The Gaborone Village Graveyard
| Wednesday May 6, 2015 14:43
Open it up and there is spread before us, in a way, which is otherwise unavailable, the names of a few of the people who lived and died in and around Gaborone between 1896 and 1965. Unfortunately the record, as in all graveyards, is incomplete.
The few words on each gravestone do, however, tell us something of their story, of children who died very young, of others whose lives were cut short for usually unstated reasons, and of those who, in their time, were locally well known.
It is said that there are 142 people buried there but of that number relatively few have gravestones. For the majority, there are small mounds and scattered stones but with no indication as to who they might have been or when they died.
The earliest identifiable grave belongs to Agnes Sooness who, in 1896, ‘while nursing the sick, fell asleep’. A possible explanation for this most unusual inscription was that the Gaborone Camp area was, for many years, malarial. Seemingly, she was battling with some kind of an epidemic to which she herself succumbed.
Then come the graves of 19 people who were killed in the South African War (1899-1902) of whom three have individual gravestones and 16 the standardised ‘For King and Empire’ cast iron plaque. The best known of these graves belongs to Captain Gough French. Those knowing only that Ireland is an independent Republic may be surprised to note that he was a member of the Royal Irish Regiment. He, Trooper Whitfield aged 17, of Plumer’s Regiment and Trooper Reid of the Rhodesia Regiment, were killed in action on February 12 1900 whilst attacking the Boer position at Crocodile Pools.
Then there is Kenelme Bishop who is described, intriguingly as being of the Protectorate Service, who died in 1905; Sgt. Mitchell of the B.P. Police who died in 1917; Arthur Douglas Ferguson perhaps the founding father of the notable Ferguson family, in 1925, Alice Glover who died in 1947 who could have been the wife of Louis Glover, leading member of the European Council, and one time owner of Broadhurst Farm, now subsumed as a significant part of Gaborone.
There is David Bowie Sinclair, District Commissioner, Mochudi with whom I have a particular affinity. Some time ago I found a very striking photo of him which had been taken by a Mochudi friend of mine – on the back he had written, ‘a friend in need, a friend indeed’ – a remarkable comment on the kinds of relationship which sometimes existed between ‘colonial’ ruler and ‘colonial’ ruled. Sinclair committed suicide in Mochudi and the comment on his gravestone, ‘at rest’ seems particularly appropriate. I hope that it is so.
Finally, there are three graves of the 1960s - Jan de Wet, in 1962, father of Boet de Wet of the famous drilling company. And then in 1965, Rantsotsope Seasole and Charles John Hunter, Director of Education. Soon afterwards a new graveyard was opened on Machel Drive and the old Village graveyard ceased to be used. In close proximity to the Village graveyard is another – which is within the precincts of the Botswana Public Service College and therefore not normally accessible by the general public. In this large graveyard there is only one grave which is identified – and this is for Lance Sergeant Tumelo Maraisane, born in Kolonyama, Basutoland in 1906 who died in Gaborone on 31 July 1955. On the thin basis of this one gravestone, I assume that this is where a considerable number of his Sotho police colleagues were also buried – the Protectorate Administration did regularly recruit them - and that they too might have succumbed either to malaria or to some other killer disease. It may be wondered today why a graveyard was set-aside for this one group of people and whether those buried there died over a period of time or whether in the mid-1950s there was a particularly severe outbreak of one or another disease.