The swirl of controversy that followed Berry Heart’s “Crush on Ian Khama” poetry performance at a festival in Maun is now common knowledge. Less common is knowledge that women – some of them reported to be pastors, commended her for mustering up courage to finally say what they have felt all along but were too inhibited to put it into words.
“A lot of ladies said to me afterwards: ‘What is all this fuss about? He [Khama] is a hot man.’ I also fail to understand what the fuss was all about because we have a hot president,” Heart says, discharging on “hot”, more than enough energy to power a full-load transnational goods train chugging up a particularly steep incline.
Of course as far as feedback about the hotness of male politicians goes, this is pretty much par for the course. At a Molepolole College of Education panel discussion a little over a decade ago, a female voice from the floor cooed about how good-looking opposition politician, Lepetu Setshwaelo, was. Farther afield, there is a theory that Tony Blair became leader of the Labour Party because he was the most handsome among the field of candidates. However, what rankled Heart’s detractors was that from the first to the last stanza, she kept the language strictly PG 18 when half of it referred to someone whom citizens are expected to both respect and fear.
As the story goes, when she appeared on stage almost naked, Heart paired the literary with the visual, the former feeding off the energy of the latter. She riffed off Khama’s 5Ds roadmap by outlining her own 5Ds romance programme: “Daily, Darling, my Dove you Determine my Destiny.” Cast within the background of performing arts history, this was something neither earth-shattering nor out of the ordinary because down through centuries and in cultures around the world, there is evidence of erotic poetry being enthusiastically consumed as a cultural delicacy – double entendre purely accidental. Examples are 15th century Egyptian love songs and Chinese classics. Plus: in Heart’s poem, there are shades of Ratsie Sethako, the only difference being that the latter hewed closer to a stylistic convention that, in a different context, a 19th century Scottish writer called Thomas Carlyle described as “concealing and yet revealing.”
Peering through the mist of time, Heart still can’t make out the outlines of what she evidently views as a mirage that began forming after her performance.
“I have poetic licence to say anything about anybody as long as I don’t infringe on their human rights. I was not insulting Khama. I just said I have a crush on him because he is hot,” she reasserts, a touch of indignation creeping into her voice and her face set in defiance that tells one that she would repeat that statement verbatim even under oath. “I fail to understand how having a crush on someone can be a bad thing. By the way that poem is one of my best pieces.”
It is also somebody else’s. On YouTube, Heart has a music video of an entirely different offering and five months ago, a netizen who goes by the username “livingstoneiam” pleaded: “upload the one about President Ian Khama sooner pliz, i loved it to bits, controversial as they try to make it.” However, that one has been stored away and offline will only see the light of stage in the same way that commercial products come out of vending machines.
“He’ll have to pay then. People still ask me to do it but I tell them they have to pay first,” she says.
As befuddled about the controversy were Heart’s former lecturers at the University of Botswana who, by her account, thought that the furore aroused by her performance was much ado about nothing. A rereading of another charge – that she was improperly dressed – provokes a spontaneous outburst of reasoned eloquence about the unsophisticated hypocrisy of those who level it. She express some perplexity that contestants of Miss Botswana as well traditional dancers half-dress the same way she did but not once have they had to incur the wrath of puritanical aesthetes.
“And by the way, that is just part of my art; it is not the way I dress off stage,” she adds matter-of-factly.
Naturally, the interview takes place off-stage on her rest day when she is wearing a striped bandage dress of decent length. Height-wise, the lady who officialised her crush on Khama is Michael Sata-tall and is sporting her trademark Jacob Zuma hairstyle.
Crush alert: there is still the question of how much of the poem was a case of life imitating art and when this issue comes up, Heart has a genuine if brief Carlylesque moment. All the time she has maintained good eye contact but when asked about the whereabouts of that crush, she breaks off that contact, lifts her chin and stares off into the distance.
“That’s personal,” she demurs, her voice low, mirthless.
Enough unsaid. However, there is still one more thing to be said about that performance.
If you search the public record, you will not find a single instance of Heart consuming the airwaves and acreage of editorial space as spectacularly as she did after the Maun performance. And, if she had to pinpoint the precise moment that her career gained its greatest propulsion locally, it would have to be that moment when she rolled the dice with the sub-erotic striptease. However, she contests the contention that she deliberately incorporated soft porn into her act to gain greater visibility as an artist with the argument that her art (literally) speaks for itself.
What is most remarkable about her story is that although she was introduced to most of Botswana through an erotic poem, Heart – who speaks three international languages, is actually a much more accomplished artist with a respectable following both here at home and abroad. In 2008, while a UB student, she recorded her debut album, “Mama” in Germany. It was on this trip that she met Rachel Wong, a Chinese singer from Hong Kong with whom she collaborated on a song in the album. The recording of this really catchy song would have marked what was perhaps the first time in Sino-Tswana linguistic relations that Setswana has been heard alongside Mandarin outside a government mega-project construction site. The two ladies became fast friends and Wong later invited Heart to Hong Kong where the pair performed together.
Last month, when the Botswana Musicians Union (BOMU) held its first ever beauty pageant, Heart participated and was crowned queen. It might seem a little odd that a poet is the beauty queen of a musicians’ union but she also happens to sing and, at least by the measure of her recorded music, Heart has a good singing voice with an impressive enough octave range. She says that she started singing at a young age in the Seventh Day Adventist Church and over time the music provided a perfect segue into poetry.
