Death in a Church of Life: Moral Passion during Botswana’s Time of AIDS 9780520945845

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Note on Pronunciation and Orthography
Introduction: Moral Passion in Suffering and Faith
One. Whose Child?
Two. “Go with Me to Babylon” . The Domestication of Inequality
Three. “Cleansing the Spirit”. The Bodiliness of Sentiment and Faith
Four. “Spirit, Follow the Voice!”. Voice and the Making of Intersubjectivities
Five. “It Is All Right as Long as We Feel Sorrow”. Care for and by the Dying
Six. “You Must Not Look Back”. Civility in the Place of Death
Conclusion. Putting Love into Words
Appendix One
Appendix Two
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

Death in a Church of Life

t h e a n t h ro p o lo g y o f c h r i s t i a n i t y Edited by Joel Robbins 1. Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter, by Webb Keane 2. A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church, by Matthew Engelke 3. Reason to Believe: Cultural Agency in Latin American Evangelicalism, by David Smilde 4. Chanting Down the New Jerusalem: Calypso, Christianity, and Capitalism in the Caribbean, by Francio Guadeloupe 5. In God’s Image: The Metaculture of Fijian Christianity, by Matt Tomlinson 6. Converting Words: Maya in the Age of the Cross, by William F. Hanks 7. City of God: Christian Citizenship in Postwar Guatemala, by Kevin O’Neill 8. Death in a Church of Life: Moral Passion during Botswana’s Time of AIDS, by Frederick Klaits 9. Eastern Christians in Anthropological Perspective, edited by Chris Hann and Hermann Goltz

Death in a Church of Life m o r a l pa s s i o n d u r i n g b ots wa n a’s time of aids

Frederick Klaits

university of california press berkeley

los angeles

london

An online audio annex for this title is available at www .ucpress.edu/9780520259669. Portions of Chapters 1 and 4 and the Conclusion of this book have previously appeared in F. Klaits, “Faith and the Intersubjectivity of Care in Botswana,” Africa Today 56:1 (2009). Reprinted by permission of Indiana University Press. University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2010 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Klaits, Frederick–. Death in a church of life : moral passion during Botswana’s time of AIDS / Frederick Klaits. p. cm. — (The anthropology of Christianity, 8) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978–0-520–25965–2 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978–0-520–25966–9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. AIDS (Disease)—Patients—Pastoral counseling of—Botswana. 2. AIDS (Disease)—Religious aspects— Christianity. 3. Church work with the sick—Botswana. I. Title. BV4460.7.K53 2010 261.8'3219697920096883—dc22 2009009151 Manufactured in the United States of America 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on Cascades Enviro 100, a 100% post consumer waste, recycled, de-inked fiber. FSC recycled certified and processed chlorine free. It is acid free, Ecologo certified, and manufactured by BioGas energy.

i n m e m o ry o f M m a M a i pe lo ( 1 9 4 7 – 2 0 0 6 )

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l i s t o f i l lu s t r at i o n s / i x a c k n ow l e d g m e n t s / x i n o t e o n p r o n u n c i at i o n a n d o rt h o g r a p h y / xv

introduction: m o r a l pa s s i o n i n s u f f e r i n g a n d f a i t h / 1 one

/ w h o s e c h i l d ? / 37

t w o / “g o w i t h m e t o b a b y l o n” : t h e d o m e s t i c at i o n o f i n e q u a l i t y / 8 2

/ “c l e a n s i n g t h e s p i r i t ” : t h e b o d i l i n e s s o f s e n t i m e n t a n d fa i t h / 122 three

/ “s p i r i t , f o l l ow t h e v o i c e ! ” : voice and the making o f i n t e r s u b j e c t i v i t i e s / 163

four

/ “it is all right a s l o n g a s w e f e e l s o r r ow ” : c a r e f o r a n d b y t h e d y i n g / 213 five

s i x / “y o u m u s t n o t l o o k b a c k” : c i v i l i t y i n t h e p l a c e o f d e at h / 2 4 6

c o n c lu s i o n : p u t t i n g l o v e i n t o w o r d s / 2 7 9

a p pe n d i x o n e / 289 a p pe n d i x t wo / 297 n ot e s / 305 r e f e r e n c e s / 325 i n d e x / 343

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i l lu s t r at i o n s

maps 1. Map of Botswana / 41 2. Map of Gaborone and Environs / 92 f i g u re s 1. Plan of the compound containing the Baitshepi Church, June 1993 / 104 2. Plan of the Baitshepi Church / 149 3. Vocal Genres of Asking and Calling Names / 190 4. Poloko’s Family / 269 ta b l e Expenses and Contributions at a Funeral / 253

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a c k n ow l e d g m e n t s

Over the course of the decade and a half in which this project has absorbed my energies, I have had numerous occasions to reflect on the intellectual contributions and warm support of many friends (as well as on their long-suffering patience). As Bishop MmaMaipelo told me, our voices build within one another, and it is a pleasure for me to reflect on this fact here. I look back with great fondness at my time as a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. Those transformative years were made deeply pleasurable by a warm intellectual community. Sara Berry has helped to guide this project with incisive advice and continual encouragement from its very first incoherent beginnings. The same is true of my dissertation advisor, Gillian Feeley-Harnik, who not only combined close, thorough readings with inspiring vision but helped me through many difficult moments. While conducting fieldwork, it was my privilege to have been a visiting scholar at the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Botswana. I would like to thank James Amanze, Obed Kealotswe, Leslie Nthoi, and Jerry Walsh for many excellent discussions and much camaraderie. I am particularly grateful to have had the opportunity to present my work at a seminar organized by the department; questions asked by students on that occasion continue to challenge me. Also in Botswana, I had the pleasure of meeting Suzette Heald, whom I would like to thank for xi

much helpful advice on directions to pursue in fieldwork. Suzette has been a careful reader and an inspiring colleague. I was extremely fortunate, through my participation in local churches, to have made connections with Mennonite Ministries–Botswana. Mennonite missionaries in Gaborone opened their hearts, homes, and office space to Laura and me. We are particularly grateful to Rudy and Sharon Dirks, and to Erwin and Angela Rempel, for looking after us before and following the birth of our son Adam. For much hospitality, we would also like to thank Erica Thiessen, and Bryan and Teresa Born. I have had the pleasure as well of consulting with Don Rempel Boschman, Bryan Born, Rudy Dirks, and Eugene Thieszen, whose extensive experience with churches of the spirit helped orient me. I have benefited from the advice of many readers who have generously devoted their energies to helping me come to clarity. For their thoughtful comments, I would like to thank Eytan Bercovitch, Bryan Born, Bianca Dahl, Hansjörg Dilger, Ørnulf Gulbrandsen, Angelique Haugerud, Barrie Klaits, Joseph Klaits, Constance Nathanson, Joel Robbins, Dennis Rusché, Laura Rusche, Dan Segal, Jacqueline Solway, and Pnina Werbner, as well as an anonymous reviewer for the University of California Press. Michael Herzfeld made an early suggestion regarding the issue of care that emerged as key to the entire project. I wish to thank Mieka Ritsema for providing me with materials on urban housing policies in Botswana, and Marion Carter for directing me to sources on HIV testing rates. The Thompson Writing Program at Duke University has provided a supportive and collegial environment for the final stages of revision. I would particularly like to thank my colleagues Erik Harms and Marcia Rego for their careful readings. The files contained in the online audio annex were edited and remastered at The Kitchen Studios, Inc., Carrboro, North Carolina. I would also like to thank Stan Holwitz and Caroline Knapp at the University of California Press, and the copy editor, Peter Dreyer, for the care and attention they have devoted to the manuscript. I wish to extend very special thanks to three colleagues who have worked extensively in Botswana: Deborah Durham, Julie Livingston, and Richard Werbner. The influence of each of these extraordinary scholars on my own thinking is readily apparent throughout this book. I have had the great pleasure of carrying out sustained exchanges with Debbie Durham, especially on the subject of funerals, about which we have co-authored an article published in the Journal of Southern African Studies. Dick Werbner has been an inspiring mentor and a key interlocutor on subjects ranging from civility to housing to religious movements. Julie Livingston has been a close colleague xii

acknowledgments

and friend since our days spent learning Setswana together. Julie and I have been engaged in a long conversation with one another, and she has been an exemplary reader. Le ka moso! I began studying the Setswana language in 1991, in a one-year course taught by Julie Croston and Sheila Mmusi at Boston University, and continued in Baltimore during 1994–96 with Mercy Bothojwame Conlon. All my language teachers have my deepest appreciation. More formal thanks are due to my funders. My initial Setswana language training was funded by a Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowship from the U.S. Department of Education. I carried out preliminary research in Gaborone in 1993 with a grant from the Global Institute in Culture, Power, and History and the Department of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University. My fieldwork during 1997–98 was supported by grants from the Joint Committee on Africa of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies, with funds provided by the Rockefeller Foundation; and from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation provided a dissertation writing fellowship in 1999. I carried out this research with the kind permission of the Botswana Government, Office of the President. Unfortunately, I cannot thank the people with whom I lived in Botswana by their actual names. Nothing one writes is commensurate with the debts one incurs during fieldwork. All the same, they will be pleased to know that I have come to understand the importance of putting love into words. My wife, Laura Rusche, a molecular biologist, and I have shared every stage of this project, including the fieldwork. I will refrain from enumerating the qualities she has brought to bear, except one—extraordinary patience. To Laura and our sons Adam and Nathan, thanks for everything.

acknowledgments

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n o t e o n p r o n u n c i at i o n a n d o rt h o g r a p h y

I have adapted the following rough guide to Setswana pronunciation from Suggs 2002:xvii. vowe l s a—resembles the short o in English, as in pot e – denotes both the high tone resembling the long a in the English late, and the low tone resembling the short e in the English met i – resembles the long e in English, as in feel o—resembles the long o in English, as in pole u – resembles the long u in English, as in flute c o n s o n a n ts g – resembles the ch in the Scottish loch kg – resembles the Setswana g consonant, but has a rougher aspiration made by the preceding k sound mm – resembles the m in English, but held for a longer duration xv

ng – resembles the ng in the English word thing nn – resembles the n in English, but held for a longer duration rr – resembles the rolled r in Spanish, but held for a longer duration th – resembles the English t, but aspirated tl – an explosive alveolar consonant, made by bringing the tongue against the teeth at the sides of the mouth tlh – resembles the Setswana tl, but aspirated tsh – resembles the English ts, as in pets, but aspirated The following are approximate pronunciations of some words that appear commonly in the text: Baitshepi—ba-ee-TSE-pee Gaborone—kha-bo-RO-nay Maipelo—ma-ee-PEH-lo Readers familiar with Setswana will notice that in most instances I have transcribed hymns printed in the Sesotho (South Sotho) hymnbook Lifela tsa Sione according to standard Setswana rather than Sesotho orthography. For instance, I write “Se mphete wena yo o rategang” (Do not bypass me, beloved one) instead of “Se mphete uen’a ratehang.” In so doing, I have followed the example of Baitshepi members, who transcribe these hymns in this fashion themselves. On the other hand, I have conserved Sesotho orthography when it seems clear to me that church members are codeswitching, for instance, when they say “Ho lokile!” (It is all right!) rather than the Setswana equivalent “Go siame!” I use conventional anthropological shorthand for kinship relations: M = mother, F = father, S = son, D = daughter, B = brother, Z = sister, y = younger, o = older.

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p ro n u n c i at i o n a n d o rt h o g r a ph y

i n t ro d u c t i o n

Moral Passion in Suffering and Faith

a girl named one tshukudu had been living well, as they say in Botswana. “I had all the good things in life,” she told a reporter from a local newspaper in 1998.1 An only child, One (pronounced OH-nay) had “loving parents and a caring aunt, who stayed with the family” in the village of Kanye. Then in 1995, when One was ten years old, her father died, followed two months later by her mother. “When I came back from school, I saw my mother in bed. I tried to wake her up but she could not answer. My aunt came over, took a look at her before we took her to the hospital where she was certified dead.” After a few months, “it became clear that the love that my aunt once had for me was dead. She scolded me at every opportunity. Whatever was demanded at school, no one was there to help me. So when she told me to quit school and look for a job, I had no choice.” One’s aunt’s “love” for her had likely diminished because the aunt had children of her own to support and resented the drain on her resources. One began a period of “moving from one house to another, looking for a job and a roof over her head.” She worked as a housemaid for uncertain wages, surviving on “handouts” from her employers. When she tried to return to her aunt, “she showed no signs of ever knowing me. She said I should go and try somewhere else. She stressed that I could not stay in the house because she wanted to rent it.”

1

While working in the village of Molepolole in a job for which she received less than her promised wages, One visited the Family of God Church and related her story to Pastor Keolopile Keipegetse. The pastor made an agreement with One’s aunt that he would “take the girl and bring her to the church’s house where the church could take care of her.” One is quoted as saying, “I am once again living a happy life, thanks to the moral and material support the church is giving me.” Not all orphans in Botswana have suffered from a lack of “love,” as the experiences of a girl named Keletso suggest. On the day her mother was buried in December 1997, when Keletso was eleven years old, some of her father’s kinswomen who attend a local church tied a blue string around her neck to show that her parent had passed away. Some say that the string—along with other measures such as cutting the hair, and smearing the legs and arms with Vaseline—helps a bereaved person “give up,” so that she will not “think too much” about the death of her parent. If you do not “give up,” you may begin to “speak with your heart,” a dangerous and sometimes fatal condition of depression. In addition, your sorrows may lead you to wonder who is responsible for causing the death of your parent, child, or other kin, and cease to love that person. When a teenage child goes about smiling at the funeral of a parent, older adults may comment approvingly, “She’s given up,” since she is showing that she is not “thinking too much.” Although Keletso is an orphan, her circumstances were not as difficult as One’s because she was able to retain the love of her immediate kin and to remain at home with them. This book describes efforts made by members of a healing church based in a high-density urban neighborhood of Gaborone, the capital of the Republic of Botswana, to sustain love in the context of the widespread illness and death brought about by the catastrophic AIDS pandemic. I do not know whether One’s parents and Keletso’s mother died of AIDS. It is clear, however, that AIDS caused tremendous numbers of deaths in Botswana during the late 1990s. UNAIDS estimates that out of a total national population of 1.6 million, about 24,000 adults and children died of HIV/AIDS in the single year 1999, while 35.8 percent of all persons between the ages of 15 and 50 were infected with HIV.2 The introduction of government programs in 2002 to make antiretroviral medications available to all adults has altered the implications of receiving an HIV-positive diagnosis, but has unfortunately not put an end to the large-scale mortality associated with the disease. For many people in Botswana, the wide range of problems that AIDS poses—how to provide for the sick and for survivors, how to treat 2

introduction

the ill, how to conduct sexual relations, how to understand and speak about the nature and causes of disease, how to mourn the dead—are problems of love. As far as One was concerned, for instance, her sufferings stemmed not only from the deaths of her parents but from the fact that the love her aunt had once had for her was dead. In tying the blue string around Keletso’s neck, her elder relatives gave her love by showing that they continued to regard her as their child. In both cases, members of local churches saw it as their duty to ensure that love would be sustained. One of my aims in this study is to understand how Christian religious commitments to love in contemporary Botswana shape the ways in which people care for one another at a time of widespread sickness and death. I begin, therefore, with an account of the meanings and usages of love and related concepts in the Setswana language. (Setswana is the majority language in Botswana, and also denotes Tswana culture or tradition. Batswana are the majority ethnic group in Botswana. The term “Batswana” is also commonly used in reference to all citizens of Botswana regardless of ethnicity.) love a n d j e a lo u s y, c a re a n d s c o r n

In Setswana usage, love (lerato) is action and sentiment directed toward enhancing the well-being of other people. A loving person has “compassion” and “patience” (bopelotelele, literally, long-heartedness), bearing with the faults of others so that they too will “feel love” ( go utlwa lerato) for one another. Many Batswana speak of God (Modimo) and of Jesus as sources of love, whether or not they are in the habit of attending a church. I once asked a woman who attended church intermittently what she thought God was. She replied, “If I ask you for money and you give it to me out of love, you are God.” Describing a very similar concept of love (orusuvero) among the Herero ethnic minority in Botswana, Deborah Durham points out that love and related sentiments “operate across bodily space; they work in the heart of one person and in the bodies of others” (2002:159, typo corrected). For example, when people are sick, they depend on the love of caregivers, who hear their complaints with patience, devote scarce resources to them, and say prayers for their recovery. Prayers and hymns communicate love from the bodies of the well to the bodies of the ill, who say that the loving sentiments in other people’s “hearts” (dipelo) “cool them down” (go fodisa) while they are lying wrapped “in blankets that dry them out” (mo diphateng tse di tšhesang)—a conventional Setswana phrase describing the position and posture of the sick. Love is something people moral passion in suffering and faith

3

do as well as feel, since it involves communicating what is in one’s own heart and body to those of others. Care (tlhokomelo) is closely linked to love but is more focused on material provision. Sending a portion of one’s cash wages to other family members and giving them gifts are acts of care. A young woman spending the day at home with her infant daughter insisted to me, “I’m not taking care of my baby. It’s my mother who is taking care of both of us, because she is working for a wage.” Dependents may care for the well-being of their providers as well, through various forms of work. “I’m taking care of my older brother’s car,” said a school-age girl scrubbing the new vehicle of a cousin (MMyZS) on whom she was dependent.3 She spoke of him as her older brother, rather than in terms of the more distant relation of parallel cousin, in light of having taken notice of his needs, and acting and feeling so as to provide for him with her caring labor. While care is an act of provision, it is often discussed in relation to feeling, and vice versa. Relatives often comment on one another’s care by speaking about their feelings as well as their deeds. For instance, a middle-aged woman who depends on the earnings of her husband told me that it is possible to care for people without loving them, and to love them without caring for them. “If someone gives you money to buy food, but does so in a contemptuous way, you will be cared for but not loved. On the other hand, you can give people love [go fa batho lerato] in many ways other than giving them money.” Another woman whose unpredictable income derives from selling second-hand clothes told me, “My brother has compassion on [ go tlhomogela pelo, literally, plucks out his heart for] me and my children,” meaning that he cares for her by giving her cash. This person spoke of care as a matter of compassionate feeling as much as of material provision. Scorn ( go sotla), the opposite of care, is likewise both an act and a manner of feeling. Scorn connotes contempt, as in common English usage, and also refusal to recognize legitimate needs. The complaint “We are being scorned!” (Re a sotlega!) is a very common one. A father may rebuke a child for not bringing food he has asked for by telling her “I am being scorned,” shaming the child by implying that she is “refusing” (go gana) her parent’s requests rather than “obeying” or “hearing” (go utlwa) them. Hospital staff are often said to scorn their patients when they speak rudely and impatiently to them, refusing to acknowledge their wishes. In general terms, talk about “being scorned” personalizes relations that contribute to material want and physical illness. Scorn injures the body. One of the most frequently used Setswana terms for suffering, tshotlego, literally means be4

introduction

ing scorned, so that a common way of saying “we are poor” is “we are being scorned.” When complaining about someone’s scorn, people are apt to say, “He does not know God.” The antithesis of love is lefufa, a term that Setswana speakers usually render in English as “jealousy.” Jealousy connotes not only envy of other people’s possessions, but a predisposition to resent slights on the part of those who should show care and love. It makes people resentful, selfish, and “yellow-hearted” (pelotshetla), rather than “long-hearted” and patient with others, or “white-hearted” (pelotshweu) and kind. Because the consequences are extremely disruptive, the propensity to jealousy is felt to be a great evil. Jealous people are well known to kill others through witchcraft (boloi ). Furthermore, jealousy tends to be self-reinforcing. “I’ve seen that jealous people don’t live well,” one church leader told me, because their demands and resentments drive others physically away, so that they live with few people to care for them and consequently become poor. In their more cynical moods, people may quote the proverb “Jealousy is cooked together with the voice; when the voice emerges, jealousy remains behind.” That is, once jealous words are spoken, the speaker remains jealous; there is no way, people say dismissively, to take jealousy out of a person. Jealousy is an ever-present threat to both bodies and relationships. “Jealousy brings dikgaba on a person” is a common saying. The term dikgaba often refers specifically to illnesses, usually of small children, brought on by the sorrow or anger of an elder or ancestor (Schapera 1934; Lambek and Solway 2001). The implication of the saying is that a jealous person acts in ways that cause pain to others, thereby angering her ancestors, who deny her protection against misfortunes and may permit the death of her child. I found that people also sometimes held comparatively young parents responsible for the sicknesses and deaths of children by dikgaba. Usually those who attributed an illness to dikgaba would blame parents for feeling resentment. For instance, a woman might attribute her spouse’s death to her mother-in-law’s anger over the man’s unwillingness to support his parent with his wages. Alternatively, parents may be blamed for feeling shame; for example, a mother might say that her infant’s illness was caused by the embarrassment her spouse felt over not giving the mother and baby food or diapers. Dikgaba indexes a complex field of blame, shame, and justifiable or unjustifiable wrath, all of which are likely consequences of jealousy. A key point about these sentiments is their relationality. A person’s care, love, scorn, and jealousy all influence the physical well-being of others by communicating the quality of his or her “heart” (pelo). Thus, care and love moral passion in suffering and faith

5

enhance people’s potential over the long term, while scorn and jealousy curtail it. Love and care for others ideally enable them to prosper, bear and beget children, build houses, grow fat, overcome illness, and accumulate wealth. Scorn and jealousy, on the other hand, reduce people to material want, make them sick, diminish their capacity to provide for their children, and eventually kill them. Furthermore, one’s sentiments are not entirely one’s own; they are shaped by those of others, and influence them in turn. Thus, the love “given” ( go fiwa) by a person may evoke love on the part of those who “receive” (go amogela), “see” (go bona), or “hear” or “feel” (go utlwa) it. This vocabulary— of giving and receiving, of making visible and audible, and of purposeful hearing—underscores the performative nature of these sentiments. A person is said to “have love” ( go na le lerato) because of what he or she does in order to enhance the well-being of others—giving, building, feeding, dressing, washing, nursing. By the same token, such actions are evaluated in terms of what they indicate about the love or jealousy in the hearts of those who perform them. When speaking about the importance of prayer, hymn singing, and other forms of religious commitment, church members in Botswana commonly insist that faith (tumelo) in God helps to foster love in oneself and in other people. Regardless of their religious commitment, Batswana routinely confront questions of who has loved, cared for, scorned, or been jealous of whom in determining how to provide for family members with acute or debilitating illnesses, how to look after survivors, and how to mourn the dead. In the remainder of this introduction, I consider why suffering and care tend to be conceived in such personalized, as distinct from normalized, terms within the popular imagination in Botswana today, and why guiding one’s own and others’ sentiments and conduct toward love may be understood as a matter of urgency, indeed as a ground of religious faith. According to T. O. Beidelman, conceiving how “the ways one’s life and society have led to what one is” is an act of moral imagination, which may contribute to “a kind of empathy or sympathy built up under the assumption that others are of like mind and experience,” or alternatively to a “self-poisoning of the mind” that makes others seem “monstrous, evil, [or] alien” (1993 [1986]: 9). Following Beidelman, I suggest that moral passion may be construed as the efforts people make to shape their own and others’ moral imaginations; in other words, as the work they devote to molding one another’s sense of decency, danger, culpability, interdependence, estrangement, fear, or love.4 6

introduction

love a s m e t h o d

In June 1993, following my first year of graduate school in anthropology, I arrived for a short period of research in Old Naledi, a community of about 30,000 people that began during the 1960s as a squatter settlement on the outskirts of Gaborone. I intended to explore marriage practices in the context of government housing policies aimed at defining legitimate access to resources among kin. At a certain point, I fell in with a young woman who was going to visit a friend staying in a compound where a hand-painted metal sign placed above the hedge and wire fence lining the yard read “Baitshepi Apostolic Church” (not its actual name).5 At the time, I was feeling lonely and frustrated by conducting interviews at random, and I wanted to find a place where I could be more of a participant. I therefore returned the next day and asked the bishop, MmaMaipelo,6 for a room in her compound where I could stay for a few weeks. Fortunately, there was a vacant room. In return, I purchased food at a local supermarket for church members living in the yard. Over the course of brief return visits in 1995, 2000, 2005, 2006, and an extended period of research during 1997–98 (twenty-five months in total), church leaders have welcomed me and my wife, Laura Rusche, with great enthusiasm to their services, and graciously put up with my impertinent questions while I struggled to understand in Setswana what they were teaching me about the word of God. They welcomed me to make audio recordings of their services, and often played copies of these recordings for themselves. However, I was never allowed to take photographs or make videos of services, because they were troubled by the thought of my standing behind a camera while others prayed. Realizing moreover that I was writing about the stigmatizing disease of AIDS, they have asked me to preserve their privacy by refraining from publishing photographs of members and from using their real names or the real name of the church. Over the years, I have sent Baitshepi leaders what I have written about their church, and have benefited from their advice—mainly, that I should say as much as possible about love. After I sent them the dissertation (2002) upon which this book is based, they let me know, in the nicest possible way, that I should say more about God as well. This book explores the moral terrain of love, jealousy, care, and scorn from the specific vantage point of close involvement with a senior woman, MmaMaipelo, who aimed to extend maternal love to members of her church so that they would “give love” in turn. This approach has set moral passion in suffering and faith

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Baitshepi apart from churches in which more stress is placed on protection against occult attack and the dangers of pollution (see R. Werbner 2008). Yet Baitshepi shares with other churches of the spirit (dikereke tsa semoya) an appeal based on bringing participants’ sentiments to bear on one another’s bodies in ways that enhance well-being. Many people, especially women, attend multiple churches over the course of their lives in efforts to find healing. Beyond healing bodily ailments, churches provide essential support networks for the poor in times of emergency, for instance through burial assistance. Church leaders receive gifts from better-off followers and give material support to those in need on an informal basis. Churches may also provide followers with places to stay when they have disagreements with their relatives, as in One Tshukudu’s case. More broadly, people speak of prayer as an important way of helping one another, since verbal requests made to Jesus place church members under divine shelter ( pabalelo) and enable them to receive blessings (ditshegofatso). Finally, church leaders preside at all funerals, which demand that everyone connected to the deceased “show love” in a public forum. Church leaders’ actions and speech at funerals, and their efforts to treat the bereaved, may thus affect the sentiments of a wide range of people. Members of Baitshepi see providing love as the core of their mission of healing and moral renewal. They “build up” (go agela) one another’s love principally by means of their voices, relying on prayers—words of love— to heal their afflictions. Thus, Bishop MmaMaipelo first preached to me about God by telling me of the power of the voice. The act of preaching the word of God, MmaMaipelo told me, physically attracts people whose love makes them willing to hear it. For many Baitshepi members, hearing the word is a matter of becoming “spiritual children” of MmaMaipelo, whom they call their “spiritual parent.” Baitshepi leaders commonly contrast such “spiritual” kinship to “fleshly” relations, epitomized by unreliable kin who have scorned them in times of suffering. Thus, hearing the word of God gives rise to sentiments of love and care and to new forms of relatedness. Drawing followers from multiple places of origin in the Tswanadominated southeastern part of the country, and in a few instances from further afield, Baitshepi brings together persons who would otherwise be strangers in the multi-ethnic city of Gaborone. During one of my first visits with MmaMaipelo, I was challenged to produce a difficult Bible passage for her to explain. I chose John 18:37–38: “Jesus answered . . . ‘Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice.’ Pilate said to him, ‘What is truth?’ ”7 I confess that I read this passage aloud with 8

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some smugness, for with my bourgeois-academic, agnostic Jewish background, I had always considered Pilate’s question unanswerable. MmaMaipelo exclaimed, “The truth, Kagiso!8 The truth is love!” The immediate lesson I drew from this exchange was that I could not hope to “hear” the voices of others if I made no attempt to love, but instead maintained an attitude of flippancy or sanctimoniousness made possible by my own privilege. Hence I made an effort, with uncertain success, to allow myself to be converted to Apostolic Christianity. I took an active part in church services and other activities, was given a church uniform, and eventually found that I was able to sing and preach in the spirit. (Dancing, however, was always beyond me.) For their part, Baitshepi leaders soon became aware of my secular humanism (although they did not have a term for it) and realized that I did not, and perhaps could not, fully share their convictions. Yet instead of expelling Laura and me from the church, they continued to welcome us despite our differences. Susan Harding shows that her own fieldwork in a fundamental Baptist community in rural Virginia brought her close to conversion because she made a point of listening with an open mind to stories about conversion. She suggests that “anything that makes you more likely to listen, including the work of ethnography, is . . . what makes you susceptible” to conversion. “You do not believe in the sense of public declarations, but you gradually come to respond to, and interpret, and act in the world as if you were a believer” (Harding 2000:57–58). Something akin to Harding’s experience happened to me. Over the course of my involvement in Baitshepi, I became aware that my acts of asking, giving, listening, and preaching had involved me in relations of care, love, and spiritual kinship with the church network, and that these relations crucially shaped the academic project in which I was engaged. MmaMaipelo and other Baitshepi leaders very much wanted me to believe in God and to agree with their teachings about the spirit (dithuto tsa semoya), but I think that my love was, and remains, even more important to them. “Why do you think you came to Botswana?” MmaMaipelo asked me early in our acquaintance. “Because people here loved you and called you here before they even knew you.” Perhaps she was right, in the sense that what I did during my fieldwork may not have been entirely of my own choosing. Church members perceived my eagerness to spend time with them not only as an indication of my love for them but as reflecting how their own love had so influenced my sentiments and actions as to make me into a spiritual child of the church. Given that for Baitshepi members, love moral passion in suffering and faith

