Botswana: Let's Strive To Brand Our Music

Botswana: Let's Strive To Brand Our Music

Mmegi/The Reporter (Gaborone)

January 15, 2007
Posted to the web January 17, 2007

Rampholo Molefhe

The argument around the renaming of our music is part of the bigger struggle for it to occupy a bigger space on the international entertainment market. Proper categories for the music - Kwaito, Mbaqanga, Kwasa, African beat - will be decided with greater ease when we have decided the larger name of the music.

This is not only part of the struggle of the marginalised peoples of Latin America, Africa and Asia to regain the leading role in creative enterprise, but it is also part of the larger struggle for appropriate economic reward for the people who create the cultural artefacts. This is necessarily part of the larger struggle for political and social rights for the artists both inside the national boundaries and on the larger global arena. The insistence by Machesa and Ndingo Johwa locally, and Banjo Mosele abroad, on what we contemptuously call 'tribal' music is in fact a more advanced struggle on the international arena for the recognition of the cultures of the peoples - particularly the oppressed - who form the artificial nation states modelled on Machiavelli's construct of the modern state.

Machiavelli's state, in more modern (colonial) times, has suppressed the less powerful peoples inside the borders of the borders that in Africa, were created to define territories of governance and exploitation by the more aggressive and bellicose industrial powers of the northern hemisphere. So, in Bechuanaland the British shaped the Central District so that it enveloped the Bakalaka, Batalaote, Basarwa, Baherero, Batswapong, Bakhurutshe and a thousand others - Bangwato being the minority - to appear as if these were all peoples of GammaNgwato, under Khama. (We all know how the Khamas became Kings of the 'Ngwato'!)

Having done so, the colonialists proceeded to sponsor the Khamas to domesticate the rest of the eight major tribes - also bunched together in the same way as it was done in the Central District - so that they would forever dominate the remaining 15 and more who were born into different ethnic groups. A nation was born. Botswana.

The same happened in every other part of the world, depending on the relative capacity of the colonising powers to perform violence among themselves, and in the protection of their colonies. This process was accompanied by a concerted effort to disarm the cultures of the colonised peoples so that the Ikalanga and the Basarwa - the indigenous of Botswana - would lose their particular cultural identities for the sake of the larger economic interests of the colonialists, administered by the eight 'major' native tribes.

So, it is only by historical coincidence that the Basarwa and the Ikalanga distinguish themselves culturally - and perhaps in terms of land rights and use - from the Setswana speaking ethnic groups.

The real struggle is against the new type of colonialism that seeks to bundle the various peoples of the hostile artificial neo-colonial state that only serves the interests of the former colonialists and the privileged members of the ruling class.