a day and a night, maybe two, generally at the beginning of the month when he would come to collect his meagre pension from the post office. Otherwise he was almost always at the lands. It was an arrangement that suited everyone, as he had a cantankerous streak and a penchant for provoking trouble. But for the time being, one of his sons had been sent out in his place, and Dipuo – whom we all called ntate, father – remained in the village.
Things had been particularly bad with Dipuo for several months. First, Mmapula had discovered that he had taken up with a local woman who had been widowed the year before. While his wife was ploughing and tending several acres at the family’s other, far distant farm on her own, the old man stayed at the lands near the village and became more and more unwisely entangled. He diverted dribs and drabs of money and part of his harvest to the widow and her family; and he began to opt out of settling disputes or engaging in ongoing issues at home. In the most dramatic incident, shortly before my arrival, he had unilaterally decided to sell most of the family’s donkeys and give the money to the widow for some expense she had complained about. Mmapula suffered much of this ignominious treatment stoically, muttering to herself and occasionally attempting to talk sense into him. When she found out about the donkeys, however, she rebuked her husband roundly and damningly in front of their children, and spoke of her contempt for his behaviour openly at home. ‘Haish, ke kgang e tona,’ Lorato noted of the situation as she updated me afterwards – it’s a big issue.
Dipuo’s ill-advised liaison had created any number of awkward situations for his children, and for their children as well. Some months before my return, he had been in the widow’s yard and had heard an accusation from one of the younger children there about an exchange of threats and insults with one of the young children from his own yard. Immediately, he had summoned the accused child and his eldest grandchild, Lorato, as well, asking her to act as mediator in resolving the dispute. She had been appalled – and was still appalled, judging from the incredulity with which she recounted these tales to me. ‘Imagine! Calling his own children to someone else’s yard! And what did he want me to do there?’ While there was no question that Dipuo’s behaviour towards his wife was indefensible, it was in incidents like this – when the issue became explicitly intergenerational – that the kgang became pressing, and that subtle means of addressing it emerged.
Adults in Botswana are generally free to discipline the children of their friends, neighbours, or even strangers, and will do so without compunction. I often saw children respond to such discipline with humility and respect. But such situations only really arise in public places, or in the disciplining adult’s own yard. By calling his grandchildren into the widow’s yard, Dipuo was behaving as if he was of that yard and had assumed the role of disciplinarian in it. Indeed, it was as if he had decided to take the widow’s children as his own, and his own children as if they were simply neighbours. This confusion of places and the swapping of roles and allegiances it connoted was distasteful and hurtful in its own right. But what made it ridiculous to Lorato was that, having adopted this new position, the old man could not engineer a reconciliation without relying on his previous position in his own yard, and the claims to which it entitled him. By calling both the accused child and Lorato as the mediator, in other words, he was calling himself out: emphasising his inability to discharge a basic role in mediating dikgang and meting out discipline among his experimentally assumed kin, by having to rely on his established kin to pull it off. The physical distance from family created by his living at the lands made room for an upending and rearrangement of relationships, and for confusion about Dipuo’s ‘proper place’ to emerge. But, at the same time, that distance had its limits; it could not create a total break from his family, and so his connection to and reliance on them was reasserted.
As his feet swelled up, Dipuo’s behaviour began to change. The change was out of necessity rather than choice: he couldn’t walk without pain. And so, for a short time, he stayed at home, did not go to the lands, and made only brief visits out of the yard. But then he went to visit his ngaka ya Setswana, or traditional healer. The visit was conducted quietly, perhaps in acknowledgement of the fact that Mmapula was a churchgoer and disdained the practice; but it was nevertheless subject to gossip and speculation among the siblings, one of whom had accompanied him. We heard that he had been advised that his feet were swelling up because of his inappropriate dalliances, and that they would continue to do so until he stopped. None of the siblings made any claims about the causality at work, but Schapera (Reference Schapera1940: 195) recorded the attribution of various afflictions to liaisons with widows whose blood was still ‘hot’ (a marker of dangerous sexuality due to their closeness to death). Regardless, Dipuo’s children had a clear sense of the justice in the situation. He had been going up and down in ways he shouldn’t have done, ways that were hurtful to his family; an illness that curtailed his movement and forced him to behave appropriately had therefore afflicted him, and it would resolve itself when he both literally and figuratively mended his ways. Indeed, the siblings’ response reminds us that Batswana trace various types of illness to disruptions in appropriate intergenerational relationships – including with the ancestors – such that the management of illness often amounts to the management of intergenerational dikgang and vice versa (Livingston Reference Livingston2005: 10; see also Lambek and Solway Reference Lambek and Solway2001 on dikgaba).
Whatever had actually transpired during Dipuo’s visit to the ngaka, what the siblings heard from each other explained and resolved the issue to their satisfaction. In this case, the siblings’ gossip and speculation were an opportunity for them to engage the kgang at stake meaningfully. Reflecting on Dipuo’s illness and treatment allowed them to participate in diagnosing the underlying issue – his inappropriate dalliances and their knock-on effects for his relationships with his children and grandchildren – and to collectively assess what it meant about each of their parents, the relationship between them, implications for the siblings, and the wider relations of the family as a whole. Intergenerational dikgang present especially tricky situations: any attempt at confrontation or mediation would have exacerbated the existing difficulties drastically, further upending appropriately hierarchical relationships, and playing havoc with the mediatory roles the elder Legaes were expected to play both at home and among their wider kin. But they also present opportunities for those of more junior generationsFootnote 3 to subtly participate in and address the problems of their parents. While Dipuo had experimentally abandoned his rightful place, the indirect engagement of his children left room for him to reoccupy it.
Perhaps a week after his diagnosis, Dipuo was back out at the lands, his feet improving. And it seemed that he had abandoned his extramarital fling. While he would continue to distress and confound his family in other ways, there were no more stories told of ongoing improprieties with the neighbour. And on the rare occasion when they both found themselves at home from the lands, he and his wife would sit up late with their heads together by the fire, sharing news, apparently reconciled.
