The boarding school, a brick and corrugated iron complex behind a high diamond mesh fence, promised education and shelter to Basarwa children who came barefooted in search of a place to rebuild their lives.
For many years, dozens of Basarwa boys and girls passed through the gates of Xakao Primary School run under the government Remote Area Development Programme. But what should have been a sanctuary for vulnerable boys and girls has become the site of one of Botswana’s most shocking child neglect scandals.
For a whole week, school authorities were not aware that eight year old Kelapile Kayawe was missing from school. Her decomposing body was recently snatched from the beaks and claws of vultures 155 kilometres from the school complex. The birds of prey had already started gorging off her eyes.
The Telegraph team spoke to the distraught father, Shushu Kasanga, who is still trying to make sense of the whole thing. For now, his life is one long string of question marks. He is still trying to figure out how her daughter disappeared from the school ground. Why did it take eight days before school authorities found out that she was not answering to the attendance roll?
Would the school authorities have discovered that the young girl was missing if the parents had not alerted them? How did an eight year old wonder away 155 kilometres from the custody of school officials into the clutches of an unforgiving wilderness where she died of fatigue, hunger and thirst? These are questions that have yet to be fully answered.
Shushu reads tribalism into the whole tragedy. Actually, what he says is: “I doubt Kelapile would have died if she was not a Mosarwa.” Many explanations have been tendered, but to him it all boils down to one word – negligence.
Surrounded by his wife and immediate family relatives who double as his translators (he can only speak Sesarwa,) Shushu makes no attempt to hide his suspicions of tribalism in the disappearance from school grounds and ultimate death of her little girl.
Tobere residents have lost count of how many times in the past they have complained to school authorities that Basarwa children are treated worse than those from other ethnic groups.
Distraught with grief and despair, it is clear that it will take years, probably decades, if at all, before Shushu comes to terms with his tragic loss.
He is planning to withdraw his remaining daughter from school for fear that she may also end up as dinner for vultures.
“My intension is to bring back my other child from school,” says Shushu. For years, he has watched Kelapile grow, hoping she would be his ticket out of poverty. “She was an embodiment of hope”, he says.
To say Shushu is a broken and disappointed man would be a careless understatement. He comes across as totally defeated. Even though he was present at the funeral, he still insists that he wants his daughter alive ÔÇô from government.
“I sent my child to school alive. I want her back alive. If school authorities could not care for her they should just have told me and I would have gladly taken her back home,” says Shushu.
For the past few weeks the death of Kelapile has gripped the sleepy and dusty Basarwa settlement of Tobere a few kilometres from Shakawe, off the Okavango Delta. Since then, Shushu can hardly sleep a wink.
“Every night I wake up and scream to nightmares that Kelapile is still alive. I still do not believe that she is dead,” he told The Telegraph crew when we visited him at his homestead in Tobere.
With a haggard face, Shushu says he has lost a lot of weight since the grisly find of her daughter’s decomposing remains. He was part of the search team “as the school was not there for us”.
“This whole thing is like a nightmare. I still hope to wake up and see Kelapile sitting next to me,” he said.
A standard one pupil at Xakao Primary School, Kelapile was one among hundreds Basarwa young children in the Okavango District who have had to leave their parents behind at the settlement so that they could stay closer to the school.
As part of the government Rural Areas Development schemes, the children are housed inside camp hostels where they are taken care of by District Council officials.
Hostel caretakers are the sole custodians of the children.
According to Splash Moronga, a relative of the family, Kelapile’s decomposed body was found some 155 kilometres from her school hostel, eight days after she went missing.
In her attempt to leave her hostel and head back for her parents in Tobere, Kelapile lost direction, says Splash.
She was found after a massive manhunt that included the police from Shakawe and Botswana Defence Force professional trekkers. School authorities were not even aware that Kelapile was missing until after her sister, who also stays at the school hostel went back to the settlement to report to the parents that Kelapile was not at school.
The parents headed to the school to confirm the story.
“We could not believe that Kelapile was not at school because we had handed her directly to the authorities at the hostel together with a contingent of other children,” says her mother, Ngondi Kayawe, who throughout this time had remained silent.
Ngondi says after Kelapile’s fate it will be difficult to allow her other daughter to remain at school.
“Caretakers have failed us. It’s like our children stay in the bush,” says Ngondi.
The problem, she avers, is that none of the caretakers are Basarwa.
“They do not speak our language. They do not understand our culture. How can it be possible that they can properly take care of our children when they so clearly look down upon us?” she asks rhetorically.
While Ngondi is willing to accept any human mistakes on the part of the hostel staff, she cannot believe that it took so many days before the authorities could even detect that one pupil under their custody was missing.
This is a kind of recklessness that all residents in the settlement of Tobere find hard to understand, let alone accept.
“They tell us they are caretakers. But how can it be possible that a child could go missing for more than a week, die in the wilderness and rot without anyone at the school realising that a child was missing?” asks Shushu.
Shushu’s sense of anger is easily understandable.
He is worried that if nothing is done many other Basarwa children are likely to die the same way that his daughter did.
By his own account, his daughter’s death has spurred him to look more broadly at the welfare of Basarwa in Botswana’s political economy.
Shushu has never met Roy Sesana, the legendary Mosarwa nationalist who has over the years become the public face of Basarwa’s fight for equality.
But Kelapile’s death is likely to flare back to the surface a festering problem that has bogged Botswana government for years; Basarwa’s call to be treated like the rest of the citizens, a campaign that a few years ago became a talking point for a campaign to be allowed to stay inside the Central Kalahari Game Reserve with Sesana as the point man.
Though many years removed from Sesana’s rebellious conduct, Shushu’s language resembles Sesana’s in many ways. Without elaborating, he says far removed from their parents, Basarwa children at the hostels cannot be expected to perform well in their studies not least “because caretakers do not speak Sesarwa and are as a matter of policy contemptuous of Basarwa”.
He sears that Government treatment of Basarwa is past any hope.
He wants schools to be brought closer to the settlement so that Basarwa children “like all children in the country could learn with the direct guidance of their parents”.
To underscore his disenchantment, he says the only reason that his daughter Kelapile died is because she was a Mosarwa.
“She would not have died if she was not a Mosarwa,” he says as a matter of fact, while looking at a distance as if in search of Kelapile’s silhouette.
Given the high emotions, it would not be surprising if Kelapile’s death could become the lightning rod of deep rooted feelings of anger, helplessness and hopelessness that have for long been simmering underneath the misleading fa├ºade of serenity among the people of Tobere.
The extent and effects of poverty and unemployment in this small settlement are unmistakable.
A good majority of the people cannot speak any language other than Sesarwa. Few have been inside a classroom and even fewer have any source of sustenance other than handouts from government.
The young men and women spend most of their day idling around, doing nothing if not helping themselves to home brewed brands of alcohol.
