The Tswana

‘Tears of the Giraffe' - the Tswana

The ‘tswana' in Botswana (the country) and Bophuthatswana (the former ‘Bantustan' of apartheid South Africa) is of course the Tswana nation. Little is known of their origins on the continent although tribal tradition records that over hundreds of years they migrated south from Africa's ‘great lakes' region and by the seventeenth century had eventually settled in what is today the South Africa highveld.

Initial internal political strife was superseded in the nineteenth century by the turmoil of the Zulu King Shaka's wars that disrupted the relative political stability in the region. This and the increasing incursion of Dutch trekboers into the area in search of land and grazing appear to have forced the Tswana westwards and to have consolidated the previously bickering clans into larger and more cohesive chiefdoms. Partly due to the need for greater security and partly due to the limited water resource in the arid country in which they now found themselves, the Tswana formed unusually large settlements of thousands of people. These were laid out in a rigidly organised fashion and it was not uncommon at this time for all the members of a particular clan to cluster around the chief in a kind of African ‘city state'. Early missionaries and explorers commented with surprise on the size of the settlements they visited in the early nineteenth century, some of which were larger even than Cape Town, the only substantial settler city in southern Africa at the time.

The emergence of this social organisation resulted in the eight merafe, or tribes, that exist in Botswana today. Although not every member of a merafe is from the same ethnic group, Tswana is by far the numerically dominant nation in the country (the national language of which is Setswana) and the chief (kgosi) of each merafe is Tswana and even in a modern world still plays a central role in community life.

Cow-culating wealth...

As in many African cultures, the most important indication of wealth in traditional Tswana society is cattle. This is still apparent in modern day Botswana, where cattle ranching is an important subsistence and commercial industry, and where bogadi (bride dowry) continues to include cattle as an important element. This ‘payment' (really an acknowledgement of the transfer of a woman's fertility) was part of the reason for the tradition of marrying one's cousin and served as a way of ‘keeping it in the family' and maintaining the extended family's wealth. A man's first wife was usually selected for him by his male relatives and in the case of his being able to afford more than one wife, chose later marriage partners himself, each wife being entitled to her own house and space within the family settlement.

Aside from their role in cultivating land, women also devoted time to weaving, and the impressive basketwork of the Tswana is displayed in many places across Botswana. An art form has grown out of the design of day-to-day functionalities and this is most apparent in the myriad of different weaves employed in basket making. The woven designs often represent the individual experiences of the weaver, but there are also formal designs known by such evocative names as ‘Tears of the Giraffe', ‘Urine Tail of the Bull', and ‘Forehead of the Zebra'. This area is essentially the preserve of women while, aside from the herding of goats and cattle, men and boys engage themselves in intricate woodcarving.

&Beyond in Botswana

The centre for the exploration of Botswana's Okavango Delta is Maun, a small town at the southern extremity of the ‘swamps' and Tswana culture is very apparent here, as it is in Shorobe, a village about half an hour distant and the home of many &Beyond staff from Nxabega and Sandibe lodges. Through the efforts of &Beyond and the Africa Foundation a vegetable garden project has been turned into a thriving business that has recently benefited further with the purchase of a delivery truck. Here, as elsewhere in Botswana, the regard for both women and men older than oneself is marked by the use of respectful terms of address such as rra (father) and mme (mother) - a reassuring element in the face of today's generally declining social structures the world over.

-Chris Roche-

Posted: Other by CC Africa, Date: 21 November 2006