Following Schapera (Reference Schapera1940: 173, 178), we might associate Dipuo’s kgang with distance, continuous movement, and staying apart. Dipuo’s transgressions and the familial conflicts they sparked emerged from the time he spent away. But Dipuo’s indiscretions were not met with attempts to collapse or erase those distances. He was not called upon to stay at home; neither his wife nor anyone else in his family moved to stay with him. Nor was he excluded or cut off from his family’s usual visits to work and help. Rather, his relative distance was carefully maintained. Any attempts to ‘solve’ the problem of Dipuo’s waywardness by bringing him closer, I suspect, would have upset a delicate balance between distance and closeness that made it possible for him and his family to relate. The necessity of maintaining distance suggests that intimacy and proximity present risks of dikgang that distance helps ameliorate. (These risks, of course, are not simply spatial, but also draw in other dynamics that create intimacy and mutual dependence, to which we will return in Parts II and III.)
As much as it helps alleviate dikgang, then, the continuous work of keeping familial closeness and distance in appropriate balance – and the specific measures required to do so, from beatings and reprimands to visiting traditional doctors – is often a source of further anxiety, strain, and conflict within families. As we will see in the next chapters, the work of coping with these strains presents further issues and requires further management, creating a cycle of conflict and irresolution that, I suggest, is constitutive of the Tswana family. Out of this cycle and the variety of tensions that generate it, a dynamic develops in which individual family members feel simultaneously compelled to stay and driven to leave. The attempt to balance this need for simultaneous nearness and distance from one’s family is perhaps best understood spatially and temporally in the process of building – which is as critical to the development of Tswana personhood as it is to reworking kin relations.
It’s nice to have your own house
You eat until you’re full
You eat without looking over your shoulder
Lorato and I leaned against our square-edged spades, looking out across the dry, yellowed patches of farmland to the brick-red hills beyond. The afternoon heat was merciless and the landscape shimmered with it. We had been clearing a rocky, steep slope at the top of Lorato’s plot of the plant life that had colonised it over the years, in preparation for digging the foundation of the house she would build there.
The plot sat high on the slope of a hill that separated it from much of the rest of the village, and it commanded a rare view. It had belonged to Lorato’s mother Keitumetse, who had begun developing it years previously, not long before her death. Close to where we stood, the contours of a foundation trench could be discerned in the tall grass, partly backfilled over the years with gravel and stone swept down the hillside by the rains. After Keitumetse’s death, Mmapula had made a point of transferring the plot into Lorato’s name – an uncommon gesture at a time when family squabbles over the inheritance of land and property were rife. Meanwhile, a few stacks of unused cement bricks, window frames, and other material that Keitumetse had acquired for building had been taken back to the family plot – a 20-minute walk away – and incorporated into its continuous building projects.
Several years had passed, and, as Lorato entered her mid-twenties, the local land board had begun to put pressure on her to develop the land – or lose it. The Ministry of Lands and Housing oversees land boards in every district; their role is to manage the land of the local morafe, or tribal polity. Historically, this role had been undertaken by village chiefs, who apportioned land to their headmen, who in turn distributed plots so that recently married men could settle among their paternal kin (Schapera Reference Schapera1940: 95). After independence, this function was centralised at district level, and land tended to be apportioned in a more geographically arbitrary way than before, depending on which areas of the village the land board had marked for expansion and development. Currently, both men and women, married or otherwise, can apply for plots, and Batswana can apply for plots anywhere in the country, regardless of morafe. Building, in turn, is no longer simply about establishing a marital home near the husband’s kin; it is also about opportunities to move away from one’s parents and siblings, whether one is married or not, to live independently, and even to generate income through rentals or resale (see Griffiths Reference Griffiths2013 for further detail on these trends).
When I first lived in Dithaba, new plot owners bore the responsibility to mark the corners of their plots with fenceposts (an echo of precolonial practices of marking off land with ‘doctored’ pegs; Comaroff and Comaroff Reference Comaroff and Comaroff1991: 134). Then, within five years of taking possession, they had to fence their plots fully and build at least one structure – even an outhouse. But demand for plots skyrocketed in the village, especially as people from around the country sought places to live, rent out, or develop and resell within commuting distance of the capital. The growing availability of mortgages sped up the hitherto slow process of building, and also drove the commoditisation of land. The standards of what constituted ‘development’ accelerated proportionately. By the time Lorato started her building project, the plot had to be fenced and a full house had to be under construction to prevent the land board from simply reassigning it to someone else when her five-year window of opportunity expired.
Mmapula was quite concerned that Lorato should retain the plot and had set aside a small amount of money from her farming income – an amount roughly equivalent to the building supplies she had acquired at the time of Lorato’s mother’s death. It was unlikely to go far. Lorato herself was equally concerned. ‘It is the only thing I have left of my mother,’ she reflected, with a note of discomfort at her admission, a brief and rare articulation of her loss.
The situation had started to come to a head while I was staying with the Legaes. The unspoken request in Lorato’s and Mmapula’s accounts of the plot was no less plain for its omission. After much weighing up of options, reflection, and consultation, I offered to help finance the building through a series of loans, partly sourced from family and friends. Once built, we agreed, the house could be rented out until the loans were repaid. Having recently landed a short contract post with the government, Lorato committed to contributing a significant proportion of the funding. The money available, however, was still not a great deal, and the only way to build the house affordably was to do as much of the work as possible ourselves. By the time we stood taking in the view, we had already been digging and hauling truckloads of river sand for making bricks at home, and we would spend much of the coming months lugging cement, quarrying dense pit sand, ferrying water, and backfilling concrete as the house progressed. We were sometimes helped in these heavy tasks by the Legae sisters and often by the children of the yard; of the brothers, only the youngest, Tuelo, assisted – and only on condition of being paid.
We commissioned a neighbour, Rra Ditau, with the building of the house, and he saw it from its design stages through to the finished structure. Already well into his fifties, he lived close to the Legaes and had built the house I stayed in. In his gnarled, worn-out work boots, his green workman’s trousers, his torn shirts, and the soft hat slung back on his forehead, he looked like any other piece labourer in the village. But he had a contemplative gaze, a habit of speaking in riddles, and a sideline as a poet and musician, which gave him an air of philosophical wisdom. He was fond of asking imponderable questions, looking askance at his befuddled listeners, and laughing heartily before changing the topic.
