Francine Walls
NOVELIST & POET
Botswana 1972: Difficult for Women
Pandora. Seattle, WA. April 3, 1973
The independent Republic of Botswana lies landlocked in the arid heart of Southern Africa. More than half a million Batswana people subsist in the Kalahari Desert and a crescent of rolling thorn-scrub savanna. Most Batswana live in a traditional society based on agriculture. Women are the agriculturalists and the domestic servants. Men are the cattle raisers and the masters of their compound.
In rural Botswana, there is no buffer for either man or woman against the poverty of the land or the vicissitudes of the crop-growing rains. Six years of every eight are drought years. In a land difficult for all, women do more than their share of the agricultural labor, all the domestic labor, bear numerous children, and often grow old at an early age.
Tonota, in the northeast, is a typical Botswana village. The round huts, the “rondavels,” of the village scattered along the road and squat burnt in the sun. Most women must build their thatched-roof rondavels, the clay laboriously gathered and carried by hand. Each rondavel has a low-walled courtyard, with a hand-polished dried mud floor that serves as a living room, dining room, sewing room, and lounge. After each rain, the gutted mud must be refinished.
Leti prepares porridge.
The women of Botswana dress ankle-length skirts, blouses, and a duke, a cloth that they wrap around their heads. They may wear shoes tied together with string, or go barefoot. Clothes are traded, not bought. Babies are carried on the women’s backs in a blanket tied around their waists and above their breasts.
At home, the men will sit on foot-high carved wooden stools and drink tea or a “kaffir” beer of fermented sorghum or ginger. If a woman is sitting on a stool and a man is without one, the woman must yield her place and sit on the ground.
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Twenty-five percent of Botswana’s men work in the South African mines, with a few migrating to one of the rare industrial sites hoping for work as unskilled laborers. Most, however, tend their cattle at the isolated cattle posts or sit at home. They always have their tribal field which is worked by the women.
A typical woman’s day is spent carrying 50-pound buckets of water 2 to 3 miles back from the river and preparing food for the compound. Under the white heat of the tropical sun, they cook “mealie” (corn meal) or “mabele” (sorghum) in their 3-legged iron pots. Grain must be threshed with staves on large clay floors, then winnowed by hand in large, flat baskets before it is pounded in the mortars. The women pound the grain rhythmically with long poles, then cook it soft for breakfast and into hard cakes for lunch and dinner.
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Although the women grow, process, and prepare the meal, the men dictate the distribution of the food. By taping or circling his foot in a certain manner, a man can tell his wife who to give mealie, who to give mealie and gravy, and who to give goat mean (if that luxury if available). In his compound, the word of the man is law.
Stirring the mealie meal.
On the outskirts of Tonota, Isaac has his compound. The two roofed huts, walled cooking area, and shade tree indicate that Isaac is a prosperous man. He now makes bricks after losing a wage-paying job due to his drinking.
Leti, Isaac’s wife, is a short, stout woman with a round face and a broad smile. She is 30 and looks 50. Of the 12 children she has borne without the aid of a midwife, six are alive today. Her first child was illegitimate, which is normal as it proved her fertility. A promise to marry in this society is virtually a legal bond.
Often it takes a young man several years to pay the “lobola,” or bride price, to the bride’s parents, as was the case with Isaac. Lobola is, on average, 5 to 8 cattle, worth about $500 in a country where the average rural income is $100 per year. Some men continue to pay off the debt after marriage. Lobola appears to be compensation to the family of the bride for taking away a useful member, as well as repayment for raising a girl.
Because Isaac is prosperous, he has an “extended family.” Two other woman relatives and a child have come to live with him. The “extended family” system is open to abuse, but there are no orphans or abandoned aged people in Botswana.
Leti supervises the women in her compound efficiently. One of the women, Francinah, cares for her toddler and brings water from the river, carrying heavier and heavier buckets as her neck strengthens. In this way, Francinah learns the tasks of the compound and gradually assumes great responsibility.
At planting time, September or October, Leti and the women and girls of the compound walk 13 miles to the “lands,” the tribally owned and allocated vegetable acreage. The women walk with an iron pot filled with mealie on their heads so that as soon as they arrive at the lands, they can prepare a meal for the men, who have ridden in a tiny wagon with the supplies.
A new household must be set up at the lands. The men plow, and the women and children plant the corn, sorghum, watermelon, and sugar cane, then they weed and harvest by hand.
The children also chase the thieving weaverbirds and wild animals away from the crops. As they grow, the girls assume a woman’s responsibility for the crops. The boys care for the cattle. Leti and the women walk back and forth from the lands to the village until they have finished the harvest.
Education is one escape from traditional society, but only for a few. Seventeen percent of the girls can attend any level of school, usually primary school. For those educated to the 8th grade, there is hope of a wage-paying job in the “modern sector,” the small towns or the capitol, Gaberones. If jobs are unobtainable, they return to agricultural life.
According to the Botswana National Development Plan, 1970-1975, the “5,000 women who join the workforce each year will assume their natural role of homemaker. The remainder must find their livelihood in agriculture or as migrant workers in South Africa.” These words mean poverty for the women to whom they apply.
Women dissatisfied with their situation are beginning to raise voices of protest. Women have begun to express the need to have a voice in the family, to have fewer children, and to have agricultural and vocational training.