I remember as a young primary school child I used to read books from my history lesson which spoke to some degree about illegitimate children.
These were mostly children who later on became heroic enough to make it into the history books like Shaka Zulu.
Words like illegitimate were very big and difficult to me at that tender age, always having a dictionary handy to clarify them. And, of course, the child’s illegitimacy always seemed to have had consequences, most of which did not add a lot of positive to their lives like having to grow without a father figure.
Shaka’s mother, Nandi, according to the history books, found herself often having to protect him from threats of assassination because of his illegitimacy, which could have only made his childhood very difficult.
All that ridicule that the poor child had to go throw!
In those days of primary school, most children I knew back then were born of married parents and that is why it was so hard to comprehend that somebody could have had ‘no father’.
Fast forwarding more than twenty years since I was in class reading about illegitimacy, I’m bringing this subject of illegitimacy back home to talk about the hundreds of illegitimate children that are given birth to everyday in this country.
Firstly, we have the teenage pregnancies to deal with, which are believed to be largely as a result of peer pressure. When a teenager falls pregnant, we say it was a mistake because of her age, taking into consideration what it takes to raise a child both emotionally and financially.
The fact is that nobody is ready in both respects to raise a child at that age. The ones that are fortunate enough to have supportive and able families tend to have it a lot easier than those who have it otherwise. But in each case of teenage pregnancy, the teen parent suffers some kind of immediate setback. Their studies are delayed if not completely put to a halt for life and their peers mostly tend to force them into some kind of isolation.
One would have thought that, as adults, the subject of family planning would be approached from a far more positive light. It is a constant cry that single parented children get deprived of the love and guidance that is enjoyed by legitimate children. It is very sad to say, but the number of children born out of wedlock in our country is very scary.
An alarming number of men and women in this country, regardless of financial and or educational background, are choosing to become lone parents.
I call it a choice because everything that is needed to avoid conception the government has provided, including education to that effect. Also, because it is very common to find siblings from different fathers although the woman has not been raped.
If it were to be passed off as a mistake with the first baby, what do we say about the second and all those who follow afterwards? They couldn’t have been mistakes too.
A lot of single parenthood is blamed on failed relationships. We have adopted a culture called ‘Vat en sit’.
This is where a man and a woman decide to move in together, normally after they feel like they have been together for long enough.
I suspect at this stage in their relationship both parties really enjoy the benefits of marriage without having gone through the process. They practically live a married life.
In most, if not all such situations, the couple relaxes a bit too much when it comes to family planning. They both feel they know and trust each other well enough to not take the necessary precautions to prevent pregnancies. Some couples even deliberately choose to have children and maybe somewhere along the line start planning marriage.
The sad reality is that in most cases the couples break up after the children are born because the reality of what it takes to raise a child is eventually realised. ‘Vat en sit’ couples seldom go for counselling. Unlike married couples, they tend to break up before they marry. But where children were born the effect of the decision to have the children out of wedlock means that these children end up suffering in one way or another.
I often wonder how many of us realise that we are in effect continuing to bring more and more Shaka Zulus back to life. As much as none of our illegitimate children face any assassination threats like Shaka did, these children get deprived the opportunity of being brought up by their mothers and fathers under the beautiful union that it was intended to be.
They face a lot of mockery and bullying everyday in playgrounds by the few peers they have that are from normal families. These things we could take for granted but they shape our personalities and characters from a very young age.
In a sense, we are bringing children into a world where they constantly need to be protected from emotional assassination. We could take the decisions we make today for granted, failing to understand that when such are taken as to fall pregnant, a life is created, one that can only come into a world that was chosen for it by its parents.
Illegitimate children miss love when we look at the bigger picture. Botswana culture is such that a child born of an unmarried mother belongs to his or her maternal parents. The paternal parents of such a child have very little or no say at all in the raising of the child. These children end up missing out on the love that they are entitled to, they become strangers to their paternal side, from the father himself through to the whole extended family and this could only leave a huge debt in any life.
I don’t think anything can replace all that lost love.