Lorato retreated into the shade of two stunted trees, and I followed. Rra Ditau, who had accompanied us for the clearing, resumed his fight with the recalcitrant weeds, his spade clanging and jarring against the stones.
‘You think I can get married now, if I have my own house?’ Lorato asked, pensively. She enjoyed surprising and provoking people with such questions, but this time she sounded contemplative, as if she had surprised herself. I didn’t see the connection, and asked why it would matter.
‘Ah, you know these men,’ she said, partly contemptuous, partly resigned, as she gazed out at the lands. ‘They want to be the ones who give you everything. They don’t like this idea of women having their own things, their own jobs, their own money. And imagine, a house! Actually, I might not even live here. A man would want me to live at his place.’
I was quiet, puzzling over whether I had inadvertently created a problem by trying to help (a niggling doubt familiar from years of work in the development sector). It was traditional practice for a man to take his wife to live in his natal neighbourhood or village; Batswana are customarily virilocal, and the administrative subunits of villages – wards – had historically marked off extended virilocal families (Schapera Reference Schapera1940: 95). At the same time, in historical practice, a substantial proportion of couples stayed with the wife’s family while waiting to build for themselves (ibid.: 97). Marriage preferences for parallel as well as for cross-cousins, at least in principle, created the possibility of such an entangled field of relationships that a man and wife (and their families) might be related in several different ways at once in any case – making the question of whether they were living virilocally or uxorilocally potentially unclear and prone to variation (Comaroff and Comaroff Reference Comaroff and Comaroff1991: 132).
These days, of course, it is common for a married couple to settle away from both of their natal homes, depending on where work and opportunity can be found. And the practice of settling and building elsewhere is not altogether new: Mmapula and Dipuo had settled away from their natal homes in a nearby town, after all, first at the lands and later in Dithaba itself. Indeed, most of the married couples I knew lived away from both spouses’ natal homes, and many lived apart – even on opposite sides of the country – depending on where one or the other was posted for work. But regardless of where married couples lived for work, they generally still built in the husband’s home village – ko gae – as well.
Many people I knew – men and women alike – had not yet married by the time they began building, although most of them had had children (something we’ll return to in Part III). A house was an asset against hard times, I reasoned to myself, a place to begin a family, a potential source of independence and income; but did these things in themselves inhibit marriage?
The unanticipated social repercussions of building didn’t end with marriageability. A few nights later – helping us offload a truckload of river sand, down to the last grains caught in the ridges of the truck bed – Rra Ditau put his finger on another. We had been discussing a growing unwillingness among the adults at home to loan us the truck for building work, in spite of our having borne much of the cost of its maintenance and upkeep. Unusual claims had been made, including the suggestion that various items we had to buy in town wouldn’t fit in the truck bed (although we had transported similar items before). ‘How do you think they feel,’ Rra Ditau asked Lorato, in his quasi-rhetorical way, ‘about the fact that you are building first, before they do?’ ‘Haish! Ke kgang akere,’ she had answered, shaking her head – it’s a problem, isn’t it? Only Moagi, Lorato’s mother’s younger brother, had already finished building a small house of his own, as well as the one in his parents’ yard in which we stayed. The eldest brother, Lorato’s malome Modiri, had swapped his plot for a combi-van; another of the younger brothers, Kagiso, was on the endless waiting list for new plots. In fact, Kagiso had exerted some pressure on Lorato to give him her plot to build on not long before. Oratile and Kelebogile, Lorato’s mother’s younger sisters, had plots of their own but no houses yet. When Kelebogile had tagged along with us to see the progress of Lorato’s house, she had been disparaging: ‘You’re only at window height! You still have so far to go!’ Reflecting on these tensions, Rra Ditau laughed his philosophical laugh. ‘Well,’ he said in a non-committal way, ‘I guess you’re killing them at home. But you have to build for yourself.’
We dropped Rra Ditau back at his yard that evening and went in to greet his wife, who was cooking fat cakes in a deep pot of oil over the fire. We sat on one of the long benches against the stacks of old four-and-a-half-inch bricks that gave rough, low walls to their isong. Mma Ditau was congratulatory about the building project. ‘You are becoming a woman now,’ she affirmed to Lorato, smiling. ‘You are becoming a person!’ Lorato was sceptical and asked why building conveyed such sudden status. ‘To have your own yard where you decide what to eat, people take you seriously!’ Mma Ditau explained, bending to examine the fat cakes in the hot oil. Lorato herself – like many others I knew who had begun to build – had often framed her dreams of having her own house in such terms: being grown up, being free of the constraints and conflicts of home, and being able to eat what she liked. When she wanted to illustrate to people just how adult, independent, and self-directed she was, she often said, ‘Ke a aga’ – I’m building – which invariably earned her reactions of surprise and respect.
But it was a burdensome dream. ‘I’m too young to be taken seriously. I don’t want people to take me too seriously!’ Lorato exclaimed, looking dismayed. Mma Ditau laughed generously.
Building a house is a considerable achievement: a testimony both to the material resources and to the personal relationships that one can mobilise for the task. Batswana have long considered it an achievement fundamental to developing as a person, independent of – if still bound to – one’s natal family (Schapera Reference Schapera1940: 103), and to founding a family of one’s own. Go aga lelwapa means to build a house and to build a family, after all. The Setswana verb for building, go aga, echoes etymologically in the words for peace, harmony, and reconciliation (kagiso, kagisanyo, agisanya – see Klaits Reference Klaits2010: 31), each of which in turn connotes helping one another to build. Building relies heavily on a range of relationships and materially instantiates and perpetuates them (Morton Reference Morton2007). Indeed, building is in many ways symbolic of living; as an interlocutor of Julie Livingston’s pointed out, ‘without building there is no life’ (Livingston Reference Livingston2005: 15; see also Klaits Reference Klaits2010: 85). But like most such achievements, it is fraught and generates dikgang; and these dikgang derive from a new uncertainty in the very relationships the builder has put to work in constructing her lelwapa in the first place – or that she might call upon in the ongoing process of building in the future. These uncertainties, in turn, are exacerbated by the new distance the builder is establishing between herself and the people she has relied on – largely family – by building apart. I would argue that it is this production, acquisition, and management of dikgang, beyond the work of mobilising relationships and materials for construction, that gives building its salience for Tswana self-making and personhood – and also for Tswana kinship.
