In the same village where the new president comes from, there lies at the Madiba Cemetery, the remains of a man who planted the seeds that germinated on November 2 – Dr. Kenneth Shololo Koma who died in 2007 and would have been 100 this year.
Koma’s introduction to leadership began not when he formed the Botswana National Front (BNF) in 1965. Instead, it began in the 1940s when, on Friday afternoons during the school term, he would lead a south-bound train of barefooted schoolchildren travelling to the Tshethong crop fields by way of the main footpath that led out of Serowe. As a contemporary of his recalled, the young Kenneth had a very strict rule: if he got tired and called a rest stop, everybody else had to take a breather. He would slap around those who dared disobey him. In later life, his insistence that people should move at his pace would create problems for both himself personally and for the BNF.
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