In one segment of the pageant, contestants had to make a brief performance and when she appeared on stage, Heart was accompanied by Woba K├¿l├¿ (real name Christophe Duranet), a Frenchman from Reunion Island, playing an unusual Burkina Faso musical instrument called ngoni. When the sound technicians took a little too long to fix the sound, Heart used the downtime to sprinkle in a little impromptu borankana jig onstage. She does traditional dance as well, she says, spicing it up with some Shakira-ish acrobatic moves. Heart herself plays the ngoni and the kayamb, a percussion instrument from the Reunion Island. Last year she was the lead actress in “Rebirth of the Ostrich”, a play that featured in the annual Maitisong Festival. Last year was also when she started performing at corporate events and released “Giving Birth to Love.” She followed up the latter this year with “Les Enfants de demain/Children of Mawa” which was sponsored by the French Embassy, Yarona FM and Standard Chartered Bank. The French means “children of tomorrow” and she can handle that language quite well as she is currently studying for her diploma in French at the Alliance Francaise in Gaborone. In addition to her native Shekgalagari, Setswana, English and French, Heart also speaks German which she has studied up to certificate level. With regard to the latter, what she had to contend with was a language with three genders, four cases, six ways of writing the definite article and 12 ways of forming plurals.
As a result of a peripatetic childhood, Heart ricocheted between all the duty stations where her father was posted. She finally rolled to a stop when she went to Kwena Sereto Community Junior Secondary School in Molepolole where she also began to find her stride as an artist. Decades later, a pocket of silence in a rustic Mmopane Block 1 setting provides her with just the peace of mind she needs to get the creative juices flowing. Determining early on that she would be an ill-fit for a regular salaried job, she registered a company while a student UB and now does event management full time through it. Through her poetry performances, she ensures that her BA in English Poetry does not go to waste.
Using her loosely connected international network, Heart has responded to all the market signals flashing at her and in the process, achieved reasonably good results. So far, the YouTube video has garnered well over 4000 and counting views. One was by someone in the United States who invited her to a poetry reading session at a university after watching her performance. She would have loved to attend, she says, but could not because of a scheduling conflict with a show in the Reunion Island. The other places she has performed outside Botswana are South Africa, Namibia, Germany, Hong Kong and Mauritius. Plans are at an advanced stage for her to do a show in France where a distributor with 250 websites has already put her music online.
All the proceeds of her latest album will go towards feminist causes that Heart has been supporting. The title of her BA thesis was “Feminists and Political Issues in Benjamin Zafanaya’s City Psalms.” As a result of her activism, Heart is a member of the recently established United Nations Regional Creative Council, part of whose mandate is to address issues around violence against women and children. Last month, Heart represented Botswana at the Council’s first meeting in Johannesburg.
Every opportunity she gets, Heart reaffirms her commitment to feminist causes which really seems a bit odd for someone who – not too long ago, was participating in a contest that feminists have chastised as objectifying women and reflecting patriarchal society’s emphasis on physical beauty. Some 44 years ago, the nascent second-wave feminism literally showed its face when a group called New York Radical Women staged a protest at a Miss America contest in the state of New Jersey.
Against this background, does Heart’s participation in Miss BOMU represent feminist evolution in reverse? Without substantively deconstructing the argument about objectification, she offers that her views on pageants are not influenced by the said strain of feminism and so she had no compunction about being part of Miss BOMU. Hers was also a quest to upend the balance of body-size power and put full-figured women on equal footing with slim ones.
“I participated because as Kagiso Ntime, one of the judges said, the main focus of the contest was artistic talent. I also didn’t want a slender girl to win,” she confesses, noting with regard to the latter that western standards of beauty have been imposed on Africans. “African women are naturally full-figured and shouldn’t be required to starve themselves to satisfy western ideals of beauty. I want to set a good example for African girls.”
But the ambiguity doesn’t stop there. The lady who calls herself Berry Heart is actually Keotshephile Motseonageng from Magagarapa, a pastoral-farming hamlet in the Kweneng district that is situated some 50 kilometres west of Letlhakeng. Wild berries are her favourite fruit, she explains, and she chose Heart because it symbolises something near and dear to her heart – love. On the night of the pageant, contestants had to change attire and the principal one that she wore was a traditional leather two-piece chosen to accentuate her African roots. Notwithstanding Heart’s apparent sense of stewardship towards her cultural heritage, some elements of this concoction don’t quite blend together and appear to create a false dynamic. At a time that Africans dressed that way for real, love was symbolised not by a heart but a live butterfly caught in the bush and presented to the object of one’s affection. It says something that chasing after a butterfly requires more emotional investment in the process than sketching a heart – a mechanical task that can be absentmindedly accomplished with eyes fully closed – or even with good old-fashioned bedwetting in the middle of deep sleep.
The response Heart gives is sensible enough. She starts by asserting that the education she received, the religion she was brought up in and the western pop culture she continues to imbibe, were bound to have a profound impact on her.
“I grew up knowing that the heart symbolises love but you also have to realise that we are influenced by American culture,” she says.
A fair bit of that culture is hitched up to freedom of speech and all too often sees (especially) young Americans going much farther than proclaiming Barack Obama’s hotness. Some of them construct the steamiest of third-base scenarios starring their president when they exercise what in that part of the world is termed First Amendment rights. This is where the story gets bigger than Heart. She is not the only urban Motswana youth who, despite living in a largely conservative society, has telegraphically assimilated into an ├╝ber-liberal, almost laissez-faire value system that is rooted thousands of nautical miles away. Viewed from this perspective, “Crush on Khama” fully conveys the stakes of that acculturation.