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has implied visiting MmaMaipelo regularly and devoting much time to church, my ethnographic pursuits of uncritical listening and prolonged hanging out were very much akin to their own acts of love. In other words, my love consisted of what I did as much as of what I felt. For this reason, it is possible to consider love as method, in the sense that my actions and sentiments shaped my views on what constituted the objects of my study. Specifically, the Baitshepi Church came to be a primary lens through which I saw issues of care and faith, simply by virtue of the fact that I spent so much of my time there. As a result, my approach is more contextual than properly comparative or historical, and the thematic trajectory of this book is driven more by love than by AIDS. My aim is not to argue that Baitshepi’s arrangements are necessarily “typical.” In some respects, its arrangements are not typical even of other churches of the spirit in the area, for instance in its leaders’ opposition to divination. Rather, my principal aim is to specify the particularity of Baitshepi Church members’ own methods of loving, so as to grasp the broader processes and practices whereby love has become a subject of moral passion in contemporary Botswana. My experiences in Baitshepi often provided a point of departure for my efforts to understand broader phenomena. The questions I asked within and outside of church contexts were often driven by concerns that MmaMaipelo had raised with me and by my observations of various church members’ involvement in caring for one another. For instance, I visited and conducted interviews with members of about ten other Apostolic churches on divination, healing, spiritual kinship, and song, topics whose importance had been suggested to me by Baitshepi members—although as a member of Baitshepi myself, I was an outsider to these churches and could not establish an equivalent footing of familiarity. I became acquainted as well with a senior woman herbalist in the peri-urban village of Tlokweng who had no connection to Baitshepi, and with the ways in which she and members of her extended family confronted problems of sickness and death. These encounters helped me to understand the particularity of Baitshepi members’ approaches. I was acquainted with MmaMaipelo’s neighbors in Old Naledi, and with her relatives living in the city or elsewhere in southeastern Botswana. These are people with long-standing relationships, friendly, neutral, or hostile, toward MmaMaipelo and her church. I attended far too many funerals. In addition, I carried out a more formal survey in Old Naledi of about twenty-five compounds located near Baitshepi. The survey focused on the 10

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names and ages of residents, their marital status, living arrangements in particular yards, sources of income, payment of school expenses, church affiliations, memberships in burial societies, and experiences with illness and death. I designed this survey on the basis of concerns raised by Baitshepi members over who loves and cares for whom, and through what means. In particular, certain explicit church teachings involving the body as a house for the spirit encouraged me to pursue my original research interests in housing and care. Finally, I involved myself intermittently with a number of nongovernmental organizations devoted to AIDS prevention and care. These included an organization, sponsored at the outset by Mennonite Ministries and subsequently by the Methodist Church, that trains members of local churches to work as HIV/AIDS counselors in medical clinics. My conversations with members of this and other organizations helped me to understand how shifts in the nature of the epidemic, in particular those brought about by the introduction of antiretroviral medications, have shaped the predicaments of people with HIV/AIDS. In turn, my involvement with these organizations helped me grasp the particularity of MmaMaipelo’s approach to AIDS prevention and care. There were few orphan care centers operating in the country during the period of my extended fieldwork in 1997–98, although there was a great expansion soon afterward. The forthcoming work of Bianca Dahl will explore how staff and children negotiate understandings of kinship within orphan care centers in Botswana. Although they possess forms of hierarchy and exclusion, churches of the spirit like Baitshepi are decidedly not what João Biehl calls zones of social abandonment, where “voice can no longer become action” (2005:11). On the contrary, these churches’ practices consist largely of efforts to make people’s voices act upon the sentiments and bodies of others. Church members do not necessarily gauge the success of such efforts in terms of health outcomes, for even death does not always signify the failure of love. From the perspective of those committed to fostering love by means of the praying voice, it would seem to pose a false political choice to insist that the only alternative to indifference about other people’s suffering consists of putting into words pain, outrage, or estrangement. Rather than deeming church members’ efforts to put love into words as evidence of a blunted moral consciousness within a “culture of inequality” (Nguyen and Peschard 2003:463), I argue that such efforts are rooted in a broader politics of care in Botswana. Social inequalities in Botswana have been experienced mainly in terms of their impact on gendered and intergenerational relationships moral passion in suffering and faith

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within domestic spaces, and as a result, the healing of such relationships has emerged as a locally compelling political concern. roa d m a p s to d e c e n c y

Baitshepi Church members have cultivated a language and a practice of articulating love at times of sickness and death, and they have coached me— and more important, of course, one another—to regard such speech and action as imperative. As have many other Batswana, these church members have in recent years faced enormous difficulties in caring for the ill, for survivors, and for the bereaved. Even before the advent of AIDS in Botswana, experiences of caregiving within families and churches focused people’s attention on the impact of their sentiments on one another’s well-being. For Batswana, the issue of whether particular people love, scorn, care for, or are jealous of each other has long been at issue during tasks of providing for the sick, the elderly, and the disabled—to a greater extent, often, than have the specific health outcomes by which epidemiological trends are assessed in humanitarian discourses. Many scholars and activists, as well as caregivers in other societies, have understood moral speech and action in relation to AIDS as consisting of making claims to equitable health care by telling critical truths about the impact of inequalities on people’s bodies. Yet members of churches of the spirit in Botswana have not tended to feel the same kinds of imperatives to engage in critical truth telling. Here I wish to explain the appeal of a discourse within which it may be deemed more socially necessary, at times of suffering and death, to put love into words than to put pain into words. What counts as morally acceptable speech and action in relation to AIDS? Critical epidemiology, Dr. Jim Yong Kim told the journalist Tracy Kidder (2003:244), provides a “road map to decency” by defining morally appropriate ways of speaking and writing about the causes of infectious disease, as well as morally appropriate action. Expanding and reframing humanitarian agendas, Paul Farmer (1999) makes the point that infectious disease epidemics have sources in social inequalities, and that doctors, policymakers, and others in a position to alter the conditions under which people remain healthy or get sick must rectify the consequences of those inequalities. Valuing all human lives equally, in moral and conceptual as well as financial terms, is a precondition for providing decent medical care and public health infrastructure to the world’s poor (Kim et al., eds., 2000). In the absence of a redistributive ethos and, most important, prag12

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matic commitments to care, public health and other humanitarian efforts are likely to be dominated by much more exclusionary and instrumentalist notions of entitlement and of decent behavior. For instance, the privileges enjoyed by “sanitary citizens” may be regarded as consequences of their decent willingness to maintain their own health, so that the deaths of “unsanitary subjects” in cholera and other epidemics may be attributed to the backwardness of their “culture” rather than to social inequalities (Briggs with Mantini-Briggs 2003). Within neoliberal conceptions of the social contract, those deemed incapable of making decently productive contributions to the marketplace may be relegated to the category Biehl (2005) terms “ex-human.” Writing of conditions in a Brazilian asylum, Biehl argues that socially abandoned “people’s efforts to constitute their lives vis-à-vis institutions meant to confirm and advance humanness were deemed good for nothing . . . their supposed inhumanness played an important role in justifying abandonment” (2005:52). Along with aid workers in Médècins sans frontières, Peter Redfield (2005) worries that medical humanitarian efforts may have the unintended consequence of keeping standards of decency in the treatment of war refugees at the level necessary for sustaining “bare life” (Agamben 1998). But “at this moment,” Redfield asks in light of the anti-humanitarian ideologies in global ascendancy today, “what else can we do?” (2005:347). Much depends, of course, on who is meant by “we.” That is to say, researchers, health workers, and activists concerned with AIDS prevention and care are increasingly recognizing how people affected by the epidemic have their own “roadmaps to decency” that shape how they speak about the sources of affliction, do or do not try to protect one another from disease, care for or neglect the sick, and work for social change. The range of such moral concerns and the debates they motivate is quite wide. For instance, South African mothers and grandmothers who advocate virginity testing perceive girls’ sexual abstinence as key to decent intergenerational relationships of respect and care, even as they legitimize men’s interests in multiple partners by insisting that boys always desire sex (Scorgie 2002). Young Luo men and women in Tanzania scrutinize their partners’ physical appearances, propensities to request or give money, and willingness to avoid using condoms in order to determine whether their relationship is on a decent footing of “trust,” which many claim is “the best protection against HIV” (Dilger 2003:40). In some parts of Kenya, an AIDS death is commonly regarded as a shameful death, one that precludes the possibility of a decent burial garnering communal sympathy, so that bereaved families moral passion in suffering and faith

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conceal AIDS as a cause of death and bury their kin far from their ancestral homes (Nzioka 2000). C. Bawa Yamba describes how safe sex campaigns and witchfinding campaigns in rural Zambia represent “competing and contradictory forms of discourse” claiming “to tell [people] how to lead safe lives, free from AIDS” (1997:200). Yamba shows that the ways in which villagers moved between acceptance, rejection, and critique of biomedical and witchcraft claims reflected their shifting assessments of the decency of local political authorities (see also Behrend 2007; Geissler 2005). In each of these instances, experiences with AIDS have led people to consider and at times to debate “who speaks morally, how to speak morally, and what moral speaking is about” (Rabinow 2002:141). In explaining why a community AIDS prevention program in South Africa failed to achieve its aims, Catherine Campbell (2003) points to the unwillingness of a range of actors—sex workers, students, mine owners, trade union leaders, local and national government officials—to take “ownership” of AIDS prevention. “People almost overwhelmingly put the locus of change beyond their own constituencies. This failure to take personal ownership of the problem is a key dimension of the lack of political will referred to so often” (2003:191). In other words, the problem lies in an unwillingness to consider how one’s own priorities might need to change in order to help limit the spread of HIV infection. According to Campbell, this unwillingness is in turn rooted in a lack of long-term commitment to the well-being of persons whose interests one may be capable of neglecting without hurting one’s own. The view of MmaMaipelo, bishop of the Baitshepi Church, was that such convictions of long-term interdependence are precisely what are most difficult and hence all the more necessary to sustain at a time of widespread suffering and death. The need to maintain convictions of interdependence is particularly pressing at funerals, which bring together many people with various connections to the deceased, and often with conflicting feelings and agendas, in a common endeavor of consolation. Yet in spite of the fact that from the mid-1990s until her own death in 2006, MmaMaipelo was excessively pained by numerous deaths among her kin, neighbors, and members of her church, and even though she was comparatively receptive to biomedical explanations, she did not regard preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS as her duty. MmaMaipelo’s methods of speaking about AIDS, while not necessarily representative of all local church members, reflected broadly shared predicaments in Botswana involving how talk about sickness shapes people’s willingness to care for each other. 14

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In many respects, MmaMaipelo’s approach to AIDS was nonhumanitarian, not in the sense that it was unfeeling—far from it—but because it did not share the goals or the stakes involved in humanitarian discourses. Notwithstanding their diversity, humanitarian discourses consistently treat premature deaths due to preventable and treatable infectious diseases as deplorable outcomes (see the reply made by Irwin et al. 2002 to Butt 2002). There is a tendency in critical epidemiology, for instance, to frame death from infectious disease as the endpoint for those caught in the “disease-social inequality trap” (Nguyen and Peschard 2003). The ways in which funerals are carried out in Botswana, however, ensure that death is not seen merely as an outcome—as the end of the social story, so to speak— but as a ground of politics. These politics are likely to center on the sentiments of survivors, who may have reasons for not wishing to regard the deaths of their loved ones as unequivocally deplorable. Writing of the Brazilian asylum known as Vita, Biehl points out that “the concept of the human is used in this local world” (2005:40; emphasis in original). The relatives of Biehl’s principal interlocutor, Catarina, recalled their and her past actions in order to place her in a medical category, assessing her worth in relation to standards of productive humanness. Here, normalizing practices gave rise to moral dispassion—that is, to systematic lack of interest in the feelings and understandings of those who do not live up to standards of humanness, normality, or modernity. In Botswana as well, capitalist and social welfare imperatives have had a tremendous influence on how people conceptualize and negotiate relationships of care, standards of achievement, and notions of personal worth. Yet concepts of love and jealousy continue to be used in this local world, and popular discourses of care remain, for better or worse, more personalizing than normalizing. There are measures that medical and social workers in Botswana can and sometimes do take to “give love” so as to advance humanitarian agendas. The most important such measure is to recognize, accommodate, and build upon imperatives underlying local caregiving practices, rather than conceiving of them as obstacles to development, public health, and modernity. As Julie Livingston shows in her outstanding study Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana (2005), a key impact of humanitarian practices in southeastern Botswana has been to reinforce people’s tendencies to assess the qualities of their relationships to one another when thinking about the conditions of their bodies. Since independence from Great Britain in 1966, the liberal democratic state of Botswana has promoted social welfare moral passion in suffering and faith

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agendas of extending medical care, rehabilitation assistance, and financial help to vulnerable members of the population. “Bodily well-being via biomedical care [has been] increasingly promoted as a universal right, and the presence of such care became a key indicator of [the] country’s level of development” (Livingston 2005:203). Official documents point out that revenues from diamond and beef exports have benefited Botswana’s citizens through public investments in universal education, transportation, drought relief, pensions, and clean drinking water in population centers. There is a comparatively well-functioning primary health care system, to which all have access for two pula (about U.S.$0.40) per visit. This health network helped to maintain what had been, before the impact of AIDS, one of the highest average life expectancies on the African continent, 65.2 years in 1991 (Government of Botswana 1997:39). Yet even before the advent of AIDS, there was popular skepticism in Botswana about the contributions of such efforts either to physical health or to decent caregiving relationships. For example, disabled persons, the elderly, and their caregivers commonly evaluate rehabilitation and pension programs in terms of their impact on the qualities of relationships. Elderly women may resist rehabilitation services provided by health workers for themselves or for disabled grandchildren because they do not wish their daughters to feel that they are under no obligation to undertake the work of nursing (Livingston 2007a). The national pension system, introduced in 1997 to provide people over sixty-five with a source of cash, has induced many daughters to shift resources away from their elderly mothers, who often complain that they now have to “beg from their children” (Livingston 2003b). Disabled clients try to draw medical workers who visit them at their homes into kinlike provider relationships, evaluating the care they receive accordingly (Livingston 2005:206). Such efforts to blur the lines between family and professional care are usually frustrated at the door of the clinic, however. The feelings and actions of overworked hospital staff are subjects of continual popular complaint. As one elderly lady told Livingston, “the daily treatment we are getting from the hospitals is not offering any help. Nurses are no longer visiting us in our compounds” (227). Clearly, the deep engagement of Batswana with social welfare practice has not, in most cases, led them to accept its categories in wholesale fashion, but has drawn their notice to the qualities of their relationships with one another as they reflect on the limitations and uncertain successes of humanitarian agendas. In directing people’s attention to the sentiments with 16

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which they undertake the work of nursing and of burial, the AIDS epidemic has done nothing to diminish such interests in relationships. One consequence of the high rates of morbidity and mortality brought about by AIDS in Botswana has been to place heavy demands on women’s nursing and other domestic labor. The epidemic has thus focused popular attention on the love (or lack thereof) with which women undertake such work for particular persons in particular places—as well as on the sentiments of sick people and survivors who place themselves under their care. For instance, One Tshukudu’s aunt was apparently unable or unwilling to support herself, and any children she might have had, without renting out the room in which One had been staying. The perceived importance of love in the context of AIDS derives in part from the fact that women’s lay nursing has historically led Batswana to assess and negotiate care by reflecting on how particular persons’ sentiments affect their well-being. Carried out within a shifting “ecology of misfortune” (Livingston 2005:145) over the course of the twentieth century, lay nursing care has been a deeply contested domain, transformed by changing standards of able-bodiedness, conceptions of autonomy and achievement, and understandings of personal responsibility in causing suffering. At the outset of the twentieth century, chiefs (dikgosi) and royal doctors/diviners (dingaka) were in charge of an indigenous public health system that regulated physical and social maturation through initiation rituals, as well as the fertility of the land through rain-making (2005: ch. 2). The decline of this system, experienced in the popular imagination as a generalized physio-moral breakdown, resulted from the outflow of Batswana men on labor contracts to the South African mines, a migration pattern that continued on a large scale from the 1930s through the 1970s. Labor migration gave rise to epidemics of tuberculosis and other illnesses popularly attributed to women’s transgressive sexuality. Women, for the most part, nursed men sickened by tuberculosis, as well as children suffering from the impairments of mopakwane (a complex disease category incorporating polio, meningitis, malnutrition, and congenital conditions). Women frequently hid disabled children within their yards during the postwar period, fearing their neighbors’ gossip over their violation of sexual restrictions and standards of infant care (Livingston 2005: ch. 4). In the 1990s, family members might become so mutually antagonistic as they nursed the chronically disabled that they would abandon each other for good (2005: ch. 1). Direct accusations of culpability for causing impairments, such as stroke and auto accident injuries, as well as arguments moral passion in suffering and faith

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over the use of scarce resources, sometimes made family members hate each other.9 The mother of a small child with mopakwane might abandon her with a mother-in-law whom she accused of witchcraft; an old woman might refuse to visit her daughter who had suffered a stroke, claiming that she herself was the elder and entitled to her children’s care; and yet mothers remained receptive to appeals that they must “give love” to their children to keep them from dying. “Women are at the center of debates in all of these cases, exercising their moral authority through nursing, gossip, prayer, greeting (or its absence), and public debate” (2005:62). In sum, experiences with physical debility have long compelled people in Botswana to be “careful about what others think and what consequences that might have” (Whyte 2002:182); not necessarily to behave selflessly, but to act—perhaps with spite, fear, or hatred—on what they know or imagine other people’s sentiments to be. Moreover, partly because lay nursing care has been so central in Botswana to people’s understandings of the sources of their well-being and suffering, they have tended to experience social inequalities as aspects of gendered and generational relationships within domestic or housed spaces, rather than in terms of class conflict (cf. Farmer 1992). As a result, they commonly take steps to reshape their own and other people’s manner of imagining such domestic relationships, for instance, by preaching the word of God, protecting themselves from witchcraft, praying and providing for the sick, and consoling the bereaved. Such efforts, which I have termed moral passion, may prove unsuccessful, self-defeating, or destructive. Yet I have learned to appreciate moral passion as a political endeavor through realizing the extent to which church members in Botswana regard faith in God as a method of coming to terms with the moral imaginations of other people. fa i t h a s s e n t i m e n ta l e n g ag e m e n t

“We want to act like the apostles did,” a leader of a church of the spirit in Botswana told the researcher Leny Lagerwerf in 1977. But “[w]e are not so strong as they [were]. They just said: ‘Your sins are forgiven, stand up and walk.’ We cannot do that. For us, illness may take one week, one month, three months. As God will. We have got difficult diseases like tuberculosis, asthma. They [may] take long” (quoted in Lagerwerf 1982:74). In other words, the work of healing is often arduous, protracted, prone to failure, and demanding of other people’s efforts—and the same is true of having one’s sins forgiven. 18

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How, in different Christian communities, do believers’ understandings of sin and forgiveness shape the historicity of their sense of self? In many evangelical Protestant movements, the experience of being “born again” gives the individual believer a new relationship with God by causing a dramatic rupture with a past, sinful self. Susan Harding (2000) shows that in order to be born again, fundamental Baptists in the United States must tell stories situating their life histories in terms of biblical narratives of sin, sacrifice, and redemption. By hearing and telling stories about salvation, fundamental Baptists allow the Holy Spirit to give them the conviction that divine purpose governs their lives. As Webb Keane cogently argues, images of rupture have been central to worldwide Protestant missions’ moral narratives, whose aim is to emancipate human subjects “from a host of false beliefs and fetishisms that undermine freedom” (2007:5). Thus for Ewe Pentecostalists in Ghana (Meyer 1999), rupture with a state of past sinfulness consists of breaking free of kinship connections created by blood. These Pentecostalists perceive a need to make a break, not with their individual sinful natures, but with ties of blood through which indigenous spirits maintain a hold on the bodies of believers. For Ewe Pentecostalists, being “born again” is a provisional—and hence continually renewed—act of becoming properly “modern,” that is, disconnected from extended kinship networks (see also Simpson 1998; van Dijk 1998). While I have heard some quite arresting stories from Baitshepi members of how conversion experiences had brought about radical ruptures with their past conduct and desires, the thrust of such accounts was that faith in God had recast their ongoing relationships with other people. A relationship with Jesus tends to be less important than the quality of relationships to others, as previous studies of Christian movements in southern Africa have likewise indicated. Gabriel Setiloane’s extensive research during the 1960s and 1970s on religious movements in South Africa, Botswana, and Lesotho led him to comment, “That effervescent enthusiasm which ecstatically confronts a stranger with the enquiry: ‘Brother, have you been saved?’ is not only rare, but frowned upon. Only ‘cranks’ are supposed to behave in that way” (1976:186). During her research in Gaborone during the late 1970s, Lagerwerf was asked “Are you saved, sister?” by members of an offshoot church of Assemblies of God, one of the Pentecostalist churches, which had then recently been established in Botswana. Lagerwerf suggests (1982:97–98) that it was unusual to hear church members in the area speak of Christian commitment as bringing about a rupture from a previous unsaved self. moral passion in suffering and faith

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In the evenings MmaMaipelo would frequently ask one of the Baitshepi members visiting or staying at her home to read a passage from the Bible to her. She was not able to read herself, but had memorized large portions of the Bible by listening to others, and routinely directed readers to particular chapters and verses. Adopting the words of Apostle Paul, she said she liked to “share with you some spiritual gift to make you firm. Or rather, so that I and you may be comforted together, me by your faith and you by my faith” (Rom. 1:11–12). One evening she asked that Luke 12:1–3 be read aloud: “Beware of the yeast of the Pharisees, that is, their hypocrisy. Nothing is covered up that will not be revealed, and nothing hidden that will not become known. Therefore whatever you have said in the dark will be heard in the light, and what you have whispered behind closed doors will be proclaimed from the housetops.” MmaMaipelo said that this passage reminds us that we need to repent of our sins (literally, debts, melato) before we die. When I asked her if it is possible to tell whether another person has repented, she replied that someone who has repented of a sin/debt will ask forgiveness of the person he or she has offended. “If you don’t ask forgiveness for offenses committed against other people, God [Modimo] will punish you, as he did David for his sin against Uriah.”10 A young woman sitting with us mused soon afterwards, “The hardest words in the Lord’s Prayer are ‘Forgive us our debts [melato] as we forgive those who are indebted to us.’ We’re asking God to judge us according to how well we have forgiven someone else.” In other words, faith is about the quality of a person’s engagements with others. Whereas fundamental Baptists in the United States speak of Jesus as the sole source of forgiveness and consolation (Harding 2000), MmaMaipelo regarded forgiveness by other people as a route, perhaps the principal route, to forgiveness by Jesus. MmaMaipelo repeatedly expressed concern to me on this point, fearing that she would be misunderstood. She wanted me to avoid conveying the impression that Baitshepi members pray to her rather than to Jesus. “My name has no power to heal,” she would insist. “It is only the name of Jesus that heals. I am only a guide [mosupi, literally, pointer] to Jesus.” Baitshepi members speak of God as acting in the world, not merely as a metaphor for love. They speak of God’s power to bring about dramatic changes in a person’s habits and conduct, to give people extraordinary perceptions in visions and dreams, to heal afflictions, and indeed to forgive their sins. Moreover, they insist that life and death are in the hands of God rather than witches: it is God alone who decides when a person is going to die, just as God decides whether a child will be con20

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ceived. Yet when these church members talk about why it is important to have faith in God, they speak of how faith brings about a renewal or a sometimes quite drastic transformation of one’s ongoing connections to others, rather than a complete rupture with past relationships. I rarely heard the Setswana term for sinner, moleofi, used in Baitshepi. This fact seems in keeping with a conception of sin as a breach that must be mended in relationships, and with the semantic equation of sin with a monetary debt to be repaid or forgiven.11 The notion that all people are intrinsically sinful has little place in Baitshepi preaching; church members are apt to remark that small children “have no sin” because they have not yet offended anyone. Neither do these Christians claim to have been saved (bolokilwe) prior to death—although members of one church I encountered do come close, and in so doing antagonized participants at a funeral I describe in chapter 6. The comparative hesitancy with which many local Christians speak of themselves as having been saved from a state of sin is particularly striking in light of the fact that the purpose of the colonial civilizing mission in southern Africa, as elsewhere, has been to instill normalized distinctions between the saved and the unsaved, the modern and the traditional, and healthy lives and sickly lives (Bornstein 2003; Comaroff and Comaroff 1991, 1997; Landau 1995).

Faith as Sentimental Orientation Tracing the moralizing thrust of narratives of modernity to specifically Protestant missionary impulses, Webb Keane (2007) argues that the Calvinist insistence on distinguishing between interior states and exterior forms has provided a key motive for what Bruno Latour (1993 [1991]) calls the work of purification. Extending Latour’s argument that purification aims to create “entirely distinct ontological zones: that of human beings on the one hand; that of nonhumans on the other” (1993 [1991]: 10–11), Keane shows that strategies of purification inspired by Protestantism aim to free the human subject from material and social entanglements to the extent necessary for taking “an agentive stance toward one’s inner thoughts” (2007:76). On the presumption that acknowledging one’s own agency is necessary if moral, technical, and political progress is to occur, persons considered to have attributed efficacy to material fetishes are commonly deemed unwilling to recognize their self-determining agency and thus to have abjured responsibility. “For those who argue that one’s freedom depends on the sense of responsibility that comes of understanding one’s own agency, fetishism or its analogues can be a source of political self-betrayal” moral passion in suffering and faith

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(77). Thus, purification agendas readily inspire claims that the sicknesses of the poor derive from their own willful ignorance or unsanitary habits, and that the state has no responsibility to protect those unwilling to take responsibility for themselves. The notion that health and wealth are signs of virtue, in the sense of the ability to act with self-determining freedom, is neatly summarized in certain uses of the Setswana term boitekanelo, literally, “self-sufficiency.” Boitekanelo is the word used to translate “health” in the official discourses of the Botswana state, and the term has popular currency as a signifier of the able-bodiedness necessary for manual labor. Boitekanelo also connotes wealth; a polite way to speak of a rich man is to say “He is self-sufficient” (O itekanetse). The neoliberal rhetoric of the Botswana state consistently stresses the need for citizens to be self-sufficient and self-reliant, so that the tone of official pronouncements upon matters of health, education, housing, and much else tends to be didactic: “Batswana must develop themselves”—or else, it is often implied, suffer the consequences (see Durham 2008). All too frequently, this moralistic set of narratives about modern and nonmodern ways of thinking and acting has brought about self-fulfilling prophecies, for instance, by framing AIDS prevention as a matter of individual responsibility rather than of caring (see chapter 1). Yet to the extent that Christian practices foster a sense of moral renewal as well as rupture, instilling convictions of interdependence rather than transcendence, they hold the potential to mitigate the consequences of the inequalities entrenched by purification strategies. Much of the appeal of Christian movements in southern Africa has long rested on mobilizing collective moral projects for healing physical ailments caused by social relationships gone awry. For example, Jean Comaroff (1985) shows how Zionist healing in South Africa recast the initiation rituals of indigenous polities, whose capacity to protect and strengthen their subjects’ bodies had been destroyed by the colonial state. During the early twentieth century, deacons of the London Missionary Society, the largest of the churches established by British Protestant missionaries in the Bechuanaland Protectorate (now Botswana), would lead communal prayers for rain and accompany congregants’ visits to the sick (Landau 1995:123–27). Such efforts reflected existing procedures for promoting bodily well-being and the fertility of the land. Livingston (2005:79–81) describes how mothers would gather in the kgotla (the central, and usually male, space of Tswana polities) to sing to royal ancestors for rain as late as the 1930s, drawing on their ability to convert the heat of their bodies into life-giving milk.12 As 22

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in Christian movements elsewhere in Africa (M. Green 2003; Hodgson 2005; Hoehler-Fatton 1996), women deployed the cosmological capacities of their bodies to renew relationships with ancestral and divine providers, making new life possible. The necessity of renewing relationships with ancestors and other kin is never more urgent than at times of sickness and other misfortune. In many churches of the spirit in Botswana, prophets (baperofeti) discern causes of affliction by receiving visions in trance states, commonly identifying pathological wombs or witchcraft as sources of suffering. Outside of church contexts, diviners and herbalists known as Setswana doctors (dingaka tsa setswana) also question sources of affliction, usually prescribing treatments for payment (Haram 1991; Ingstad 1989). Diviners and prophets commonly promise “protection” (tshiriletso) from occult attacks, helping sufferers to renew their relationships with ancestors who have “turned their backs” ( go huralela) on them. As Adam Ashforth points out in his work (2000, 2005) on witchcraft in Soweto, South Africa, people say that they must have faith in the treatments prescribed by the prophet or diviner in order for them to work. Again, faith in this context involves the quality of one’s engagement with the sentiments of other people. Ashforth shows how people who may not consider themselves Christians at all commonly conceive of transformations in their relationships with others as shifts in their faith or belief. (In Setswana, “belief” and “faith” are rendered by the same term, tumelo, which derives from the verb go dumela, to agree. Henceforth in this text, I frequently leave the term tumelo untranslated, rather than rendering it as “faith” in quotation marks. Placing the word “faith” in quotation marks is liable to convey the false impression that I consider certain people’s faith to be mistaken or less than fully Christian. Yet I do wish to highlight divergences between tumelo and certain connotations of faith and belief common in contemporary Euro-American usage.) Ashforth demonstrates (2005:123) that many in Soweto are concerned about witchcraft in an increasingly competitive environment but try to resist fully believing in it, because belief or tumelo involves orienting your sentiments and actions in a particular way—in the case of witchcraft, around the conviction that other people want to kill you. As my friend Thabo once told me after we had debated the meaning of a smear of dirt we had found on the front wall of the house: “once you start thinking about that shit, you’re finished. Then witchcraft is everywhere.” . . . Fortunately, our discovery of the smear was not accompanied by any serious moral passion in suffering and faith

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mishap in the house, so it was not difficult to discount the threat of occult attack. Had something awful happened when the memory of that mud lasted, resisting the pull of witchcraft explanations would have been difficult. In any event, as we all knew, the house had been protected from such attack by a pair of traditional healers some months earlier, so we did not have much to worry about. (Ashforth 2005:124–25)

If Thabo were to believe fully in witchcraft, he would feel and act on the basis of the conviction that he had been bewitched. Ashforth relates another conversation with his mother in Soweto, MaMfete, whose friend Modiehi told him that she herself “partly” believes in witchcraft (2000:73, 76): “And you try to resist seeing witchcraft?” I said. “You try to find other explanations? Is that what you mean by not going deeply into it?” “Mmm. I try to undermine it so that I can keep on with my life. You see, if you start thinking too deeply about this thing you can start thinking that everything that goes wrong is because of witchcraft. That can really mess up your life. Before you know it, you’ll be living in another land, a world of your own, where you really won’t be understood by other people” (Ashforth 2000:50; emphasis added).

