The land of hills and wind,
The light on the hillside,
Where royals grow tall.
From great rocks above
Rest the legends of the land,
Overlooking the village,
The Khamas in marble stand.
Below the Bangwato roam
Like sable antelope.
Spread as fine as spiderwebs,
They reside in the city and towns,
Proud of their culture, our national history.
It is from this tribe,
My mother’s people come,
But it is no longer our home,
A culture forgone.
Following the capital to the south,
We modernised, building:
Gaborone,
A city,
The global village,
Where all tongues meet and mix,
Where ties to tribe live past
The city boundaries.
The children know
Their Block and Phase,
Not their tribe and totem.
Their Setswana is broken
And their English
American slang.
Their lineage is international.
We are a headache to immigration,
As we don’t fit the culture’s mould
With one too many passports.
Where do they place us?
Still, I go to Serowe,
Not a boy in search
Of his father’s kgota¹
But as a transnational scholar,
Excavating the source of origin.
Rain winds batter my car,
Darkness clouds my view,
The GPS fails to find my lodge,
I am stranded in my tribal land.
I call the front office,
The lady says,
“Yes,”
Enough times to cut the line.
I get the impression,
“Ga ke itse sekgowa².”
I ask my companion,
“Talk to your tribesman.”
He is from the city,
Though his roots are in Palapye.
He feels more affinity to Kanye.
He calls the lady,
“Ga ke itse Serowe³.”
She tells us to go straight,
“We are up the hill.”
Her directions are as dark as the sky,
As cold as outside,
Reminding us:
We are Bangwato aliens.
That is when the truth unfolds.
Origin begins
At the point of departure,
Das ist der Ansatzpunkt,⁴
Not the well from which blood flows,
Not the office from which papers blow,
But the place from which I grew
Up, high enough to look back
At the hills of our elders’ memories
Of where they sowed their seeds.
To see
My grandma’s old house is
Now a museum
For Khama III. He sold it,
Yet my relatives mortgaged it,
Tearing any remaining ties
We had with the tribe.
Serowe is a juncture,
Where grandma started her life,
Raising my mother and aunt,
Until life, as it so often does, took them
South to new pastures,
Leaving Setswana with it.
Gaborone was a new place,
Needing a new language,
A world language,
For all those spat from the sea
To understand:
We are forward thinking.
1. Home in the village
2. I don’t know English.
3. I don’t know Serowe.
4. Das ist der Ansatzpunk: That’s the starting point.
First published in The Kalahari Review
Samuel Rubadiri 