It was one of the highly charged moments during the 1999 operatic melodrama about whether tribal age-regiments could legally operate as vigilante units and police Molepolole at night. Area MP and then cabinet minister, Daniel Kwelagobe, and Julius Bodigelo, one of his constituents who has styled himself as something of a court jester, found themselves on different sides of an issue and determined roast comedy would bridge that gap.
Reaching back across a huge span of time, Kwelagobe told the kgotla meeting that when still a young man, the now clean-shaven Bodigelo wore his luxuriant Afro hair in a Mount Kilimanjaro edifice. Getting his own back when he got a chance to get a word in edgewise, Bodigelo reminded the MP that at around the same time, he was hawking rinky-dink jewellery around the village. South African musician-cum-wordsmith, Senyaka, wasn’t around then to add ‘difong kong’ to street vocabulary but that is what people today would call the sort of merchandise that DK is said to have sold on Molepolole streets in his youth. To his credit, the MP was good-humoured about the whole thing.
With the festive season well and truly over, the kgotla meeting run has started in earnest. As sure as alcohol tax will go up some time soon, there will, in all likelihood, be stories of an acid-tongued political, tribal or other leader having roasted a member of the audience or a civil servant seated at or behind the high table or the entire audience. In what instances would this qualify as roast comedy and when would it just be bad old-fashioned bullying? It is necessary to make this distinction?
The Kwelagobe-Bodigelo encounter is an elegant example of genuine roasting because the roasting cut both ways. Had Bodigelo been too timid and too quixotically respectful to not shoot back his own barbs, then he would have been bullied. There are roasting gold standards and one is that when the poor roast the rich and powerful, that is comedy. However, when that operates in the reverse and the recipients cannot return the favour, then that is intimidation.
About roast comedy: By some remarkable bit of cultural-linguistic happenstance, “roast” can be directly translated into Setswana and retain the same lexical meaning it conveys in English: go gadika, which means to “fry” someone with mirthful words. In the United States, the hot king-sized bed of capitalism, roasting has been commercialised by the Comedy Central TV channel in the form of roast comedy events that feature marquee-name celebrities. The most recent was held last year and featured actress and comedienne, Roseanne Barr.
The roast tradition goes back to 1910 when celebrities would be subjected to the most intense but, at least officially, good-natured public ribbing in front of an audience. There are no filters on the comedy and the result is that even taboo subjects like death are considered fair game. Somehow those who get a place on the dais to do the roast always have an explosive command of expletives and claim that their routines don’t come from a mean-spirited perspective even as they drop hard-core obscenities almost every minute.
At one recent roast, a celebrity’s teeth were compared to “a row of urinals” and in wishing billionaire Donald Trump well in his bid for US president, a comedian named Jeff Ross just made sure he messed up his next sentence.
“First though, I hope you win because I can’t wait for the assassinay – I mean inauguration,” Ross said to Trump.
The death of Steve Jobs was a tragic event but Ross found a way to mine it for nuggets of comedic gold, telling the story of the Apple founder and the products that he sold over guitar licks as he performed at a US city: “Bill Gates is so rich he hired cancer to kill Steve Jobs…. Did you see him? His family put him in this expensive coffin, then paid for an extra coffin to protect it from scratches…. He was thinner than the iPad 2 at the end there…. Everybody wanted to work for Steve Jobs – except his pancreas.”
Generally, the style of American comedy is atavistically gravitating in the direction of coarseness – which degrades culture. In the England of Charles Dickens, it was perfectly normal to publicly pour scorn and ridicule on physically challenged people and that is how far back the US has gone at this point. Between 2008 and 2010, one of the staples of Saturday Night Live, a live television sketch comedy show, was making fun of the blindness of then New York governor, David Patterson. Here at home, those who choose to be enthralled and ensnared by neo-colonialism fashionably associate comedy with the west but if they checked their fancies against facts, they would find a long cumulative record that shows that this vocation has always been part of our multi-tiered cultural infrastructure. The most basic proof is that in every culture, people laugh. Just that should change the conversation.
Because Botswana’s nascent commercial comedy scene tends to arc toward America, its practitioners generally tap into the vein of a Dave Chappelle, a Chris Rock or some other fabulously successful black American comedian. When this emulation goes overboard, our culture is also coarsened. A few years back, one local comedian appeared on the Btv breakfast show and tried to wring out a joke from the tragedy of a child who was brutally murdered by its father with an axe. There was no need for him to swim across the Atlantic Ocean when we already have attractive local alternatives.
Take Bodigelo, who routinely turns uneventful weekday mornings into priceless – if generally unexploited YouTube moments. Superb at sensing the mood of a meeting, his strategy is to position himself nicely within a comedic sweet spot in order to tackle third-rail subjects.
The roast style of the kgotla has high decorum standards that force those who do it right to positively censor their language. “Positively censor” because as the Russian ├®migr├® poet, Joseph Brodsky observed, censorship is good because “it increases metaphoric powers of the language.” This comedy occurs in a forum of polite company and the baselines that the botho protocol establish require that where speech intersects with aesthetic sensibility and cultural sensitivities, there should be no serious tension. In a carefully calibrated mixture of humour and substance, Bodigelo carped about Kgari not attending on one of the top three items in the job description of recently-installed traditional leaders: producing an heir within wedlock within a few thousand hours of investiture.
Conversely, the kgotla also features acts from the high table that luxuriate in making jokes about members of the audience or ordinary people who, incidentally, are expected to maintain a pleasant temperament when they are being trampled upon in this way. To state the obvious, this fails the symmetry test because the recipients cannot return the disfavour. This practice is in brazen disregard of the ethics of interpersonal relations (which don’t need to be codified for anyone) because this roasting comes at the expense of the subjects’ dignity. And, in a Christian-majority country like Botswana it is necessary to invoke the foundational message of the Bible – “love thy neighbour” – and stress the importance of connecting with its substantive and expansive meaning in deed.
The quality of the comedy itself needs to be assessed. Comedy is a combination of wit and humour and follows a well-established pattern: set-up, connector and punch line. Often the lampooning of audience members is bereft of these basic comedic elements and when that happens, what was supposed to be funny instead calcifies into hate speech. In this, those who qualified to mobilise psycho-analysis to understand human behaviour would probably detect sadism fuelled by a deeply pathologised mind.
Hate speech disguised as comedy and aimed at the weak and poor also serves to expose the deficiencies of the kgotla. There is a tendency to oversell the merits of the kgotla system in order to create false nostalgia for a past that has ridden off into the sunset. However, for all its pretensions to virtue and as the case in point shows, the kgotla is not a place where all have equal democratic citizenship. Cases of leaders roasting ordinary people are well-documented but for reasons of job security, dikgosi never call the culprits to order. During the roasting, dikgosi would be inclined to cackle with glee a little too eagerly and if it comes down to it, would be awfully quick to offer silky defence for this wrongdoing. They know that having the audacity to say ‘no’ in a culture of ‘yes’ is not good for their civil service careers. However, by allowing its democratic promise to curdle this way, the kgotla fosters an environment where the emotional brutalisation of other citizens is tolerable.