Ashforth attributes people’s resistance to belief or tumelo in witchcraft to their desire for self-preservation, in that “if a person believes strongly that he is being bewitched, the powers of the poisonous muthi [medicine] that has been sent to harm and kill will be enhanced” (2005:125). Yet it seems to me that something more is at stake, as MaMfete implies: tumelo in witchcraft is apt to interfere with your capacity to love, to be loved in return, and to participate in collective projects devoted to enhancing love. If you see everyone as a threat, you are apt to become a perpetrator as well as a victim, in other words, a witch yourself. Influenced by the Calvinist emphasis on demarcating the interiority of self-consciousness from exterior forms and disciplines, modernist conceptions of religion frame faith not as a method of loving or fearing but rather as sincere assent to propositions about God (Asad 1993:40–41; Keane 2002; cf. Miyazaki 2000). Keane draws attention (2007: ch. 3) to the evolutionary and hierarchical implications of anthropological constructions of “religion” and “culture” that cast faith as a method of self-determination performed through sincere assent to concepts, distinct from outwardly directed action. Protestant missionary imperatives to make converts recognize their individual self-consciousness as the true source of agency, rather than al24

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lowing them to impute agency to rituals, texts, or icons, have shaped anthropological tendencies to cast “religion as the domain of immaterial beliefs, and culture as the domain of concrete expressions” (2007:112). Protestantism, Keane points out, “has offered influential expressions of the high moral value of agency. In many cases . . . it ties that moral value to the preliminary task of getting people to see what beings in the world are actually agents (God and humans, not spirits or fetishes) and what kinds of agency properly belong to them” (2007:52). Yet as I show over subsequent chapters, expressing or disclaiming tumelo in particular agents—God, witches, diviners, therapeutic and vital substances, viruses and other sources of illness—is not primarily a matter of recognizing their reality, presence, or efficacy as agents.13 More than a way of acknowledging presence or efficacy, tumelo constitutes a set of methods for orienting one’s own and others’ sentiments and actions in relation to those agents that have an impact on people’s well-being—methods that, it is hoped, will themselves prove efficacious.14 Thus, the phrase “speaking truth” ( go bua nnete) in popular usage does not usually connote distinguishing real from unreal agencies so as to locate responsibility exclusively in oneself or others. Rather, “speaking truth” involves speaking in such a way as to do true things for other people (Alverson 1978:138–39). For example, a television program shown by the South African Broadcasting Corporation in 2006 featured the efforts of Zola, a soap opera star, to reconcile an accused witch to her neighbors in Soweto.15 After eliciting this woman’s tearful account of how her neighbors had ostracized her, Zola encouraged the neighbors to assemble in her yard to state and allay their grievances. At the conclusion of this reconciliation session, the woman spoke passionately to all those who had been accusing her: “Let us speak truth [A re bueng nnete] according to the word of Jesus Christ!” (Such appeals to Jesus’ words are made quite commonly by committed church members and nonchurchgoers alike in the region.) It was clear that this woman did not mean, “Let us distinguish between true and false sources of suffering, and allocate blame to those whose actions have truly been responsible for causing it,” but rather “Let us speak so as to do true things for each other, as Jesus instructed us.” A young woman Baitshepi member watching the show commented, “Yes, we should do the truth [re dire nnete] and live in peace and mutual understanding [kutlwisano, literally, the act of causing one another to hear].” Thus, “speaking truth” is a means of placing relationships on a proper footing, long the ideal aim of divination. In order to “speak truth,” people must reflect on the impact moral passion in suffering and faith

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of their words on the sentiments and well-being of others. It was undoubtedly in this spirit that MmaMaipelo asserted to me that the truth is love. In keeping with the accused woman’s distress, Ashforth writes with a keen understanding of “the damage that the fear of witchcraft can cause” (2005:xiv). He documents a fear-inducing praxis whereby some diviners’ and Christian prophets’ words about witchcraft cause clients to look with suspicion and resentment on what others have felt and done. The brother and sister of Ashforth’s friend Madumo threw Madumo out of their house after their mother’s funeral (Ashforth 2000). While their mother was ill, a prophet in the Zion Christian Church (ZCC) had indicated to the brother that Madumo had bewitched her. Madumo was persuaded by a diviner, Mr. Zondi, to regard the misfortunes in his own life as caused by witchcraft. Embarking on a course of therapy intended to counteract the witchcraft and to reconcile him to his family, Madumo told Ashforth that the diviner’s herbs “are helped by my belief, by my faith in Mr. Zondi. I can use millions of herbs, but without any belief, they won’t work out” (2000:65). This series of events culminated in a harrowing domestic scene in which Madumo’s brother and sister accused him directly of trying to kill them through witchcraft and told him that they hated him. Yet I find Ashforth’s overall thesis—that living in a world of witches is to live with a “presumption of malice” on the part of others (2005:1)—to understate the poignancy of Madumo’s quest, which consisted as much of an effort to regain and renew the lost love of his relatives as of an attempt to kill them before they killed him. People in southern Africa live with the possibility that others might want to kill them, or that they may unintentionally kill them through infection, but they are also sharply aware that they need their love, especially when illness, death, or other misfortunes threaten to deprive them of it. As a result, they often make conscious efforts to foster love, to protect themselves from the consequences of its absence, or both, with the protracted and often unsuccessful assistance of experts such as Mr. Zondi and MmaMaipelo.16 As the non-Christian diviner Mr. Zondi told Ashforth (2000:127) in explaining the origin of witchcraft: “And the majority of people, they don’t love each other. So that is where it starts.” Yet once people have been persuaded that others’ love for them has soured into jealousy, they are liable to fear for their lives, and to act on their fears in ways that make love impossible.

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Faith and Interdependence Widespread popular recognition in Botswana of the importance as well as the difficulties of sustaining long-term mutual involvement at times of suffering tends to counteract tendencies among local Christians to act upon distinctions between the saved and the unsaved. Joel Robbins has recently made a comparative argument that “Christianity cannot help but present itself as a discourse that demands changes not only in personal morality but also in the shared ethical codes that constitute an important part of a people’s culture” (2004:319). Under circumstances of Christian religious innovation broadly construed, Robbins argues, “there is an enduring conflict between Christian and traditional moral systems that is recognized in these terms by adherents themselves” (2004:323; see also Engelke 2004a). To be sure, images of personal and historical rupture hold an important place within Christian discourses in Botswana. Many leaders of churches of the spirit insisted in interviews with James Amanze (1998:122–23) that a Christian must acquire a new self through being born again, and that Jesus’ death provided believers with means of a new relationship with God. Moreover, many churches in the region frame belief in God as a method of self-determination that enables adherents to accumulate wealth through disciplined work, and that sets them apart from “lazy” and “jealous” nonbelievers (Bornstein 2003; Kiernan 1997; Maxwell 1998). All the same, I have been impressed by how socialized a God this tends to be. “God is not in the sky, but dwells among us [o aga mogo rona],” Baitshepi members frequently insist. Committed Christians and nonchurchgoers alike are apt to say that a person who scorns someone else “does not know God”; Baitshepi members explain that because God dwells or builds ( go aga) within us, a person who scorns does not know that he or she is actually offending God. Moreover, in carrying out divination, members of numerous churches ask God’s help as well as the help of ancestors in imagining and reorienting other people’s sentiments. In other words, tumelo in God appears a style of exercising moral passion within a broader politics of care, love, scorn, and jealousy. Given local Christians’ concerns about their own and others’ capacities for jealousy, it would be mistaken to construe this Christian discourse as centered solely on love, or to cast Baitshepi members’ understandings of jealousy as nonChristian. Moreover, while diviners commonly sharpen their clients’ ambivalence about their relations with kin and neighbors, churches supply sources of ambivalence as well in this respect. Hence the comparative bearing moral passion in suffering and faith

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of this material is not on theorizing Christianity as a logic of love, distinct from a non-Christian logic of jealousy and suspicion (cf. Schoffeleers 1989). Local polemics ranging prayer against divination, or drinking water in church against beer in a shebeen, or wearing blue against black mourning dress, need to be understood in light of how these activities intensify practitioners’ sense of their involvement in the sentiments of others. In keeping with this emphasis on imagining and remaking one’s own and other people’s sentiments, I take moral passion and faith as objects of analysis, rather than Christianity construed as a distinctive cultural logic. Christian believers in Botswana very commonly draw firm distinctions between the ways in which Christians are supposed to behave and the ways nonbelievers behave. For example, Christians must not drink beer, which as a communal activity creates sentiments of fellowship among drinkers, who tend primarily to be men; many Christians say that beer drinking wastes resources and diminishes people’s capacity to make plans for the future. In making these arguments, local Christians draw on the legacy of Protestant missionaries who during the early twentieth century attempted, in association with some local rulers, to replace communal beer drinking with domestic tea consumption (Landau 1995:104–9). MmaMaipelo had been a beer seller and drinker when she received a calling in 1982 to found a church; she heard a voice telling her to abandon beer, and never again sold or drank it. The same is true of her first converts, who were all neighboring women beer brewers. Nonetheless, neither Baitshepi members nor their neighbors who continue to drink beer in Old Naledi speak or act as though Christian faith and beer consumption were aspects of incommensurable moral orders. I once remarked to MmaMaipelo and some other senior women Baitshepi members that beer brewing was similar to preaching the word of God because both activities bring people to a woman’s yard. I meant my remark as a joke—presuming, in effect, that drinking and preaching were aspects of opposed moral orders—but the women responded seriously and thoughtfully. Beer brings many people to your yard, they said, but only those who have love will come to hear the word of God. In addition, the word lives forever, whereas beer ends in the toilet. Clearly, these Christian women understood their tumelo in terms of the capacity of words and beer to shape the sentiments of people gathered together in particular spaces—yards, houses, or churches—to pray or to drink. Early in our acquaintance, MmaMaipelo actively resisted a suggestion I made that her neighbor across the 28

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lane might be committing a sin by brewing beer. “A person has got to live [i.e., make a living],” she reminded me. On the rare occasions when I asked the neighbor for beer in her yard, she was very hesitant. She poured a gourd for me with a look on her face that clearly implied: “What will MmaMaipelo think of you? What will she think of me?” Although this woman was not a church member herself, her children attended Baitshepi for several years, and as far as I know, there were never any conflicts between her and the children over the fact that she sold beer. If MmaMaipelo’s neighbor had thought of herself as a purveyor of traditional morality at odds with Christianity, why would she hesitate to incorporate me into the terms of such a morality, or be concerned about what MmaMaipelo would feel about my drinking? In no sense did the neighbor consider herself wrong to be selling beer. What was at stake, of course, was her ongoing relationship with MmaMaipelo. Neither she nor MmaMaipelo wished to trouble their relationship by insisting on exclusive moral rightness in this instance, although the relationship was indeed later jeopardized by the disruptive sentiments arising from the death of MmaMaipelo’s husband. It is precisely insofar as people recognize a need to continue working out the terms of their interdependence that they must feel concerned with what others think of them and with what consequences their sentiments might have, even if they disapprove of their activities or fear their hostility (Whyte 2002). To the extent people feel that they need others to love them, normalized distinctions between modern and nonmodern ways of thinking and acting, however broadly current in religious, medical, or political discourses, may seem less relevant to them than the processes by which they work out the qualities of their relationships to one another.17 In part because sickness and death have historically compelled Batswana to consider what others think of them and to adopt measures for shaping their sentiments, local Christian discourses tend to emphasize perceived methods of renewing love and/or counteracting witchcraft—such as prayer, cleansing, and song—over distinguishing oneself from the unsaved. Claiming to have been saved from a condition of sin in which others are mired risks foreclosing the terms of one’s involvement with them, by establishing a footing of hostility inimical to caring for the sick and bereaved. In this respect, asserting that one has already been saved—and, therefore, is not in need of anyone else’s forgiveness and may act with disregard for their sentiments—might have consequences parallel to believing fully in witchcraft, and thus encounter explicit disapproval. I was struck, for example, moral passion in suffering and faith

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by the reluctance of preachers at all-night funeral vigils to dwell on the need to be saved from damnation. On these occasions, members of multiple churches gather to console the immediately bereaved as well as a diverse group of other survivors by causing them to hear the enlivening sounds of their preaching voices. A minister from a church other than Baitshepi who preached as follows at a funeral struck the usual tone at such occasions on the subject of salvation: “Let us pray so that we do not enter into the time of trial. If you have prayed faithfully, you will not go to trial after death, but if you have not prayed, you will go to trial. And if you go to trial, you may be acquitted, but perhaps you won’t be.” Whatever emphasis pastors may place on damnation in preaching within their own churches, the delicacy with which they speak about the matter at funerals indicates their concern with how they may be perceived by others who do not share their interests or sentiments.18 In general, then, the work that church members of nearly all denominations undertake in managing bereavement in Botswana has the effect of countering tendencies to ratify believers as modern as opposed to backward persons, tendencies that Webb Keane (2002) traces to Protestant impulses to emancipate self-determining subjects from the influence of others’ words.19 As Richard Werbner writes concerning political styles common throughout the African continent, “care and respect for others—indeed, civility— is a precious and precarious condition of survival and as such is the object of recognised strategies for its conscious defence” (2002:20). The efforts church members devote to consoling the bereaved at funerals in Botswana help survivors sustain and renew convictions of their interdependence, even as death compels them to recognize how they put each other in danger, and even as churches supply grounds for contesting the terms of their familiarity with one another. People living in Africa or elsewhere may indeed come to believe—I use the word advisedly—that their survival depends on their fear that others want to kill them through witchcraft or by other means. Such a belief is not a premise of social life, however, but a contingent (and it is to be hoped, remediable) outcome, one that MmaMaipelo made a conscious effort to forestall in her dealings with suffering and death. MmaMaipelo was thus never convinced that people ought to believe fully in AIDS, if in so doing they were to orient their conduct around fears of or blame for infection. My more specific contention, therefore, is that Batswana are concerned with more than accusation when confronting the problems posed by AIDS (cf. Ashforth 2005; Farmer 1992). As I stated at the outset, the kinds of 30

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work involved in diagnosing illness, negotiating sexual relationships, nursing the ill, taking care of survivors, and consoling the bereaved all involve sustaining and (all too often) diminishing love. In order to comprehend the urgency of renewing love in the context of AIDS, as well as the importance of having tumelo in God at a time of widespread suffering, it is necessary to consider the broader range of means by which, and the purposes for which, Batswana attempt to shape one another’s ways of imagining relationships. Rather than attributing either the personalizing nature of discourses of care in Botswana or the religious emphasis on engagement with the moral imaginations of others to the doctrines of any particular Christian denomination, I regard such discourses as rooted in people’s awareness of how housing activities shape the care or scorn, love or jealousy they feel for one another over time. The imperatives underlying the Baitshepi Church’s moral passion cannot be understood without taking into account the range of processes by which Batswana try to build up love for one another in particular places over the course of their lives. m o r a l pa s s i o n i n h o u s i n g ac t i v i t i e s

I develop the concept of housing activity over the course of this study in order to highlight the place-ness of both love and faith. Housing arrangements make possible a wide range of loving—but also scornful and jealous— activities and relationships. The circumstances of the orphans One and Keletso, for instance, were determined largely by whether they were able to retain the love and remain in the homes of their close kin. Some evidence for the association between love and houses lies in the fact that the verb “to build” ( go aga) is the etymological root of some key Setswana terms for sentiments and actions that promote the good of others. The word for peace, kagiso, also means “causing to build.” Harmoniousness, kagisano, is the act of causing one another to build. To reconcile ( go agisanya) people is, literally, to cause them to cause one another to build. Building, in short, appears to be an important local metaphor for the relationality of love; a person’s love is built up by what others do and feel. Many of the situations that make Batswana aware of how their wellbeing depends on the sentiments of others, and that induce them to try to influence those sentiments, involve housing activities. Under the rubric of “housing activities” I consider not only building but a broad range of actions that involve people in one another’s welfare in particular places: nursing, visiting, staying, calling, hearing, obeying, drinking, bathing, praying, moral passion in suffering and faith

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asking, singing, healing, procreating, confining, hiding, marrying, moving, consoling, mourning, and burying. These activities are felt to have an impact on the well-being of people’s bodies—an understanding construed, in some church teachings, in terms of the saying that the body is a house for the voice or spirit. Indeed, much of the appeal of Apostolic Christianity derives from its methods of housing the spirits of adherents in ways that enhance their well-being. These housing activities create spatial and physical contexts that are popularly understood to structure the terms of personal interactions (see Durham 2005a), so that sentiments of love, care, scorn, and jealousy arise from the ways in which housing activities are carried out. One of my aims in relating these housing activities is to specify particular patterns in which social inequalities are experienced and morally assessed in contemporary Botswana. A double-sided set of processes that I call the domestication of inequality compels people to devote energy to imagining and shaping the love or jealousy they feel for one another. On the one hand, Batswana experience in their domestic arrangements the effects of inequalities arising from the capitalist labor market, as the ability to earn money shapes the terms on which people value one another’s capacities. At the same time, the moralities and hierarchies involved in housing activities play crucial roles in shaping how these inequalities are perceived and assessed. For example, access to cash is increasingly necessary in order to build a house, and a primary purpose of building houses is to earn cash on the rental market. Yet a person almost never builds in order to house himself or herself alone, but to house others who in many cases do not have much money. Even as the moralities that inform housing activities have been deeply influenced by neoliberal and consumerist conceptions of personal worth, Batswana often mitigate the consequences of inequality by building, nursing, praying, and burying—all of which compel awareness of how one’s welfare is linked to others’ sentiments. Through a series of iterations on the moral passion involved in housing activities, I hope to illustrate the intensity with which Batswana often become involved in one another’s sentiments, and to describe the depth of thought they give to problems of love, even when they do not adopt the particular methods MmaMaipelo advocated. This book begins and ends with death, the occasion that makes perhaps the greatest demands on people’s love. After an initial chapter focused on a case study, the chapter sequence begins with a consideration of houses in general terms, moves toward the

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particular housing activities associated with church, and returns again to houses transfigured by death. Chapter 1 presents background on the subjects of gender, migration, and sexual pathology in Botswana, and situates the Baitshepi Church in the context of religious movements in the region. I present this material in conjunction with a point raised in almost all discussions of AIDS in Africa in the popular media, namely, the stigma and secrecy that surround the illness. Rather than seeing stigma as derived exclusively from concerns about individuals’ sexual behavior, I argue that AIDS has been so difficult to discuss in Botswana because speech about sexually transmitted illness frequently amounts to critical commentaries on caregiving relationships. The scrutiny directed toward such relationships is particularly intense as a result of the close connection between AIDS and death. More publicly perhaps than any other occasion, death forces people to evaluate relations of care, love, scorn, and jealousy. Participants at funerals must consider carefully what they do and say—about, among other things, the nature of fatal illness—so as to manage the social consequences of their sentiments. I make this argument through a case study of a young woman Baitshepi member’s illness and death, which provoked those involved in her care to reflect upon and debate her social loyalties. Controversies at the funeral between this woman’s extended family and the church network revolved around what feelings to put into words about her death, and where and with which persons she had been placed. Whereas church members celebrated her faith and eternal life through preaching and song, members of her extended family expressed profound sorrow and hinted that church leaders had bewitched her. Likewise, by placing her body in particular houses— including the room where church members had nursed her in Old Naledi, and the “final house” (ntlo ya bofelo) of the grave in her home village—her caregivers made competing claims that she had been their child. Posing the question of why Batswana find it so important to shape one another’s caregiving sentiments, chapter 2 develops the concept of the domestication of inequality by focusing on the ways in which love and individual achievement are enacted through housing activities. After showing that urban housing policies in Gaborone have aimed to reward those capable of earning wages and punish those who are not, I explore how people’s practices of building for and staying with others reflect contested understandings of how they ought to value one another’s capacities and sentiments. Church leaders commonly present themselves as custodians of domestic

moral passion in suffering and faith

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moralities, insisting for example on children’s obeying or hearing their parents. This chapter specifies the reasons underlying MmaMaipelo’s efforts to sustain love within a “spiritual family” by exploring how church members have negotiated access to money, labor, and other resources through housing activities. Having shown that Batswana reflect on their own and other people’s life chances by considering how building and staying affect the love or jealousy they feel for one another over the years, I turn in chapter 3 to substances that nurture and destroy as they are conveyed between persons, altering their sentiments in the process. Batswana often disagree with one another about the nature and consequences of such transfers, yet consider them intrinsic to the growth, well-being, and injury of people’s bodies. Sexual intercourse, for instance, is not only an expression of prior love between partners, but an act that may create it. Yet it is also liable to give rise to dangerous conditions of “dirty blood.” Certain places especially associated with the transfer of nurturing or destructive substances—houses of confinement, churches, and beer gardens—shape the sensations and sentiments of those within them. Thus, church members describe Baitshepi as a house of nurturance, where they build up love by sharing certain phenomena—water, clothing, and voice—among their bodies, while refusing to have tumelo in other substances—beer and herbal medicines—that they regard as provoking jealousy. Chapter 4 discusses the transformative power of one of these phenomena, the voice, on bodies and relationships. Because church leaders initially evangelized me through instruction about hearing the voice, the voice has been central to my own understanding of people’s efforts to engage with the moral imaginations of others. The Setswana proverb “The word does not return, only the finger does”—meaning that it is possible to extract a finger from another person’s ear, but never an insulting word—reflects popular presumptions that spoken words possess power to influence other people’s thoughts, sentiments, and intents. This popular ethos lends itself, as do the transfers of substance discussed in chapter 3, to religious valorizations of intersubjectivity. Rather than focusing participants’ attention on distinctions among divine and human speakers and hearers, churches of the spirit tend to authorize particular forms of intersubjectivity, on the presumption that the word of God ought to “build” or “dwell” in the bodies of believers. As they sing personal hymns, for instance, church participants reflect on other people’s experiences, as well as on their own past sentiments and actions. Like hymn singing, calling people’s names in order to 34

introduction

make requests is a means of creating spiritual kinship among church leaders, followers, and ancestors. The chapter concludes with an account of how MmaMaipelo spoke to me about her calling so as to persuade me to believe in God, and presents some reflections on rupture and renewal in accounts of Christian conversion. Chapter 5 turns back to AIDS, showing that MmaMaipelo’s aim in preaching the word of God at a time of relentless death was not to reassure sufferers of the goodness of divine purposes but rather to stimulate love in her hearers. In so doing, she engaged with widespread concerns in contemporary Botswana about how relations of care may be made to persist at a time when illness and death have rendered them particularly difficult to maintain. The chapter explores the sentiments involved in the extremely demanding task of nursing the ill. A sick person (molwetsi) is relatively immobile, so that others must work for his or her good. Since the feelings and actions of people who are nurses (baoki) to the sick have an immediate bearing on their welfare, the issue of where—that is, in whose yards—the ill are cared for is crucial. The willingness of young women to undertake the work of nursing is consequently a subject of much popular concern and evaluation. Care for the dying influences a range of social relations over the long term, because survivors recall the care or scorn with which others have treated the sick and their caregivers, and behave toward them accordingly. Furthermore, it is important for the dying to “leave instructions” ( go laela) in their final days, telling particular survivors to care for one another. The silence of the dying may be construed as resentment, and as indicating that others may fall ill as a result of their ancestral anger. I consider these issues in light of how the introduction of antiretroviral medications since 2002 has presented men and women with divergent predicaments regarding HIV testing and care. Chapter 6 turns from comparatively private decisions about how to provide for the ill to the public domain of funerals. “You must not look back” is an instruction commonly given by a dying person to his or her close kin, expressing the desirability of their “giving up,” or resigning themselves to death, yet at the same time indicating the difficulty of the process. Bringing mourners to a state of “giving up” ( go itlhoboga) is the goal of preaching consolation (kgomotso) at funerals. Yet “giving up” is difficult at a time when people’s sentiments toward one another and the deceased are subject to evaluation in the public space of death. The sentiments arising from this public attention, in turn, have long-term consequences for relations within households, extended families, and church networks. moral passion in suffering and faith

35

For my part, I found consoling the bereaved to be an extremely difficult task. In the Conclusion, I consider the necessity, difficulty, and social consequences of putting love into words, and recapitulate the overall argument concerning the capacity of love to remake people’s moral imaginations at a time of widespread suffering. MmaMaipelo passed away in June 2006 at age 59. They tell me that her leg swelled up, that the doctors diagnosed cancer, and that she died within four months of falling ill. I wish very much that she had lived long enough to see this book in print. She never looked to my work to validate her own efforts to preach the word of God, yet was always aware that I was reflecting on those efforts, and hoped that I would learn from them. “You are my judge [moatlhodi],” MmaMaipelo once said to me with a laugh. “You will tell people, ‘These are the good things MmaMaipelo is doing, and these are the bad things she is doing.’ ” I don’t think that her laughter was a reflection on the presumptuousness of my proceedings, not in this instance at any rate. Rather, I think that she was conveying an expectation that I would treat her with the same generosity of spirit with which she placed her reputation in the hands of a person whose convictions, understanding, and tact she had good reason to doubt. Perhaps there has been an element of complicity to the relationship. Be that as it may, what enabled MmaMaipelo to accept the tensions between academic and religious projects was her keen awareness of the fact that people have multiple loyalties, and her belief that maintaining a sense of our interdependence consequently takes a great deal of spiritual work, to which there should be no end—not even (especially not!) death. “In our church we teach ourselves to forgive one another, because if we do not forgive each other, Jesus will not forgive us either.” The last time I saw her, she left me with the admonition: “Study—study to see whether your love for people has grown or diminished. Study so that God will give you love for people.”

36

introduction

one

Whose Child?

in june 1995, I was chatting with a senior woman member of the Baitshepi Church about the ubiquitous public health messages on billboards and the radio warning people about the spread of AIDS. At the time, a common slogan was “AIDS—It is Your Problem Too—Use a Condom.” During the period 1997–2000, such messages stressed sexual abstinence and monogamy as well: “Avoiding AIDS is as Easy as Abstain, Be Faithful, Condomise.” By 2005, prevention slogans had disappeared from most billboards, replaced by exhortations to “Know Your Status.” The church member said to me in 1995, “I don’t understand why so much fuss is being made about AIDS. There are many sexually transmitted diseases [malwetsi a dikobo, literally, illnesses of the blankets], like syphilis and gonorrhea, but you don’t hear much about them.” I said that this was probably because syphilis and gonorrhea could be treated effectively, but AIDS was fatal. She replied simply, “Oh, I didn’t realize that.” As I became better acquainted with the range of issues involved in talk and silence about HIV/AIDS, I began to suspect that my friend had understood quite well from public health messages that AIDS was an almost inevitably fatal disease, as it remained for the vast majority of Botswana’s citizens until 2002, when the government began to make antiretroviral

37

medications (ARVs) available free of charge to adults on a national basis. She had, however, not wanted to speak about it as such. In popular media reports about AIDS in Africa, it is commonly pointed out that the disease continues to be highly stigmatized. In Botswana during the late 1990s, there was widespread reluctance to be tested for HIV, although many thousands of people went to clinics every year to be treated for other sexually transmitted diseases.1 Yet people rarely attributed a particular illness to HIV or AIDS in casual conversation during the period 1993–2000, a situation that (as I discuss in chapter 5) had changed in significant respects by 2005. Reflecting on this state of affairs became, for me, a point of departure for a broader inquiry into local understandings of how feelings and acts of love influence the sentiments and physical wellbeing of other people. This chapter discusses how Batswana imagine, reevaluate, and try to shape one another’s sentiments in the context of illness and death, and explores how such processes have affected talk about AIDS. For Batswana, the question of what to say and what not to say about sickness is in many respects an issue of sentiment. Expressing care and love for the ill helps to alleviate suffering, while scorn and jealousy (lefufa) worsen it. The spoken word is one of the most important of the many forms through which these sentiments affect the well-being of others. For instance, praying aloud for the sick is an act of love with a capacity to heal, and to stimulate love in turn on the part of hearers. By contrast, if you hear jealous words spoken against you, you may fall ill, and if you are already sick, you may “give up” ( go itlhoboga) and die. Saying openly that a person’s illness is incurable, and that death is imminent, is a very hurtful act. In discussing the nature and causes of illness, people must consider the potential impact of speech and hearing upon others’ well-being, and upon the qualities of their relationships with them over the long term. More publicly perhaps than any other occasion, death forces people to evaluate relations of care, love, scorn, and jealousy. At funerals, the multiple commitments of the deceased to others—kin, church and burial society members, work colleagues, the broader community—are publicly recognized in a variety of ways, even as burial in a particular place defines the permanent “home” (legae) of the dead with specific people. There is an imperative to attend funerals in order to “show love” ( go bontsha lerato) by participating in the work of death. At the same time, death provokes painful sentiments of sorrow, fear, and blame. On many occasions, the very nature of the sentiments expressed is a matter of controversy. In the instance I 38

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describe in this chapter, one group of participants celebrated the Christian faith of the deceased even as another articulated loss and blame. In expressing such sentiments, those who take part in funerals reflect on the issue of who has loved and cared for whom, and who is thus to be considered a parent, child, or other kin, in relation to whom. Because death tends to call into question the nature of kinship and many other ties, participants at funerals must consider carefully what they do and say—about, among other things, the nature of fatal illness—so as to manage the social consequences of their sentiments and to guard against or otherwise come to terms with the possibility that relations will be permanently upset. Particularly disruptive are hints that a person’s death has been caused either by “promiscuous” sexuality (boaka) or witchcraft. Such talk may put survivors at odds with one another for years, making them feel that another person’s ill will or irresponsibility is the cause of their bereavement. On the other hand, the communal involvement demanded by funerals may induce even those who suspect one another of culpability to manage their differences in order to participate in the endeavor of showing love. Such imperatives to manage one’s own and other people’s sentiments in the context of death crucially shape popular talk and silence about AIDS. The manner in which MmaMaipelo spoke about AIDS at funerals, as well as to members of her church in less public situations, reflected the capacity of severe illness and death to concentrate people’s attention on how others feel toward them, on how they may wish them to feel, and on the methods they should use to influence their sentiments. MmaMaipelo’s method of fostering love in the time of AIDS rested on a determined agnosticism about the role of human agency in causing sickness—though not about its role in alleviating or worsening suffering through nursing care—derived from the conviction that accusations of promiscuity or witchcraft give rise to jealousy. Death, she insisted, is entirely in God’s hands, not in the hands of witches. In putting faith in God, people should adopt specific methods for “giving up” ( go itlhoboga) before and after a death, as well as for “thinking about” or “remembering” ( go gopola) their own and others’ past sentiments and actions. These methods center on putting love into words in a manner that leads people to reimagine their kinship and other relations to one another in particular ways. This chapter locates MmaMaipelo’s stance within broader personalizing discourses of care in Botswana, showing that within particular situations—church contexts, medical settings, and funerals—people have considered how to speak about sickness by imagining how talk about sexually transmitted and fatal illness whose child?

