Your tautona...

So, there's a particular genre of conversation I have with Batswana (and sometimes with other folks in Botswana, such as Zimbabweans, Australians, etc.) regarding our (i.e., America's) tautona. (This is a contraction of the Setswana words for big lion, and is used to designate political leaders, e.g., presidents.) Anyway, the conversation usually takes the tone of comic teasing, but the underlying sense is something like: Your tautona -- what is he thinking? (Sometimes people will offer this question quite explicitly.) Is he crazy? What is he doing? Why does he love war so much? Why is he killing so many people?

My housemate had a friend in town visiting from NYC, and we took her out to Gabane (an outlying village I've mentioned before) for some sight-seeing. Gabane, like most (if not all) villages in Botswana has a chief (kgosi) and a kgotla (or customary court). We drove through the village and parked outside the gate, which had a large sign with the figure of a buffalo's head on it. (The buffalo is the totem of the Balete, who are the people who live in Gabane.)

By the way, if you want to quibble with someone about the term 'tribe' -- and believe me, there is much quibbling to be done -- you can check into H-Africa and argue it out with them.)

The other side of the sign, inside the fence surrounding the kgotla, showed the lines of descent of the dikgosi (chiefs) of the Balete going back several generations (I forget how many), as well as the names and years of the age regiments.

An age-regiment, or mophato, was formed around an initiation school (bogwera) for boys who were roughly contemporaries. Age-regiments could then be organised for collective labour, training, battle, or, under different circumstances, being sent off to the mines together. The female counterpart was known as bojale.

Missionaries, as you can imagine, were not so fond of this rather un-Christian behaviour, and the schools haven't really been done for decades now. There's been some talk lately of reviving bogwera, but I'll save that for another post...

We walked into the kgotla, past the pen for cattle that are impounded as fines in cases heard by the chief, and greeted the women who were sitting on chairs under a tree in front of the kgotla. The kgotla itself was an open, shaded space, with some shade cloth strung against the slanting sun. We walked up to the offices at the far end of the kgotla, and found the chief, sitting on a chair on the porch, with some ladies sitting on a bench next to him. My housemate, who had lived in Gabane some years ago and knew the kgosi, greeted him, clapping her hands together and making a little curtsey. I had been drilled in this style of greeting over and over two summers ago during intensive Setswana, and was familiar enough with it to approximate it.

I also had just enough Setswana to follow some of the exchange that followed between my housemate and the kgosi. My housemate explained that her friend had come from America, and that we wanted to look around and take some pictures. The chief remembered my housemate from when she had lived in the village, and there was some inquiring after and well-wishing towards various batho ba Gabane. What I remember vividly is that the chief brought up Iraq and Bush. I don't remember exactly how he brought them up; only that he do so, and the general sense was, 'What the hell?'. My housemate replied something to the effect that people? leaders? ditau tse ditona? in America like to kill too much... and I think that was a satisfactory conclusion to the exchange.

This isn't an every day thing, but it is definitely an on-going thing. A couple of guys with whom I was chatting brought up the fact that the death penalty is legal in Botswana, and that their tautona could essentially kill someone if that person had something wrong. My response to them was that our tautona kills people whether they've done anything wrong or not...

All this talk about our tautona in Botswana! Do you good people even know who the tautona ya Botswana is? Here's your chance to find out...