Mochudi

The rain pots, the novelist and the school on the hill

Kgosi Lentswe I became a Christian in 1892. He was also the tribe’s rainmaker, and he kept the tools. Isaac Schapera, who wrote the standard book on the subject, called the rain ceremonies the most important a Tswana chief took part in. Lentswe left his pots with his daughter Kgabyana. She was uneasy about having them. Schapera was then a young anthropologist who first came to the Bakgatla in 1929, so she handed them to him, and he put them on loan with the museum in Cape Town on a promise that the tribe could have them back whenever it asked.

It asked in the 1970s. John Speed, a district officer in Mochudi, wrote to Cape Town and a pot came north, but he parked it at the National Museum in Gaborone for safe keeping, and the National Museum then refused to let it go the last stretch up the road. Too valuable to risk in a village, it said. Sandy Grant, who ran the new museum on the hill, fired off one strong letter, then admitted he had nowhere secure to put the thing and went quiet until he had a proper cabinet for the rain pots of Lentswe and of the regent Isang. Schapera backed him from London in June 1978: the pot was tribal property and belonged in Mochudi. Five years later he passed on what Alec Campbell, the National Museum’s founder, had told him: the pot on show there was a replica and the real one was hidden away. The rainmaking horn that went with it had never been given to Schapera at all, and he had no idea where it had gone.

Whether the original is in the hilltop cabinet today I can’t tell you from the published record. Ask when you are up there.

The anthropologist with the Voigtlander

Schapera used a Voigtlander camera in Mochudi, and what he wrote down here fed his handbook of Tswana law, his study of rainmaking and Married Life in an African Tribe (1940). In 1984 Grant posted him some of the old prints to identify. One showed a lion hunter. People in the village said it was Moswetsi Kgakole. Schapera was fairly sure it was Klaas Segogwane of Mabalane, a man who turns up in the praise poems he had collected.

The letters he and Grant exchanged from 1968 to 1985 have been printed, and they are funny. In 1979 the magazine Kutlwano reviewed one of his books and called him “late”. He asked Grant to tell the editor that he was still alive, or had been on 3 March. He came back in 1980 for a tea party at the museum with people he had known half a century before. In October 1985 he flew out for an honorary degree in Gaborone and did not make it up the road to Mochudi. He died in 2003, aged 98.

A bench in Mafikeng

Linchwe II was in his mid-twenties and studying in Britain when the novelist Naomi Mitchison invited him to her house at Carradale in Scotland in 1960. In 1963, the year he was installed as kgosi, the two of them sat down side by side in the central square of segregated Mafikeng, on a bench marked for blacks only, until the police arrived with warnings. Grant, who knew them both, thought it was staged from start to finish. Linchwe told the tribe that she was his adopted mother. The Bakgatla called her Mmarona, “our mother”, and she kept the role of tribal adviser until 1989.

The old mission hands did not take to her. The Dutch Reformed mission had had the Bakgatla to itself for about 90 years and, by Grant’s account, it allowed no tennis on its court on Sundays and no ballroom dancing at all. Mitchison wrote about birth spacing and the joy of sex in the magazine Kutlwano, and got the horrified reaction she was fishing for. Her own book about those years is Return to the Fairy Hill (1966).

The Londoner who stayed

It was Mitchison who talked Linchwe into offering land for a transit centre for people fleeing apartheid, and the London activists behind it recruited a 26-year-old assistant editor, a publican’s son who had read history at Cambridge, to run it. That was Sandy Grant, at the end of 1963. The colonial government disliked the idea and the tribe agreed only once the refugee centre was paired with a community centre for the village. It opened at the end of 1964, in the middle of a drought that had started in 1962 and did not break until 1966, so its first real work was feeding people. A printing works, a night school and a tennis club came later.

Grant stayed in Botswana for the rest of his life. From 1975 he restored the abandoned school on Phuthadikobo, built the first road up to it, brought in water and power, and saw it open as a museum in 1977. Linchwe had revived bogwera by then, and the numbers show how it caught on: about 400 young men one year, 700 to 800 expected in 1982. Grant photographed the 1982 school with the chief’s permission and hung 81 of the pictures on the hill.

In 1981 the government let Linchwe shoot a lion so that the skin could be given to the visiting head of UNESCO. His first expedition found nothing and the second found one lion, after which he called for a five-year ban on killing them.

What has gone since

Grant’s photographs are now the record of a village that mostly isn’t there any more. They show ox wagons and “donkars”, the back half of an old bakkie pulled by donkeys, and thatched rondavels with decorated courtyard walls. He and Elinah Grant put the painted houses into a book, Decorated Homes in Botswana, in 1996, as block and tin were replacing them.

The Grants gave up the museum in 2007, the year Linchwe died, and Sandy wrote afterwards that it went downhill without them. His recording of the initiation songs, the only one in existence, ended up unplayable. He became a citizen in 1982 and died in 2021, aged 84.