Long Live Bonnington Memories

This arrival, this week, of the famed English writer Carolyn Slaughter adds to the growing monumental attention that the historical Bonnington Farm continues to receive. It has been a belated but welcome upsurge coming decades after its neighbouring Broadhurst Farm established its name as a Gaborone residential suburb and industrial area. Not only has the electoral commission just named a constituency after Bonnington, but for a while now a junior school, a shopping mall and a national monument have been toiling to affirm the significance of this name. When the Department of National Museum and Monuments, or more precisely, the Minister, first declared the Bonnington Silos a National Monument in 2006, it was more an artifice of faith than a fully informed intervention. The immediate motivation for listing the site as a National Monument was more to protect it while research ensued. Hence, the initial reasons were┬átinkered with┬áfactual errors – a story for another day. Given the scarcity and associated scramble for land in Gaborone, some urgent action was needed because the presence of the farm house and silos could no longer be guaranteed by its location on the protected shores of the Segoditshane River, as the tenacious construction of a mall in the neighbourhood had demonstrated.
 
Yet, long before the National Museum proposed the legal protection of the Bonnington farm, the site had been immortalized in ink by two protectorate time characters. One was a one time successful farmer and builder of the farm house and silos, Daniel Henry Le Cordeur, while the other is Carolyn Slaughter, who was a frequent visitor to the farm as a little girl, and whose colonial administrator parents lived at the village suburb of Gaberones.
 
On an unspecified date in 1952 when ‘Churchill was the Premier of Britain’ and the┬á ‘Mau Mau’ wanted to ‘oust all Europeans from Kenya’, Le Cordeur took his type-writer and composed a 2 page letter that he put in a time capsule and stuck under his newly constructed bath. The time capsule, turned by time and dereliction into a broken bottle whose paper content was half spoilt by the elements, was uncovered in 2008 by a team led by Victor Mokobi and myself. Thanks to this letter we have been able to connect with the Le Cordeur children, received several artifacts that were used in the farm in the late 1940s and 50s, and, by snowball effect, connected with Carolyn Slaughter. According to the time capsule, Dan Le Cordeur bought the Bonnington farm in 1944 from Smith and Lamb. By 1952 Bonnington Farm, exported cattle to Johannesburg, and operated4 stores at Bonnington, Kgale Station, the Quarry and Gabane. In fact, Dan Le Cordeur is the man whose quarry shop led to the infamous ‘Tsolamosese’ story and associated location where Gabane women faced a bush rapist as they walked to the quarry and Kgale stores before Dan opened the Gabane store.
 
If Dan Le Cordeur’s epistle tells us about the fears, interests and times of the farmer and businessman that he was, it is Carolyn Slaughter whose books succor a glimpse into the bright and darker sides of Bonnington. And, it seems Slaughter has nothing to lose because in Before the Knife and Dreams of the Kalahari she not only lays bare the demons that troubled her own family, including sexual molestation, but she goes at length to expose the skeletons of prejudice, racism and abuse at Bonnington. As an insider, she especially gives the reader an appreciation of the social drama that characterized lonely colonial masters and their families. While in Gaborone this week Slaughter will do several things including voluntary participation in the ongoing development of a storyline for Bonnington farm open air museum and a talk at the University.
 
Indeed, the race is not always for the swift. Whereas Bonnington Farm monumentalizing seems to have started later than, say again, Broadhurst, it would seem that in Bonnington we have the soul and romance of the place. Besides the farm house and the silos, it is a thrill to connect with the stories, owners and users of the site in the Le Cordeur family, Carolyn Slaughter and that magnificent story teller, 94 year old, Mack Ephraim Molatlhwa of Gabane, a trusted aid of the Le Cordeurs. This week, Thursday the 20th at 530pm, Gaborone will especially drink from the river of time in the National Museum Little Theatre when Carolyn Slaughter gives a public talk entitled “Personal Memories and Sociological Perspectives on the last years of the Bechuanaland Protectorate”. Long live the memories of Bonnington, and a special homecoming to Carolyn!
 
**Phillip Segadika is Head of the Archaeology and Monuments Division at the Botswana National Museum. This article is facilitated by Kansai Plascon, GICC and the Grand Palm Hotel – sponsors of the Bonnington Farm Open Air Museum.