Shoks Mnisi Mzolo retraces the footsteps of the liberation struggle and explores museums in the land of millions of cattle, classic literature, precious stones and wandering elephants.
The 300km journey from Francistown to Serowe, Botswana, is uneventful. The landscape is mostly flat and monotonous, with livestock grazing in the distance along the A1, the national road that stretches from the Zimbabwean border, through Gaborone, to South Africa. Before turning right at Palapye, we passed a police roadblock where an officer greeted the bus driver before waving us through. Along the A1, we also crossed two veterinary checkpoints for foot-and-mouth disease control.
From the A1, I spot the railway tracks running almost parallel to the Motloutse River. According to archaeologists, the Motloutse was a site of gold mining in the 1200s, during the era of the Kingdom of Mapungubwe and Great Zimbabwe, two of Southern Africa’s ancient states.
Centuries later, in 1971, Botswana’s first diamond mine, the game-changing Orapa, began operations. Maru was also published that year. Jwaneng would later become the world’s richest diamond mine by value. More on the book and the precious stone later. Botswana is renowned for its abundant wildlife, including buffalo, elephant, leopard, lion and rhino – the Big Five – as well as giraffe, hippo, impala, jackal, kudu, lechwe, monkeys and zebra. Birdwatching is equally popular, and tourism continues to thrive.
Tourism contributes an astonishing 12% of the country’s US$20.35 billion GDP and accounts for a tenth of all jobs. Covering nearly 12,000km² and home to more than 100,000 elephants, Chobe is larger than Jamaica. In the west lies the vast Central Kalahari, spanning 52,800km² – three times the size of Gauteng and roughly equivalent to the combined size of Burundi and Rwanda.
Nevertheless, cattle are the only four-legged beasts claiming Botswana’s horizon these days. However, there was a time when sightings of wildlife were familiar. For one, Nelson Mandela and his comrade Max Mlonyeni felt they “were on safari” when smuggled into Botswana in January 1962. They saw “all manner of animals, including a battalion of baboons,” recalled Madiba, or, in those years, David Motsamayi, adding that they had even seen a lion. These days, you’ll have to visit wildlife parks for such sights or venture north, where it doesn’t take much to spot a giraffe or see elephants crossing the road.
Mandela had travelled through Botswana en route to Algeria for military training. As an aside, Madiba received his first passport, in Ethiopia, from Emperor Haile Selassie. From the 1960s to the 1980s, Botswana was an oasis of freedom in a repressed region: Hage Geingob, Thabo Mbeki, Jacob Zuma, Samora Machel and multitudes of other freedom fighters transited into exile through these lands. Others, like one-time Turfloop student and Soweto teacher Onkgopotse Tiro, perished here, slain by Pretoria’s bloody cross-border machinery.
A house that once sheltered Machel in Lobatse is now a museum. Nearby is the Fish Keitseng home that offered sanctuary to Zuma, Mbeki and Mandela as refugees. Up in Algeria is the new Nelson Mandela Stadium, which cost a cool €300 million. Dedicated to the Algerian-trained guerrilla, Madiba, the 40,000-seater stadium was officially inaugurated in 2023.
Serowe, King Khama III and Bessie Head
Back to my destination, Serowe, a village founded in 1902 by King Khama III. In the 1990s, it was among the sites cited by Unesco as possible examples of living heritage. Nothing came of that, but such recognition underscores Serowe’s historical richness. Thataganyana Hill and Khama’s home, now a museum, are must-sees for anyone keen on the story of this charming village, its people, and the country’s march from disparate polities into the nation it is today.
While Botswana was a gateway to decolonisation for Southern Africa’s political activists, my reason for visiting was to trace the rhymes of the past few centuries and ancient history. My previous stop, Khami Ruins – though just 200km from Francistown, my base took me back to a time when those lands were home to an ancient civilisation. As any villager will proudly note, three of Botswana’s former presidents hailed from Serowe. Teacher, journalist and novelist Bessie Head, one of the region’s literary giants, settled here after fleeing apartheid in her native South Africa in March 1964. It was in her new country that her literary career was born and nurtured, and where many of her works are set. It was also in Serowe that artist John Koenakeefe Möhl, shunned in the south because of his heritage, flourished.
My thoughts return to some of Head’s erudite works – and Möhl’s inimitable landscape paintings – as our bus advances in a southerly direction. Meanwhile, the mercury climbs beyond 30°C before 10am on an October Thursday.