But Lorato’s story also underscores another critical dimension of building, of the spatialities of kinship and personhood, and of the dikgang these produce: their temporality. In all three of the exchanges described above, the problem was not simply that Lorato was building a house, or where or how it was being built; the problem was with when it was being built. Lorato was building not only before marriage but before having children – a time when her major responsibilities were still to her natal yard (especially since she had landed a steady job). She was building before most of her mother’s siblings, including Modiri, her mother’s brother or malome. She was building for herself before she had built for her parents – something many of her mother’s siblings had done (as well as the two-and-a-half that Moagi had built, Kelebogile and Kagiso had tiled the house, installed plumbing, and made various other major infrastructural additions; see also Livingston Reference Livingston2005: 15). And, as neighbours frequently commented, she was building fast; most of the house was completed in under a year (although, importantly, it was never entirely finished). Lorato was building out of sync, out of turn, and out of time; and these distemporalities were all potential sources of dikgang, especially with her mother’s siblings.
Like the dikgang explored in Chapter 1, the potential dikgang posed by Lorato’s building distemporalities were framed and anticipated in terms of intergenerational disruption. Inheriting her mother’s plot and beginning to build was part and parcel of a gradual process in which Lorato was both becoming an adult and shifting to occupy her mother’s familial role (as described in the Introduction), both of which were fraught intergenerational transitions. But, whereas her mother had been the eldest Legae daughter, Lorato’s relative youth and inexperience meant that she was drawn into her mother’s generation as a younger sibling. As we will explore further in Part II, Tswana sibling relationships are often cast in parent–child terms – as, too, are marriages. Part of Lorato’s transition was eased by the fact that, in these terms, she remained the child of her mother’s siblings. But by building in advance of her malome and her mother’s other siblings, and in advance of a future potential husband as well, Lorato was upending those relationships – a child become parent. Building before having a child of her own (and therefore still a child herself), but also before building for her parents, exacerbated her uncanny position, to the extent that she herself was uncomfortable with it.
These temporal and intergenerational dilemmas had a number of sources. First, there was the matter of early inheritance: Lorato was only 14 years old when her mother died. Inheriting property so young is unusual among Batswana and is a possibility that only really began to arise with the advent of the AIDS epidemic. In fact, Lorato might not have inherited the plot at all; Mmapula might have retained it, sold it, or given it to another of her children, and she would have been well within her rights to do so. Given that both Mmapula and her other children were, at the time, favourably situated with plots – and in a context where complaints of property grabbing from orphans had become a hot topic of discussion everywhere from the kgotla to social workers’ offices and in the popular media – Mmapula made the decision to transfer the plot to Lorato. Both the orphan care NGO in which Lorato was registered and the local social worker’s office assisted in the process. But formalising the inheritance wasn’t sufficient to normalise its distemporality; as Kagiso’s pressure demonstrated, for as long as the plot was undeveloped, it remained potentially subject to claims from older kin – in the Tswana sense, Lorato’s parents – who were ready to build, as well as from the land board itself.
In consultation with other arms of government, the land board had suspended its usual development requirements in cases like Lorato’s. No specific new deadlines for development were given, although it was rumoured that inheritors such as Lorato might have only five years to develop from the age of majority (18). Given the scarcity of jobs and the expense of building, even this apparent leeway was insufficient – especially as applications for plots in Dithaba began to outstrip the availability of gazetted land, and the land board began reclaiming and reassigning plots that had not been suitably developed. Government-linked charitable organisations such as the Masiela (Orphans) Trust Fund got into the building game in anticipation of these scenarios, mostly where orphaned children in destitute families had inherited land (Masiela Trust Fund 2015); NGOs also built houses ad hoc for child clients in difficult circumstances (as we will see in Chapter 3). People like Lorato and her family had few options beyond their connections to someone like me, whom they had met through their involvement with NGOs.Footnote 2
Charitable organisations, NGOs, and associated individuals were all able to mobilise much larger immediate capital than many builders could, a situation that – in concert with land board pressures – could speed up a building process that was otherwise undertaken over years, as and when materials and labour were available. Whether because they needed to prove the timely disbursal of funds to donors (as many NGOs did), or whether they had only a limited time to be involved in the work (as I did), these additional figures were all working on different clocks – and therefore knocking builders like Lorato out of their proper time. In this sense, the untimely death of Lorato’s mother inserted Lorato and her family into what could be glossed as a transnational humanitarian project on the one hand, and a national development project on the other, in some unpredictable ways – thereby introducing unprecedented influences on the spatio-temporalities of her family, their intergenerational relationships, and her own self-making trajectory.
Several months later, Lorato’s house was nearly finished – a state that turned out to be perpetual, as most building in Botswana is – and we sat on the wide stoep, taking in the view. Her neighbour immediately down the hill had recently finished a small two-and-a-half of his own, and its clean corrugated tin roof glared in the sun. I asked whether she had ever spoken to him.
‘He’s late,’ she said, using the sensitive Setswana idiom for death.
I was taken aback. The house had been finished less than a month. The neighbour had only recently moved in, having never really stayed at the plot before, although it had a pre-existing structure. She explained that he had died in his sleep. It was several days before his body was found.
I asked what had happened – whether it might have been witchcraft born of jealousy, on account of the new house. But Lorato shrugged and shook her head, unconvinced. ‘Gareitse,’ she said – we don’t know. ‘But that’s why I don’t like the idea of staying alone.’ As much as she had dreamed of building for herself as an escape from the pressures of staying at home, to stay alone – and therefore to be seen to have been building for herself (Klaits Reference Klaits2010: 86) – was not only unconscionable, but also potentially dangerous. In her case, the risk was greater because of the intergenerational tension it threatened. ‘They are going to want to teach me a lesson, you know, at home,’ she added, almost as an afterthought. While Lorato’s situation was in many ways unique, she could nevertheless predict the dikgang that would emerge and the way in which they would be interpreted: as a lesson to her about her proper place, generational role, and claims to self-making.
