cultural excursion, part 1

This weekend the international office took us on a “cultural excursion” to introduce us to some tradition beliefs, rituals and, most importantly, food.

We left on Saturday morning and went to a local village where we met the chief and some of his councilmen. They were so excited to teach us about their culture and to truly immerse us they held a mock wedding and a mock trial in the traditional style.

They needed volunteers for the mock wedding and so I offered. I was assigned the role of the bride’s uncle, which in real life would have meant negotiating the bride price and organizing the feast, but in the mock-up it just meant standing in the back with the rest of the “family”. The couple stood facing the chief and he asked the groom questions such as “how did you meet this woman?” and “what did you say to make her like you?” It was great to hear how the “groom” answered these questions on the spot.

You could tell the deputy chief wanted to spice things up and so next came a mock trial where my fellow Macalester student, Derek, played a townsman who was accused of beating his wife because she refused him sex. The chief, trying to get Derek to explicitly say that he had beat his wife for sex kept asking very leading questions but Derek, very diplomatically, kept saying things like “it was uncharacteristic of me”, “I was drunk”, “it won’t happen again” and he managed to avoid a direct answer. Though he didn’t avoid teases from the students for the rest of weekend about being a wife beater.

Throughout all of this I couldn’t help but notice the contrast that was present between the modern and the traditional. As we sat through an enthusiastic rendition of a very traditional ceremony under a traditional thatched-roof hut, councilmen were almost continuously stepping out to answer their cell phones. I wonder what the elders of generations passed would have had to say about that. Also, although we were in a hut with hand carved chairs and a fire pit in the center, there were fluorescent bulbs lining the ceiling and a telephone jack on one of the posts.

I suppose this contrast may reflect some of the overriding forces that have shaped Botswana’s history. While Botswana (then called Bechuanaland) was a British protectorate, the British took little interest in the area as no natural resources had been discovered and the land was not near the ocean or even a river running to the ocean. Due to the lack of settlement, Bechuanaland was made up of isolated villages and there was no main town, let alone capital, well into the 20^th century. However, as Botswana gained independence in 1966 and then discovered a rich source of diamonds the following year, the country was rushed into modernity.

The government that was established was blessed with seeming unlimited riches from the diamond mines and the capital city began growing quickly. Traditional villages would have seen rapid changes as the young generations went into town to study and people would have supplemented traditional healers with hospitals and pharmaceuticals. The villages would have had no choice but to adopt modern innovations and the changes would have happened so fast that the contrasts that now exist would have been hard to avoid.

Our next stop was the local dam. In my studies, it has seemed that whenever I have read about a dam in a developing country it has been in a negative sense. Whether it is displacing homes, removing farmland, or negative ecological impacts, dams usually show up in the column of what went wrong. But the people of this village are proud of their dam, even show respect for it as no one swims in the water due to a mythical snake that inhabits the deepest part of lake.

The lake created by the dam was, unfortunately, rimmed with broken beer bottles and litter floated in the shallows. The scene created another contrast (unfortunately a theme in Botswana) between the expansive, tranquil lake set among foothills lined with the greenest trees and the thoughtless, distracting trash along the shore. I tried to think of how the problem could be solved, but the real issue is the mentality of the people, and short of changing that I don’t know if there is much to do (maybe put out more trash bins?).

It looks like the weekend excursion will be split over a few posts, as I’ve only made it up to lunchtime of the first day. Look for more soon.

Rice with chicken, beef stew, carrots and hot sauce, washed down with a Fanta, followed by a scoop of ice cream for lunch…

p.s. The title of the last post is a lyric from a song called “Lesson Learned” by one of my favorite artists. Can you name the artist? First person to leave a comment or an email with the write answer gets special mention in the next post. (No Googling or you-tubing it; though guesses are welcome)