Short green-brown trees claim the frame every now and then. Distant hills materialise from time to time. The land is mostly flat and dry. For one, the Shashe River, which hems Botswana and Zimbabwe before emptying into the arc-shaped Limpopo, is dry in parts, mimicking a sandy playing pitch. On that note, the sight of cattle is a tribute to Batswana’s ancient and modern water-gathering techniques. Semi-desert conditions aside, the trip is meditative. My emotion is that of going on a blind date. Serowe had been on my to-do list for decades. As I later learned, the history-rich village is clean, slow-paced, crowded and likeable.
Upon arrival, I met Gase Kediseng and Kabo Jone (pronounced Johnny) at the Khama III Memorial Museum. Both are deeply invested in Botswana’s centuries-long journey before unification. Associate curator Kediseng, with facts and trivia on the tip of her tongue, joined the museum a quarter of a century ago. Jone, a former schoolteacher from Serowe and my guide for the day, has been here since 2010.
The single-storey museum was home to King Khama, Queen Semane and their children, including Sekgoma II (the monarch’s son and successor). The museum chronicles the story of Khama, who led his Bangwato community from the dry lands of Palapye. The latter was Khama’s capital from 1889 to 1902. It was at some point during those years, amid the Anglo-Boer War, that the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek pursued Palapye. Khama was resolute. Records from the University of Botswana show that, before sending his men to mount a defence against the ZAR, he warned the Boer belligerents not to enter these climes “with armed men” and to refrain from approaching “my cattle-posts.”
The economic and social importance of cattle endures amid a worsening desert-like climate. The museum’s Kediseng harks back to the ways people once accessed water to sustain livestock. In fact, on the premises stands a borehole that, a century later, still provides water for the property.
Though prepared to defend their lands against belligerents, the people of Botswana were welcoming to those who sought safety. That is how Bessie Head wound up here. During her stay in Palapye, where she worked as a typist, the New Statesman published one of her works, “A Woman from America”. Unbeknown to Head, she had begun the walk to the global stage. Accolades and recognition followed until her death in 1986, at the age of 48, and continued posthumously. This year marks 40 years since her passing and, thankfully, her work continues to nourish one generation after another.
It was in 2003 that Head was awarded the Order of Ikhamanga, the presidential award for excellence. She is survived by a body of literary work that appears in many languages, from English to Japanese and Swedish. The 1990s also saw the publication of works such as A Woman Alone: Autobiographical Writings. In addition to stints in Palapye and Pretoria, the Pietermaritzburg-born Head worked as a journalist in Cape Town and Johannesburg, and as a teacher in Durban and Serowe.
The latter vaguely resembles Dilepe, the fictitious village in her novel Maru, a story of bigotry and love set in Botswana. The book was published 55 years ago. While similarities between the author and Margaret Cadmore, a teacher in Maru, are apparent, Head’s own experiences are detectable in Makhaya, the political activist protagonist in When Rain Clouds Gather, her debut novel, published in 1968.
In real life, Bessie Head faced profound prejudice, a recurring theme in her work. Like Trevor Noah, whose birth was considered a “crime”, the author was born to African and European parents.
Unlike Noah, however, Head never met either side of her family. She was separated from her mother when she was born on July 6, 1937, in Pietermaritzburg, in the then Union of South Africa. That polity – under the leadership of Barry Hertzog and the British Crown – also occupied Namibia. Within that discriminatory system, Head endured prejudice from a young age. That’s more than 1,000km south-east of this world-famous village. The museum in Serowe is a repository of her papers and a guardian of her story. Adorning the walls of the Head section are images of the author through the years. On her desk are various personal effects, not least two humble but essential tools: a typewriter and a kerosene lamp.
Although their oeuvres are not similar, Head’s work brings Buchi Emecheta to mind. Perhaps it is the underlying and essential theme of women’s hardship. Both transcended their suffering to be counted among the finest.
Inside Khama III Memorial Museum
In the main section of the museum, black-and-white and colour photographs, with the aid of an insightful guide, bring to life Seretse Khama – the future first president and scion of the monarch. The display also takes visitors back to the era of the trials and tribulations his family endured, as recounted by Michael Dutfield in A Marriage of Inconvenience: The Persecution of Ruth and Seretse Khama, and to apartheid-era Pretoria’s blot on that page of history.
Jone explains how Pretoria and London conspired to persecute the man for his “crime”: marrying Ruth Williams. Yes, interracial marriages were considered a crime even in Botswana – the land that had escaped colonialism’s worst.
As regent, Seretse’s uncle, Tshekedi Khama, also got a taste of racism as soon as the imperialists found a pretext to strike. British admiral Edward Evans “ordered 200 marines, fully armed” on a 1,800km journey from Cape Town to Serowe, noted Dutfield. Here, Tshekedi was publicly axed for “exceeding his authority by punishing a white man”.
