Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana
Staff Writer | Thursday October 31, 2013 13:57
Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana is an unusual volume that will appeal to a wide variety of people with diverse interests. It is a historical study, but with strong ethnographic underpinnings and a grounding in public health issues. The author says of her approach: “Understanding histories of bodily misfortune requires that we integrate political economy and socials history with cultural and epistemological questions. Because the human body is the site of productive and reproductive labour, a source of ethnic and gender and generational identity, and a primary site for thought and experience, this integration is particularly important where questions of health and the human body are concerned” (page 22).
Professor Julie Livingston has been teaching history at Rutgers University in New Jersey since 2003. In 1992 and 1993, she completed two masters at Boston University, the second being an MPH. She then went on to Emory University to do her doctorate in African history. This brought her to Botswana where one of her bases was at Cheshire Homes in Mogoditshane. Her main interviews were conducted between 1997 and 1999 in Diphaleng, Thamaga, Kumakwane, Mmopane and elsewhere. Livingston has studied many aspects of disability including HIV/AIDS, aging and chronic illness. She has experienced her own “long and debilitating illness”.
A history of debility in Botswana is not something that one can find readily in books, journals, and personal records or in the archives. It requires many approaches to tap the place of bogole in society in southeastern Botswana. Livingston uses ‘debility’ in relation to chronic illness, aging and other impairments associated with disability. She is concerned with social identity more than clinical status. For example, outside Botswana, an old man who becomes dependent on using a cane is signaling his disability; while in Botswana “canes historically symbolised the power of elderhood and the aggregation of dependents rather than the loss of independence”.
Yet in Botswana, the quest for therapy may lead the individual down a variety of paths until they become segole, one who can no longer be healed. But not everyone will accept that label, even in situations of adversity and extreme disability. What characterisation an individual accepts relates to their moral imagination, how they survived the quest, and how they are now coping with their situation. The spatial dimensions of debility are broad, but the bogole may remain hidden. Batswana visiting England are struck by the high visibility of disabled people. While a segole is someone who is not normal, but the personal goal might not be independence to overcome dependence, as found in approaches to rehabilitation in the northern world, but instead how to live fully within a web of dependencies.
Moral imagination is defined by the author as the way we envision possibilities for a morally better or worse world than the one in which we live. People living with debility develop an enhanced moral imagination because of their circumstances. “Many people in southeastern Botswana imagine morally by constructing historical landscapes. History and social memory are by no means the only sources of morally imaginative life”. The Tswana moral order is based on a shared set of values and mutually perceived expectations for behaviour. There is a tendency for people struggling to cope in the modern moral climate “to create a nostalgic past (that) is always changing”.
“The basic markers on this imagined landscape may remain the same-elders, Modimo (God), rain seeping, mothers, hearts, witches, healers, lunatics, secrets, madi, digole, trees, lightening, Setswana, beer, cattle and so forth-but their shape, their context, and the norms to which they refer gradually change over historical time” (page 21). This fascinating book is divided into five parts. The first part: Family Matters and Money Matters – introduces the reader to the village context as found in late 1990s, the overall situation and the cases of debility to be pursued.The second part: Public Health and Developing Persons – includes a history of the evolving Tswana cosmology and how approaches to body and health have changed over time.
The third: Male Migration and the Pluralization of Medicine – has two processes that over time (from the 1920s to 1940s) transformed the meanings and even the experiences of debility.Part four: Increasing Autonomy, Entangled Therapeutics, and Hidden Wombs – is an interesting chapter on the period after World War II up to Independence in 1966, tracing how different medical systems, including the Tswana traditional medical knowledge, evolved over these years, as Bokgoni bo teng Bogoleng (there is ability in disability).Part five: Postcolonial Development and Constrained Care – looks at the rapid changes of post-independence, including peri-urbanisation, provision of social services and infrastructure, decline in employment on the mines in South Africa and changes in patterns of familial caregiving.
“For southeastern Batswana, the priorities of industrial capital drained the productive and creative strength of their communities and replaced physical vitality with polluted madi, disordered aging and increasing poverty”. Increasing individualism actually “undermined the pubic health system and spurred transformations in family and community institutions. Tswana diagnostic categories expanded or shifted to incorporate new epidemiological realities and bongaka and biomedicine became further entangled with one another” (page 234). The importance of familial care-giving has now gained greater recognition because of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
“Familial care needs to be better historicised and acknowledged as operating within the shifting politics of gender, age, family and community” ... “Traditional medicine has a complex intellectual, political and economic history, one that bears closer examination” because African therapeutics has a role in healing (page 235).
This book is an important milestone for people and professionals to understand the dynamics of what is happening in Botswana.Livingston’s treatise is supplemented by a dozen black and white photographs from three sources: photos by a Stephanie Cohen taken in 1998 and 1999, undated photos from the London Missionary Society/Council for World Mission Archives and six photos by Isaac Schapera from the Royal Anthropological Institute Archives taken about 70 years ago.