Sir Ketumile Masire – The early years

Talented individuals can spring up from any part of a nation's soil. Sir Ketumile Masire was born into a comfortable but modest family in Kanye. That village was, and still is, the capital of the Bangwaketse people, located in what was then known as the Bechuanaland Protectorate. There was nothing about Masire's heritage that gave him any real advantage.

The first-born of Joni (or Johnny) Masire and his wife Gabaipone (née Kgopo), Ketumile was born in Kanye on the 23rd day of July, 1925. Gabaipone had retained a traditionally calm demeanour while awaiting the birth of her first child. Her husband, though, was extremely excited. She named her son Ketumile1, after one of her uncles. Her son was also given the European name of Quett. The young boy would operate with two different names for the rest of his life. When, as was fairly common, he was given the names of his father and grandfather, he became Q.K.J. Masire.

The name "Quett" is actually a shortened version of Marquette. Another of his uncles, "Boloi" Kgopo, had an avid interest in world history. At the time of Masire's birth he had been impressed after reading about the seventeenth century French missionary-explorer Jacques Marquette.

After giving birth, Gabaipone became known as MmaKetumile. She was an outgoing, talkative, and even outspoken woman. Her family members remember her as humorous and fun to be around. She had done a few years of primary school before marriage, and used to keep an eye on the smaller girls. After marriage she was involved in agriculture and domestic work like virtually all Batswana women of that era. In her spare time, she liked to relax by making pottery, and is said to have had much talent.

Joni, likewise, was extremely jocular. His eldest son would eventually come to look a great deal like him. He was fairly short, around five and a half feet tall, slim, with solid features and a big smile. He is remembered as a straightforward man who worked hard to improve his family's prospects through wage employment and cattle keeping. Through his diligence he became the trusted right arm of his long-term employer, Richard "Montsioa" Rowland. A Coloured businessman, Rowland was by the 1930s one of the Protectorate's wealthiest entrepreneurs. As a busy mine-owner, trader, philanthropist, and adviser to the Bangwaketse chiefs, Rowland left the day-to-day running of his Kanye shop to Joni Masire. When he was in the shop, Masire senior was known to amuse customers with his good-natured humour and antics. When off duty, he would usually ride his wagon out to his cattle post at nearby Moshaneng.

The Masires were the senior family of the small Motebejana ward, located on Kanye's west side. In 1937 it had a mere hundred people. Joni's father, Masire-a-Sealetsa, was the upstanding headman of Motebejana and was known for his independent spirit. In 1936 he was courageous enough to risk royal wrath by standing up for the judicial reforms contained in the 1934 Native Tribunal Proclamation, which was then being bitterly opposed by the Bangwaketse Kgosi Bathoen II (1928-69). Joni was Masire's eldest son, and so became headman of Motebejana in his turn.

Like the Baphiri living in South Africa, the ancestors of the Masire family and Motebejana ward were once Bahurutshe who joined the Bangwaketse sometime before the reign of Makaba II (c.1790-1824). Earlier they had stayed at Kgoro Hill, near modern-day Good Hope, during a period of chaos and famine. There they substituted phiri (hyena) for tshwene (baboon) as their family totem. Thereafter they retained the totem as a reminder of the tough times they had endured. Gabaipone's families, the Kgopos, are the direct descendants of Makaba II's father, Moleta (c.1770-90). They were not regarded as royal family members. It was a family that placed a premium on education, and a very high proportion of its members went through primary and secondary school.

For about the first three years of his life the young Ketumile lived with his mother in the Kgopo compound. At this stage his parents had still not built a house of their own. Two of MmaKetumile's sisters had had children at the same time she did and the three shared their maternal experiences together. Like most healthy and intelligent babies, Ketumile cried a lot in his first years. Allegedly he was not easy to control, and is said to have bitten his babysitter cousin hard on occasion.

