If there is any church dance that requires an EIA study, it is the “mokhukhu” of the Zion Christian Church. All that leaping into the air and stamping feet on the ground has to definitely impact negatively on the environment. Imagine then the horror that Roy Sesana must have felt when, by his account, a team of wildlife officers “did the mokhukhu dance on me.” The Setswana he used was “ke MaWildlife ba binela mokhukhu mo go nna.”
This was 2005 and Sesana was in his element as leader of the First People of the Kalahari, the Basarwa rights lobby group. You could not miss him then because FPK was awash with cash, having earlier won the P400 000 prize money that comes with the “Right to Livelihood Award” – the so-called Nobel Peace Prize.
When he would pass time as he passed through Gaborone on his way to Europe or the United States, Sesana would play pool at a bar in the Pop Inn shopping complex. There, half the patrons speak his name. His horns’ headband securely strapped on, he would circle the table, angling for good shot positions and knocking back a Castle beer between his turns. Or he would be posing for photos with star-struck female fans (admirers?) at Riverwalk mall.
Almost a month into the second round of Survival International’s fight with the Botswana government, Sesana has literally not raised his voice because he has been robbed of a platform that made him the star performer he is. FPK has not exactly covered itself with glory and is currently slumped against the ropes. The lobby group has been heavily battered by administrative incompetence and its Gantsi office has been shut down for some six years now. “Pet tragedy” is not a term that exists ordinarily in the English language but from a point of view of language, the biggest pet tragedy of the current saga it is that the elderly Mosarwa activist is unable to share his gift of the gab with those who love Setswana. Love or hate him but Sesana’s level of linguistic smoothness is impossible for the average person.
As a language, Setswana has lost its appeal to a disconcertingly large number of its native speakers and at a time that it is being revived, Sesana was an accidental hero in that effort because he has this effortless, almost ridiculous fluency in the language. Martin Amis, the British writer, says that one of the chief responsibilities of the writer is to slay clich├® wherever s/he finds it and invent fresh language. Sesana may not be a writer but he has been sub-consciously waging a writerly crusade to rid Setswana of clich├®s and create fresh vocabulary. He may not have consciously set out to enrich and make Setswana appealing but the abiding certainty is that each time he opens his mouth, he says something that nobody would soon forget.
Certain aspects of his activism – like biting the hand that feeds him by associating with an organisation that campaigned against Botswana diamonds – are disagreeable but it is hard to resist the vivid language that he uses to draw word pictures. “Ke MaWildlife ba binela mokhukhu mo go nna” enables the listeners to visualise the scene he is describing much better than a dry description would have. Idiomatic expression marks the pinnacle of linguistic proficiency and in almost every conversation, Sesana uses meticulous, almost classical prose.
While everybody else calls the Basarwa wood-and-grass hut “mogwaafatshe”, Sesana seems to consider that a bit too pedestrian and in the course of recounting an ordeal with the government, reveals a new term for it. On a YouTube that Sunday Standard chanced upon in 2010, Sesana controversially claims to have lost P200 000 when government officials forced him out of the CKGR. This is a story you want to take with a large grain of salt but that is a different topic altogether. Explaining the circumstances that led to such loss, Sesana said that he had hidden the money in his “khubama-re-itshebe.” In itself, the phrase describes the activity of two or more people kneeling to discuss private matters in hushed tones and has to be most vivid description of a Basarwa hut. To enter it, one has to kneel (or stoop), and thus “khubama re itshebe” seems to be more apt than “mogwaafatshe.” Sesana claims that he lost this money when the government came to “thukutha” (rob) CKGR people. Following this and other incidents, Sesana immersed himself in CKGR politics and it was during the course of this activism that he made the acquaintance of Kgosimontle Kebualemang who worked as FPK coordinator. Sometime in 2008, the two men fell out and before he quit, the latter had been planning to haul Sesana before a disciplinary committee hearing for having absented himself from work without permission. Batswana use “sela” to describe recovery of lost property and when quizzed on this particular episode, Sesana said that he could not believe that someone he had “found” at Kuru Development Trust could have the temerity to summon him for a disciplinary hearing: “motho ke mo setse ko Kuru…”
On the whole, Sesana has a rich personal life story, some of which is recounted in “Tears for My Land”, a book by Kuela Kiema. He is a Dxanakhoe who was born in Molapo in an unspecified year and as a young man travelled extensively within the CKGR as well as to other places outside, notably the Boteti area that borders the game reserve. In addition to his mother tongue ÔÇô Dxana ÔÇô he also speaks Dcui, Tsila, Dxolo, Naro, Setswana, Shekgalagari and Kalanga.
Sesana has no western education but according to Kiema’s book, is imbued with a deep knowledge of the philosophy and mythology surrounding Kua hunting and gathering practices.
“He uses all the traditional hunting methods and knows all about medicinal and edible plants,” Kiema writes.
The FPK leader’s working life began in Southern Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe) in tobacco plantations where, according to the book, “he was treated like a dog.” When he visited Molapo, he would bring tobacco which he sold to neighbouring villages. After Southern Rhodesia, Sesana worked in the South African mines for eight years. It was during this time that he acquired Fanagaloo, a lingua franca used exclusively in South African mines. When off-duty, he would often participate in the “vicious street fights”, a gruesome spectacle organised by the miners themselves as entertainment.
The book says of these fights: “Sesana has never forgotten how he was beaten by Swazis, Xhosas, Manyasas and Zulus. He received stab wounds many times to both his body and his head. It didn’t always go against him though, and he beat many of those who challenged him.”
He would definitely have relished the opportunity to lock horns (pun unavoidable) with government officials as SI embarks on a fresh campaign against Botswana tourism but this is one street fight he will have to sit out. Tragically, that also means less classical Setswana prose.