Lorato did stay in her house for a short while, almost experimentally – not alone, but with Lesego and Tshepo, two of her teenage cousins,Footnote 3 who came to help and who were similarly eager for some space away from the family. The adults at home accepted this arrangement in principle and for the time being, but they were insistent that all three girls should make themselves available to help at the lands and at home as usual. They lasted less than two months. Partly, it was too difficult to keep everyone fed on Lorato’s meagre income; partly, all three missed being in the bustle of home. But, above all, juggling obligations at their natal yard with piece jobs and the work the new place required was too onerous for the distances and time involved. The situation had created an ongoing battle with the family, who continuously berated all three girls for neglecting their duties at home – teaching Lorato a lesson, as she anticipated they might. The distemporalities of Lorato’s building project, the profusion of overlapping, ongoing – and gendered – obligations in disparate places they entailed, the instability of the relationships that might have supported her, and her own indeterminate and tenuous generational position made staying away ultimately too difficult to manage. While the new house had seemed to present an opportunity to escape the burdens and dikgang of living at home, in fact it simply added to them and made them more difficult – eventually impossible – to navigate. Lorato was as yet unable to sustain, through space and over time, the relationships, responsibilities, and dikgang that living apart entailed.
Deborah Durham notes that Batswana link ‘the inability to manage people and relationships’ (Reference Durham2004: 594) with childhood, while David Suggs notes that women’s adulthood depends on others’ ‘believing they have competence … [in] the establishment of managerial household independence’ (Suggs Reference Suggs2001: 108). I would connect the management of people, relationships, and household independence to the management of dikgang arising from the relationships on which households rely. If self-making is, in part, the continuous acquisition, navigation, and successful negotiation of dikgang – a process that the perpetuity of building might be said to symbolise – then Lorato’s failed attempt to set up house for herself marked a setback in making for herself and in making the generational transitions that implied. Lorato returned home, and the house remained empty.
Figure 4 Lorato’s house.
Lorato’s frustrated experience suggests that the spatio-temporalities of humanitarian and development projects, whether undertaken by government or by NGOs, have unexpectedly important roles to play in the spatio-temporalities of Tswana personhood and kinship. In the final chapter of this Part, I trace the spatialities of organisations in Dithaba that work directly with families like Lorato’s, and examine the ways in which they both echo and subvert the spatialities of the families they serve.
Tsholo filled me in as we bumped our way along a meandering red dirt road to the outskirts of the village in her NGO’s spacious, logo-plastered combi-van. ‘The girl’s parents died,’ she began.
So she left their home village and came here looking for work, maybe as a maid for somebody. At first it was fine, she was living with a family, cooking for them, caring for the children. They didn’t pay her much but she had a place to stay, and food. But then her younger sister came looking for her. After some time the family felt it was too much and kicked them out. When we found them they were just staying under a tree.
The yard to which we were making our way was the last stop in the NGO’s grand tour. We had begun at the orphan care centre, as they called it, which stood in the heart of the village behind a high perimeter fence. The centre comprised several modern, custom-designed buildings: an office block, an impressive kitchen and hall, and a set of classrooms, all set around an open, paved area in the middle of the plot – not unlike the buildings of a household, set around a lelwapa. I was introduced to some of the children who attended, and I participated in some group singing and play in the hall, which spilled out after us into the open area as Tsholo led me round the classrooms to see the large garden tucked away behind the buildings. As we walked, Tsholo described how the organisation was helping the children with their schooling and life skills, and providing opportunities for developing their talents, as well as feeding them and letting them ‘just be children’.
After the centre, Tsholo showed me to a café and shop a short drive away, freshly painted and still boarded up but soon to be opened by a group of parents as income-generation ventures. The project as a whole had been conceived and founded by a European citizen now resident in Botswana, was heavily funded by European development agencies, and was supported by many resident expatriates from Europe, the UK, and the USA. But, on a day-to-day basis, Tsholo and her husband – both from the village themselves – ran the show. Throughout the tour, Tsholo spoke about the centre’s clientele as ‘our children’. Having known the organisation since its inception, I was struck by the rapidity of its growth and the reach it had achieved; but the model, and even the structure of the tour, was familiar to me from dozens of other NGOs I had visited around the country. Indeed, I had led similar tours myself. Whether because she acknowledged that shared experience, or whether it was part of the tour, Tsholo was frank about the family we were visiting last.
‘The social workers had heard about them but weren’t doing much,’ she continued. The NGO fell under the auspices of the local Social and Community Development (S&CD) office, and the two agencies held the majority of their orphaned clients in common. They sometimes worked together on cases, but they also shared a certain mutual suspicion and distrust, which was not uncommon in similar settings around the country. ‘S&CD found them a place at school, but you know they were hardly eating, only the meal they got at the centre,’ Tsholo went on.
The social workers were looking for a plot for them but not managing. You know Tumelo at S&CD, we worked together with her on that one, going to land board. Then they found this plot, but hei! You see how far it is, how are the children supposed to get to school? Tumelo couldn’t find transport for them, so for a long time we were coming here to pick them to school ourselves.
By now we were already at the outskirts of the village. Patches of dusty scrub stretched between intermittent cleared yards. Where people had built, their houses were clearly newer: many were still unpainted or not yet plastered, and some had reached only window level. Children stopped their play to watch us pass.
‘At least we managed to find some money for building,’ Tsholo continued. ‘S&CD managed with some, and then there was this volunteer with us who did a lot of fundraising for it. But when the house was finished! Owai … Relatives started pitching up from everywhere.’ I admitted I had been wondering about them; previously unexpected family members had a habit of gradually overpopulating such tales. I asked whether anyone had tried to find the girls’ extended family in their home village before the building had begun. Tsholo shrugged.
We didn’t know anything about them. But as soon as the house was there … Ija! This other uncle, the mother’s brother, came with the wife, they have two children; then the child for the mother’s sister; plus the three children that were here already. Now there are eight people in a little two-and-half, and lots of others coming and going. Nobody is working, you know, and the food basket from S&CD is not enough. We took the older girl back to school but then she fell pregnant, imagine … She is still motsetse [confined] in the house by now.