In 1928 Joni completed a house for his family in Goo-Motebejana, and moved there at the time that his second-born child, Gabalengwe, a girl, was born. His parents would later have four more children. Basimane, Basimanyane, and Bantlohile were Ketumile's brothers, while Morufhi was his second sister. Ketumile lived at Motebejana for the next five years or so, although his grandmother often looked him after when his mother was at the lands. It was common for the women of the Kgopo family to leave their children with their mother when they went farming. As the family was large there were sometimes as many as a dozen young ones left with grandma. Ketumile's cousins insist they learned discipline and a strong sense of family from their grandmother. Children were delegated chores and were expected to carry them out responsibly. In the evenings, the children and grandma sat around telling fairy tales and mmutla (hare) stories, sang songs, and pondered riddles. One such riddle concerned the young Ketumile, who was in the habit of wearing his cap the wrong way round (like a modern rap singer). This riddle went:

"Mokolwanyane o rwele capese?"

At about the age of eight or so, Ketumile's parents began taking him to the family cattle post at Moshaneng, a few kilometres from Kanye. Initially they stayed with him to train him themselves rather than leave him alone at the mercy of sometimes ruthless herd-boys. After some time, he was left to fend for himself, drinking milk and making his own logala (sweet porridge). He also learned to deal with his fellow herders, who had the normal tendency to harass their master's sons. Perhaps after some hard-earned experience, Ketumile became an expert with the whip.

A common contest among herd-boys was the game of nxabi, in which two boys armed with a whip or a switch would oppose each other separated by a bush. They would then attempt to beat their opponent's shoulders and back. Masire developed an unorthodox style for these contests.

While most of his opponents relied on a classic two-handed approach, Ketumile developed a formidable left-handed stroke. By the time he was in his early teens he was hard to beat, and is said to have bloodied many bigger, potentially bullying opponents while his own back and shoulders remained unscathed.

Until the age of thirteen and a half Ketumile spent his time at the moraka (cattle post). There he matured, learning to look after himself and the family cattle. In addition to routine herding chores, he indulged in the common amusements of cattle post life, such as oxen racing, hunting small animals, and organizing fights between the strongest bulls in the vicinity. In these years he developed a lifelong love of agriculture and the outdoors life.

When he went to the moraka his cousins of the same age had instead begun attending primary school in Kanye. Ketumile had wanted to join them in school, and finally had the opportunity to do so when his brothers became old enough to replace him at Moshaneng. In fact, Joni almost kept his oldest son out of school altogether. So, when he got the opportunity to attend Rachele Primary School in Kanye in 1938 Ketumile was, according to a classmate, "very serious". He was anxious to make up for lost time and to make the most of an opportunity nearly denied him.

From the beginning, Ketumile was a precocious student. He completed his first three years of school (Sub A, Sub B, and Std. 1) in two years--a record time--and soon spoke English well. After this he graduated to Kanye Senior School where his teachers allowed him to skip Std. 2. Two years later, in 1941, he was allowed to skip Std. 5. According to his aunt Bontsejang, then a teacher in the Kanye school system, it was many years before a similar student came along. People who remarked on his progress noted: "O tla inaya sengwe".

This quick progress was not the result of natural talent alone. One of Masire's schoolmates remembers that he studied hard even early on in primary school. "The President, even though a lad, really used to burn the midnight oil." In addition to book learning, Masire was skilful with his hands and became an excellent carpenter and wood-worker. For fun, Masire joined the Wolf Scouts.

When in 1943 he finished top of his class in Std. 6, his academic excellence was such as to enable him to earn one of a handful of Bechuanaland Protectorate Government bursaries for further education. As such, the name of Ketumile Masire appeared in the newspapers for the first time. His academic achievements even earned him a mention in Indlovu/Tlou, the news sheet for Batswana soldiers serving in World War Two. In 1943 Masire aimed to complete his secondary school education and then go to the University of Fort Hare to get a degree in Agriculture along with a teaching certificate. He had loftier ambitions than most of his Kanye peers who talked mainly of going to the mines in Johannesburg.

But before he went to university, he still had to finish Secondary School.

*Excerpt taken from “The Making of a President: Sir Ketumile Masire’s Early Years” by Barry Morton and Jeff Ramsay. Published by Pula Press (1994)