39

would affect relations of care. This is illustrated by the death in 1997 of a young woman member of the Baitshepi Church named Tebogo.

m i g r at i o n , g e n d e r, a n d pat h o lo g i c a l s e x ua l i t y i n b ots wa n a

“Poverty in the midst of plenty” is Ørnulf Gulbrandsen’s (1994) apt description of Botswana’s contemporary situation. Since independence in 1966, Botswana has experienced tremendous economic growth, driven for the most part by diamond mining, upon which government revenues are heavily dependent. In addition, Botswana exports large quantities of beef to the European Union. Unlike those of many African countries, Botswana’s government has not squandered its wealth in widespread corruption and violent contests for power (see Samatar’s account [1999] celebrating this accomplishment). The government, a liberal democracy, has not been forced to take out substantial international loans under structural adjustment. Since independence, a single political party (the Botswana Democratic Party) has ruled the country, but opposition parties hold many seats in Parliament. Economic growth in Botswana has created an educated middle class, something that was virtually nonexistent thirty years ago, but at the same time, it has led to consolidation of agricultural resources and deepening inequalities (K. Good 1999). For example, Jacqueline Solway (1998) shows how the commercialization of cattle production in the western Kweneng district since the 1970s has brought about a decline in the mafisa cattleloaning system, whereby laborers would acquire means to build up herds of their own. To an increasing extent, wealthy herders frame the terms of rights to grazing land, as well as rights to water cattle at boreholes (Peters 1994), albeit in ways that sometimes extend communal access to land and water (Gulbrandsen 1990; R. Werbner 1993). Formal education has become an avenue to upward mobility for many citizens of Botswana in recent decades, but in numerous instances, it has also had the effect of making experiences of inequality more cutting. Unless children are sent to expensive private English-medium primary schools, they are taught mainly in Setswana, the majority language, until standard 4, when teaching shifts entirely into English. Students often have difficulty with this transition (Botswana Government 1993:112) and fail their secondary school examinations. Many of my friends in Old Naledi express deep personal shame over having failed, and thus having had to enter the labor force at a disadvantage. 40

chapter one

A NG OL OLA

ZAM B I A Kasane

N

Z I MB M B AB A B WE WE

NORTH-WEST Maun

Bulawayo NORTH-EAST

NA MI B I A

Francistown Ghanzi

CENTRAL

GHANZI Serowe Mahalapye

KWENENG KGATLENG Mochudi

Molepolole KGALAGADI

SOUTHERN

Gaborone Kanye

0

SOUTH-EAST Lobatse

50 100 150 km

S O U TH T H AF A F RI RICA

Johannesburg

Map 1. Botswana. Courtesy of Maps.com, reprinted by permission.

For Batswana, efforts to make ends meet have long hinged on migration. Most of the country’s population is concentrated in the eastern portion, which receives more rain than the Kalahari Desert to the west (see map 1). During precolonial times, people depended on a combination of rain-fed agriculture and pastoralism, and cattle were the primary form of wealth. An idealized settlement pattern among Batswana has involved moving seasonally between centralized villages (metse); settlements at fields (masimo) where sorghum, maize, and other crops are cultivated; and cattle posts (meraka) where herders stay. A number of villages, such as Molepolole, Mochudi, and Kanye, now have populations in the tens of thousands. During precolonial times, such villages were the capitals of polities (merafe) ruled by kings (dikgosi ), who were subsequently incorporated as “chiefs” of their whose child?

41

respective “tribes” under the British policy of indirect rule. In independent Botswana, the largest villages are the capitals of their respective districts, where the dikgosi continue to hold great authority. The fields and cattle posts tend to be far away from the villages and cities, so that people spend hours travelling by bus, donkey cart, and foot between them. This idealized settlement pattern has provided rationales for land use and reform policies (see R. Werbner 1993) that in the context of a diversity of local arrangements have been imposed coercively at times, especially upon historically subjugated San minority groups (Hitchcock 2006).2 Immense transformations arose from the heavy engagement of Batswana in labor migration, which intensified dramatically in the early twentieth century, when South African mines and other industries began recruiting workers from throughout the subcontinent. Employment for cash wages was scarce in Botswana, known in the colonial era as the Bechuanaland Protectorate. Thus in the early 1940s, as many as 40 percent of young men were absent from some parts of the Protectorate at any given time, working in South Africa or in the British military (Schapera 1947:195). The majority of migrants were men, although substantial numbers of women became paid domestic workers. In some areas of the Protectorate, dikgosi tried to prevent women from leaving, forcing them to take over agrarian production and restricting their access to cash. Further transformations occurred immediately before independence in the 1960s, when urban areas began to expand within Botswana, and in the late 1970s, when the apartheid authorities in South Africa curtailed labor migration from Botswana. Nowadays, most wage work is to be found in Botswana’s cities. Yet given the shortage of urban housing and the uncertainties of employment, those living in urban areas continue to feel the importance of maintaining a rural base, in particular by building houses for their parents. In many parts of Africa, a range of transformations in agrarian production—cash-cropping, wage work, land dispossession, concentration of assets—has made it both more difficult and more essential for people to rely on the labor and support of kin (Berry 1993). In Botswana, migration for wage work has had a broad impact on relations of marriage, parenthood, and siblinghood. Whereas in precolonial times, sons were dependent on fathers for productive assets, especially cattle for bridewealth (bogadi ), labor migration quickly gave rise to dependence on cash, to which young men had the most immediate access. Gulbrandsen’s research (1994) in the southeastern Ngwaketse region of Botswana shows that labor migration 42

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makes agrarian production viable, since remittances are used to purchase cattle and hire labor, and yet constrains accumulation, because family labor is often scarce during peak times of the agricultural cycle. Small-scale farming and herding thus depend on cash from wage labor, to which young men have privileged access. While women have long earned cash from informal enterprises such as beer brewing and trading, and currently participate in wage labor to a far greater extent than in the past, the earnings of women outside the salaried class tend to be lower and less predictable than men’s. In 1993–94, 62.4 percent of men in urban areas aged fifteen to sixtyfour, but only 39.2 percent of women, were wage earners (Botswana Government 1995:35). For these reasons, as Anne Griffiths notes (1997:223), ties of support among women tend to be “most effective when incorporated within a network that also operates in association with men,” who retain greater access to cash, land, and cattle. Even so, many women forgo official marriage, managing their households in relative poverty or prosperity with the help of unmarried brothers, sisters, and daughters and sons.3 Women expect to marry only after they give birth to their first child, if at all. It is almost unheard of for a marriage to be celebrated in the absence of children. Out of ninety-six children under the age of fifteen whom I surveyed in Old Naledi in 1998, only ten had parents who were officially married at the time of their births, and none of these ten was an eldest sibling. In this book, I use the term “spouses” to refer to the partners in any recognized relationship, whether or not marriage has officially taken place. This usage reflects local practice. The terms for husband (monna) and wife (mosadi ) are ambiguous, because they also mean “man” and “woman” and are often used in reference to unmarried partners. Marriage is conceived of as a process, starting as sexual relations between lovers (dinyatsi ). Men must care for their lovers by giving them money and gifts, or the relationship will come to an early end. If men maintain and increase such care after the birth of a child, the relationship may eventually culminate in marriage. By giving bridewealth in the form of cattle or cash to his wife’s parents upon marriage, a man is legally recognized as the father of the woman’s children, and in most cases also becomes the legal owner of his wife’s property (Molokomme 1987). Bridewealth payments are often understood as a form of thanks by a husband to his in-laws for caring for his wife during her childhood (Schapera 1938:138). During the colonial period, the extended absence of men on labor contracts led to a dramatic lengthening of the marriage process (Comaroff and whose child?

43

Roberts 1977). Men would retire from labor migration only around the age of forty, at which point they would complete exchanges of bridewealth and set up their own households in rural communities. The fact that men channel much of their earnings from wage work to the support of their parents and unmarried sisters continues to discourage most men from marrying before they are forty, and many women from marrying at all (Gulbrandsen 1986). Thus, gender inequality in access to resources accounts in large part for men’s and women’s interests in delaying marriage. In explaining women’s reluctance to marry, a number of scholars (Schapera 1941; Gulbrandsen 1994; Helle-Valle 1999) have indicated the frustration and jealousy experienced by many married women, who are unable to take lovers because they tend to be under their in-laws’ surveillance, even as their husbands are free to sleep around, devoting substantial resources to their own lovers. By contrast, unmarried women are often able to provide for themselves and their children by keeping or rejecting lovers as they choose (see Guyer 1994). As I discuss in chapter 3, “protecting oneself” by sleeping with multiple partners may be a way of compensating for the emotional shortcomings of recognized relationships. Given the frustrations associated with marriage, women rely heavily on their children’s care. Women unable to bear children are both pitied and held in contempt (Upton 1999). In many cases, the sisters of infertile women “give” them children ( go fa bana) to raise, so that in later years they will have children to look after them. Men too need children who will care for them once they retire from wage earning. In choosing a wife, a man usually seeks a woman who already has children, so that he will become a father to her offspring, and to be assured that his wife will be able to bear more children for him. Men who marry a woman with a child say, “I’m taking the cow along with the calf.” Yet older children often have a say in their mothers’ marriages. I was told that teenaged children may pressure their mothers to reject a potential husband, because stepparents are presumed to put the interests of their own children and parents first. There are notorious tensions between children and the second wives of their fathers, or the mothers of their stepfathers. In addition, there is much talk of widespread sexual abuse of girls by their stepfathers, other male relatives, and schoolteachers (see the fictional account in Dow 2000). This situation, in which men and women commonly have children by multiple partners, is well suited to the rapid spread of HIV/AIDS. The disease spread into Botswana beginning in the late 1980s, and the increasing 44

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number of deaths had become a common subject of conversation by about 1995. As elsewhere in Africa (see Bledsoe 1990b), men and women alike associate condoms with transitory relationships, since they prevent conception. Although men often do use condoms, as evidenced by the large number scattered on the streets of Old Naledi, some fear that they will fall ill if the plastic or spermicidal fluid in the condoms enters their blood. Women are often in no position to insist that condoms be used; HIV transmission between regular sexual partners is now estimated to account for more than half of new infections in sub-Saharan Africa (Chin 2007:147). In any case, women often desire children, with or without the intention of building a marital relationship with the father. In addition, widespread alcohol abuse fosters sexual activity among multiple and concurrent partners, an epidemiological condition highly associated with HIV transmission (Weiser et al. 2006). The very high prevalence of other sexually transmitted diseases (E. Green 1994) and the rarity of male circumcision (Langeni 2005) also contribute to high HIV incidence rates in the area. Before giving an account of the place of AIDS within popular imaginations of transgressive sexuality in Botswana, I offer a brief timeline of the epidemic’s spread and of official efforts to control it and to treat its victims. 1987—The first cases of persons with HIV-related symptoms are reported in Botswana (Botswana Ministry of Health 1994). 1992—Sentinel surveillance studies of pregnant women show that 14.9 percent and 23.7 percent of women in the urban areas of Gaborone and Francistown respectively are HIV-positive (Botswana Ministry of Health 1992). c. 1995—The increasing frequency of deaths becomes a common topic of conversation. 1999—The government introduces a program to provide antiretroviral (ARV) medications to pregnant women to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV. About 24,000 adults and children are estimated to have died from HIV/AIDS during this single year, out of a total national population of about 1.6 million. It is estimated that 35.8 percent of the population between the ages of fifteen and fifty are infected with HIV.4 2002—With the assistance of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Merck Company Foundation, the government introduces a program to make ARVs available free of charge to adults. whose child?

45

2003—HIV prevalence among women aged from twenty-five to twentynine is estimated at approximately 50 percent in the national population, and to have been at this level over the previous three years (National AIDS Coordinating Agency 2003:17). 2004—Acting upon the finding that only about 20,000 people have volunteered for HIV tests since 2002 in spite of the availability of ARVs, the government mandates that all persons visiting a medical clinic for any reason be offered an HIV test. The number of Botswana citizens infected with HIV is estimated at 300,000.5 2005—During the course of this year, about 15 percent of the national population is estimated to have volunteered for or agreed to receive HIV tests. A total of 157,894 HIV tests are administered during 2005, about 69.5 percent of them to women or girls (Steen et al. 2007:486). A total of 36,422 patients across the country are receiving ARV therapies by April 2005.6 The national HIV prevalence rate among women aged from fifteen to nineteen is reported to show a significant decline for the first time, to 17.8 percent from 22.8 percent in 2003.7 As elsewhere in the world (Farmer et al., eds., 1996; Wallman 1996; R. White 1999), gender inequality in access to resources has been a key factor in the spread of AIDS in Botswana, because many women depend directly on sexual relations with multiple partners for material necessities. More broadly, gender inequality helps to maintain the conditions under which women and men bear and beget children by multiple partners over the course of their lives, and that encourage marital infidelity among men (Dube 2004). People’s reluctance to tell one another that they are infected with HIV also contributes to the epidemic’s spread. In large part, this reluctance reflects the stigma attached to “promiscuity.” Although women commonly have children by different men, calling a woman “promiscuous” (seaka) is a grave insult. As Jo Helle-Valle (1999) shows, a woman is liable to be called “promiscuous” if she does not use the resources she receives from her lovers to care for her children, but instead “wastes” ( go senya) them on drink. Calling a woman promiscuous is a way of scorning her, calling into question her willingness to provide for her children, and casting doubt on whether her spouse is her children’s father. Many people think it crucial that children be kept ignorant of the possibility that men other than their mothers’ spouses begot them, since relations with stepparents are so tense. 46

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In addition, “promiscuous” sex with people in mourning and other states of pollution has long been locally understood to give rise to diseases of “hot” or “dirty” blood (Ingstad 1988). By stressing that AIDS is a sexually transmitted disease infecting the blood, public health messages have strengthened its popular association with dirtiness, heat, and promiscuity. I experienced consistent difficulty during the period 1997–2000 persuading members of multiple churches that a person might contract HIV without having been “promiscuous.” Death and debility brought about by sexual conduct are so commonly attributed to “promiscuity” that it is hard to avoid implications of blame when discussing AIDS. Suzette Heald (2002, 2003) is correct, I think, to take the Botswana government to task for having excluded traditional healers, locally known as Setswana doctors (dingaka tsa setswana), from official AIDS education and control programs (see E. Green 1994 and the caveats in West 2006 and Simmons 2006). Yet given the stigma long attached to illnesses of “hot” or “dirty” blood diagnosed by these healers, it is unclear whether their inclusion would encourage popular openness about infection. Concerns in Botswana about transgressive sexuality have for decades reflected anxieties about the qualities of marital and intergenerational relationships—indeed, about “the relevant parameters of the social body” (Livingston 2005:147)—as much as worries about the well-being of individuals. Epidemics of sexually transmitted diseases have long been ascribed to the perceived unwillingness of women in particular to sustain proper caregiving relationships. During the decades following World War II, there was much popular concern about the debilitating conditions thibamo and mopakwane, diagnosed by Setswana doctors as arising from the improper timing of sexual intercourse. Such diseases appeared to be affecting many migrants returning from the South African mines wasted and coughing blood, and children suffering from disfiguring impairments. The increased prevalence of thibamo and mopakwane spoke of the collapse of the indigenous public health system by which chiefs had regulated personal maturation through initiation and cleansed their communities of toxic pollutants (dibeela) such as unpurified abortions. The result was “an increased pathologization of the womb” (145) along lines comparable to anxieties about reproduction elicited by colonial transformations elsewhere in Africa (Feldman-Savelsberg 1999; Hunt 1999; Thomas 2003). Thibamo, sometimes identified with TB, is said to cause bloody cough and weight loss, especially in adult men. A man can contract thibamo by sleeping with a woman who has had a recent miscarriage, and may infect his wife or whose child?

47

child with thibamo by sleeping with another woman while his wife is pregnant (Livingston 2005:172). Mopakwane, whose symptoms are manifested solely in children, occurs when spouses have sexual intercourse during the period of postpartum confinement. The “hot blood” produced by this improper sexual contact then infects the child through the mother’s breast milk (173). Both men and women continue to hold women primarily responsible for diseases arising from such improper timing of sexual activity. Men are said to need to engage in frequent sexual intercourse in order to maintain their able-bodiedness (Livingston 2005:175)—boitekanelo, literally selfsufficiency. Men aspire to physical and economic “self-sufficiency” by acquiring the strength necessary to earn money for themselves through manual labor.8 For women who have had to nurse debilitated spouses and children, on the other hand, thibamo and mopakwane have “served as public idioms that warned women against severing their own interests from those of family” (2005:175). Talk about thibamo or mopakwane not only problematizes women’s sexual conduct but reminds them of their obligations and perceived failures to provide for spouses and offspring through nursing, child rearing, and other domestic labor. In attributing a child’s mopakwane to his mother’s “promiscuity,” people often comment on two forms of perceived self-indulgence: lack of respectful comportment (maitseo) in sexual matters, and carelessness in looking after children. Much the same is true of talk about “promiscuity” in the context of AIDS. Popular concerns about sexual pathologies have thus long reflected anxieties about the qualities of caring relationships between spouses and across generations. However, the ABC (“Abstain, Be Faithful, Condomise”) prevention messages that dominated official AIDS control programs in Botswana during the 1990s did not make reference to relationships, apart from a general exhortation to stable monogamy. Such slogans imply that infection and prevention are the responsibility of individuals who ought to aspire to “self-sufficiency”—boitekanelo, the Setswana term used to translate “health” in official discourses. If a person practices safe sex, he or she will avoid contracting fatal illness and thereby remain “self-sufficient.” The unintended corollary, however, is that those who do fall sick with AIDS have been “promiscuous” and irresponsible; they are certainly liable to be viewed as such by potential caregivers. As Livingston notes (2005:239), “Palliation and caring sentiment are rarely at the center of overloaded international health agendas, but they continue to structure popular evaluations of care and community and thus to shape impressions of 48

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biomedicine and choices in health-seeking behavior.” Even such an astutely critical community health worker as Catherine Campbell (2003) frames AIDS prevention as an endeavor conceptually and practically distinct from providing care. Yet medical and social workers in Botswana are forced to grapple on an everyday basis with issues of care as they attempt to prevent the spread of infection by encouraging people to learn their HIV status. In May 2000 I attended a meeting of approximately thirty members of various local churches who had volunteered to serve in medical clinics as counselors for people who wished to have an HIV test. The group had been organized by a Canadian pastor from Mennonite Ministries, with the collaboration of a Ugandan health worker with long experience with NGOs and government agencies. At the time, ARV medications for adults were available in Botswana only to the elite who could afford high recurrent costs, and to employees of a few companies—such as the De Beers subsidiary Debswana—that were subsidizing drug purchases. However, the government had instituted a program the previous year to provide ARVs to pregnant women to prevent mother-to-child transmission of the virus. At the meeting I attended, volunteers (who were almost all women, and all relatively well educated, judging from the use of English as the common language at the event) shared stories about their experiences as counselors, with the Ugandan health worker and the Canadian pastor presiding. These clinical encounters had clearly been fraught with strong emotion; one volunteer remarked that her clients were trembling during post-test counseling sessions when she asked them, “Are you ready for the result?” I was struck by the extent to which volunteers felt that they needed to discover clients’ actual as opposed to declared motives in undergoing an HIV test, and by the consistency with which counselors deemed these actual motives to hinge on clients’ relationships with family members. One counselor related that a 22-year-old woman asked for an HIV test because she was planning on getting pregnant, and that the result of the test was positive. The counselor said that the client had not shown reluctance to be tested in her pre-test counseling session, and speculated that she had thought she would test negative. The Ugandan health worker (who had never met the patient) remarked that this woman’s talk about pregnancy plans was probably a screen; she had probably not wanted to have the counselor, her spouse, or her family consider that she might have been promiscuous. In another case in which disclosure and care were intertwined, a young woman pregnant with her first child told her counselor that she would not whose child?

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inform her parents of what she already knew to be her HIV-positive status for fear that they would throw her out of their house in frustration, since they had invested heavily in her education. Her parents, she said, accepted her boyfriend, who seemed healthy, so that they would imagine that she was the one who had been promiscuous. Participants in the meeting wondered why she had come for counseling. The consensus was that she had probably enrolled in the mother-to-child transmission program, whose staff were counseling patients solely on how to keep children from contracting the virus. The client had probably sought a counselor in order to discuss her relationship with her parents, who she feared would expel the baby as well as herself from the house when they saw she was not breast-feeding. (Since HIV can be transmitted through breast milk, HIV-positive women who have recently given birth are advised to bottle-feed their infants.) In fact, this client had made a point of asking the counselor not to contact her parents before the baby’s birth. As in another instance, when a male client asked a counselor to telephone his girlfriend with his negative result (a request the counselor granted), clinic staff found themselves involved in family members’ negotiations over care and love. There was speculation at the meeting that this man had some hidden motive in asking the counselor to speak to his girlfriend; perhaps he would make reference to his negative result in order to claim that his girlfriend had been sleeping around if she were later to test positive. The widespread illness and death associated with AIDS have clearly placed heavy burdens on people’s emotional capacities, as well as on their resources of time, labor, and money, making it ever more necessary and yet difficult for them to care for others. Nursing the ill, providing proper funerals, and looking after survivors all demand heavy commitments, both at times of immediate crisis and over years of work. The point I wish to stress is that Batswana have long understood and dealt with debilities associated with sexual “promiscuity” by reflecting on the sentiments and acts that build up or worsen their relationships with parents, children, siblings, and spouses. As in the mid twentieth century, speech and willful silence about “promiscuity” are today ways of considering the activities by which people, women in particular, have intentionally endangered others and/or nursed them with the love in their hearts. In the following section, I suggest that the capacity of love to transform kinship has been central to church practices as well. Church members often say that they have been physically attracted to church by the love that leaders “give” ( go fa), and furthermore that the love they “receive” ( go amogela) in church surpasses 50

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that which they receive from people in their own extended families. The importance of such love is all the greater in a time of widespread illness and death, when it is increasingly uncertain who is able or willing to care for whom. “g i v i n g love” i n t h e b a i ts h e p i c h u rc h

When asked to explain the value (mosola) of church, members commonly reply, “A church helps people” (Kereke e thusa batho).9 This answer summarizes the various kinds of material support, healing, teaching, and companionship that churches provide, and signals how people commonly understand church participation as a means of making their sentiments enhance the welfare of others. The highly diverse religious movements in Botswana draw on broad preoccupations with the capacity of love and care to create social and physical well-being. Praying, singing, healing the sick, consoling the bereaved, and contributing to burial societies, church funds, and other support networks are all popularly regarded as ways of “giving” and “receiving” love. Thus MmaMaipelo, bishop of the Baitshepi Church, continually reminded her followers of the importance of living with love (lerato), patience (bopelotelele), and truth (boammaruri ). It was particularly incumbent on her to do so, since as the head of the church, it was above all her sentiments that maintained harmony (kagisano) among her followers. Anyone who walks through Old Naledi on an early Sunday afternoon will hear the sound of singing from buildings where people have gathered to pray. These church buildings run the gamut from halls occupying plots of their own, to informal structures of metal sheeting and plastic, built within the compounds of their leaders. The range of these structures reflects the diversity of Christian movements in the area, as well as churches’ tendencies to expand over many years from single meeting places to networks with headquarters and branches. Christianity has been a dominant religion in Botswana since the nineteenth century, when dikgosi allied themselves with missionaries who were primarily from Britain. Churches founded by missionaries (Roman Catholic, Anglican, Dutch Reformed, Methodist, Lutheran, and United Congregational Church of Southern Africa, or UCCSA, descended from the London Missionary Society) are locally known as “churches of the law” (dikereke tsa molao) in reference to the fact that some had been the official churches of Tswana “tribes” under the rule of colonial-era dikgosi (Landau whose child?

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1995). The appellation “churches of the law” also reflects their command of very substantial resources, and their participation in national policymaking through ecumenical organizations such as the Botswana Christian Council (BCC). Social programs operated by the BCC in Old Naledi include a shelter for children without places to stay, housing for the destitute, and classes for school-leavers. The Catholic Church located in Old Naledi runs a heavily attended infant crèche. “Churches of the law” are popularly contrasted with “churches of the spirit” (dikereke tsa semoya), which are themselves quite diverse, but may be generally characterized as combining missionary teachings with a range of healing and other practices derived from precolonial sources. Churches of the spirit have a complex history in southern and central Africa (Anderson 1992; Comaroff 1985; Daneel 1970; Engelke 2007; Janzen 1992; Kiernan 1990b; Maxwell 2006; Oosthuizen 1992; Sundkler 1961). The first such churches in the region appeared in South Africa around the turn of the twentieth century. However, dikgosi with ties to “churches of the law” in Bechuanaland perceived them as a political threat. Churches of the spirit began to expand in Botswana once this repression was relaxed, beginning in the 1950s, under the leadership of returning labor migrants (Lagerwerf 1982). Churches of the spirit range in scale from the immense Zion Christian Church (ZCC), based in South Africa, and the large Spiritual Healing Church, based in Botswana, to the very numerous small-scale churches that meet in people’s yards. Amanze (1998:ix) estimates that about 65 percent of all church participants in Botswana are members of churches of the spirit, and that 30 percent belong to churches of the law. In drawing distinctions among churches of the spirit, people commonly indicate how they emphasize or reject specific practices related to divination and healing. Some churches, such as Baitshepi, reject divination and certain forms of healing such as purgations, for reasons discussed below. To some degree, controversies over these practices reflect the broad influence of Pentecostalist churches, some of which have been established in the region since the early twentieth century, while others have expanded into Botswana over the past two decades from bases in other African countries (Maxwell 2006; van Dijk 2006). During the early 1990s, their membership comprised somewhat more than 5 percent of churchgoers in Botswana, according to James Amanze (1998:ix). Pentecostalist churches commonly disparage so-called African practices, regarding divination, for instance, as work of the devil, and stress the necessity of being “born anew” by receiving the Holy Spirit.10 Such Pentecostalist teachings resonate with 52

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certain aspects of Baitshepi practice. Baitshepi members identify themselves as Apostles, people called to spread the word of God, a mission derived from the event of the Pentecost, when (as they sing in a hymn composed by one of the leaders) Jesus’ disciples “were sitting in a house / when glory broke out, / the Spirit poured out over them, / the Holy Spirit.” In this text, I use the terms “Apostolic church” and “church of the spirit” interchangeably in reference to Baitshepi, since members describe their church using both terms. MmaMaipelo founded the Baitshepi Church in 1982, when at the age of thirty-five she heard a voice telling her to stop drinking and smoking, that a great drought was at hand, and that she should call people to pray and repent. She had never attended a church prior to her calling. Baitshepi is a small and tightly knit community, with a sizable proportion of members related by descent or marriage to the bishop or to her first women converts. Other young adults enter the church upon moving to the city to look for work, having family members or friends from rural homes who had joined previously. As in most churches in Botswana, most Baitshepi members are women, who comprise about three-quarters of the participants in any given Sunday service. Of forty-four women in Old Naledi over the age of fifteen whom I surveyed in 1998, twenty-four identified themselves as members of a church.11 Men tend to be discouraged from attending church by prohibitions on beer drinking, but some are attracted by the prestige attached to official positions. For women, on the other hand, church participation provides one of the few available avenues to public leadership. One woman told me that she had joined the Dutch Reformed Church upon marrying, seeing that she was no longer a child who ran from place to place on errands, but was rather a mosadimogolo, a “great woman,” whose position required commensurate prestige. Large or small, every church of the spirit has a hierarchy with a bishop (bishopo) at the apex, and founders aspire to form branches in other communities. The spouse of the bishop is usually regarded as the joint church leader, so that people refer to the male bishop as “Rre Bishopo” and the female bishop as “Mme Bishopo.” This was the case in the Baitshepi Church, where MmaMaipelo’s husband was known as “Rre Bishopo” until his death in August 1997. In Baitshepi, senior women are known as elders (bagolo), and the most senior men below the rank of bishop are pastors (baruti ). Such positions, attained by seniority or by certificates earned at a variety of local theological institutes, carry much prestige. In particular, men who become pastors preside at funerals and weddings. The bishop of whose child?

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a church of the spirit is usually its founder, having experienced a calling or (in most cases) led a schism from an existing church. Such schisms commonly arise from disputes over church funds or the inheritance of rank (see Daneel 1988). Baitshepi Church activities center around the compound in Old Naledi where the church building is located, and where MmaMaipelo lived before moving to a village outside Gaborone in 2000. Every Sunday around 11 o’clock, and every Wednesday and Friday at 6 o’clock, members arrive for services dressed in their distinctive uniforms. Those in the church youth group arrive twice a week for meetings and choir practice. Members frequently stay awake all night for fund-raisers, parties celebrating the emergence of mothers from confinement, Easter and other important holidays, and funerals. Apart from these scheduled occasions, senior members spent much time visiting MmaMaipelo, asking her advice about their affairs, and reading the Bible with her. In addition, many church members would gather at a nearby compound in Old Naledi belonging to MmaSeobo, MmaMaipelo’s first convert and the most senior elder of the church. A well-attended Sunday service in Baitshepi comprises about fifty people. In 2000, Baitshepi leaders gave me a list of over four hundred members, most of whom are entirely nominal. It is very common for people to attend churches intermittently, at times of illness or other crises, or to move from one church to another over the course of many years. In Baitshepi, there is a comparatively small core group of longtime members. On the list of over four hundred, there are thirty-eight people (excluding small children) who were committed church members during the entire period from 1993 to 2000, or who died during that period and were buried as Baitshepi members. In addition, there are about forty current or former members who were very active in church for a substantial time during that seven-year span. Many of these committed members are the children or other relatives of women who had sold beer in Old Naledi before starting to pray with MmaMaipelo soon after her calling in 1982. Some of these women have since moved away from the city to nearby villages and have introduced their neighbors from those villages to the church. Apart from MmaMaipelo’s and MmaSeobo’s own mothers, who joined the church when they were elderly, there are few church members substantially older than the founding cohort of women (born c. 1945–55). Setswana is the shared natal language of nearly all Baitshepi members, but they draw attention to one another’s multiple places of origin in the Tswana-dominated southeastern part of the country during fund-raising 54

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events, when they group themselves into competing choirs, which they refer to as “branches” of the church, such as the Mochudi branch, the Gaborone branch, and the Molepolole branch. This pluralizing discourse reflects the fact that the church brings preachers of the word of God together from multiple places, where leaders hope to set up branches of the church in the future. Less a discourse on hosts and strangers within the multi-ethnic city of Gaborone than a means of recognizing the range of members’ homes, talk of branches expresses a sense that the church creates unity from multiplicity, and multiplicity out of unity. With a few important exceptions, Baitshepi members tend to have had limited formal education. This is especially true of the church elders of MmaMaipelo’s generation, who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, before primary education became universal. Children of Baitshepi members in school during the 1990s tended to fail their exams with regularity, largely because work at home prevented them from studying. Most of the male pastors make their living as builders, while many of the women elders depend on rental income, earnings from sewing clothes, and the support of children and spouses in wage work. Most church members also depend to various degrees on cultivating fields. People in MmaMaipelo’s extended family, for instance, have fields in the Kgatleng District about three hours’ journey by bus and foot from Gaborone, and children travel frequently between the city and the fields in order to attend school or to help with agricultural work. An elder named Violet had traveled throughout Botswana selling second-hand clothes until 1987, when, after praying with MmaMaipelo, she received a small-business loan from the government that enabled her to start a dressmaking factory, where she has employed a number of young women in Baitshepi. Violet has been very successful in “doing for herself” (go itirela), as people say when referring to gains through initiative. She runs her clothing business under the names of three companies, one owned by herself, and one owned by each of her two children, who are also members of Baitshepi. She has invested in cattle and built a large house in an upscale neighborhood of Gaborone. Violet married in 1999, but her husband (whom I never met) fell sick and died soon afterward. During the 1990s, MmaMaipelo and MmaSeobo provided young migrants to the city with food and places to stay in their respective compounds in Old Naledi, and during her husband’s lifetime, MmaMaipelo used the money he gave her from his work at a slaughterhouse to help church members in emergencies. It was such acts of generosity, as well as whose child?

