One would assume that there is no need to make a case for history – that a case for history was obvious to everyone. However, from the opinions that have been expressed by some people we would thought they knew better it is clear that we must restate why history matters. To the question why history matters, Professor Penelope J Corfield’s response is: “The answer is that History is inescapable. It studies the past and the legacies of the past in the present. Far from being a ‘dead’ subject, it connects things through time and encourages its students to take a long view of such connections. All people and peoples are living histories. To take a few obvious examples: communities speak languages that are inherited from the past. They live in societies with complex cultures, traditions and religions that have not been created on the spur of the moment. People use technologies that they have not themselves invented. … So, understanding the linkages between past and present is absolutely basic for a good understanding of the condition of being human. That, in a nutshell, is why History matters. It is not just ‘useful’, it is essential.”
I am no historian, but I am a lexicographer. In the last ten years working with historians, in particular my friend Fred Morton, I have felt that the teaching of History must be made compulsory in our schools. In particular, I have felt that we need to make Botswana history compulsory to all Batswana from a very early age. If you want to enslave and subjugate people, you need to teach them that they have no history, that their ancestors were cave people swinging from one tree to another; that they didn’t invent anything; that they won no battles; that their composite way of life was nothing until you, their colonizer, came on the horizon to lift them from the abyss. Sir Seretse Khama had an excellent grasp of this problem. That is why he said: “We were taught, sometimes in a very positive way, to despise ourselves and our ways of life. We were made to believe that we had no past to speak of, no history to boast of. The past, so far as we were concerned, was just a blank and nothing more. Only the present mattered and we had very little control over it. It seemed we were in for a definite period of foreign tutelage, without any hope of our ever again becoming our own masters. The end result of all this was that our self-pride and our self-confidence were badly undermined. It should now be our intention to try to retrieve what we can of our past. We should write our own history books to prove that we did have a past, and that it was a past that was just as worth writing and learning about as any other. We must do this for the simple reason that a nation without a past is a lost nation, and a people without a past is a people without a soul.”
No self-respecting society undermines the teaching and research of its own history. We must continue to push the envelope into Artificial Intelligence, Engineering, Financial literacy and other such areas. While we do so, let us do so while we provide our children with a solid grounding of their own history. Without an understanding of our own history the national “self-pride and self-confidence” will be crushed forever. We will go into a competitive world rudderless – likely to be blown away by the eastern and western winds. History “is essential for ‘rooting’ people in time” and this is critical because “people who feel themselves to be rootless live rootless lives, often causing a lot of damage to themselves and others in the process.”
Without History, the story of how this land was defended and fought for is lost – we would merely live in the now and now with no knowledge of how we came to be where we are. History constantly reminds us that Kgosi Sechele of the Bakwena, the famous Ramokonopi, in collaboration with other merafe of the Bangwaketse, Bakgatla, Batshweneng, Bakaa and Bakgatla mounted a fierce defence of the Tswana state at the breast shaped hills of Dimawe in 1852, a stone’s throw away from Manyana. People died in that battle. We must never forget the battle at Dithubaruba of 1826 where Kgosi Sebego of the Bangwaketse “with cowhide shields, spears and battle-axes surrounded the village,” and at dawn, defeated the Bakololo and chased them out of the Bakwena capital, restoring the Dithubaruba to its rightful owners. We cannot forget how Sebego in 1833 defeated the Matebele at Dutlwe chasing them from the Ngwaketse land. Who can forget how the heavily armed Bangwato warriors defeated the Ndebeles in 1844 in Shoshong? We are the sons and daughters of fierce warriors. History teaches us that in 1895 the three dikgosi: Kgosikgolo Kgosi Bathoen I, Kgosikgolo Kgosi Khama III and Kgosikgolo Sebele I went to England to object to Bechuanaland being administered under Cecil John Rhodes’s company British South Africa Company. Their campaign was successful, and Bechuanaland remained a British protectorate. So, we are proud of our History. We are proud of the revolutionary work of Kgosi Tshekedi and Kgosi Bathoen II.
We are inspired by those who walked this soil before us. We are inspired by Khama the great and Tshekedi whose voice reverberates from Serowe, Pilikwe to Tiger Kloof. Our soil is soaked by the rolling poetry of Sekokotla Kaboeamodimo in Gangwaketse, Kgomotso Mokane in Gammangwato and Rabojalwa in Mokwena. In this soil of ours are the melodies of Ratsie Setlhako, Speech Madimabe, Stampore and Andries Bok. This soil carries stories of a hardworking people thrust by history into a harsh and an unforgiving land. It narrates a story of how they were able to hew out for themselves a most glorious future out of the rocky and sandy plains.
History is therefore essential for our understanding, not just of the past, but of the future. We are more likely to repeat mistakes of the past if we ignore how similar matters were handled in the past. At the heart of our progress, we must inculcate in our children an appreciation of their history. History is at the heart of movies, historical novels, our dictionaries, tourism and business itself. To marginalize history from our curriculum would be in the words of Sir Seretse Khama tantamount to sucking the soul out of our nation.
