People of the West

Bongi D D M Radipati | Wednesday March 29, 2023 15:26

Like Dimpho, that individual would be born into a place inhabited on the one side by indigenous people, ignored and marginalised, in the middle, tribal people constituting some portion of the emerging elite and on the other side, settler communities, wealthy and privileged. His and hers, again like Dimpho’s, would be customs unique to the place, and around him and her would be people of many ethnicities and races and who spoke multiple languages but only one of which would be this country’s official language.

The web of isolation which demanded hardiness defined his and her youth and adulthood. He and she would grow to have a close intimacy with the area’s harsh climate, its wilderness, its people, livestock and wildlife, all of which reminded him and her of his and her own imperfection, frailty and dependency. If, like Dimpho, he and she had ever been unsure about his and her preference for this area, I have often wondered if he or she would disclose it. I doubt if he or she would, because doing so, however sincere could be deemed to be a betrayal of what it means to be a person of the west.

I have come to realise that this is the internal mythology of the place. These details about a person of the west and his and her people and their place then may appear small and trivial, but they accumulate to convey our understanding of the times they - and we - lived in. They also reinforce the apt observation that at the bottom of all past life resides the inclination to preserve it.

When I was young, it would take us a day or two to arrive in western Botswana as visitors. Then we often traveled slowly as passengers in the back of old trucks on long dirt roads. At each stop, a cloud of dust would continue past us onto the road ahead and the forest on the road’s sides. This was in the late 1970s and very early 1980s when the population of Botswana was barely 1 million. While I remember that each visit there was a physical inconvenience even to a youngster like me, I also recall that I relished those visits as they took me to a place that appeared to have a sense of expansiveness and an openness to others.

With the benefit of reflection, it now appears that the expansiveness and openness of this place is probably by design. This is so because the main thoroughfare through its villages is often a national highway - either the A2, the A3 or the A12 roads. These thoroughfares now facilitate visits to that area or through it. Does western Botswana have space for matters of the soul? I think it does. Perhaps more than anywhere else in this country, there is horse riding here for work and pleasure; there are valleys of varying sizes here and one of them and my favorite, the Okwa valley, is best for seeing nothing remarkable but for contemplation; and somewhere here there are the same but two different churches separated by race.

With the cards they were dealt and the few tools of desert life they had, it is a wonder that the people of the west had accepted the facts about their place without bitterness. Actually now I am inclined to think that the people of the west have always had to be indifferent to decent comforts and worldly baubles. In any case, using every conceivable livability criteria, from housing to entertainment, from cultural diversity to economic viability, and from education to opportunity, this western part of our country would not make it to the top. But the people of the west and their area capture some of the simplest truths about us: in some ways they have had and continue to have an intriguing life; in many instances they (like us but in varying degrees) have come a long way since the days of my youth; and in ordinary people, in unexpected places, despite the odds, there is often some concentration of dreams and hope, yet it is easy for all these to escape us.

Elsewhere, places similar to the west of Botswana are variously called the Outback (in Australia) or the Out West (in the USA). The people there, as are the people in western Botswana, are largely agrarian communities, with sparsely populated land area devoted to livestock farming. The people there, as are the people of the west of Botswana, historically are used to living slightly off the grid of modern commerce and its trappings. But there is life and vitality even in the midst of desert conditions and demands. And inasmuch as others elsewhere have accepted their life as necessary, to my fascination, the people of the west must have equally accepted their different life as necessary for them. And I realise, not for the first time, how much more I still need to know about our people.

Mid-year in this country brings with it bursts of chilly weather amidst cloudless skies overhead and drying plant life underfoot. But charitably, for the western part of Botswana, it also brings a welcome set of popular events. These include the Khawa dune challenge and cultural festival, the Toyota 1000km desert race and the defunct Kuru dance festival. (A prequel to this area’s annual entertainment calendar is the Kgalagadi Polka Dance Festival held in early autumn.) These events have always been democratic as the spectators who brave the elements and who can stand for long, have the best view of the performances yet they pay, if they do, no more than anybody. In a place renowned for requiring hardiness, all the smugness and aloofness of other places might be gone, replaced here in the west, and during those events, by a sense of shared experience of the cold, dust (again!) and spontaneous intermingling, in a type of open-air promenade.

These days when I visit Dimpho and other people of the west and their area, I do not feel inconvenienced; I feel like a student. Perhaps it is their working out of acceptance and survival in a difficult place, and their harnessing of what it means to be like them that continue to teach me about others and their places.

*Radipati is a Mmegi contributor