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her efforts to heal afflictions, resolve disputes, and create marriages, that MmaMaipelo had in mind in saying that she “gave love” to her followers. In turn, young women staying in the church compound worked all day in the yard—cleaning, cooking, washing, bathing the children—while senior women who earned cash gave MmaMaipelo substantial gifts of money, clothing, and other commodities. However, the church has provided no institutionalized support for the very poor. Members must pay for their own uniforms (about 70 pula, or $17) and for transport to functions that take place away from Gaborone. They are also exhorted to pay P2 per month in fees to the church treasury, as well as to subscribe to the church burial society. Young women, in particular, who earn little cash and depend on wage earners who do not attend the church, must balance commitments of time, money, and labor to the church against commitments to their respective kin. Baitshepi members often reflect on such multiple connections by speaking of relationships among “spiritual” and “fleshly” parents and children. All church members refer to MmaMaipelo as the “parent of the church” (motsadi wa kereke). In particular, the young women whom MmaMaipelo and her husband RraMaipelo allowed to stay in the church compound often referred to them as their “spiritual parents” (batsadi ba semoya). Especially during my first period of research in 1993, church members often told me that “spiritual children” (bana ba semoya) are more important than “fleshly children” (bana ba senama) because spiritual children have love for their parents and “hear” or “obey” (go utlwa) their words. By contrast, “fleshly” relatives in your extended family are often jealous, resenting the support you give to others. A number of women staying in the church compound told me that they had decided to live there after having been healed of an illness, and because “MmaMaipelo has more love than my own mother.” In most cases, they had no grievances against their mothers; they would say that MmaMaipelo and their “mothers at home” love them equally. However, “MmaMaipelo loves everybody,” they said, including those who are not in her “fleshly” family, allowing them to stay in her yard without working for a wage. Over time, I came to perceive that remarks about spiritual kinship did not necessarily imply that church members had broken off relations with people in their extended families. Rather, they reflected complex and contingent relations of asking, giving, hearing, nursing, and staying in one place or another—activities that may generate new relationships of parenthood and childhood. In speaking about the love that spiritual children 56

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have for their spiritual parents, Baitshepi members drew my attention to the ways in which love and care create overlapping kinship relations in a context where the reliability of such ties is open to question, not least because of the prevalence of severe illness. Since a central purpose of church is to reshape members’ sentiments by building up love among them, and since the very act of speaking about illness may heal or injure a suffering person, naming sickness is apt to be construed as a matter of faith (tumelo). According to Baitshepi leaders, one must refuse to “believe” or “have faith in” certain illnesses, because the sentiments involved in speaking of them are liable to provoke jealousy. In the remainder of this chapter, I consider how Baitshepi leaders encourage their followers to have tumelo in God by speaking in certain ways about suffering, as well as by making comparatively exclusive claims regarding who has cared for whom. In particular, they say that believers ought to adopt certain styles of “remembering” or “thinking about” ( go gopola) their past actions and sentiments, and of “giving up” ( go itlhoboga) before and after death occurs. Framing tumelo in God as a method of sustaining love, MmaMaipelo exercised maternal care in nursing AIDS sufferers in part by avoiding speech about the pathological state of their wombs. naming affliction

In discussing faith and belief in relation to illness, I take my cue from Byron Good’s critique (1994) of Edward Evans-Pritchard’s Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande (1937). Evans-Pritchard shows that the fact that Azande attribute almost all misfortunes to witchcraft does not reflect empirical misunderstandings on their part, but rather a moral framework in which a wide range of misfortunes are explained in terms of personal responsibility. As Good points out, however, Evans-Pritchard’s emphasis on the rationality of “native belief systems” contributed to a juxtaposition common in much social scientific writing between knowledge as correct understanding and belief as reasonable but ultimately erroneous opinion. When belief is presented as an inferior version of the knowledge of the analyst, the writer’s own social loyalties often appear in the guise of value-neutral propositions, biomedical or otherwise (West 2005:233). Following Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1977), Good points out that oppositions between erroneous belief and apparently value-free knowledge arose through conceptual shifts in Christian terminology. Before the Enlightenment, the sentence “I believe in God” meant “I love God,” expressing loyalty whose child?

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to a divine being whose existence was recognized by all as a matter of course. By contrast, a modernist connotation of the phrase “I believe in God” is that the existence of the divinity is a proposition that the believer sincerely affirms (see Asad 1993; Keane 2002; Robbins 2007). Belief in this sense is a form of uncertain knowledge rather than an assertion of sentiment and loyalty. Within churches of the spirit in Botswana, and indeed in local nonchurch contexts as well, the concept of tumelo has more to do with sentiments and with relationships to other people than with knowledge of realities. Although church members certainly do mean that God exists when say that they believe ( go dumela) in God, only in a secondary sense does tumelo connote recognition of the reality of God or anything else. I once asked a sixteen-year-old woman named Lesego, who had joined Baitshepi after having been healed of an attack of witchcraft suffered at school, whether she believed in witchcraft: “A o dumela mo boloing?” Lesego answered, “If someone bewitches me, I don’t have anything to do with that person, because I do not believe in witchcraft” (Ha motho a ka ntoa, ga ke na sepe le ene, ka gore ga ke dumele mo boloing). She acknowledged the existence of witchcraft and in fact had just been speaking to me at length about having suffered from witchcraft assaults. My question about her tumelo, however, prompted her to speak not of its existence but rather of her sentiments toward witches. In keeping with the significance of the term as “agreement” (from the verb go dumela, to agree), tumelo is a matter of aligning one’s sentiments in relation to those of other persons.12 By refusing to have tumelo in witchcraft, Lesego refused to share the sentiments of those who practiced it. In a practical sense, not “having anything to do” with a witch means refusing to take vengeance through occult means. For Lesego, having tumelo in God as opposed to witchcraft was a way of recognizing and averting her own capacity for jealousy. In many churches of the spirit, prophets diagnose sicknesses caused by sejeso, harmful medicine introduced into a person’s food by a witch, and combat witchcraft through a variety of means, especially purgations (enemas and emetics), which cleanse the body of witchcraft substances. Members of such churches commonly say that what sets Christians apart from witches is that Christians have love, so that they refuse to take vengeance by engaging in witchcraft themselves. Such remarks bear similarities to Lesego’s comment that if you do not dumela in witchcraft—that is, “agree with,” “believe in,” or “have faith in” it—you will have nothing to do with 58

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someone who bewitches you. As Adam Ashforth shows (2000, 2005), however, the act of “protecting yourself” ( go itshireletsa) in churches, or in consultation with non-Christian diviners, is quite liable to fuel suspicion that you are counterattacking by occult means. Churches are thus very often perceived as sites of witchcraft as well as of healing. Baitshepi leaders take an unusually adamant position in relation to possibilities that their followers or relatives could be victims of witchcraft. They argue that you cannot be bewitched at all so long as you refuse to have tumelo in witchcraft, but rather place your tumelo in the healing power of water and voice as deployed in Baitshepi ritual. They do not deny the existence of witchcraft altogether; such a claim would make others suspect that they are witches themselves. Yet they strongly disapprove of remarks attributing particular illnesses to witchcraft, because such assertions produce resentment among those who suspect one another of hurting their loved ones. Thus there is no divination practiced in Baitshepi, and MmaMaipelo “refused to believe” ( go gana go dumela) in many other diagnoses, particularly those made by Setswana doctors, that make people blame others for causing illness. I once related to MmaMaipelo, together with another woman elder of Baitshepi, an accusation made to me by a widow from the village of Tlokweng claiming that her recently deceased husband had been bewitched by his own mother, who had been jealous that her son was taking better care of his wife than of herself. The elder explained that “in Setswana tradition” (ka setswana), a parent who feels neglected by a child may afflict that child with an illness known as dikgaba (hurt feelings), which must be treated by Setswana doctors (Ingstad 1989:251–52; Lambek and Solway 2001; Livingston 2005:171).13 MmaMaipelo interposed with the assertion that diviners had tricked the widow into attributing her husband’s illness and death to dikgaba. Setswana doctors, she asserted, investigate who is at odds with whom, and during divination sessions attribute illness to the jealousies that they know exist (cf. Pfeiffer 2006:94). I asked her whether she would believe (go dumela) a person who told her that he or she was sick from dikgaba, and she replied, “I do not believe in / agree with dikgaba” (Ga ke dumele mo dikgabeng). “People have a duty to speak to one another about their problems. Dikgaba is a sign of jealousy, of a failure to talk things out.” Again, the reality of dikgaba was not MmaMaipelo’s concern, but rather whether it was appropriate to have tumelo in it—that is, to attribute sickness to it, and more precisely to share the sentiments of those who would identify it as the cause of sickness in a given instance (cf. West whose child?

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2007).14 In her opinion, illness was not to be attributed to dikgaba, because such talk gives rise to jealousy. Whether or not this is the case with AIDS was a matter of ambivalence on MmaMaipelo’s part. The place of AIDS in preaching varies widely in different churches in Botswana (cf. Garner 2000; D. Smith 2004). Some Pentecostalist churches give AIDS an important place in exhortations to sexual monogamy, and some Apostolic church leaders encourage their members to serve in AIDS prevention and care programs such as the counseling sessions described above. Prophets in other churches of the spirit deny the existence of AIDS altogether, attributing sickness instead to witchcraft or to “Setswana diseases” (malwetsi a setswana) such as boswagadi, a sexually transmitted illness associated with the pollution of mourning (Heald 2002; Mogensen 1995; Pauw 1990). As I show below, the approach of Baitshepi leaders falls between these extremes. By no means does it represent all local stances on the issue. For instance, MmaMaipelo’s opposition to speaking about witchcraft or dikgaba illustrated her disapproval of what she considered jealous accusations on the part of some of her neighbors in Old Naledi, and her insistence that her own followers feel and act differently. Even so, as a particular approach to the problem of what to say about the nature and causes of fatal illness, the discourse of tumelo in Baitshepi illustrates widely held concerns about the healing and injurious powers of sentiment, and about how death forces people to evaluate who has felt love for whom. AIDS was the subject of one of the weekly meetings of the youth group of the Baitshepi Church in July 1997. At the time, the youth (basha) of the church consisted of about twenty women and five men, ranging in age from about 17 to 30. The youth leader announced that they would be performing two dramas. In the first, some of the youth would take on roles of evangelists trying to convert the others, who pretended to be nonbelievers. The second skit would be performed at an upcoming interchurch meeting organized by Mennonite Ministries at the Old Naledi community center to address the subject of AIDS. Both dramas appeared to have been organized spontaneously. In the first skit, some of the youth pretended to be beer drinkers; some, followers of Setswana doctors; and some, stubborn people who refused to believe in God or the Bible. The Apostles approached each of these groups and began by saying, “The land has been laid waste—you see that children do not listen to their parents, and that the disease AIDS is out there. So you have to believe and repent in order to gain eternal life. The flesh will die, but the spirit will live on.” The “nonbelievers” asked them dismissively, “Where is 60

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God? Have you ever seen him? God is in this beer bottle,” or “God is in these divining bones,” or “God is my grandfather.” To which the Apostles responded that God is not seen, that God is the voice that dwells or builds (go aga) in the flesh of a person. This is perhaps the central “spiritual teaching” (thuto ya semoya) of the Baitshepi Church, one that elaborates upon a broad local presumption that words convey people’s sentiments to others, for good or ill. The subsequent skit about AIDS opened with a young woman who refuses to obey or hear ( go utlwa) her parents’ instructions to do the housework. Instead, she runs off to a disco, where her girlfriends set her up with a predatory man. Afterward, she gets sick, grasping her stomach and doubling over, and returns to her parents, begging them to care for her. Her father throws her out, saying, “You’re sick because you refused to obey [go utlwa],” but her mother feels sorry for her and takes her to the doctor, who immediately announces to both mother and daughter, “It’s AIDS.” The mother runs back to her husband in a panic: “You know what the doctor said?” The father, however, refuses to believe the diagnosis, accusing the mother of telling stories. The drama being over at that point, the youth began a dance, with each youth member standing up in turn, saying that AIDS is out there, that we ought to be faithful to one partner, and that we ought to use condoms. During the dance, the man who played the seducer stood in front of the group and cried out desperately, looking at the veins in his arm, “I have AIDS! I’m going to die!” Sitting as audience, I was troubled by the implication that AIDS can only be acquired through immoral behavior, so after thanking the youth for their efforts to help people, I asked them whether they thought it possible for a person who leads a Christian life to have AIDS. MmaMaipelo, who had been in attendance, took it on herself to answer my question. She said that Christians might contract AIDS, but in fewer numbers than nonbelievers, and in any case if you are a believer, you will have eternal life. Yet she concluded by saying that she did not much like to preach on the topic of AIDS and was doing so only because the government wanted church leaders to make statements on the subject. “It’s the law” (Ke molao), she said. In other words, she doubted that talk about AIDS is good for evangelizing, because there is so much blame involved in discussion of the disease. She later told me, in fact, that my words had convinced her that the youth should not perform the skit in public at all. Indeed, a drama in which people who are acknowledged to have behaved immorally contract a fatal illness as the result of their actions does whose child?

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not reflect the poignancy of church members’ situations. They were able, I think, to perform the skit spontaneously because they had seen similar dramas before, and lightheartedly because it did not portray the sentiments they feel, or may wish to feel, toward their sick or deceased colleagues and relatives. For church members, the question of whether or not to call an illness “AIDS” derives its import from the efforts they make to manage their own sentiments, as well as the impact of these sentiments on the wellbeing of other people, through their tumelo. “Refusing to believe” in dikgaba, for instance, means that you will not attribute an illness to grievances elders have against their children. By refusing to talk about wrongdoing or resentment, you help to mitigate jealousies between them. Likewise, the difficulty of attributing an illness to AIDS stems from troublesome sentiments associated with suggesting both that a person has been “promiscuous” and that he or she will soon die. Thus, the intentions of church members in nursing and subsequently commemorating Tebogo, a young woman who died in May 1997, were not to make use of her illness as an occasion to warn others against AIDS, but to “remember” and “give up” in ways that celebrated her faithful death as well as their own nurturing love. s u s ta i n i n g c a re a n d fa i t h

Tebogo, who was born in 1975, joined Baitshepi in 1993, soon after she moved from her home village in the Central District to Gaborone to look for work. She had no children and no recognized marital partner. At the time she came to Gaborone, her older brother had recently moved to the city and joined the church himself; within a few years, he had become a senior pastor. Soon after Tebogo became a member, both she and her brother moved into the compound in Old Naledi belonging to MmaSeobo, the most senior elder of Baitshepi. Starting around 1992, Tebogo had begun to suffer intermittently from a number of ailments. Her outpatient medical card, which her mother showed me after her death, documented a series of illnesses involving diarrhea, weight loss, inflamed lymph nodes, and genital sores. I know nothing about the circumstances under which Tebogo might have contracted HIV. I once asked her if she would like to make a taped interview, in which I intended to raise the subject, but she never agreed to do so. After she died, others told me that she had not wanted me to “remember” ( go gopola) her by the voice she had had when she was ill. In gen62

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eral, Batswana do not speak of memory as a faculty in continual operation, nor do they say that people possess memories that elicit emotions once called to mind. Instead, they speak of “remembering” or “thinking about” the past as a distinctive style of feeling and behavior. It is possible to recall past events without “remembering” them. For instance, people often say that they are being “reminded of” ( go gakologelwa) a past occurrence. Being “reminded of” something does not involve any particular attitude or behavior. By contrast, saying that persons are “remembering” implies that they are dwelling on or “thinking about” ( go akanya) the past in such a way that the act of recollection affects their sentiments, conduct, and physical well-being. (In order to highlight the particularities of this form of memory work, I consistently place the term “remembering” in quotation marks here.) In this instance, Tebogo had not wanted me to dwell upon her suffering, as she imagined I would when I listened to her voice on tape. As I discuss in chapter 4, church members commonly identify a person’s voice as her spirit, so that speech and especially song communicate her spirit to others, causing them to “remember” her sentiments and actions. During her illness, MmaMaipelo and other Baitshepi members discouraged one another from “remembering” the circumstances under which Tebogo might have acquired AIDS and instead urged her to “think about” the love she was receiving from their prayers and other care so that she would recover. When I met Tebogo in February 1997, she had been too ill to work for the previous three months and was staying in the compound belonging to MmaSeobo. She had been referred by the clinic in her home village to a hospital in the village of Mochudi, but since she had no family there, she preferred to be cared for at the clinics in Gaborone, where the church network was based. Those who were looking after Tebogo included her mother, who had come to Gaborone three months previously from her home village to care for her, three brothers, and a maternal aunt who had a plot of her own in Old Naledi. MmaSeobo’s family, all members of Baitshepi themselves, were as actively involved in caring for Tebogo as her own relatives. Over the course of several months, they bought food, cooked for her, washed her clothes, helped her to bathe, spent time talking, plastered the walls of her room so that she would be warm at night, and helped her go to the hospital when she was unable to sleep or needed rehydration. In addition, MmaSeobo did not charge rent for Tebogo’s room while she was sick. This was an extremely important circumstance, given that Tebogo’s older brother, working for the City Council for a monthly salary of about whose child?

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300 pula ($85), was the only member of her family earning cash, and that her mother was unable to help in the family’s fields while staying in Gaborone. Other members of Baitshepi were also involved in caring for Tebogo, but to a less active extent. MmaMaipelo, however, visited the compound every day to pray with Tebogo, and her preoccupation with the illness was reflected in her preaching and her efforts to make me understand what the Bible teaches about death, consolation, and resurrection. For instance, at a church service that Tebogo was well enough to attend in mid-March, soon after the funeral of the brother of the mother of one of the pastors, the passage chosen for preaching was 2 Samuel 12:15–23, which I was told concerned consolation (kgomotso). In it, David’s son by Bathsheba falls ill, and he pleads with God to save him, refusing food, and lying all night on the ground. When the child dies, the servants are afraid to tell him, but when David finds out, he rises, washes, changes his clothes, and eats, saying, “While the child was still alive, I fasted and wept; for I said to myself, ‘Who knows whether Jehovah will have compassion for me and allow the child to live?’ But now that he is dead, should I fast? Can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he will not return to me.” This passage, many of the preachers stressed, consoles us by showing that death is the road that we must all take, and that we ought to pray to God for healing but resign ourselves to death once it occurs. Members of Baitshepi and other churches often preach about this passage at funerals, exhorting the bereaved to “resign themselves” or “give up” ( go itlhoboga) rather than remaining with jealousy in their hearts, asking who has been responsible for causing death. The passage that precedes this, in which the prophet Nathan tells David that God would punish him for his sin by causing his child to die, was not read or mentioned in any of the preaching. During this particular service, everyone prayed for Tebogo’s health— although on previous occasions when she had not been in attendance, she had not always been prayed for. In keeping with their refusal to preach about the death of David’s child as punishment for wrongdoing, church members made efforts to be ambiguous about the cause, nature, and probable outcome of Tebogo’s illness. In so doing, they left unbroached the potentially explosive question of Tebogo’s “promiscuity” and insisted that they were not going to “give up” on her survival. In general, when a person inquires casually about another’s illness, asking, “What is the problem?” (Molato ke eng?), the answer usually refers to a part of the body that is in pain, rather than a dis-

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ease name. Disease names are likely to suggest causes, and the less specific people are about the nature and causes of affliction, the less danger exists of provoking a confrontation over responsibility for suffering. When I asked church members what “the problem” was with Tebogo, they replied “her abdomen” (mala), or “sores in her heart” (dintho mo pedung), and left it at that. I commented to MmaMaipelo during this period that she did not seem to be interested in talking about the causes of illnesses, and she replied that this was in fact the case. In Deuteronomy, she told me, it says that God can cause sickness, but it says in Job that Satan can as well, and she herself is not capable of distinguishing between the two in any given instance. When a person in the church becomes sick or suffers some other misfortune, she said, she asks herself whether she as their “parent” has done anything wrong to incur God’s punishment, but it is impossible to examine ( go lekola) another person’s spirit to find out what he or she has in her “heart.” Although medical doctors should investigate ( go tlhatlhoba)—an expression used for the work of divination as well—the cause of a person’s illness, she herself does not want to do so. For instance, her own husband had long been ill with tuberculosis, but she would not ask him where or how he contracted it, for fear that this would cause trouble in their relationship. She was, perhaps, concerned about suggestions of thibamo or AIDS. “There is no way that we can be separated” (Ga re kake ra kgaogana), she concluded. In April 1997, I accompanied a number of the youth members to visit, bring food, and pray for Tebogo at Princess Marina Hospital, the large referring hospital in Gaborone, where clinic workers had taken her for rehydration. Tebogo’s body was becoming emaciated, she was in terrible spirits, and the youth stood by her bedside with tears in their eyes. Tebogo then told us that a nurse had asked her whether she wanted to have an HIV test, and that she had said yes, because she wanted finally to know. At this point, MmaMaipelo’s niece (yZD) Dineo shook her head, saying that she disapproved of such tests, because if they were positive, you would “give up” and be unable to think about anything else. In keeping with this sentiment, MmaMaipelo insisted repeatedly during Tebogo’s final weeks that she would not “give up” on her, even as there was reason to believe that the doctors had told Tebogo that her disease was incurable. On the occasions when MmaMaipelo prayed over her, we bowed our heads as she placed her hands on Tebogo’s shoulders, saying that it is not we but God who has the power to heal and asking God’s glory to enter

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into her. Once while talking to Tebogo afterwards, MmaMaipelo remarked that people who become very thin ( go bopama) don’t necessarily die, and that she herself might pass away at that moment even though she was not emaciated. Such prayers and encouraging remarks are deemed extremely important, since they prevent the sick from “giving up.” In some ways, medical practice also fosters ambiguity about the nature of illness. When MmaMaipelo told me that she was unwilling and unable to investigate sickness, she remarked that she did not force anyone in her congregation to show her their medical cards, since they were their “secrets” (diphiri). Other people also commonly deny knowledge of the cause of someone’s illness or death by saying that they have not seen the relevant medical cards. Outpatient medical cards, which are written by clinicians for the use of other doctors, are thus treated as secrets—although not necessarily as undeniable truths—about people’s conditions, secrets that are often unknowable to the sick themselves, since the cards are written in English and in medical language. An AIDS diagnosis is made a particular secret on these cards. It is against medical regulations in Botswana for practitioners to indicate such a diagnosis through any means other than listing drugs that are prescribed for HIV and recognized as such by other doctors (Dr. Volker Hoynck, pers. comm.). A clinic worker in Old Naledi told me, however, that when a person tests positive for HIV, he writes on the medical card the word “immunosuppressed,” or the code “RVD+” (retroviral disease-positive). In Tebogo’s case, a doctor had written on her medical card that “immunosuppression test results seem positive,” and during her final weeks, when clinicians were giving her painkillers, they wrote “immunosuppressed?” on her form, indicating that they too were not quite certain about the nature of her illness. For their part, those who looked after Tebogo were displeased with the care she was receiving in the hospital, but their dissatisfaction did not stem from the mysteriousness of clinic proceedings. They were not angry that Tebogo had not received a clear diagnosis, had not been told why she was given particular medications, or been informed why, as her mother once put it, “blood was always being taken out of her and water put in.” Rather, they were upset because the nurses scolded Tebogo, did not give her nutritious food, refused to wash her, and once discharged her without informing her caregivers, so that she had to come home in an expensive special taxi. This was “scornful” behavior, and church members perceived the numerous hospital visits they made with gifts of fruit and meat as extremely important to Tebogo’s well-being. 66

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If everything conspired to make the nature of Tebogo’s sickness ambiguous, Baitshepi leaders did speak to me at length about the illness of another young woman, named Onalenna. Onalenna was not ill in biomedical terms. However, during church services and when singing with the youth group, she would suddenly be “entered by the spirit” ( go tsenwa ke mowa) and dash out of church. Once, during a Sunday service, her head and shoulder coverings came off her uniform before she could be restrained. One of the elders sternly re-dressed Onalenna, while one after another publicly admonished her, telling her that if she had been entered by the Holy Spirit, she would have sung and preached like the others. Running out of the church, they lectured her, was a sure sign of suffering from an evil spirit (mowa wa bosula), and they instructed her to sing and pray constantly so as to hinder it ( go o kgoreletsa). About two months later, Onalenna stopped attending church, and MmaMaipelo informed me that she was suffering from a “spiritual disease” (bolwetsi jwa semoya), which she explained to me as follows: “If you are not living well at home,” she said, “or if people have insulted you, when you start to sing in church, sorrow [bohutsana, a term also used for bereavement] overcomes you, your heart does not fall [pelo yagago ga e wele, i.e., you are not able to remain calm], and you may be entered by an evil spirit. You should not think about [go akanya] the life you are leading outside the life of the word of God, and you should not think [go akanya] ‘I have been insulted by so-and-so.’ People preach properly when they have patience and love for one another.” In other words, it is necessary to concentrate on renewing your love for other people when singing or preaching the word of God, since “thinking about” insults will make you resentful rather than patient. Baitshepi leaders told me at this point that Onalenna had quarreled with her marital partner and had left his yard to live with her mother. Onalenna herself, however, told me that she had not been ill at all. When she is entered by the spirit, she said, she is able to discern ( go tlhatlhoba) the causes of problems in other people’s lives. She blamed MmaMaipelo for “not wanting my spirit,” meaning that her spirit led her to divine sources of affliction. Onalenna eventually joined another church, where she became a prophet. In MmaMaipelo’s view, Onalenna had been “remembering” or “thinking about” things incorrectly. She told me that she preferred an illness like Tebogo’s to one like Onalenna’s, since Onalenna’s sickness demonstrated that she was lacking in faith. I was quite struck by this remark, because Tebogo was clearly near death, and for MmaMaipelo to say that her illness whose child?

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was preferable to Onalenna’s showed that something was at stake for her in the work of nursing apart from whether Tebogo recovered or died. Indeed, Baitshepi members said that Tebogo’s faith in God led her to love MmaMaipelo for what she was doing to care for her as a mother, and it was in light of this relationship that they discussed or avoided discussing the nature of her illness. Baitshepi leaders described the nature of Onalenna’s illness—so called by them—so explicitly because they cast it as a sign of problematic sentiments on her part. Especially once an open breach had occurred between themselves and Onalenna, they had no reason to be ambiguous about what they saw as her illness. Calling Tebogo’s sickness “AIDS,” on the other hand, would in no way have served as an affirmation of her faith. It would have been an act of scorn, stigmatizing her as promiscuous and possibly discouraging people from caring for her. At one point during Tebogo’s decline, MmaMaipelo announced at a women’s prayer meeting that it was impossible to tell whether a person had AIDS by looking at them, and that therefore no one should be scorned on the suspicion that he or she had been promiscuous or might infect others. The one occasion I witnessed before Tebogo’s death when MmaMaipelo did preach about AIDS (albeit in somewhat veiled terms) was an instance in which the issue of faith again took precedence over concerns about multiple sexual partners. MmaMaipelo preached that she was worried because the land was being laid waste by deaths, and she exhorted the congregation to behave well (le itshware sentle) and to repent ( go ikotlhaya). However, the meaning of repentance was ambiguous. MmaMaipelo wanted those in her church to refrain from having more than one sexual relationship at a time, and her preaching might have been taken as a statement of this conviction. What she stressed, however, was the importance of believing in Jesus when you die, because if you do not, “You will really be dead” (O tla bo o sule tota). One result of Tebogo’s decision to be nursed by Baitshepi members was to strengthen ties between her immediate family and the church network in Gaborone. During and after her illness, Tebogo’s mother became involved in the church, two of her brothers moved onto MmaSeobo’s plot and became church members, and during school vacation her mother sent another of her daughters from their home village to attend services. Yet Tebogo’s illness appeared to create or to have exacerbated tensions between the Old Naledi–based church network and her immediate family, on the one hand, and members of her extended family and residents of her home village, on the other. For instance, Tebogo told me that there were people 68

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in her extended family (batho ba losika) living in Old Naledi who did not visit her during her illness, unlike MmaMaipelo, whom she called her “spiritual mother.” On one occasion, she entered MmaMaipelo’s compound screaming that she had heard a voice telling her to pray there, and she did not settle down until MmaMaipelo prayed over a cup of water and gave it to her to drink. MmaMaipelo likened this episode to her own calling in 1982, implying that Tebogo’s running into her compound was a sign that she had been similarly “called” (bidiwa) by God. The relationship between compound dwellers, who were intensively involved in Tebogo’s care, and other church members, who appeared more distant, was thus mirrored in the relationship between Tebogo’s relatively immediate and extended families. The fact that Tebogo was being cared for in a church compound in itself limited the ways in which extended family members could be involved in her treatment. For instance, given Baitshepi leaders’ opposition to divination, it would have been impossible for anyone to take Tebogo to a Setswana doctor without first moving her away from MmaSeobo’s compound. I am certain that if Tebogo’s mother had decided that she ought to be moved, she would have been, since church leaders wish to avoid direct confrontations with the families of members. However, once Tebogo’s therapy began to be managed in a church compound, such decisions seemed to rest with the family members most immediately involved in her care, especially her mother and aunt, as opposed to more distant relations, most of whom were in any case far away in Tebogo’s home village. A few days before Tebogo died in the hospital in late May 1997, she called MmaMaipelo to come to her bedside so that she could “say farewell” or “leave instructions” ( go laela). Also present were Tebogo’s mother, MmaSeobo, and the spouse of Tebogo’s older brother. MmaMaipelo later told the congregation that Tebogo had said farewell by informing them that she had heard a voice calling her name, and that she had seen MmaMaipelo in a dream praying for her. Also at this last conference, Tebogo sang her personal hymn, “Do Not Bypass Me, Beloved One” (Se mphete, wena yo o rategang), which she had always sung during church services in order to obtain the strength to preach. Being able to say farewell and to sing during one’s last moments, MmaMaipelo later told me, is a sign that a person has self-understanding (itlhaloganyo). A person’s song, she said, remains with us as the word dwells in the flesh; when a person is absent or has passed away, his or her song is a memorial (segopotso, literally, something that causes “remembering”). whose child?