She gestured up ahead a little, where the house had come into view. It was a neat, peach-painted two-and-a-half. The stoep had black iron burglar bars across its front, a security measure only well-employed people could generally afford. The house sat in the back corner of the fenced, cleared yard, which had been swept smooth and featured a few decorative flowers in broken water jugs near the standpipe.
We turned in at the gate and one of several small children in the yard ran up to open it for us. We drove through and turned in front of the house, Tsholo leaning over me to shout a greeting at the small group of women and children washing clothes under a tree in the back corner of the yard, opposite the house. ‘I don’t know those ones,’ she commented, suspicious. She came to a halt in front of the stoep, where a young woman looked up from her sweeping and smiled at us shyly.
We didn’t get out of the combi-van. Tsholo explained to the young woman that we were just passing by, and then asked after the girl who had just given birth. The young woman chatted readily but apologetically, casting me uncertain smiles throughout – we had not been introduced, which made us both hesitant. The new mother was fine, and the baby was healthy. They were hoping she could go back to school for the next term. The younger siblings were at school. The young woman herself still hadn’t found work. A half-dressed toddler came waddling out of one of the rooms onto the stoep, uncertainly; Tsholo called teasing, affectionate greetings to him and the young woman smiled broadly and encouraged him to greet us. Shortly afterwards, we headed out again, on our way back to the centre, saying goodbye to everyone we had greeted on the way in. Their expressions were studiously impassive.
The epidemiology of HIV and AIDS has focused on spatiality from the outset, and on the pathological potential of mobility in particular. The rapid transmission of HIV has been traced along transport and migration routes, linked with imperatives to move away from home for work or other opportunities, and to return home for care, or to die (see, e.g., Dilger Reference Dilger2006; Reference Dilger, H. and U.2010; Dilger et al. Reference Dilger, Kane and Langwick2012; Farmer Reference Farmer1992; Klaits Reference Klaits2010: 40–5; Thornton Reference Thornton2008: 74–6). In many ways, these are contemporary reformulations of long-standing concerns: Schapera’s colonial-era assessment of the effects of labour migration from Botswana to neighbouring South Africa was similarly devastating, as we saw above (Schapera Reference Schapera1940: 178). In both cases, mobility is understood simultaneously to create and to reflect social crisis, specifically in the form of family breakdown – an understanding that fits neatly within the broader logic of the AIDS narrative. And these spatialised assumptions are implicit in many programmes designed to address the epidemic, including those run by orphan care projects such as Tsholo’s and by government social work offices.
The pathologised spatialities of HIV and AIDS epidemiology map the spatialities of kinship described in Chapters 1 and 2, echoing their risks and amplifying their stakes. But the creative dimensions of distance, multiplicity, and mobility for the Tswana family, and the responsiveness to crisis that kin spatialities enable, are largely overlooked in formulating responses to the epidemic. NGOs and social work offices providing supplemental care to orphaned children and their families often organise space much as it is organised in the gae, allowing them to engage both families and the epidemic in unique and constructive ways. But the imperative to contain the epidemic underpins certain exceptions and inversions made in the spatial organisation of these agencies, in new patterns of staying, building, and movement, which in turn refigure kin spatialities. The spatial practices that provide strategies for families managing dikgang are also disrupted by these interventions, which attempt to encompass families and create alternative spaces to the gae. These new configurations generate new dikgang in turn, but they simultaneously constrain families’ means of addressing them – generating unintended effects that may prove more significant than those of the epidemic itself.
An impressive variety and number of NGO interventions target children and their families in Botswana. I established a unit to liaise with and coordinate them in Botswana’s Department of Social Services in 2005; a rapid assessment I conducted uncovered no fewer than 220 orphan care projects – as most called themselves – nationwide. They ranged from preschools to therapy camps, from weekly ‘life skills’ and abstinence programmes to residential places of safety, from community mobilisation programmes to income-generation projects. Some involved one person handing out donations; others, a committee of local volunteers conducting events, or a group of professional social workers creating training curricula. Many communities – including Dithaba – had several such projects, targeting the same children, and their initiatives frequently overlapped and competed with one another. These projects filled important gaps in government programmes and helped clients navigate government bureaucracies and access resources. Their relationships with local S&CD offices were alternately collaborative and combative, but both agencies were deeply interdependent. Among NGOs, the sought-after ideal, often the best-funded and most respected projects, operated on the model of the drop-in centre, like Tsholo’s. Despite the prohibitive costs involved, NGOs right across Botswana were quite insistent about building their own centres rather than working through existing (and often empty) government buildings or in an exclusively home-based manner. Once built, some centres ran all-day preschools, but most were set up for after-school care; they usually welcomed orphaned children and youth of school-going age for several hours every afternoon.
As Tsholo’s tour demonstrated, the spatialities of orphan care centres are strongly and deliberately reminiscent of the gae. Tsholo’s centre, like many others, had been designed with its buildings set around a paved, open area that explicitly referenced and resembled the lelwapa. Offices, classrooms, and kitchen/hall each occupied different structures, for use by different people (the children hardly ever ventured into the offices, the office workers seldom into the classrooms, but all might gather together in the hall or in the open area outside, for example). The open area was used by the children for play, by the staff to sit out and bask in the sun, and sometimes for eating meals, as well as for welcoming guests and, on special occasions, hosting celebratory events – much as a lelwapa would be. Indeed, some centres I have visited were set up in rented yards, originally built for residential purposes around a lelwapa, or even in the founder’s own lelwapa – particularly at the start of new programmes. To many centre coordinators, these were key measures in helping the children they served feel ‘at home’.Footnote 1
The NGO’s layout was reminiscent of the gae in other ways, too. Tsholo’s tour took us to affiliated income-generation projects and building sites that bore a geographical relationship to the centre not unlike the relationship between the lands, cattle post, and the anchoring lelwapa. All, notably, were sites where NGO staff and clients might be based (or ‘stay’), among which they would frequently be called and sent, and where they might be seen to be doing care work (cooking, for example, gardening, building, or looking after children) – characteristics that echo those of the gae. Indeed, as in Tsholo’s case, many NGOs were managed by couples; frequently their children were in attendance and extended kin were tapped to help with the day-to-day running of the project, making the spatial work undertaken by the NGO a sort of extension of their familial movements. As well as being actively engaged in building at the centre’s main site, these projects frequently undertook building for clients, such as the young girl Tsholo described above – creating room for their self-making projects while binding them in new ways to the NGO itself.