Next is a photograph of the nation’s first all-male Cabinet. “Only 11 people,” Jone remarks. “Look around to see what they achieved.” I do so and concur. But there are also many things that have gone wrong. I later discovered that while the country’s GDP per capita is among Africa’s highest, the Cabinet has grown disproportionately, and the number of people languishing in poverty hovers at 15%. Botswana is sparsely populated and has enjoyed a legitimate, stable political system since attaining independence in 1966.
Coupled with falling life expectancy (from 67 years to 61 over the last decade, compared with 74–75 years in Mauritius), poverty levels are an indictment. Head would have gasped at the number of people who remain “attached to hunger struggles ‘til sunrise”. In recent decades, Botswana’s leaders have merely tinkered at the edges of the problem. The Guardian Sun writes of alarming dropout rates despite free schooling – iffy prospects lurk. Factors such as poverty are blamed for the dropouts, underscored by a 54% decline in secondary school enrolment compared with primary school enrolment. A vicious Catch-22 situation is at play.
Back at the beginning of my museum visit, a British researcher – with Caribbean and African roots – is sifting through old papers as part of the museum’s digitisation project. At this point, Jone leads me to a plain pink-and-white room used for community events. Then it’s off to a room filled with woven baskets of all sizes. Adorning the walls are relics from the 1800s and portrayals of ancient village life.
Politics meets economics
Switching to politics and economics, Jone, flashing a knowing smile, reminds me that diamonds were discovered here in the post-colonial era. “God hid our mineral resources [from Britain],” he says, singling out imperialist Cecil Rhodes, whose legacy of dispossession and looting continues to haunt the 21st century. When Britain questioned how the country would survive without mineral resources, the ruling classes pointed to hoofed assets.
“They said, ‘We have cattle, and that is how we’ve survived for generations. We’ll keep surviving’,” Jone notes. The importance of such assets is underscored by the fundraising campaign in the 1970s to build the campus of the University of Botswana – the country’s first. The clarion call was “Motho le motho, kgomo”.
It underscores the role of cattle among the building blocks of post-colonial society. “It was only after independence that we discovered diamonds,” explains Jone before tapping into the province of imagination. “What would have happened if the diamonds had been discovered while Rhodes and his company (still) ran the show?” Yet overdependence on diamonds remains an issue. Distributing wealth to lower levels has been slow, leaving the door wide open for social ills such as substance abuse, teenage pregnancy and others.
Jone explains that Rhodes’ open aggression and looting prompted Khama, Bathoen and Sebele – monarchs of neighbouring Setswana-speaking polities – to meet Queen Victoria II of England in 1895 to ask her to “protect” their lands from grabbers. The trio had learned from Lesotho’s Moshoeshoe I, who sued for peace in 1852 after routing the Anglo forces for the second time. Fast forward to the 1890s: colonial land grabs prevailed. So did the subjugation and destruction of African states. The death of King Lobengula kaMzilikazi during the war with the British opened the door to colonialism in Zimbabwe. A few years later, Germany unleashed “collective punishment” on Namibians for resisting colonial rule. In 2023, more than a century later, Measure of Men retraces that era.
Southern Africa did not escape oppression either, from the Cape to the Limpopo. Botlhale Tema’s People of Welgeval offers an eye-level perspective on South Africa’s serfdom and human trafficking. The story of the atrocities committed in the Congo requires a library of its own — two decades of Belgium’s King Leopold II era of mutilations and massacres claimed millions of lives.
So, by all accounts, Botswana’s leaders had very few options. “This was a big deal for the chiefs. They wanted to go [to London] on their own,” Jone says of the 1895 voyage. “They fastened their shoes and set off, saying only: ‘Maybe we’ll come back alive, maybe not’.” It was a troubled period.
Dumelang Mma-Swaneng, Rra-Swaneng
Although Botswana’s desert-like climate has worsened, bovines still outnumber their two-legged cousins. The museum’s Kediseng later explores how people accessed water to sustain livestock. Migration was another strategy, as exemplified by the exodus to Serowe. It was here, an area named after a water-rich plant, that they found water. On the museum’s premises stands a borehole that, a century later, still provides water for the property.
Five hours later, I surrender to the present after a tour that included Thataganyana Hill. Traffic is building up and the temperature is cooling down. Newspapers speak of heated national politics.
While atop Thataganyana, I spotted the famous Mma-Swaneng and Rra-Swaneng hills, notable for standing side by side (like mother and father, hence Mma and Rra), and the sizeable, world-famous village: home to three of Botswana’s former presidents and one of the region’s most celebrated authors. Up there, stillness is palpable.
- Shoks Mnisi Mzolo is a roving storyteller with a background in arts and culture, and financial journalism. He also works as an independent researcher and is an avid tra
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