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MmaMaipelo thus continually stressed to her followers how Tebogo had identified church leaders as the people whose sentiments had contributed most to her well-being by showing her the love of Jesus. Tebogo’s decision to stay in a church compound during her illness was key in this regard, since it placed responsibility for her care with church leaders. She depended upon their care while sick, and relied on them to guide her own sentiments so that she might sing and “leave instructions” when dying. In short, Baitshepi leaders claimed that Tebogo had loved them for what they had felt and done for her in her time of suffering, and that in so doing she had become their child. At her funeral, Baitshepi members’ efforts to celebrate her faith provoked controversy over who had in fact loved her, and whose child she should thus be considered to be. s e n t i m e n t a n d k i n s h i p at a f u n e r a l

In Botswana, burial defines the location of a person’s permanent home (legae), distinct from all other places where he or she has lived. In the past, people were buried in the places most closely associated with their productive activities, men in their cattle kraals and women and children underneath their houses. Such practices declined in most localities over the course of the twentieth century.15 Nowadays most people are buried in communal cemeteries (mabitla) located in villages and cities. The question of where a person should be buried is often controversial, especially in cases when children must be buried in one or other of their divorced parents’ homes. In Tebogo’s case, however, everyone implicitly agreed that as a young person who had not married or built a house for herself, she would be buried in the rural village in the Central District where her parents had raised her. Thus, Tebogo’s burial identified her home as the village, to which church members had to travel in order to assert publicly that she had died a faithful member of Baitshepi. The funeral began during a late Saturday afternoon. Baitshepi members, dressed in their uniforms and carrying candles to light the body on its way (as they do only at the funerals of their own church colleagues), accompanied the closed coffin from the mortuary, located in an industrial strip adjacent to Old Naledi. They went to MmaSeobo’s compound, and laid Tebogo in the house she had occupied. This was, in a sense, a pre-burial: church members placed Tebogo in the house where she had “stayed” in Old Naledi before taking her to the “home” of her kin. After pastors had said prayers over the body, they carried the coffin back into the hearse for 70

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the drive to Tebogo’s village, where it was placed in a room in her parents’ compound. Church members had intended, I think, to accompany the hearse, but there were some difficulties involving the minivan taxi they had hired. After the hearse left, they took off their uniforms, gathering warm clothes and blankets for the night, and boarded their hired transport a few hours later. During the two-hour trip, church members sang the one-line hymn “I Won’t Throw It Away, My Faith” (Ga nkake ka e latlha, tumelo ya ka) over and over, to the evident chagrin of the driver, who turned up his radio. During the all-night vigil (tebelelo) preceding the burial, Tebogo’s mother and aunt, who had nursed her in Gaborone, lay in mourning next to the coffin. A vigil is held from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. immediately outside the room where the coffin rests, underneath a canvas tent. Electric generators provide light. While a vigil is in progress, women prepare tea and fat cakes (balls of deep-fried dough) to serve the assembly about halfway through. While a senior member of the deceased’s family makes arrangements with a single pastor to be the overall organizer, vigils are always carried out under the auspices of pastors from multiple churches, even if the deceased had been a committed member of one particular church, or had not been a church member at all. Pastors and others attending the vigil alternate their speeches, each person standing when wishing to speak. The assembly introduces hymns during these speeches, in order to elaborate on what is being preached, and sometimes to express impatience with the speaker. Almost all of the pastors presiding at funerals are men. MmaMaipelo, however, took the unusual step of encouraging a number of women in Baitshepi to enroll in correspondence courses with local theological institutes. Women who have passed these courses preside at funerals along with men from Baitshepi and other churches, and may likewise be called pastors (baruti ). Senior Baitshepi women thus enjoy the same kind of prestige as their male counterparts on such public occasions. The stated purpose of a vigil is to console ( go gomotsa) women of the deceased’s bilateral kindred who are lying in mourning on the floor next to the coffin, as if they too were dead. These women are deemed in particular need of consolation, because they are said to have been the deceased’s caregivers (batlhokomedi) and must hear the enlivening words of the preachers if they are to nurse the ill properly in the future (cf. M. Green 2003: ch. 8). Church members in particular are supposed to encourage mourners by showing that they have already “consoled themselves” with the knowledge that “the spirit does not die” (mowa ga o swe), and that believers whose child?

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have eternal life. However tired, cold, and sick they might be feeling, they must speak and sing with “energy” (bonatla) rather than mope about “like corpses,” as a Baitshepi elder scolded church members on one occasion. Thus during the vigil for Tebogo, Baitshepi members recalled Tebogo’s last words, in which she had reported hearing a voice, elaborating that it had told her that her way was open. They emphasized that she had been blessed in knowing in advance of her own death. Whereas Baitshepi leaders had discouraged open speech about the possibility of Tebogo’s death before it occurred, during the vigil they cast her farewell as a sign that she had accepted God’s decision that she would die. They spoke of her acceptance as an indication of her tumelo, in that she had not expressed self-pity or resentment. Church members often speak of Job as an exemplar of patient suffering, since he did not follow his wife’s advice to “curse God and die,” but rather accepted his afflictions as God’s will.16 The alternative— complaining that not God but a specific human being has caused one’s ill health or imminent demise—gives rise, of course, to ill will. Hence, a principal reason for encouraging the bereaved to console themselves is to limit their potential resentment of anyone whom they might suspect of having brought about the death of their loved ones through witchcraft, promiscuity, or other wrongdoing. An improvised speech at the vigil given by a young woman named Rosina, a Baitshepi member who had been a close friend of Tebogo’s but was otherwise unrelated to her, provides an example of the “energy” with which church members are supposed to engage in consolation. Rosina spoke “in the spirit” (mo moweng), very forcefully and with a great deal of passion, with breaths coming from deep within her. Church participants say that when the spirit enters them, they feel a force coming up from within their bodies, a force over which they have to maintain some control in order to avoid being choked and falling over. Words spoken “in the spirit” have a power over the emotions of listeners that words spoken “in the flesh” (mo nameng), that is, in casual conversation, do not possess. The upbeat hymns and the passionate preaching made the tone of the vigil not at all mournful, but rather celebratory of Tebogo’s faith. (Rosina’s speech may be heard in file 1 of the online audio annex, at www.ucpress.edu/9780520259669. I hope that the listener will forgive the poor quality of the recording, as well as the drumming sounds I made as I thumped my Bible in time to the singing. See Appendix 1 for the full text, as well as Rosina’s subsequent comments to me on her own words. The transcription records in separate lines the phrases Rosina spoke between each breath she took.) 72

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In her preaching at the vigil, Rosina repeatedly quoted songs from the popular Sesotho hymnbook Lifela tsa Sione (Songs of Zion),17 saying that Tebogo had herself spoken the words of the hymns. When I later asked Rosina whether Tebogo had actually used these words, she replied, “These are the words that I spoke for her. When I spoke, I took the position [seemo] she had had in life. If she had been at the funeral, these are the words she would have wanted to say.” In thus making ambiguous who is speaking any given words, preachers may use the words of hymns to sound the voices of the deceased at their own funerals. As Rosina preached, she related her own words, the words of the hymns (one of which was Tebogo’s personal song), as well as the singing of the group, as if they were Tebogo’s words. Rosina began with her own personal hymn, which she always sang in church to give her strength to preach. She immediately framed what she was going to say as “remembering”: “I want to remember the person of God.” Over the course of her preaching, she said repeatedly that she was “remembering” or “thinking about” ( go gopola) how Tebogo had expressed faith in eternal life through her songs, as well as her (Rosina’s) own ongoing relationship to the Baitshepi Church. Whereas prior to Tebogo’s death, church members had insisted that they would not “give up” on her, and encouraged her not to “give up” herself by “thinking about” the possibility that she had a fatal disease, during the vigil they repeatedly “remembered” Tebogo’s faith precisely in order to “give up,” that is, to console themselves. Rosina stressed five principal points in her preaching, all centering on how Tebogo’s tumelo had created love between herself and other church members during her sickness. I outline these five points schematically in the approximate order in which Rosina raised them. First, Rosina emphasized that Tebogo had said farewell by singing hymns showing her recognition that death was near (lines 10–28, 42–63). Given that Rosina was speaking the words Tebogo would have wanted to say, perhaps Tebogo was herself saying farewell at the vigil. Second, the act of wearing the church uniform, which Rosina called “the uniform of a soldier,” had given Tebogo strength to avoid bad words and intentions (lines 29–30). The cloth of a church uniform strengthens the body at its vulnerable joints, giving its wearer a dignity or presence (seriti) that wards off undesirable sentiments, one’s own as well as those of others. Third, Tebogo’s hymn singing had been a way of “speaking to her God,” that is, of reflecting on the nature and consequences of her sentiments whose child?

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(lines 60–61). Speaking to one’s God in this fashion is also an act of “remembering” (see chapter 4). Rosina stated repeatedly that singing had made Tebogo “remember” or “think about” the fact that she had to “return” the life she had “borrowed” from God, and allowed her to do so without resentment. Tebogo had acknowledged God as a giver to whom she owed obedience. Fourth, Rosina spoke of Tebogo’s faithful death as well as her decision to be an “evangelist” in terms of movement in space: she had “gone on the Lord’s road,” which she “chose for herself” when she might have chosen otherwise (lines 97–98). This imagery resonates with the widespread presumption that acts of movement or placement in space build up sentiments of love, care, jealousy, and scorn among particular persons. Finally, Rosina concluded by invoking the “angels” of Baitshepi—a reference to both the Holy Spirit and the bishops’ personal ancestors—and compared herself to Tebogo, in that she too has spiritual parents, namely, MmaMaipelo and RraMaipelo (lines 125–29). A person who hears the words of Baitshepi leaders does not die without a parent, since she has spiritual parents who love her, providing for her and guiding her sentiments during her suffering. Rosina’s speech was received with great enthusiasm. Everyone, it seemed, joined vigorously in the hymns, and the village women who brought tea and fat cakes immediately after Rosina finished danced among the chairs while the congregation continued to sing. The intended effect of speech and song at night vigils is to make listeners feel consoled, and I must say that it worked on me in this instance. The experience of hearing such impassioned preaching all night was so exhilarating that it came as something of a shock the next morning to witness my friend’s body being lowered into the ground. The words and actions of people in Tebogo’s extended family presented a striking contrast to those of the Baitshepi members. In general, relations between the two groups consisted of a tense compromise. Tebogo’s family had had to pay most of her funeral expenses, since she had not belonged to the Baitshepi burial society. A different church with a branch in Tebogo’s home village had organized prayer services there during the week following her death, and at the vigil there was some rivalry between pastors of this church and those of Baitshepi over the proceedings. When I later asked members of Baitshepi about Tebogo’s relationship to this other church, they told me that people in that church had not known her very well, unlike those of Baitshepi, who had spent a long time in Gaborone with her. MmaMaipelo similarly called my attention to the words of an elderly man from Tebogo’s village who remarked at the vigil that it was Tebogo’s “spir74

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itual family” (losika la semoya) in town who had known her best. Most of the villagers, however, spent the night talking to one another around fires burning in the yard rather than attending the vigil at all, and church members later speculated that they did not attend “because they were beerdrinkers rather than Christians.” Such tensions became obvious at the service preceding burial the following morning, the tone of which was completely different from that of the vigil. A morning service begins about two hours after the vigil ends, after people have rested and bathed. At the funerals of church members, their colleagues change back into their uniforms for the morning service. Others put on the usual attire for formal occasions—suit jackets for men, headscarves and shoulder throws for women. The effect is to make immediately apparent, through the color and style of people’s clothes, who is and is not a member of the church to which the deceased had belonged. When dressed in their uniforms in such a public context, church members say that they are “of one spirit” (mowa o le mongwe hela), setting themselves apart through their tumelo in God. At 6 a.m. on the morning of a burial, people begin to enter the house of mourning to view the body, and printed funeral programs are distributed to everyone.18 After about an hour, as the assembly sings hymns, the coffin is brought of the house by relatives or others listed on the program and placed in the area where the vigil had been held. Elder relatives, whose names and relationships to the deceased are also printed on the programs, are then given an opportunity to speak. The first speaker during this morning service, Tebogo’s paternal grandfather, did not express consolation but rather a sense of profound loss. At the same time, he claimed responsibility for the course of her care. He began by announcing that Tebogo’s death had been caused by “blankets” (dikobo), a euphemism for sexually transmitted disease. He went on to emphasize that her illness had started three years previously “away in Gaborone.” She had been taken, he said, to medical doctors, Setswana doctors, and prophets in Gaborone, but none of them were of any assistance. Whenever she did come home, he said, she had soon gone away again; the implication being that when she came to her home village, she got better, but that when she went back to the city, she got worse. “Now, my people, this child has left me. But she has not left only me, she has left my children, she has left her friends, she has left all of us.” After making his speech, he walked away from the Baitshepi members who were gathered around the coffin, and he had little to do with them afterward. whose child?

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MmaSeobo, who was listed on the program as Tebogo’s nurse (mooki), spoke next. She seemed defensive. Speaking in a dispassionate and formal tone, she said that when “we” (implicitly, the church members) had first met Tebogo, she had already been suffering from illness, and that she would get better and then worse again. Only recently had her illness become devastating. However, MmaSeobo concluded, Tebogo had been a person who had always struggled against ( go leka) her illness and trusted in God. Later, a Baitshepi pastor preached about the resurrection of the spiritual body, concluding forcefully, “Death is not a sin” (Leso ga se boleo), and saying that death was made by God so that we could enter the next world. Such tensions continued to make themselves felt. At the burial, Baitshepi members stood next to the grave in their uniforms holding the church flag, which rarely leaves the premises in Gaborone, ostentatiously claiming Tebogo as one of their own. Many of the church members made a point of sprinkling soil over her grave, which is usually done, for the most part, by people in the extended family in order to merge the deceased with the ancestors, who are identified with the earth. In scattering soil on Tebogo’s grave, church members reinforced their claim that she was their kin as well. After the burial, those in Baitshepi washed their hands in tap water in order to cleanse themselves of the dirt of death, while everyone else washed with water treated with herbal medicines (metsi a a phekotsweng) by Setswana doctors. (The usual practice is in fact to set out two such tubs for those who do and do not want to come into contact with protective herbs.) At the subsequent gathering of men, an elder of the village publicly asked the church members to leave before making the tatolo, the formal announcement of the cause of death. He gave no reason for this, but merely indicated to the “guests” (baeng) that there was food set out for them elsewhere. During the meal that followed, the church members sat apart from the villagers, and rather than remaining to talk afterward, as is usually done at funerals, they quickly departed back to Gaborone the way they had arrived the previous night, in a group. Summing up the funeral, MmaMaipelo’s son told me that the vigil had been a success, since the fact that none of the church members had wept as the coffin was being lowered indicated that they had been properly consoled. By contrast, he pointed out, women in Tebogo’s extended family had collapsed from grief. When I related these incidents to other residents of Old Naledi, they told me that the villagers must have suspected the church leaders of bewitching Tebogo, or of depriving her of the protection of her ancestors in 76

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her home village by keeping her in the city. Their refusal to eat with them was perhaps the clearest sign of such suspicions, since funeral meals are regarded as prime occasions for witches to poison their victims. The idea that church leaders, like Setswana doctors, may be witches as well as healers reflects broad suspicions that those who promise spiritual protection may be protecting themselves at the expense of others’ vitality. I heard many rumors of a church of the spirit near Gaborone whose members have become wealthy by bewitching their own children. Such stories are in keeping with widespread anxieties over actual recent incidents in which children have been killed. Ambitious business owners and politicians are said to use children’s body parts as medicines to accumulate wealth and power. During the 1990s, such alleged murders precipitated a number of riots against the government, which was seen by many as shielding the perpetrators (Durham 2004; Gulbrandsen 2002). More specifically, tensions at Tebogo’s funeral involved competing claims as to whose child she was. Church members stressed that Baitshepi had guided Tebogo’s sentiments, making her a child of the church because she had recognized the love that MmaMaipelo and others gave her. On the other hand, her grandfather emphasized that her extended family had cared for her by sending her to a variety of doctors over the course of her illness. The implicit suggestion that Baitshepi had bewitched Tebogo amounted to a claim that the church leaders were not her parents at all, since they had not properly cared for her. The different ways in which church members and villagers expressed their love for Tebogo—through energetic consolation and somber expressions of loss respectively—expressed these competing claims to kinship. I do not know why Tebogo’s grandfather stated that she had died from a sexually transmitted disease, but I suspect that the expulsion of church members from the formal announcement of the cause of death, and villagers’ refusal to eat with them, may have been responses to the very enthusiasm, bordering on joy, that Baitshepi members had shown during the vigil. In spite of these obvious tensions, church members said that they had maintained a certain civility (maitseo) throughout. The funeral did not disintegrate into open confrontation, as some do. Tebogo’s grandfather made a point of saying a polite good-bye as the church members drove off. When I raised the subject of the grandfather’s speech with MmaMaipelo the following day, she remarked that he was in great grief (o hutsafetse thata), and that she been unable to hear whether he had mentioned sexually transmitted disease. She added, however, that she had no complaints whose child?

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about his involvement in bringing Tebogo to a Setswana doctor, because she does not want to interfere in the efforts of relatives to heal the sick. “We know that Tebogo is in a place where she is happy, and we’ve given up now [re itlhobogile jaanong],” she said with an apparent mixture of cheerfulness and relief at having managed the funeral in such a way as to assert faith while maintaining civility. She had avoided an open breach with Tebogo’s relatives from the village. About six weeks after Tebogo’s death, one of her brothers was baptized into the Baitshepi Church, announcing during the service that he had been impressed by what the church had done for his sister, and that he would like it to do the same for him. While clearly principled and heartfelt, MmaMaipelo’s approach to nursing and burying Tebogo was hardly disinterested. Her aim was to perpetuate caregiving relationships among members of her church, refusing speech about pathological wombs and dwelling instead on maternal love. In speaking and acting as she did, MmaMaipelo presumed that the sentiments she expressed would have an impact on the ways in which Tebogo, other church members, and villagers who participated at the funeral imagined their relationships to herself and to one another. Her moral passion consisted of encouraging other people to “remember” and “give up” in a particular fashion: to refuse to “remember” or “think about” past insults or other disruptive sentiments, or to diagnose diseases in terms that elicit such “remembering”; not to “give up” on possibilities of healing; and to “remember” a deceased person’s faith in ways that enable survivors to “give up.” It is true that “remembering” and “giving up” are forms of memory work that tend to frame past events in ways that suit present interests, agendas, or inclinations. More specifically, however, they are styles of feeling and acting toward other people that possess consequences for the qualities of ongoing relationships. The same may be said of tumelo or faith in God, which in the case I have described consisted of nothing other than a particular method of “remembering” and of “giving up” elicited by prayer, song, and nursing care. As far as MmaMaipelo was concerned, Onalenna’s proclivity to incorrect “remembering” showed that she was lacking in tumelo—that is, in willingness to orient her sentiments away from insults and jealousies. In the introduction to a recent collection of essays on kinship and memory, Janet Carsten points out (2007:24) that “loss is absorbed and transformed, and in time becomes the source of creative refashionings, in and through everyday processes of relatedness.” This formulation suggests how

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“remembering” and “giving up” may be means of sustaining particular kinds of relatedness in the face of loss. Carsten pursues a line of inquiry anticipated by Meyer Fortes’s discussion in Oedipus and Job in West African Religion (1983 [1959]) of how Tallensi account for a person’s good or evil destiny in terms of relationships of care among ancestors and the living. Carsten argues: “In many cases, the conscious or implicit assumption of such losses is an integral part of adulthood, and of creating new kinds of relatedness in the present and future. In this sense we might say that a work of memory is the necessary counterpoint to kinship relations in their broadest sense. Conversely, . . . where such a work of memory is rendered difficult or impossible, the possibilities for present and future relatedness become radically constrained” (2007:24). In an essay in the same volume, Veena Das and Lori Leonard (2007) document how expert discourses on relatedness may in turn constrain expressions of loss. Das and Leonard describe the efforts of clinicians in a southern U.S. city to convert girls infected with HIV into “responsible, compliant patients” who would be able to “speak truthfully about their [sexual] relationships” (2007:212). In denying the likelihood of the girls’ deaths and orienting discussion around their future sexual responsibility, clinic staff gave no discursive place to the girls’ anger over one another’s deaths, and at their past abuse and exploitation at the hands of relatives. In this expert discourse, care and its absence were not appropriate subjects of memory work. By contrast, MmaMaipelo’s method of sustaining love within a spiritual family derived its appeal from a broader politics of care in Botswana, where styles of speaking about illness—especially sexually transmitted illness and fatal illness—are ways of speaking about the qualities of caring relationships (hence the title of this chapter). Speech about promiscuity, talk of witchcraft, and songs about patience in suffering all constitute ways of reflecting on particular persons’ love for others—as well as methods for reorienting the sentiments of hearers. Thus, the different kinds of truth telling that occur in church settings, at funerals, and even in clinical counseling sessions are less focused on defining individual persons’ characteristics in terms of normalized medical categories than on working out the qualities of their caring relationships with one another over time. Given that the ways in which people speak about disease are so crucially shaped by their sense of possibilities for caring, any transformations in the conditions under which they may give care to one another are likely to affect the manner in which they talk about illness as well. As I relate in chapter 5, I was

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struck by the comparative readiness of some people to describe themselves as HIV-positive in 2005, once ARV medications had become widely available for adults and children in Botswana. Concerns about possibilities for caring have likewise given anthropologists cause to rethink the analytical and political grounds of work on kinship. John Borneman (1997) shows, on the basis of research in Germany, that the provision of care, in particular among same-sex couples, is acquiring legal recognition as a means by which people may claim access to rights and resources. He draws on such findings in order to criticize heterosexist biases in kinship studies, arguing that anthropologists have constructed theories of “communal reproduction” based on ideologies that subject the unmarried to legal discrimination (Borneman 1996). This analytical project, Borneman contends, should be abandoned in favor of attention to “processes of voluntary affiliation” centering around “the priority of an ontological process—to care and to be cared for— . . . a fundamental human need and nascent right in the international system” (1997:574, 583). I find, though, that conceptualizing care as a “voluntary” relationship distinct from putatively natural ones tends to foreclose the issue of precisely how caring sentiments and acts affect the emotions and well-being of other people.19 As I have argued, there is a widespread presumption among Batswana that a person’s love, care, scorn, and jealousy are likely to give rise to comparable sentiments on the part of others, and indeed to affect the conditions of their bodies. Such processes are not usually seen as transactions between autonomous agents, but rather in terms of the capacity of certain persons’ sentiments and bodily states to influence the well-being of others within particular spaces, such as yards, churches, and funerals. All the same, Borneman’s discussion of care invites comparative attention to the range of processes by which people come to acknowledge how their well-being depends on the attitudes and activities of others, or alternatively ignore or deny such connections. Experiences of death and loss, as Carsten suggests, may be key instances of these processes. Isaac Schapera, justly the most influential of all anthropologists who have worked in Botswana, wrote in his classic ethnography Married Life in an African Tribe (1941:33) that the veneration of ancestors had been displaced by officially sponsored Christianity by the 1930s, thereby largely leaving aside questions of how death’s memory work transforms patterns of care and relatedness.20 Yet we have seen that the moral passion involved in such memory work is apt to be construed in Christian terms, as Hansjörg Dilger (2007) shows to be the case as well in some Neo-Pentecostalist churches in Dar es Salaam in the context of 80

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AIDS. The emotions expressed at funerals in Botswana, ranging from grief to celebration, often reflect particular stances toward the question of who has cared for whom, and are liable to be regarded as expressions of faith or its absence. For Baitshepi members, tumelo in the context of death is an intersubjective memory work, consisting of efforts to orient one’s own and other people’s sentiments in particular directions, undertaken with recognition of the difficulties and possible failure of the enterprise. In chapter 6, I return to the subject of how funerals and mourning provoke powerful sentiments with a capacity to redefine relatedness. In some measure, what drives such processes is the fact that burial identifies the permanent home of the deceased in a particular place and with particular people. Yet in order to understand the sentimental significance of locating the dead in one place rather than another, it is necessary first to turn back to the broader context of migration and mobility, in order to consider how acts of movement or placement in space build up love, care, scorn, and jealousy among persons. In the following chapters, I argue that Batswana imagine possibilities for feeling and giving care in terms of housing activities, such as burying, nursing, and praying, through which they engage with one another’s sentiments over the course of their lives.

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t wo

“Go with Me to Babylon” The Domestication of Inequality

during the year 2000, MmaMaipelo’s only son was having a large house built for her and for himself in a village west of Gaborone. MmaMaipelo and her son had long been eager to move away from Old Naledi, but for different reasons. Both of them had bemoaned the fact that their house in Old Naledi was cramped, and that the yard flooded when it rained. For Maipelo, who had recently earned a degree in chemistry from the University of Botswana and found a well-paying government job, however, the new house was a sign of his status and a means of recasting certain domestic arrangements with which he had never been entirely happy. Maipelo is the only member of Baitshepi with whom I routinely conversed in English. In 1993, when he was twenty-four, he explained to me that although his parents had loved him, they had never properly cared for him when he was a child. He was especially bitter about having been sent to a Setswana- rather than an English-medium primary school, because his teachers were untrained, he claimed, and beat the children. “I will never put my own children through this,” he told me. “Before I have children, I will finish school, find a well-paying job, and move into a better neighborhood. My mother doesn’t understand that I don’t want to raise my child in poverty. A child should grow up respecting the father, and have a nice home in a neighborhood which he is not embarrassed to admit he is from.” 82

Maipelo is quite pleased, however, with the fact that his mother started the church in 1982. He traces the transformation in his upbringing in large part to it. “At first, my father started to change, turning away from drinking beer all the time. Then my mother was called by the voice and she stopped drinking as well.” A few years later, recognizing his abilities, Maipelo’s teachers assigned him to a boarding school for his secondary education. RraMaipelo paid the fees from his work in a slaughterhouse. At this school, Maipelo was able to devote much more time to study than he could at home. The young women migrants who during 1993 were staying in the church compound in Old Naledi “are not my sisters,” Maipelo told me at the time, “they are just children of the church. My mother is doing them a great favor by letting them stay here. This house is too crowded, but there is nothing I can do about it, because my mother likes people. Often these people come from illiterate families. They stay here for free, they get food; they are even getting paid for their work as seamstresses for Violet,” the Baitshepi member who owns a clothing factory. Maipelo has long been close to Violet, who devoted much time and money to assisting him at school, and he calls her his sister. “So the money they’re being paid is leaving the family?” I asked. “Yes, leaving the family for good. I do not know how this family gets by financially. I know that Violet and some others help out my mother, but my mother also gives Violet money when she is broke.” Before his death in 1997, RraMaipelo had given his wife a portion of his monthly wages, and she in turn had provided small sums to the spiritual children (bana ba semoya) staying in the church compound in Old Naledi. In MmaMaipelo’s son’s new house, which does not include a church building on its plot, there are twelve rooms, including three baths and a double garage, with running water and electricity. The receipts, which MmaMaipelo proudly showed me as evidence of her son’s care for her, indicated that the cost of the building materials was about 70,000 pula (approximately $17,000). Yet few if any spiritual daughters unrelated to MmaMaipelo stayed in the new house for lengthy periods, I think very much to her regret. These housing arrangements have been key to the terms on which Maipelo, his parents, and members of their church have given love and care to one another over the years. As we saw in chapter 1, the qualities of caregiving relationships are centrally at stake in discourses about AIDS in Botswana, so that people’s speech and silence about the nature of illnesses reflect their expectations that talk about suffering will affect the sentiments “g o w i t h m e t o b a b y l o n”

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they feel toward one another. The method of “remembering” encouraged by MmaMaipelo is a technique of orienting people’s sentiments, and of encouraging them to rethink the terms of their relatedness and familiarity. Yet illness and death are not the only set of circumstances in which Batswana attempt to shape one another’s love. Indeed, the import of the question “Whose child?” in the context of death derives from the broader set of circumstances that make people concerned about the qualities of their children’s love. Why should it be so important in contemporary Botswana for people to devote what I have called moral passion to imagining one another’s sentiments and channeling them in particular directions? The task of this chapter is to show that the ways in which love, care, scorn, and jealousy have become subjects of moral passion in Botswana today have shaped and been shaped by the domestication of inequality. I employ this concept in a double sense, as a means of grasping the simultaneity of processes whereby social inequalities are experienced and conceptualized in moral terms. On the one hand, neoliberal models of achievement, health, and citizenship (see Durham 2007; Nyamnjoh 2006; van Dijk 2003) current in Botswana have enabled certain persons to command disproportionate shares of resources, and in so doing have restructured the ways in which people value one another’s capacities. In their domestic arrangements, Batswana have felt the effects of inequalities brought about by the capitalist labor market, because those with direct access to money, such as Maipelo, are able to dictate the terms on which others will or will not be housed and otherwise provided for. On the other hand, Batswana commonly experience and assess inequalities in moral terms arising from housing activities, such as building, nursing, praying, and burying. While the consequences of inequality may be exacerbated by the hierarchies involved in housing activities, Batswana frequently try to mitigate those consequences by housing one another in various ways. In other words, they make efforts to domesticate inequality, in the sense of bringing its consequences under control (cf. Brenner 1998).1 Domestic moralities and hierarchies frame the ways in which Batswana conceptualize inequalities arising from the capitalist labor market, even as neoliberal valuations of personal capacity have shaped the moralities governing housing activities as well. Many housing activities induce Batswana to consider the moral grounds of individual achievement and of care by others within a political economy that identifies “self-sufficiency” with formal education and command of wages. For instance, building and furnishing houses are signal accom84