But there are, of course, clear distinctions to be made. Agencies in which children and staff are resident full time are comparatively uncommon in Botswana, and residential orphan care has been scrupulously avoided in government policy responses to AIDS (although the few institutional places of safety offered by NGOs and government are becoming oversubscribed, with many social workers suggesting that more such institutions are required). The patterns of movement undertaken by agencies also differ sharply from those undertaken by kin, especially in terms of their direction. As we have seen, kin move more or less constantly among the spaces of the gae in ways that gravitate centripetally around the lelwapa. Tsholo’s movement among the NGO’s sites also mimicked this directionality. However, NGOs and S&CD both specialise in moving their clients outwards, or centrifugally, in directions expanding away from the family gae and the pseudo-gae of the centre – a directionality key to their agendas of social change. NGOs that take children out on therapeutic retreats are an obvious example of this tendency, but trips to events and workshops, or social worker subsidies for transport to school, follow the same pattern. Referrals to additional NGOs or government offices, which constantly expand a client’s responsibilities for movement, are another onerous dimension of this tendency. These movements rarely take in the lelwapa of clients at all – unless, as in the case above, it has been built by the NGO for them, often away from the client’s gae.
This apparent avoidance distinguishes government and NGOs not only from kin but also from neighbours and friends, for whom visiting is critical to maintaining relationships. It was not uncommon for Batswana to reflect disparagingly on both NGOs and social workers in these terms, complaining that they stay in their offices or are always away at workshops and events when they should be moving around the village (a topic we will return to again in Part V). To some extent, the types and directions of movement undertaken by agencies are reminiscent both of the problematic aimlessness of ‘going up and down’ and of building: they involve moving and drawing others away from the familial lelwapa, partly as a means of establishing and entrenching an alternative base. In both ways, distance is continuously produced and becomes a defining spatial characteristic of the relationship between agencies, clients, and their families. In turn, this extending distance unsettles the careful balance Tswana families manage between closeness and distance.
But perhaps the critical spatial features of both NGOs and government offices are the boundaries they establish and destabilise. Like every yard, shop, or business, both government offices and NGOs were marked off with fences and gates, some of them quite intimidating. But these agencies also created bureaucratic boundaries: one could not access them without appropriate referrals, without proof of claims (in appropriate paperwork), without registering, without waiting and often being turned back, and in some cases without being accompanied by appropriate advocates. Even once these requirements had been met, access was controlled: children’s family members were seldom allowed in past the office of the orphan care centre, except for invitation-only special events; they would not be taken along on the children’s retreat camps, nor see the offices of the NGOs that ran them. The boundaries of each of these agencies, then, created differential claims of access that distinguished them from each other, and from the families they served. Combined with their centrifugal tendencies, these spatial practices mark a gradual inversion: the NGO becomes increasingly exclusive and the family lelwapa increasingly accessible to a new range of agencies and institutions, the boundaries between them blurred and realigned.
Of course, homes also have boundaries: fence lines at the edge of the yard, the low wall that distinguishes the lelwapa, the walls of the house that define spaces of sleeping, bathing, and intimacy. And each boundary works to exclude specific groups: suitors may not pass beyond the yard’s fence; visitors must announce themselves when entering the lelwapa and will not usually pass beyond it; and the interior spaces of the house are reserved for immediate family, close friends, and occasionally neighbours, with the bedrooms of adults usually off limits even to these. In this sense, we might see the boundary-making work of NGOs and government offices – like others of their spatial practices – as a process of creating a similar, but alternative, family-like space by establishing both alternative sorts of boundaries and alternative patterns of movement. And that may be one reason why the appearance of the girl’s unexpected family in her new house seemed transgressive to Tsholo, much as our appearance in the yard seemed to be transgressive for her family.
Limiting access to these alternative spaces has profound implications for the relationship of family to organisation, and for relationships within the family as well. In Chapter 1, as we listened to Tefo’s beating, Boipelo made an important point in this regard. Tefo’s mother had left the door open, enabling the entire family to enter, should it prove necessary. While no one went in, the fact that anyone could enter held her accountable and kept Tefo safe. In other words, it kept the beating within the family’s sphere of access and therefore subject to its oversight – and to its ethical reflexivity as well. Where the family cannot enter – or where one member of the family can, as a client, and the others cannot (or their rights are suspect, as in the case of the NGO house above) – its relations of authority and responsibility are challenged, even potentially suspended. Notably, as in the case of Lorato’s house, the threat posed is to intergenerational relationships: a child who can move freely in and out of an orphan care centre, or even a house built on her behalf, supplants a parent who must wait to be called or invited to enter, generating new freedoms of movement for the former and new constraints on the latter. As we have seen in Chapters 1 and 2, these inversions threaten new dikgang – a likelihood already apparent in the simmering mutual suspicion I noticed on Tsholo’s tour to her client’s newly built house.
Places of intervention also lack the integration – either with one another or with the malwapa of their clients – that is characteristic of the gae; they are arguably characterised more by their fragmentation. Of course, government social work offices and NGO programmes are not necessarily intended to integrate with one another, or with the homes of families they serve; while this fragmentation may distinguish them, it is unsurprising. At the same time, the spatialities of the gae and of intervention are not simply distinct. The similarities that intervention spatialities bear to kin spatialities link the two, enough for the fragmentation of intervention practices to disrupt the spatial practices and integration of the gae. During my time in Dithaba, children and teenagers returning home from the orphan care centre frequently chose to take their friends halfway, to stop and hang about on the train tracks, or to go off for illicit meetings, not returning until after dark. The centre, already shut, took no responsibility for these situations (and it could hardly track 70 children across the village in any case); the families, uncertain whether special events at the centre might be taking place and whether their children had or hadn’t been sent home, did not know when to expect them. Arguments became frequent between the adults at home and the children dallying en route: about missed chores, unwashed school uniforms, missed meals, their unavailability, and undesirable goings up and down. Children resisted and avoided these confrontations, spending even more time away, adeptly deploying the sheer variety of possible excuses to do so (Dahl Reference Dahl2009a). They developed a reputation in the village for being children who didn’t listen (ga ba utlwe),Footnote 2 who were disrespectful, lazy, and contrary, and even for frequenting bars and being otherwise ‘out of place’. They were closely watched and often beaten at school and at home accordingly. A cycle of worsening tension and conflict, of serious dikgang, emerged. While this situation was perhaps an extreme example, it demonstrates the risk such fragmented interventions present, in the proliferation of ‘in-between’ spaces they create – which compete with the anchoring ‘in-betweenness’ of the lelwapa.
