A few weeks ago, my great grandmother turned one hundred years old. Imagine! The world was a very different place. In commemoration of this momentous occasion, I was asked to write a poem for her to be shared on her birthday. Here’s a live recording of it, but I have included the transcript below for interested in reading. Evidently, my Setswana isn’t anything to ride home about but for the sake of time and place I did use a few expressions to capture the culture. Enjoy 😊
100 times
Has the earth
Revolved around the sun;
36525 times
Have you seen the moon
Chase after the sun,
Not you’ve kept count,
But let’s take account
That the world is a different place.
Many views are out of date,
The way of life,
As you knew it
Has changed.
When you came to this world,
Botswana was still a British protectorate,
Bechuanaland.
We saw ourselves as tribesmen,
Before calling ourselves citizens.
This family of yours was once
Solely Setswana speaking;
Look how we have grown,
Lekotwane Anglophones,
Cosmopolitans, living abroad:
Bo Ireland, America, Oman and the list goes on.
Can you imagine:
In your twenties, you saw your chief,
Our first president, Khama III
Return home with a white wife.
They came to your farm by the Tati River.
To you it was just another day,
But to us
We wonder
Like historians in archives,
What was it like?
Did those mixed children greet you?
Did you ever spank them,
Embodying the values of home,
“Ngwana mongwe le mongwe ke wa rona.”
Every child is yours.
When Khama was banished,
It was to your father
That he sold his house to.
Now it’s a museum; imagine,
Your father’s house is history.
Around the same time
You witnessed
A colour bar separate
Whites from blacks.
Apartheid was practiced;
To you it must have been life,
To us it is the vilest thing,
Black and white
In our textbooks,
We read your life.
By the time you were forty,
Botswana was birthed,
And I wonder
what difference it made
To say that you are a citizen
And not just Bangwato.
Then again,
You had to register,
For the law favoured the patriarchs,
And you were Motswana
Through your mother,
How times have changed.
By the time you reached sixty,
Botswana’s economy was booming,
As were the death rates to AIDs,
Which ate a generation,
Burying the children of the soil.
How was that for you?
Just another day
Under the hot sun
Of Gaborone?
Forty years stronger
You saw your children
Stop watching faces
To start staring
At television screens and phone screens,
Yet you resisted the devil’s devices,
And I imagine are happier for it.
You saw your chief’s son
Ascend the throne of parliament,
Only to be exiled for embezzlement.
To think that those caramel bears
Were a nuisance.
You outlived the queen of England
And survived the epidemic of Covid,
Though you had to bury more children
Than one would have hoped to.
All this is to say:
You are a hundred years old.
I guess that is perspective,
When we look at the timeline
Of the last century,
But knowing you,
That’s not how you’d look at it,
From the lens of politics and economics.
That’s what scholars do.
You are a mother, grandmother,
Great grandmother
And now a great great grandmother.
Truly, you are the definition of an elder.
What matters to you is family,
And yours started at fourteen
When you were married
To a man much older than yourself,
Twice your age to be precise,
From pastures much greener than Rakops
What an era.
The youngest marriage registered
In the history of Botswana.
Congratulations on living a life of firsts.
To think the London Missionary Society
Would have had you sit
At the back of the church at your wedding,
Because of you were a ‘half cast.’
Still,
You gave him six children:
Violet, Patrick, Selby,
Albert, Dorothy, Eileen.
What a full life.
You were schooled on a wagen
By a tutor on the commute.
You trained as a seamstress,
Designing some of the finest dresses,
But that’s not how we remember you
By your children and exploits
In the shifting landscape of our
Landlocked desert’s high rising buildings
That was once nothing more than bush.
We remember you
By the things you’ve done for us,
Like the crumpets and popcorn
You’d serve us when we’d visit.
We remember you
By the ice lollies
On hot days and the hot faces
After misbehaving,
Slapping sense to our senselessness,
A matriarch who’d not spare
The rod and spoil the child,
A virtue worth praising.
We remember you
By the sacrifices,
Supporting the single mothers,
To get back on their feet,
And loving the lonesome child
Without a stable home.
We celebrate you,
A mother among mothers!
Happy Birthday
From the children of tomorrow!
Samuel Rubadiri 