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plishments of adult personhood, areas of long-term planning, and activities in which to invest substantial resources of cash, labor, and time. “If you’ve finished building,” some school-age women I once encountered said to me laughingly, “your life is over. You might as well start preparing your funeral. If you’ve gotten a good job, have your children living with you, and have built a house for yourself—really, your life is past!” One of Julie Livingston’s friends pitied her for not building for herself in America, since “without building there is no life” (2005:15). The appearance of a house and yard communicates certain things about the capacities and inclinations of those who inhabit them. For example, many elderly women wish to retain their autonomy as householders for as long as possible before moving into the homes of their grown daughters, and they display their able-bodiedness by keeping their yards swept and their houses impeccably clean. “Ao! This home is spotless!” people might think when visiting a woman no longer able to undertake farm work. “She is not so old after all” (Suggs 2002:40). Young women improve their marriage prospects by building and decorating their compounds in order to show that they are hard workers, albeit to a decreasing extent nowadays, since they devote more time to schooling and wage labor (Grant and Grant 1995:118). Women attract people to them as they build rondavels (traditional round huts) out of clay mixed with cow dung, and spread brightly colored designs on the house and courtyard walls. Conversely, people may comment that a dilapidated yard shows that a family is “always fighting” and unable to work together well enough to keep up appearances (Ørnulf Gulbrandsen, pers. comm.). Nowadays, to an ever-increasing degree, a person needs cash in order to build and builds in order to receive cash on the rental market. Since the 1970s, the increased availability of imported building materials, together with shortages of thatching grass and roofing timber caused by overgrazing, have contributed to a decline in traditional construction skills. People have had to acquire cash in order to build houses out of concrete and corrugated metal (Grant and Grant 1995:34–35; Larsson 1990). Government officials have carried on the legacy of missionary efforts to instill habits of domesticity in Africans (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992: ch. 10), identifying the willingness of Batswana to build with “modern” materials with their readiness to “develop themselves” into modern persons by earning money. As a minister of education told a gathering in the village of Mochudi in 1991, “Look, your houses are made of mud and cow dung and therefore cannot stand even a small flood. . . . Always when I go round and talk to “g o w i t h m e t o b a b y l o n”

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the people in the rural areas, I tell them that one of the marks of civilisation is the way you can control your environment . . . part of civilisation is to build very strong structures out of cement, concrete, iron and metal” (quoted in Grant and Grant 1995:35). In 1998, a friend of mine with much experience in construction estimated the cost of a three-room concrete house at P5,800 for materials and P1,000 for labor. Because most entrylevel factory workers earn about P300 per month, and domestic workers even less, people in cities build “bit by bit” (ka monokela) as resources become available—that is, if they are lucky enough to have the rights to a plot; otherwise, they become renters, paying about P100 per month for a single room in a concrete house. Statements that Batswana must “develop themselves” have great popular appeal, resonating as they do with long-standing conceptions of achievement as “doing for oneself” ( go itirela) through hard work, which ideally makes people wealthy and “self-sufficient” (itekanetse).2 Yet even though house construction practices and housing policies have rewarded the individual “self-sufficiency” of those successful in the labor market, it remains the case that a person almost never builds a house for himself or herself alone. It is often impossible, for that matter, to build by oneself alone. Women call on the help of relatives to purchase building materials (Larsson 1989:97), and men as well as women buy furniture on installment plans in hopes of receiving small loans from friends and family to pay them off. Both men and women see issues of who has helped them build, of where and for whom they build, and of with whom they stay, in terms of the love, care, scorn, or jealousy others feel for them. Moreover, because building is a key aspect of social achievement, people perceive that their life chances depend on their ability to influence such sentiments. Such concerns seem to motivate preaching on Jeremiah 40:4, a text popular in many local churches: “Now see, I am releasing you today from the chains on your hands. If it is good in your eyes to go with me to Babylon, let us go, and I will take good care of you [ke tlaa go disa sentle]; but if it is evil in your eyes to go to Babylon, just refuse [gana fela]; see, the whole world lies before you; where it is good and right in your eyes to go, just go there.” In such preaching, Babylon is invariably identified as the Promised Land; God is asking his children to come to Babylon, where he will care for them, but they are free to refuse, that is, to scorn their parent. Issues of care and scorn are framed here in terms of movement in space, on the premise that a child cannot be compelled to stay in any given place, or to

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care for his or her parent. Each person must reflect on the care and love he or she has received from others, and stay or move accordingly. The popularity of this Bible passage undoubtedly reflects how large-scale labor migration has given rise to novel understandings of autonomy and interdependence among elders and juniors (Durham 2007; Livingston 2005). Neither young men nor young women can any longer be compelled by their elders to channel their wages or devote labor to their support; the whole world is spread out before them and they may go where they like. In the popular Setswana novel Ya Le Nna Babelona (Go with Me to Babylon) by O. B. Otladisang (1993), a young woman named Leidi runs away to Old Naledi from the village where her father is the pastor of a church of the spirit. As a result of Leidi’s refusal to hear the word of her father, she leads a life of dissipation in the city, self-indulgently “playing” (see Durham 2005b) rather than engaging in the housework necessary for her family’s well-being. In Otladisang’s didactic narrative, Leidi’s disregard of church and kin culminates in rape and prostitution. Eventually, Leidi returns to her father’s church and preaches on the importance of hearing the words of one’s parents. As we have seen, the historical experience of predominantly male labor migration has made it appear particularly immoral for daughters to conceive of their own interests as separate from those of their families. Because sons have for decades had the ability to leave entirely, it is especially incumbent on daughters to hear the words of their parents; their refusals to do so are said to culminate in “promiscuity” and pathological sexuality.3 Otladisang’s story speaks to popular perceptions that the long-term security of women and men is not contingent solely on their capacity to bear or beget children, but on these children’s willingness to hear their words and thus stay with or build for them. Much local attention focuses on how people’s movements from one place and set of persons to another over time shape the care and love they feel. The very multiplicity of places in which it is possible to stay or build—towns, villages, fields, and cattle posts— indicates how such arrangements may be contingent on the perceived care, love, scorn, or jealousy of persons in particular places. As we saw in the previous chapter, the grave establishes the “final house” (ntlo ya bofelo) of the person, once all other buildings, stayings, and sendings are past. It is incumbent upon everyone, ideally, and certainly all relatives, to attend the funeral of an adult so as to give love to the bereaved. In many cases, they must take time off from work and travel great distances

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in order to do so. The expansion of refrigerated mortuaries since the 1970s has made such gatherings feasible. Yet mortuaries drove up the costs of funerals dramatically, as elaborate manufactured coffins came to be seen as essential for proper burials. I often heard the complaint that nowadays “funerals are just showcases,” and that people attend the funerals of the rich in large numbers to see fancy coffins and eat expensive food, while not bothering to help at those of the poor. In providing an elaborate funeral, the relatives of the deceased show that he had been—and that they continue to be—“self-sufficient,” capable and respected. People invest scarce resources in burial societies to avoid the embarrassment of a funeral where poverty is on public display. Notwithstanding complaints that the poor are neglected, many Batswana will go to great lengths to ensure that the funerals of their neighbors and co-workers are respectably attended. Such imperatives are felt so strongly that many government agencies and parastatals provide free transport for their workers to attend funerals. “Senior management knows our stand on this matter,” said one worker. “If they do not attend the funerals of our relatives, we will not attend theirs either. Being a boss or not being a boss does not matter any more” (quoted in Ngwenya 2000:272). Funerals are often displays of individual accomplishment, yet death demands care by others regardless of the ability of the bereaved to pay, for it is dreadful to leave them alone in the darkness (sefifi) of grief in their yard, at the “place of death” (ko lesong). House building likewise increasingly demands access to cash, and yet the moral terms on which people build for and stay with one another are not necessarily determined—although they are certainly shaped—by their ability to provide money. In both building and burying, men and women consider how their own and other people’s well-being hinges on their willingness to do things about the house, not only on their abilities to earn cash. As they build for and bury one another, Batswana communicate sentiments of care and love, scorn and jealousy, and in so doing, they apprehend how their material circumstances and physical well-being depend on the dispositions of others. The feminist sociologist Marjorie DeVault’s study (1991) of caring as gendered work in the United States shows that popular American conceptions of family life center on food preparation and shared eating, which typically demand a great deal of labor from women. Rather than arising through marriage and procreation alone, American families are created and maintained by what DeVault calls “caring work.” As they grow up, women have

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to learn not only cooking skills but how to empathize with others so as to meet their emotional needs. DeVault shows that the care involved in “feeding the family” transcends dichotomies between feeling and doing, and between the reproduction of persons and the production of things. DeVault points out that women work hard to provide an emotional haven in the home, but that neither they nor the wider society value caring work as much as wage work. In the terms I have proposed, the inequalities arising from the capitalist labor market have been domesticated in the United States in such a way that caring work is devalued as a matter of feeling as opposed to doing (see Hochschild 2003). A distinctive feature of the domestication of inequality in Botswana is the existence of a popular vocabulary in which love is conceived of as activity as well as a feeling, and rarely discussed in isolation from its effects on social relations (Durham 2002). Hoyt Alverson makes this point eloquently: In the industrial West our most revered and eloquent formulations of love, truth, and understanding seldom make reference to anybody doing anything. Indeed, “doing” is often considered as a profanation of the ethereal profundities of thought and emotion. For the Tswana, love, “truth,” and understanding obey performative principles; the very words in Setswana point to action. . . . For the Tswana, to be a person who likes someone is to be a person who shows affection for someone; to be one who knows the truth, one must act or do the truth; to honor or respect someone is literally to present that person with material goods which insinuate that respect; . . . to understand is to hear someone; to do the truth means to be trustworthy and reliable in terms of proper cultural performances. (Alverson 1978:138–39; emphases in original, typo corrected)

More specifically, I suggest, housing activities have a recognized effect upon people’s love, and therefore an acknowledged potential to influence relationships of material provision. For example, Francis Nyamnjoh describes the anxieties felt by middle-class women from other African countries living in Botswana about the possibilities of sexual liaisons between their husbands and their maids. “Some interviewees felt that it was risky to allow maids to cook for their husbands at all, or to do so often, since the way to a husband’s heart is through his food. If the maid, who has already taken over most of the domestic chores that are traditionally the domain of the wife, were to take over the cooking as well, what would stop her from

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taking over the bedroom and the husband’s heart?” (Nyamnjoh 2006:204). Seduced husbands are apt to divert resources to their girlfriends, even going so far as to build houses for them (205). In such instances, people speak explicitly about negotiating class and gender inequalities in their work about the house, through activities that foster love and jealousy. Rather than conceiving of the house as a place of emotion as opposed to provision, Batswana assess and experience inequalities through the doing of such caring work as cooking, building, nursing, and burying. Since people’s life chances often depend on the sentiments with which they and others carry out these activities, they make efforts to imagine and shape the qualities of one another’s love, rather than devaluing care as a taken-forgranted aspect of domesticity (cf. Tronto 1993:112–22). In making a case that housing activities provide moral bases for conceptualizing inequalities stemming from differential access to resources and entitlements, I wish to make clear that the hierarchies involved in domestic relationships are liable to reinforce and justify inequality. For example, heavily exploited domestic workers—especially women from Zimbabwe or other African countries who are unable to claim legal protections in Botswana—may speak of their relationships with their employers as zombification or enslavement (Nyamnjoh 2006:142–43, 193). More generally, however, love is supposed to structure domestic hierarchies, as opposed to leveling them out or casting them as relations of pay for time worked. As a result, the moral terms of hierarchies and inequalities are likely to be negotiated in terms of who has or has not given love to whom, and on what grounds. For instance, even as young people appropriate official rhetorics of youth citizenship and self-development when demanding loans from government agencies, they draw on domestic moralities governing forms of asking among seniors and juniors (Durham 2007:122). In what follows, I explore the material and moral stakes involved in housing activities by specifying the particularity of MmaMaipelo’s approach to fostering love. Baitshepi practices supply provisional, contested resolutions to widely experienced predicaments arising from the domestication of inequalities based on gender, class, and generation. Specifically, this chapter examines the moral passion involved in negotiating access to money, labor, and other resources by exploring what it has meant to church members and their kin to be staying with or building for those attached to a “spiritual family.” As we saw in the case of Tebogo’s illness, MmaMaipelo understood faith in God as a method of shaping caregiving relationships and sentiments among particular persons. “We are all God’s 90

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people,” MmaMaipelo often told me. “But we are not all God’s children. What is the difference? Read John chapter 1, verses 11 to 13.” I would read aloud: “He came to his own people, but his own people did not receive him [ go tshola, to accommodate in a house]. But to all who did receive him, he gave the right to become children of God, who were those who believed in his name, who were not born of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of a person, but of God.” MmaMaipelo would then say, “Amen. God’s children are those who are willing to hear the word of God and obey it.” The moral grounds for sustaining and valuing caregiving acts and sentiments under circumstances of inequality are at stake in calling a woman either a “spiritual child” or, as MmaMaipelo’s son put it, “just a child of the church” draining resources from his real family. Since local debates about how to value personal capacities and sentiments hinge on who does what for whom about the house, it is necessary to explore how official urban housing policies have made certain standards of achievement and provision locally compelling. In aiming to reward the “self-sufficiency” of individuals, these policies have usually ignored or denigrated residents’ strategies of drawing on the care of others in order to build, and of building so as to provide and receive care and love. Ironically in light of their moral intent, housing policies have made it all the more essential for residents to embrace strategies of fostering love so as to enhance their own security and that of others. m o d e r n h o u s e s , m o d e r n m o re s ?

To reach Old Naledi from downtown Gaborone, residents travel in minivan taxis known as kombis for about two kilometers from the taxi rank (see map 2). On the left they pass New Naledi, a community composed of identical single-story rectangular houses arranged in a grid. On the right, after a commercial strip, there is a deep ditch lined by a high fence topped with barbed wire, behind which lies Old Naledi. The ditch, designed for drainage, borders Old Naledi on the north and east, while the railroad, originally planned by Cecil Rhodes, bounds it on the west. On the south is another road, beginning near the Gaborone Dam and crossing the railroad into an industrial area. These definite boundaries mark off the community and serve, whatever their intention, to prevent people from settling outside it. During the period 1997–2000, when prevention messages dominated official AIDS programs, kombis entering Old Naledi passed a large billboard reading in English, “Avoiding AIDS: As Easy as Abstain, Be Faithful, Condomise.” “g o w i t h m e t o b a b y l o n”

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to Francistown 0

1

2

3 km

to Molepolole MOGODITSHANE

GABORONE City Centre New Naledi Gaborone West

Old Naledi

TLOKWENG to South Africa

to Lobatse Railway

Gaborone Dam

Map 2. Gaborone and environs

An initial impression upon entering Old Naledi is of enormous poverty, dense living conditions, and great activity outdoors. The streets are winding and mostly unpaved. Kombi drivers race with their passengers past beer gardens, crowded (especially at month’s end, when wages are paid) with men gathered to drink; children pushing wheelbarrows loaded with containers filled with kerosene or water from standpipes; and tuck shops where women sell soap, biltong, fruit, bread, fat cakes, and occasionally fish caught from the nearby reservoir, the Gaborone Dam. Everywhere there is socializing, as men gather to smoke, drink, and play at cards or drafts, while tape players resound with South African kwaito music; small children scramble in their play across fences separating one yard from another; and women chat while minding babies or doing the washing. A young woman who moved from Old Naledi to another neighborhood in Gaborone where the houses and yards are laid out in a uniform grid wrote 92

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to me, “I go outside these days but there’s nobody there to talk to, so I just go back in the house.” Old Naledi inspires a substantial amount of local pride. “Those who cannot find beauty in Old Naledi are looking for the wrong kind of beauty,” people say. A young man who opened a graphic design shop in the community told a local reporter, “I have lived in both poor neighbourhoods such as here in Naledi, and very wealthy ones like when I was staying outside. Naledi remains close to my heart. I would not live anywhere else. Naledi has a unique character about it that no other place has.”4 How do people in Old Naledi manage to earn a living? Early in the morning and late in the afternoon trucks crowded with men drive through Old Naledi, going to or coming from construction sites. The construction industry employs the largest number of workers in the city, 26.6 percent of the wage labor force in 1991 (Botswana Government 1998:142). In addition to operating tuck shops known as dimausu, women sell commercially manufactured sorghum beer and, if they own sewing machines, make garments, which they sell either on their own or to hawkers. Another important source of income is letting rooms to tenants. Major expenses include food, rent, transport, clothing, school uniforms, kerosene, service levies, health care, and funerals. A young woman renting a room in Old Naledi gave me the following figures for her monthly budget in 1998. She earned P265 (about U.S.$66) per month at a printing shop in northern Gaborone. To get there, she had to take two kombis each way, unless she walked two kilometers from downtown. Each month, her expenses for transport came to about P80, she paid P85 rent, and spent P100 on maize and sorghum meal, rice, cooking oil, kerosene, and washing powder. These expenses added up to what she earned. In addition, school clothing for her son cost about P150 annually, paid by her mother, who rented a room and brewed beer in a yard elsewhere in Old Naledi. Old Naledi is composed of yards (malapa, sing. lelapa or lolwapa) of an average size of 360 square meters (van Norstrand 1982:54), each of which usually contains more than one house (ntlo).5 The City Council provides garbage collection and standpipes with running water, but there is no electricity, apart from that powering streetlights, which were installed in 1994. The different kinds of houses in Old Naledi attest to pronounced wealth differences. There are very few rondavels with thatched roofs; most houses are rectangular, some built out of earth, many out of concrete, with metal roofs. Some houses are large, with multiple rooms and windows. At the “g o w i t h m e t o b a b y l o n”

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other extreme, there are houses constructed out of scrap metal and pieces of plastic or canvas, known as ditakana or mekoko. Many compounds are crowded with bricks, or with piles of river sand to be mixed with concrete for brickmaking. Quite often, a yard may contain a large concrete house, where the plotholders live, along with small houses or ditakana for renters. There are a small group of relatively prosperous plotholders in Old Naledi, numerous plotholders who struggle to get by, and very many desperately poor renters. Gaborone has been one of the fastest-growing cities in the world, with a population that rocketed from about 17,000 in 1971, five years after it became the capital of newly independent Botswana, to 60,000 in 1981, 133,000 in 1991, 183,000 in 1997, and a reported 208,411 in 2005 (Botswana Government 1997:13).6 Together with a chronic shortage of wage employment in rural areas, a key impetus for urban migration was the severe drought of the 1980s, which made agriculture and herding unsustainable for many of the rural poor. People came to where there was water, at the Gaborone Dam. The tendency among officials since the first colonial urban planning efforts of the 1960s was to view poor migrants as a troublesome group who needed to be controlled. The systematic clearing and “upgrading” of squatter communities, along with official reluctance to provide land for inexpensive housing, reflect visions of development that endanger the well-being of substantial portions of the population. All too often, the ideology of “development control” has had the effect of domesticating inequality in the most reductive sense, reinforcing the unequal terms on which people engage in the capitalist labor market by compelling the poor to become and remain renters, while disrupting residents’ capacities to enhance their security by building up their yards over time. Residents often stress the old in Old Naledi: it was the first neighborhood in Gaborone, they say, before any of the others were built. In the early 1960s planners concentrated on the problem of accommodating “a growing population of lowly paid skilled and semi-skilled workers” who were squatting near the railroad line while employed in the construction of the new city. Their houses were to reach a certain “standard set by Government,” so that a “Shanty Town” would be avoided. From the start, the “suburb for a Low Cost Housing Scheme” was to be segregated from the business, official, and elite residential areas of the city: “The majority of the occupants for many years to come,” concluded an official at the Public Works Department, “will be semi-tribalised, and will not wish to mix either with the more highly educated and paid African, or European.”7 Officials therefore discussed mak94

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ing subsidized loans to migrants to “encourage them to erect homes . . . in terms of a controlled scheme, under which due consideration can be given to public health requirements, rather than to force them by restrictive legislation to put up illegal shanties in an area where the builder hopes that his settlement will pass unnoticed.”8 Due to lack of funds, however, no such plans were implemented in the squatter community of Naledi, which grew rapidly on land that was zoned for industrial development. In 1973, when about 6,000 people lived there, the government bulldozed houses in Naledi and tried to resettle the inhabitants in mass-produced houses for which they would pay rent. This resettlement effort failed because people kept returning to their original plots rather than pay rent, and new migrants to the city demanded to be allocated the new homes (van Norstrand 1982:14). Faced with continuing migration to the city, in 1978 officials decided to “upgrade” Old Naledi rather than forcibly resettle all its inhabitants. This project, begun with funds from the Canadian International Development Agency, was exceptional in attempting to preserve both the boundaries that residents had established around their yards and the irregularly shaped paths they used. The developer in charge of the project, John van Norstrand, accompanied residents on walks through the community. “People pointed out,” he notes, “that one should never follow a similar and consequently familiar route to and from one’s plot. Such a route was . . . easily bewitched” (van Norstrand 1987:447). Because developers made efforts to incorporate existing arrangements into their planning, relatively few residents had to be resettled. Aside from constructing roads, standpipes, and pit latrines, this upgrading project consisted of regularizing land titles and making building material loans available for standard house plans (Larsson 1990:123) under the auspices of the Self-Help Housing Agency (SHHA), in amounts based on the “individual income” from employment of the “household head” (Botswana Government 1992:52). Titles in individual names were distributed as “certificates of rights,” whereby the state continued to own each plot, although the title holder had rights to dispose of the houses on it as long as one house met a certain construction standard (van Norstrand 1987:450). In return, residents were required to pay a monthly service levy intended to finance SHHA. This was P12 during the period of my research, which many people complained was too high, and on which about half of SHHA plotholders were in arrears during the early 1990s (Botswana Government 1992:52).9 “g o w i t h m e t o b a b y l o n”

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When this upgrading project was completed in 1982, Old Naledi had a population of about 10,000. However, the 1991 census records the community’s population as over 20,000 (Botswana Government 1991), and current unofficial estimates put it as high as 50,000,10 in an area measuring about two square kilometers. No new plots have been allocated in Old Naledi since the late 1980s. A consequence, perhaps unintended, of upgrading and squatter clearance schemes has thus been an explosion in the rental market. During the mid-1980s, when housing titles were being formalized, residents of Old Naledi who had previously provided free living space to fellow squatters began to let out rooms for rent (Feddema 1990 [1987]:22). In 1989, tenants in urban areas who had monthly incomes of less than P234 had to pay an average of 20 percent of their incomes on what was then a median rent of P35 (Botswana Government 1992:25), a proportion that was much lower for wealthier tenants. In 1997–98, the usual monthly rent for a single room in a concrete house in Old Naledi was P100, and a room in an earthen house rented for about P60 a month. Residents’ complaints about SHHA have been numerous. It is expensive to take out a building material loan from SHHA at 9 percent interest over fifteen years, fixed service levies can be burdensome, and most banks do not accept certificates of rights as collateral for loans. In addition, according to Anita Larsson (1989:150), SHHA officers provided little actual building assistance during the 1980s and were concerned rather with ensuring that construction was carried out according to regulations. Yet on the whole, the upgrading of the late 1970s succeeded in providing basic services, such as public standpipes, in such a way as to enable residents to build over many years. They were allowed to retain the structures they had built of whatever materials they had, adding to them when resources became available. For poor women living in Gaborone, Larsson (1989) shows, holding plots and building houses are crucial sources of security. Houses ensure rental income, and access to a yard allows women to carry out informal incomeearning activities such as beer selling. Over the long term, building houses in the city enables residents to accumulate enough resources to build in their home villages, where they hope to live in later years. Houses in the city may then be transferred to children, so that they too will be provided for. House building provides for others as well as for oneself and is an important means of perpetuating caring relationships over time. Unfortunately, efforts to upgrade informal settlements in this fashion have been the exception rather than the rule in Botswana urban planning, especially since 1987, when the Accelerated Land Servicing Programme 96

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(ALSP) went into effect. Since SHHA had been losing money through defaults on building material loans, arrears on service levies, and public use of standpipes, the ALSP was designed to ensure full cost recovery on newly built housing. Full cost recovery became an officially acknowledged goal in a 1990 Government White Paper, which stated: “It is not the function of government to provide lease hold accommodation to all who need housing, any more than it is a function of government to produce food and clothing for general consumption. Housing, like other consumption items, is best produced and acquired by individuals and firms in the private sector, using market prices to ensure that resources are efficiently used” (quoted in Botswana Government 1998:150). Rejecting policies that had mitigated inequalities by allowing people to build “bit by bit,” planners aimed in effect to reward those capable of being “self-sufficient” in the labor market, and to punish those who were not, through full cost recovery programs for housing. In the year 2000, purchasers had to pay P3,600 out of pocket for the least expensive plots in Gaborone, and P66 per month for four years to cover the costs of developing the plot. These expenses did not include construction costs, for which the City Council offered P6,000 in building material loans.11 No temporary structures are allowed. Such lump sums are far beyond what most new migrants to the city can afford. Under these circumstances, existing neighborhoods such as Old Naledi become extremely crowded, and informal settlements surrounding the city spring up frequently, to be demolished periodically by government bulldozers. In my reading of official documents, I have not encountered any connections made between overcrowding and squatter settlements, on the one hand, and policies of having residents pay large sums for fully serviced plots and expensive housing on the other. Instead, subsidized urban housing is said to “fuel rural-urban migration.” Officials need “to promote more realistic public expectations about what government may be expected to offer . . . and what should be the responsibilities of householders” (Botswana Government 1992:10). Strikingly, much of the recent rhetoric of urban planning as a “development control system” (Botswana Government 1998:129) echoes the fears and class biases of the planners of the 1960s. For instance, the fact that the poorest neighborhoods in Gaborone have the highest population densities is attributed to the propensity of the poor to have large families (1998:133). Structures built to house informal commercial activities “are constructed with temporary materials like card boards, corrugated sheets and cartons. Apart from the eminent visual pollution, “g o w i t h m e t o b a b y l o n”

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these structures pose the danger of converting the city scape into a slum.” Because the informal business sector “directly encourages urban in-migration, it is inimical to social and political stability as it creates an impoverished and explosive lumpen-proletariat” (1998:120). While planners concerned with “development control” have long regarded Old Naledi as an eyesore, residents have themselves pressured their elected city councilors to provide sewers, tarred roads, better drainage, and street lighting. In 1993, the Ministry of Local Government, Lands, and Housing, in which most policy-making power resides, made plans for plotholders to purchase their yards for a lump sum of about P3,000. In return, the city would provide water and sewage connections to each yard. Yet the irregular street patterns made these connections too expensive, and designs were postponed until 2000, when a scheme to demolish about one-third of the neighborhood’s yards made front-page news in the national press.12 Again, this was to be done to create straight roads, along which sewage and drinking-water pipes to individual plots could be laid, at a cost of P90 million. Displaced plotholders were to be reimbursed in cash for the value of their buildings, and new plots were to be allocated to them elsewhere in Gaborone. Such plans began to be implemented in 2009, as this book was going to press. Public discussions between planners and Old Naledi residents about this upgrading project revealed officials’ ignorance of and lack of interest in ordinary people’s efforts to build caring relationships through housing activities. At a meeting with residents in May 2000, authorities from SHHA and the City Council asserted that the ministry’s upgrading scheme would be put into effect, and solicited questions about what was bound to take place. Many questions reflected the suspicion that plotholders would not be fully compensated for their yards, in particular for the costs of construction labor. Yet some residents voiced concerns about the very idea of giving cash for houses. Given the problems (mathata) of today, one woman asked, how much money could people devote to building anew? Mathata is a euphemism for severe illness and death. Since AIDS has killed many wage earners and channeled resources into caring for the sick and burying the dead, available cash is apt to be used for purposes other than building. Another woman complained, “I’m a widow with three orphans [masiela] on my plot. They don’t have a father, I don’t have a husband. I’ve only been able to build shacks on my plot, and the government won’t give me any compensation for them. I shouldn’t be forced out.” A third woman objected, “My father was the original plot holder. He passed away seven 98

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years ago, and I’ve been staying with my sisters in the yard ever since. Now which of us is going to receive the cash compensation?” “The money you will be given for your houses is yours,” replied a SHHA official. “You are free to spend it as you choose, or to go back to your villages.” As for possible disputes over compensation, she said, such matters would have to be resolved in the courts. It is difficult to determine whether planners intend upgrading projects to curtail rural-urban migration, but it is clear that many would not be unhappy with such a result. In a subsequent conversation with me, this SHHA official expressed her frustration at being caught between the multiple demands of residents, the elected City Council, and the civil servants in the ministry. When a squatter settlement had been forcibly removed in the recent past, she told me, City Council members had disclaimed responsibility for the unpopular evictions and “scapegoated us housing officials.” She voiced similar frustrations about the unwillingness of Old Naledi residents to build according to plan. “Their certificates of rights stipulate that a plot should house a single household, but people find economic reasons to overbuild their plots. They set up commercial activities like beer gardens, and then they complain that their pit latrines are filling up quickly. It’s just commotion and chaos.” A person intending to build a house is supposed to report to the SHHA office to obtain permits. Yet because the paperwork is often delayed, many people build without official approval. The ministry, she said, would decide whether those who had built without approval would receive compensation for structures to be demolished during upgrading. I argued to her that upgrading along the lines proposed would likely disrupt many residents’ livelihoods, given the uncertainties of compensation, the ways in which AIDS had eaten into people’s resources, and the fact that plotholders and renters who use yards for selling beer and other income-generating activities would have to make alternative arrangements in an even tighter housing market. “I see how you may feel that way from a human point of view,” she replied, “but from an administrative point of view Old Naledi has to be developed. It’s true that people may be made destitute, but development will improve public health by making the area less crowded. Upgrading may be a punishment for those in Old Naledi who have been taking the law into their own hands. Of course, I’m not at all surprised that people engage in commercial activities in their yards, since that is what they do in the rural areas. But we have to teach them that there is law and order, and that the law works for the good of all.” “g o w i t h m e t o b a b y l o n”

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On the contrary, urban planning has demonstrably not worked for the equal good of all. Although “development control” policies have not always had the consequences intended by planners, they often exacerbate the effects of inequality by rewarding those who have lived up to capitalist standards of achievement, while diminishing the tenuous security of those who have not. As a result, the planned upgrading of Old Naledi threatened to deprive many people of important sources of security in the midst of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Yet the neoliberal ideology that housing arrangements ought to be determined by the relative “self-sufficiency” of individuals has made it all the more imperative for people to imagine and shape the qualities of their caregiving relationships, because those with and without secure access to housing must evaluate the terms of their interdependence. MmaMaipelo’s own background provides a case in point, showing how a woman’s efforts to house herself and others may be contingent on the love she has received and given. bu i l d i n g b y love