Notably, the dikgang arising out of these situations were primarily intergenerational – much like the dikgang that attach to the familial management of space and time we saw in Chapters 1 and 2. And they were addressed in similar ways: with confrontations, beatings, and disparaging gossip. These dikgang were borne primarily by clients and their families, but also escaped them and spilled into broader concern, among neighbours, at schools, and in the village at large. As people reflected and speculated on the causes of these problems and what they meant about the children and their relations, the families’ dikgang were compounded in ways they could neither control nor adequately engage. The organisations that had inadvertently generated these prolific dikgang and brought them into these wider discussions, however, were markedly absent from the processes of addressing them. While I saw NGO staff and volunteers reflect on and consider the undesirable aspects of their clients’ behaviour among themselves, and even speak to the children about it, such discussions and reflections were generally not undertaken with families, nor in community venues. In NGO interpretations, the source of and responsibility for the issues at hand were invariably situated at home, among kin. Unlike Tefo’s beating, Dipuo’s illness, or Lorato’s return home, the spatio-temporal dikgang produced by orphan care interventions presented no obvious means of management. The new risk they represented was not simply a matter of people being in the wrong places at the wrong times, or being unavailable to be moved as they should (although it included these things as well); it was produced in the assertion of a spatiality that competes with and disrupts that of the family, simultaneously exposing it to intense scrutiny and ethical assessment on the part of others, and isolating it from engagement in those processes in ways that might address the issues involved. And, as we saw in Chapters 1 and 2, these exacerbated dikgang carry the threat of particularly dire consequences for intergenerational relationships – the very relationships that orphan care interventions are designed to reinforce for children who have lost parents to AIDS.
In reflecting on ‘housing activities’ and the emplacement of sentiment, Klaits offers a pithy explication of the double meaning implicit in the greeting ‘Le kae?’ or ‘O kae?’ (lit. Where are you?): ‘where you are affects how you are, both in terms of your relationships to others, and … your physical well-being’ (Klaits Reference Klaits2010: 120, emphasis in original). To this observation, I would add that the questions that often follow and that head this Part – O tswa kae?, O ya kae? (Where are you from?, Where are you going?) – not only suggest the Tswana proclivity for constant movement, but are also a sort of shorthand assessment of relationships to home and family, and of progress in making-for-oneself, of which stayings and movements are emblematic. Both are subject to constant negotiation and significant uncertainty, and both perpetually produce dikgang – the management of which involves striking the right balance between closeness and distance, mobility and presence, scatteredness and integration, delimiting and ensuring both the coherence of intergenerational relationships over time and the possibility of independent personhood in the process.
AIDS – an epidemic in which movement, closeness, and distance have taken on pathological dimensions – might be understood as just this sort of kgang, suggesting that long-standing practices of managing space among kin might be better suited to dealing with the epidemic than popularly assumed. However, to the extent that government and non-governmental responses to the epidemic have misread the dangers in kinship spatialities – and have introduced new spatial logics and practices that invert and transgress them, on new timelines – their coping potential has been unintentionally undermined.
Of course, the ways in which families and intervening agencies manage space over time are not the only ways in which they negotiate their relationships. As Dipuo’s example suggests, the work one is doing and the things one is contributing or withholding, in the places in which one stays and among which one moves, have similarly fraught and contradictory implications for both kinship and personhood. In Part II, I examine Tswana practices and understandings of care in terms of contribution, the dikgang they generate, their implications for kinship and self-making, and the effects on these dynamics of AIDS-era programmes and interventions.
***
INTERLUDE: Ear Wiggle
‘Koreen, mpona,’ insisted Thabo, tugging at my arm. We were both sitting on our heels in the sparse shade of a brambly bush, taking a rest. Around us, the children continued digging, shovelling the loose river sand into buckets and hauling it up to the truck. The sun blazed and the sand was hot on our bare feet; but below its surface it held the cool, moist memory of the river. Frogs exposed by the children’s shovels tried to wriggle deeper into the riverbed or else shook themselves and hopped past us into the deeper shade, granular in their coats of sand.
‘Koreen! Mpona!’ When I finally turned to look at him, Thabo was wearing his characteristically serious expression. It gave him an uncanny air of wisdom for a six-year-old. Still, I couldn’t tell what he wanted me to see.
‘What am I looking at, kgaitsadi?’ I asked. I usually called him ‘brother’, although he found the term a bit dubious and would furrow his eyebrows at me when I did.
‘Look!’ he repeated, impatiently, turning his head sideways just a notch. I realised his ears were moving, wiggling back and forth. He kept his face still but watched me carefully from the corner of his eye, waiting for a reaction.
I laughed with delight and pointed at his ears, unsure how to say ‘wiggling’ in Setswana. He cracked a mischievous, satisfied smile in response, still wiggling his ears. ‘Now you watch me!’ I said, doffing my broad hat and wiggling my ears as vigorously as I could.
Thabo’s look changed back to one of total seriousness. He stood up and put his hands on the top of my head and over my eyebrows to make sure I wasn’t cheating by wiggling some other part of my face. He had been showing his siblings this trick for days, and none of them had been able to replicate it. My ears kept wiggling.
Satisfied, Thabo sat back down on his heels and propped his chin on his hands, looking at me thoughtfully. ‘So that’s why I’m your brother,’ he remarked, conclusively.
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