It takes a village for us to be
Bongi D D M Radipati | Monday October 24, 2022 06:00
Usually, such is life in a village. Actually, in a village, there isn’t much of a maze of a complicated ecosystem, but often just a simple human plan: here you will live, there will live somebody else; this will be her livelihood, there will be yours; and these will be your elders, there will be hers!
For your part, as for theirs, it isn’t just the wrench of village life, usually simple and sometimes hard, that has spanned your collective consciousness.
But together with other villagers, you have lived on the land of your birth, witnessed its transformation under the jackboot of modernity, remembered your upbringing, held dreams, and earned vocations elsewhere.
Indeed, in your mind, you have a series of dazzling but strong fragments, skipping from one time to another, and forming a searing recollection of memories about your past life juxtaposed with your life now.
With each passing year, and as you became more accustomed to who you really are, your customary weekend and holiday visits there became somewhat regular. And, as the years passed, unavoidably you grew old and thus (hopefully) perceptive.
Then imperceptibly you realized that the older you became, the more likely that you were inclined to admit that you have always been lucky to have your village, and that you are privileged to have it as a home that has held steady throughout your life.
A village is the kind of place in which a typical adult citizen of Botswana has always felt it her right and duty to live. This is not to mean that such a right and duty are easily asserted, nor is it to mean that village life is necessarily the best choice for every such citizen.
Rather, it is to contend that, for some older generations, such a choice is often a default one, reinforced by the claim that, for them, village life in this country is both their inheritance and their destiny. Here are the reasons for that contention: a typical villager has the pleasure of manual labour - hard work and handiwork necessitated by their surroundings and timing. Done properly, that village manual labour can be an antidote to her poverty. (Elsewhere, poverty is manual labour’s typical concomitant.) In a village’s manual work, there is a strange sense of development and antiquity: the changing seasons of the year on which this manual work is devoted are as meaningful as the passing years of her land ownership. And then there is the land itself, referred to proudly by the villager as hers and always to be held. Often, this signifies a notion of possessiveness and pride over land that is invaluable to her but may be perceived by others as valueless.
If you are a villager, but can manage to look past your village’s insufficiency of city-life amenities and opportunities, or its scarcity of city culture and its subgenres, or that life in your village is easily a scrabble, and then turn your gaze elsewhere, you can benefit exceedingly.
Your gaze may develop into something more than just being a hobby to observe how a third of this country’s population still lives, or where most of us originated. Actually, it may even be better than a temporary study of others in some other place! But rather, your gaze may metamorphose into an occasional escape from city-life. And if you have the patience to absorb and observe the place, the intimacy of a diarist and the prose of a writer, your gaze may reward you with the ability to see the quirks and arcana of village life.
Then you will be able to describe them to others with such riveting ease that it would appeal to almost everyone. Indeed, like Edward W Said in his definitive book, Orientalism, you may be able to capture the understanding, the sensibility and the response to village life, as a tribute to the power of an account about a place, of one’s mind about their home, and of how a place tends to define us in unexpected ways. If you can manage this emotional and intellectual task, you will then realize that rarely do observation, personal memory and sincerity appear so essential for one’s recollection of their past life and their desire to continue that life in the present, all things considered.
We villagers often turn outward to our villages as a believer would turn upward to Heaven. And as we do so, I expect that our countenances evoke a cross between nostalgia and gratitude and between uneasiness and optimism about the place and its people. Consider that the people in our villages are largely the rank and file. Many do not have university education, and fewer still have any philosophical idea about our villages, except that we want them to be good places to live in. In any event, as in other places, in our villages, we encounter the best and worst of humanity, we experience the mundane and the wonders, and we feel both exhilaration and despair. But our to and fro movement between the cities and our villages and between our lives in the cities and in the villages, underlays everything about our lives generally. Actually, the expectation of villagers and the expectation of urbanites - about a better life for them - are the anode and cathode of the great expectations of this country’s citizens.
And as our old age approaches, with it comes at last the acceptance that we will revere our villages because they are places centred around us and they promote our deepest civic virtue. So there are reasons for cautious optimism about our villages and reasons too for celebrating them. In fact, alongside the warmth of their familiarity, there is no more talismanic and reassuring tradition in village life than regrouping again at the kgotla: for activities and conversations and interactions that thrum with the pleasures of each other’s company! In the end, we know that our villages can be highly personal. They can mark a reliable home, reflect our cultural traits, reward our ordinary lives, and substantiate the emotional relationship we have built with a place and its people. In other words, it takes a village for us to be!
*Radipati is a regular Mmegi contributor