“I never thought I would live like this,” MmaMaipelo often told me, gazing about her living room in Old Naledi, which contained armchairs placed around a tea table, a small refrigerator, and glass cases displaying ornaments given her by church members. “I thought I would always be poor and suffering. But I have love for people. How do you think I am able to sit here all day long? I do no work, people bring me food, nobody tells me to do anything, all I do is preach the word to my visitors. It must be because of the love I give.” MmaMaipelo described love to me as a physical pull (kgogo), literally bringing other people to her. If people are indifferent or even jealous of you, she said, giving them love through gifts, consolation, or advice may stimulate love in them in turn. On the other hand, “If you’re always badgering people and asking why they don’t help you, you’ll drive them away.” MmaMaipelo consistently identified love, rather than “self-sufficiency,” as the condition for and outcome of the housing activities of building, furnishing, and preaching. For example, she told me that during the late 1980s, her husband, RraMaipelo, had resumed drinking after she had earlier persuaded him to stop. “Instead of feeling resentment [dingalo, recurrent pain] against him, I spoke to him. There is no sand or bricks in the yard, I told him, to build the house with [i.e., he had been spending on beer rather than the house]. Realizing this, he soon stopped drinking. There is no 100

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point having resentment. What are you going to eat, your resentment?” In other words, because a woman’s security depends on having a house built, she has to orient her own sentiments toward love, so that others will love and build for her. MmaMaipelo’s perspective on love and building was shaped by the fact that she was never her household’s primary wage earner, and by her experience during young adulthood as a dependent upon particular relatives, as I relate below. Yet the notion that building and other housing activities presuppose and generate love has broad resonance for both men and women in Botswana, much as does the view that building reflects one’s capacity for individual achievement. The fact that building sustains and generates relationships, while also displaying individual achievement, underlies the view that “without building there is no life.” The attention Batswana pay to the ways in which housing activities build up love, care, scorn, and jealousy has not, I suggest, been adequately addressed through analytical approaches focused on developmental trajectories and households. Within southern African studies, a focus on developmental cycles, dominant especially in the literature of the 1970s and 1980s, related class differentiation to changes in household size and composition over time. Research on household composition in Lesotho (Murray 1981; Spiegel 1980) and Botswana (Gulbrandsen 1980; Botswana Government 1982; Izzard 1985) explored “alternative resolutions of the problem of attaining a livelihood under conditions of desperate poverty,” showing that “such analysis was complementary to and not antithetical to a class analysis” (Murray 1987:239). For instance, competition over scarce resources leads to “constant tension, incipient conflict, potential breakdown” in relationships between spouses. Such situations account for the statistical frequency of “three-generational extended families in which grandparents looking after grandchildren are linked by female absentees outside an extant conjugal relationship” (Murray 1987:242–43). Developmental trajectories help to determine the particular relationships upon which people depend, and, in so doing, shape the conditions under which they become vulnerable to impoverishment if these relationships break down. An important insight arising from this literature has been that in the context of circular rural-urban migration, “households” must not be presumed to be discrete entities defined by shared residence. This point has perhaps been made most forcefully by Pauline Peters (1983) in an essay criticizing the tendency to reify and problematize “female-headed households” in Botswana rather than to examine relations within and between “g o w i t h m e t o b a b y l o n”

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them. Likewise, Nicholas Townsend argues that the “residential household is an inadequate, and misleading, unit of analysis” (1997:405) because it obscures the ways in which men support their children, lovers, sisters, and sisters’ children even if they are not living with them. Such critiques of reified conceptions of households have been valuable and their findings indispensable, yet stop short of inquiring how housing activities shape caregiving relationships. Within the Botswana literature, Anita Larsson has taken a crucial step beyond this approach in a series of superbly detailed studies focusing on housing materials and compound layout (e.g., Larsson 1990). Larsson’s central insight is that house building provides for others as well as oneself. She develops the concept of “housing strategy” in order to grasp people’s efforts to ensure security by making “material improvements to the dwelling” (Larsson 1989:17). For instance, grown sons commonly build houses for their parents in their home villages. Very often, those who build such houses have no prospect of inheriting them (Larsson 1996:78), but do so in order to maintain a rural base, and to ensure that their parents will feel cared for. As elsewhere in Africa (Berry 1985; Cooper 1997), investments in houses have implications for the status of relationships. Even so, the concept of “housing strategy” is ultimately too narrow, since it focuses exclusively on construction. This point may be made clear by considering two Setswana concepts of dwelling, namely, “to build” ( go aga) and “to stay” ( go nna). Building a compound (motse) means to construct it physically. Under certain circumstances, the act of building gives the owner (mong) of a compound a home of his or her own. In particular, a house built in a village is referred to as a home or legae, a term that also signifies the village itself as the place of origin of one’s kin. A house built in the city is rarely called a legae, since building in town is ideally a prelude to doing so in the village. The question “Where do you build?” may thus be a way of inquiring where a person’s legae is located, but perhaps also where a person is constructing houses for family or rental. Everyone, it seems, hopes to “build for themselves” ( go ikagela) eventually. “Staying” may signify being habitually stationary in a yard. A senior person who spends most of his or her time within a house or yard, sending juniors to run errands, is said to “just stay” there ( go nna hela). A young person without a job may complain that he is “just staying” in the yard rather than going to work. “Staying” may also be used in a sense similar to the North American concept of residing. It is very common to stay in a yard for many years before building a home. A grown daughter, 102

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for example, may stay indefinitely with her children in her parents’ compound. Literature on developmental trajectories shows that vulnerability to impoverishment is contingent in part on the shifting compositions of households, and on gender and intergenerational relations within them. Attention to the domestication of inequality yields the further insight that Batswana commonly experience, imagine, and alleviate or exacerbate the consequences of inequality by engaging in housing activities. The common perception, for instance, that a yard belonging to the bishop of a church of the spirit should be full of people reflects recognition of the fact that a person’s love can shelter others if it is sufficiently strong, and conversely that the strength of a person’s love is demonstrated by others’ willingness to stay with and visit her. In MmaMaipelo’s view, housing church members in her yard created a “spiritual family” (losika la semoya) upon different principles than a “fleshly family” (losika la senama). These were MmaMaipelo’s terms and were familiar mainly to the young women who stayed in her compound while looking for work without paying rent. In the Holy Sabbath Apostolic Church compound elsewhere in Old Naledi, by contrast, rooms are rented to people who are not church members, who tend (as the bishop of this church explained) to be more reliable in their payments, since they may be readily evicted if they do not pay. Yet as in Baitshepi, the fact that a large number of people stay in the church compound is taken as a sign of the bishop’s love. An elder of Baitshepi who stays in the village of Molepolole tried for years to attract followers to a branch church of Baitshepi built within her own compound. Her efforts were chronically unsuccessful, because her own children who stayed in the compound would not attend church. “People are not sheep or goats,” MmaMaipelo told me sadly. “They look about before getting into things. If they see trouble in the yard, they won’t come to hear the preaching.” MmaMaipelo’s efforts to create a spiritual family reflected her experiences of care and scorn with particular relatives. She was born in 1947, the seventh of nine children, and was raised by her parents at their fields near the village of Mochudi. There they cultivated sorghum, maize, and other crops. She had no formal schooling. Two of her siblings have built compounds at the fields, her eldest brother RraMpho and a younger sister, MmaDineo. MmaMaipelo was always close to MmaDineo but less so to her other siblings. The two sisters told me that before their father died in 1965, he solemnly instructed them to care for their mother, since he realized “g o w i t h m e t o b a b y l o n”

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A L

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Church building Room rented by MmaMaipelo’s niece (yZD) and her spouse Bedroom of MmaMaipelo and RraMaipelo Rooms rented by male pastors Room occupied by three women (spiritual children) Bedroom of Maipelo Sitting room of main house Kitchen Room occupied by MmaMaipelo’s and RraMaipelo’s elderly mothers, a niece (yZD) of MmaMaipelo, and the niece’s two small children Latrines

Figure 1. Plan of the compound containing the Baitshepi Church, June 1993

that their older siblings would refuse to do so. “He set the two of us in order [o re rulagantse] by his voice,” MmaDineo said. Siblings who are “set in order” are especially responsible for each other, so that cattle received on a sister’s marriage may be used for the brother’s. During the 1930s, sisters “set in order” looked after one another’s children in their respective compounds (Schapera 1938:186–87). In 1967, when MmaMaipelo was twenty years old, she came to Old Naledi, where she sewed clothes on machines belonging to her brother RraMpho and an older sister, MmaOfile, in the yard where they were staying. These siblings, she said, mistreated her, taking the bulk of the earnings from sewing. Beginning in 1968, when she bore her only child, Maipelo, her spouse RraMaipelo would give her a share of his wages from his work in South African mines, yet most of his earnings were absorbed in building a house for his own parents. MmaMaipelo bought the shacks that had occupied her present compound in Old Naledi from a FZD for a small amount of money, but was unable to support her son Maipelo there. He spent most of early childhood at the fields with his aunt MmaDineo. During the 1970s, MmaMaipelo sold beer and hard liquor in her yard, smoking and drinking heavily. In some respects, her shebeen presaged the church she would later found. “I was a very bad beer seller,” she told me. Many shebeen owners allow their customers to run up debts, thereby avoiding a reputation for driving people away. This was particularly true of MmaMaipelo, who desired the yard to be full of people. “My spirit wanted to give, not to sell,” she told me. She often remarked that she would give small amounts of cash to church followers upon request, without keeping account of debts. In 1975, after finishing building his parents’ compound, RraMaipelo began to stay in Old Naledi with MmaMaipelo, found work at a slaughterhouse, and channeled most of his earnings to her support. In 1979, when he was thirty-four, they were married, and he took out a SHHA loan to build a one-room concrete house (room B in figure 1) on their plot in Old Naledi. A loan from SHHA partially financed a three-room house (containing rooms K, E, and F) constructed in 1984. In 1990, RraMaipelo completed a large house, containing a sitting room, two bedrooms, and two rooms accessible only from the outside.13 Around this time, MmaDineo began to send her own daughters to work in MmaMaipelo’s yard while Maipelo was attending boarding school. For many years, MmaDineo’s daughters moved between the fields and MmaMaipelo’s yard. The children of MmaMaipelo’s neighbor and first convert MmaSeobo, who is not on good terms with her own siblings, have also been going to MmaDineo’s fields for many years. “g o w i t h m e t o b a b y l o n”

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The church network has thus provided agricultural labor for MmaMaipelo’s sister and the sister’s spouse. In sum, the emphasis that MmaMaipelo placed in her teaching and preaching on “giving love” reflected her own long-term struggle to ensure security for herself and others by building, staying, and sending. Only through love, she insisted, can such efforts be successful. It might be thought that MmaMaipelo’s impetus for creating a spiritual family derived from the fact that she gave birth only to one child, a son. She would in fact often comment that although she had only one child by her flesh, she surpassed other women because she had many children of the spirit. Yet it was long experience with care and scorn that motivated her to create a spiritual family, experience not contingent on procreation alone. The bishop of the Holy Sabbath Apostolic Church, who had five daughters, told me of similar rivalries with demanding siblings. In terms echoing MmaMaipelo’s, he said, “Those in your extended family don’t want to have anything to do with church. They remember you from before your calling, and don’t believe that the word of God can come from you.”

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Such comparisons between “spiritual” and “fleshly” children reflect the ways in which women’s domestic labor expresses love for others. Women renters frequently share the work of yard sweeping and food preparation with plotholders in order to be seen as “children of the yard.” This is not to say that housework expressing the love (or lack thereof) of dependents for their seniors, landlords, or employers necessarily mitigates gender and class inequality. On the contrary, Nyamnjoh (2006) shows that employers of underpaid maids in Botswana may justify wage exploitation in terms of domestic hierarchies that subordinate girls to parents, or to foster parents and their children. The wage relationship of domestic service is apt to be assimilated to hierarchical relations of love about the house. “There is an element of overworking them that we do,” one female employer of a maid admitted. We do not observe working hours. Somebody even at 6 o’clock is still cooking dinner. After cooking dinner they have to wash up. By the time they can go to sleep it’s 9 o’clock. The problem is that we treat maids the way we will treat a child at home. Because, according to Setswana culture, when there is a young girl in the home, whether it is your child or not 106

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your child, you send them to do chores as if they were your own child and they can work until anytime. Let’s say somebody, your friend, or your relative, sends a child to stay with you and go to school in Gaborone. This child is expected to do chores and they do chores anytime and I think it’s that mentality of a child in the home. We don’t take it like this is a worker. So we don’t observe working hours. They can work from early in the morning, when my children have to go to school, which means before seven, they should be up to prepare the children to go. But remember that during the day they have an easy time. It’s not like they are forever on their toes during the day, because who is there to supervise them? And they don’t really do a good job. Most of the time they will just be there, since there is nobody at home, or perhaps only the baby they are looking after. (quoted in Nyamnjoh 2006:167)

At stake here are the contested meanings both of being a certain person’s child and of love between mothers and daughters. A girl child is supposed to work hard for her parents out of love for them, so that an employer’s complaints about a maid are apt to center implicitly on her lack of love: the maid would “do a good job” without supervision and without payment for time worked if she had love for her foster parents. Hence a common saying is that “the worth of a child lies in being sent.” Children as young as three years in Old Naledi, especially girls, do a great deal of work caring for their infant siblings. Girls’ work becomes increasingly time-consuming and burdensome as they near adolescence (Durham 2004:595). A child who runs errands promptly and without complaint when called is said to “hear” the voices of her elders, whereas a disobedient child “refuses to hear” those voices.14 In addition to bringing physical objects from place to place, children are often made the carriers of voices that bring adults to one another. When an adult wishes to consult another, a boy or girl is often “sent” to say, “Mother-of-so-and-so is calling you to her yard.” For their part, very small children often possess considerable freedom of movement. Five-year-old children may be attracted by the singing in a church and attend without their elders, though with their permission. Two-year-olds may tell their mothers to bring them to the fields “because they like the life there.” Mothers often send small children to stay with grandparents at the fields or villages so that they may “become used to one another.” On the other hand, younger women who lack time to care for their children in town may leave them with elderly parents in the villages, to whom they may provide cash or food but little in the way of needed childcare, nursing, or other domestic labor (Livingston 2003b). All of these “g o w i t h m e t o b a b y l o n”

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movements cause young people as well as their elders to reflect on the qualities of one another’s love. The following case shows how motherhood may be contingent not only on procreation but on the ability to influence the movements of one’s children among relatives’ yards.

Case One: Whose Daughters? Botlhale was the eldest of the three children of one of MmaMaipelo’s older sisters, MmaOfile. Born in 1966, she lived with her mother at first in Mochudi, and subsequently in the nearby village of Oodi, until 1993, when she came to Old Naledi and joined the church. She had two daughters of her own, born in 1983 and 1990 respectively. Botlhale never studied beyond standard 6, and had been a domestic worker and seamstress before passing away in 2005 at the age of thirty-nine after a prolonged illness. During the period when I knew her, Botlhale was not on good terms with her mother, MmaOfile, whom people for this reason called by a teknonym referring to her second child rather than her first. Botlhale’s father, who had never been married to her mother, was from the village of Serowe. In the mid-1980s, MmaOfile married a man with the surname Sekuru from Oodi. “Better to be an orphan [lesiela] than have your parent remarry,” Botlhale told me. Her stepfather and his mother were jealous of her, badgered her for a share of her earnings, and informed her younger siblings when they were small that she was not their older sister. Botlhale’s greatest grievance was that when she wanted to apply for an omang identity card, which is necessary to open a bank account, her stepfather’s mother told her to have her father in Serowe get the card for her, “even though I wasn’t staying with him.” When I wrote down each family member’s full name and date of birth in the course of a survey I was conducting, Botlhale remarked that although she and her two daughters still bore her mother’s husband’s surname, Sekuru, she wanted to change their identity cards to reflect her mother’s unmarried surname. In 1997–98, Botlhale was staying rent-free in a one-room house (room B in figure 1) that had been the first concrete structure built in the yard, to the side of the main house. She had been able to buy furniture for herself, including a wardrobe, a propane stove, a bed, and ornaments, from her wages as a seamstress at Violet’s factory, where MmaMaipelo had arranged for her to work. As a domestic worker in Mochudi, Botlhale had been able to afford only a metal tub and blanket for herself. MmaMaipelo wished her nieces and other young women staying in her compound to have their 108

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own furniture, because it displayed the love she had for them. “People would say that I’m scorning them if they were to see them working in the yard without anything in their own houses.” In 1997, Botlhale’s fourteen-year-old daughter Kesetse came to Old Naledi to go to school and to stay in the church compound with her mother. She had been living until then with Botlhale’s own mother in the village of Oodi. Botlhale suspected that her mother had not been caring for her well, since her report card showed that she had been coming to school dirty. (As I discuss in the following chapter, bathing other people and oneself is an important way of showing care and love.) In the church compound, Kesetse performed a great deal of work when not in school, as girls her age must—running errands, cooking, serving food, sweeping the yard and house, polishing the furniture and outdoor steps, washing clothes, preparing baths, and looking after the small children. The elder women recognized Kesetse as an obedient child who heard the words of her parents. In January 1998, at the start of the new school year, Maipelo’s unmarried spouse, Oteng—Botlhale’s MyZSW—was transferred by her employer away from Gaborone, and she asked MmaMaipelo to send Kesetse with her to look after her own seven-year-old son. Oteng would pay Kesetse’s school expenses. MmaMaipelo and Botlhale agreed, and Botlhale brought her younger daughter Mavis from Oodi to the church compound in Old Naledi to take Kesetse’s place. Botlhale’s mother MmaOfile, however, was unhappy with this particular arrangement, since she had wanted Kesetse to return with her to Oodi rather than to stay with the church network for the long term. (MmaMaipelo told me that MmaOfile had another young granddaughter who could run errands for her in Oodi, but I do not know what arrangements had been made in MmaOfile’s compound.) One Sunday morning before church, soon after the child Mavis had arrived in the yard, MmaMaipelo and her sister MmaDineo were commiserating about the conduct of their older sister, MmaOfile. “You can’t refuse to have anything to do with your daughter and then expect to have her child stay with you. She didn’t bring up Botlhale to respect her, so she shouldn’t imagine that Botlhale owes her anything.” Then someone came in with the news that MmaOfile had arrived in the yard without greeting those gathered in the sitting room of the main house—a gross violation of sociality—and was now in Botlhale’s house going through her wardrobe for the clothes belonging to Mavis, whom she intended to bring back to Oodi. For two hours during the church service, MmaMaipelo, MmaDineo, MmaOfile, “g o w i t h m e t o b a b y l o n”

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and Botlhale were closeted together. Once they did enter church, MmaOfile preached that “Satan is following my children,” and her daughter refused to shake her hand at the end of the service. Who is to be considered a mother or daughter in relation to whom may thus depend on where girls stay, for whom they work, and who has the ability to make such decisions. Conflicts arising from such issues are often framed in terms of who has cared for whom, how well, and where. This account illustrates how a woman’s capacity to influence the movements of her children often depends on having a yard of her own, or on staying in a yard on good terms with its owners. Young mothers who are shuttled among the yards of unhappy relatives are unlikely to stay for long periods with their children. (One such woman told me that she was “just a person”—motho fela—someone who had been unable to find a place of her own in which to stay or build.) It was only after Botlhale moved into the church compound that her daughters began staying with her, and that she was able to care in turn for MmaMaipelo and other church members by having her daughters work for them. The domestic labor which Botlhale and her children had provided MmaOfile did not, in Botlhale’s and MmaMaipelo’s views, make them into MmaOfile’s daughters and granddaughters, since they were not staying with her on good terms.

Case Two: Church and School, Time and Money Participation in the Baitshepi Church demands a tremendous amount of time. This is particularly the case for the church youth group, for the most part women, who aside from attending services on Sunday mornings and Wednesday and Friday evenings must also come to meetings and choir practices on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, and Thursday evenings. They must also travel very frequently to funerals, where they often work through a day and night preparing food. Other all-night occasions, such as fund-raisers, major holidays, and bringing nursing mothers out of confinement, occur regularly. It is common for youth members to spend a day working at a funeral, stay awake all the following night for the vigil, attend the burial at dawn, and then go to a job. When church participants complain about the burdens of membership, they often speak about the time that church takes away from other activities, including work in their own compounds. Yet it is through such active engagement in church that members show their love and “energy” (bonatla). MmaMaipelo had close relationships with a number of North American missionaries from Mennonite Ministries from 1994 until the organiza110

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tion withdrew from the country around 2003.15 In 1996, a Mennonite named Cathy offered to subsidize private schooling for Kerileng, a Baitshepi youth member who was staying across the lane from the church compound with her mother and maternal kin. Because Kerileng had failed her exams following form 2, she was ineligible to remain in the public schools. In order to continue her education in hopes of passing the O-level exams after form 5, she needed to attend a private school costing about P600 per term. Kerileng’s mother, who could not afford this expense, accepted help from the Mennonites through MmaMaipelo. In November 1997, Kerileng went to stay with an older sister in a village about twenty kilometers west of the city and started commuting to school. MmaMaipelo soon began complaining to me that Kerileng had been neglecting church, staying away from youth meetings and services. “A person has got to remember how she began,” she told me. She quoted Isaiah 1, in which God reproaches the Israelites for forgetting divine care for them in their beginnings. “Cathy has paid Kerileng’s school fees, but she wouldn’t have done so if she hadn’t known me. Kerileng would be out of school otherwise.” Kerileng, on the other hand, told me that she left Old Naledi because she needed time to study for her exams. The church was making far too many demands on her time, and the more youth events she neglected, the more scolding she had to endure from the youth leader. She was caught between failing her exams and losing her patronage. In the end, Cathy left Botswana, while Kerileng failed her exams, left the church entirely, and started to look for work. Conceivably, Cathy might have provided funds to Kerileng’s own mother, who is not a member of any church, rather than channeling money through Baitshepi. However, such a step would likely have insulted MmaMaipelo, who would have seen it as impugning the church’s willingness to care for followers without favoritism. In fact, a different Baitshepi member left church due to an argument that arose precisely because he had paid another member’s school fees without the knowledge of MmaMaipelo or the other elders. MmaMaipelo compared this behavior to that of a “spiritual daughter” who had once stayed in her compound but would routinely go out without informing her: “When I call her, she doesn’t hear and she doesn’t come.” Each action showed disregard for her position as a giver of care and love to those in her compound and her church. She was responsible for the daily running of her compound, and along with other elders and pastors on the Finance Committee, for the equitable distribution of substantial sums. Such debates about the time, energy, and money devoted “g o w i t h m e t o b a b y l o n”

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to schooling, to church, and to housework reflect ways in which the moralities arising from housing activities structure the terms on which women consider their love and their relatedness. While the standards by which they value one another’s labor and accomplishments have clearly been shaped by the capitalist market, the meanings of intergenerational care among women continue to revolve around who sends, hears, and stays in particular places. Likewise, housing activities associated with marriage shape the moral terms on which men and women perceive the consequences of gender inequalities. love a n d i n e qua l i t y i n m a r r i ag e s

MmaMaipelo put a great deal of effort into bringing about marriages among Baitshepi members, providing rooms in her yard to potential husbands and wives and trying to resolve quarrels between them. There were similar arrangements at the Holy Sabbath Apostolic Church elsewhere in Old Naledi, where in 1998 two of the male bishop’s five unmarried daughters stayed with spouses in their respective houses. In Baitshepi, the small children of church members who were not yet married were often sent for extended periods to stay with the father’s parents so that they could “get used to one another.” This was an unusual arrangement, since unmarried women often fear that partners and their families will claim custody rights over their children on the basis of care they have provided (Helle-Valle 1999:384; Upton 1999:160). I once asked MmaMaipelo at what point she had become so interested in bringing people together ( go kopanya batho). Around 1980, she replied, before her calling, she was approached by some of her husband’s relatives asking for help finding a spouse for a man in their family. “This was the first time I realized that people looked to me as someone who could put people on the road to marriage.” She selected a woman who, after spending some time with the man in question, ran off. MmaMaipelo was extremely upset by this outcome and wept to one of her neighbors, who, she related, “told me something I will never forget: ‘You go about helping people all the time, but you yourself can only be helped by God.’ ” Ideally, marriage enhances security by housing men and women together, so that they share resources and provide for children. This is frequently not the case, as inequalities along lines of gender and generation give rise to domestic jealousies and violence. Nonetheless, men and women continue to house one another and their children through marriage processes, and 112

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their interests in doing so reflect their perceptions of the need to be loved by others. From MmaMaipelo’s point of view, having her nieces stay with marital partners in her compound transformed them into daughters and sons: “I don’t take Dineo’s spouse to be my daughter’s lover, I take him to be my child.” From the perspective of men and women marrying into the church, staying together in the church compound was confirmation that they had taken MmaMaipelo as their parent. In so doing, men reinforced their standing as pastors. Significantly, in very few of the numerous instances in Baitshepi in which these marital relationships have ended has the inmarrying partner remained a church member after the separation. “Pastor so-and-so in Baitshepi has a new spouse,” a nonchurchgoing woman neighbor confided to me at one point, “and people are starting to whisper about him and his former spouse. That pastor ought to leave the church, or there will be jealousy.” People in Old Naledi confirm that it is unusual for an unmarried man to stay in the same compound as his spouse’s parents, because his in-laws would thereby be forced to “know” ( go itse) about the marriage and be responsible for settling disputes. When I casually spoke to a woman about the living arrangements of her eighteen-year-old daughter, who was staying with a partner in a yard a short distance away, she smiled and told me, “I don’t know anything about that,” although it was clear that she was perfectly aware of the situation. As Anne Griffiths (1997) makes clear, one of the first questions asked by court officials dealing with marital disputes is what action the parents of each spouse have taken. Housing activities associated with marriage processes contribute to such perceived responsibilities to look after other people’s love, as well as to the ambivalence men and women commonly feel about getting married. Ørnulf Gulbrandsen’s careful account (1986) of marriage practices in southeastern Botswana shows how men and women experience the consequences of gender inequalities in access to resources within their domestic arrangements. The marriage process begins with a period in which a man visits ( go ralala, literally, to traverse a yard) a lover (nyatsi ) in her compound, usually with the awareness and implicit consent of her parents. Childbirth is ideally followed by formal marriage negotiations, and subsequently by a wedding, exchange of bridewealth, and house construction in the husband’s father’s ward. Actual arrangements rarely correspond to this ideal, because both men and women have an interest in postponing marriage. According to Gulbrandsen, “g o w i t h m e t o b a b y l o n”

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many young men say that “before you marry, you can always have pleasant times with your wife, while afterwards there is just fighting” (1986:15). Once husbands and wives are living in the same yard, women often accuse their spouses of neglecting them and the children when they come home from beer drinking, and quarrels sometimes culminate in wife beating. Thus men choose “to postpone the establishment of a co-residential unit patrilocally as long as possible” (1986:15), a step that almost always follows marriage. In addition, a man’s parents and sisters may be reluctant for him to marry, since his marriage would diminish the support he would provide them. Competition between wives and their affines often leads a husband’s mother to delay building a separate yard for the newly married couple. By delaying, she may continue to draw on her son’s support, and supervise her daughter-in-law to keep her from taking lovers. Jealousy and witchcraft among sisters-in-law are common results (1986:19). Consequently, a woman often prefers to remain unmarried, sell beer in her natal compound, take or reject “as she likes” lovers who give gifts, and rely on the support of her own children as they grow up (1986:20). Given men’s and women’s ambivalence about marriage, it is only relatively late in life that men begin to stay with their socially recognized children in compounds which they have built in their villages after marriage. In a survey of fifty-nine men between the ages of twenty and forty whose home (legae) is a particular ward in the village of Mmankgodi west of Gaborone, Townsend found that in 1993 “no man under age forty was coresident with his own [socially recognized] children in the village” (1997:413). The eight men in this age group who had established their own households with children were all living either in Gaborone or in South Africa; in all other cases, men’s children were living with spouses and spouses’ parents (1997:412–13).16 Survey data from Old Naledi illustrate the urban side of this dynamic. It is somewhat more common for young men to stay for substantial periods of time with their children in the city than in their home villages. As Townsend shows, men rarely stay with their children in the villages before building for themselves there upon marriage. Yet in Old Naledi, out of thirty men aged from twenty to forty in sixteen compounds I surveyed in 1998, thirteen were staying with both their children and marital partners. Out of these thirteen, however, seven men were staying in one of three compounds associated with a church and were themselves committed church members. This puts them in a distinctive category, as I have already related: these men had taken the bishops of their respective churches 114

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as their parents. Of the other six men staying with their children, two were officially married and had built in town. Thus, of the thirty men surveyed, only four unmarried men not in a church compound were staying with some children socially recognized as theirs. Four additional unmarried men were staying with partners in the absence of children, not in a church compound. None of the thirty men surveyed had yet built for themselves in their villages. Men do frequently visit lovers in the city as they do in villages, but judging from Townsend’s material, it appears to be a largely urban practice for unmarried partners to stay together with or without children, usually in rented accommodation. Staying together ( go nna mmogo), like men’s practice of visiting ( go ralala or go etela) their lovers in the evenings, limits the couple’s parents’ involvement in the relationship. An unmarried, nonchurchgoing woman named Kamogelo, born in 1961, had been staying with a partner for nine years in rented accommodations in Old Naledi and elsewhere in Gaborone. She remarked, “If we were living in my home village Moshopa, we would be visiting [ go ralala]. Here in town we’re staying together, hiding ourselves [go iphitlhela] from my parents. It’s not necessary for my parents to have seen my spouse [monna wame]; they don’t know him because he hasn’t yet married me.” Kamogelo spoke of hiding oneself as a mark of respect for one’s parents, who need not “know” of a marital relationship as long as the couple are visiting or staying together in town; that is, as long as the daughter has not moved away ( go fuduga) from her natal compound to be married. She went on to speak with disapproval of her own pregnant daughter who had “moved away” to stay with her lover elsewhere in Old Naledi. “My daughter isn’t hiding herself from her parents; she’s being willful [o a itaola, literally, controlling herself]. What she ought to do is have her boyfriend visit her here at night when we don’t see him.” As for her own arrangements, Kamogelo told me that she had refused to stay with her current partner, Dieke, until she had had a child by him and seen that he was properly caring for her children from a previous union. They began to stay together after she came out of confinement with her first child by him. Dieke told me that her other children were his now, since he is paying their school expenses. For men, staying together, which in this case the woman made contingent on her partner’s care, may thus be a means of acquiring children, similar to marriage, but perhaps without its potential jealousies. Kamogelo at any rate was ambivalent about marriage. “Setswana marriage is difficult,” she observed. “A husband’s parents are “g o w i t h m e t o b a b y l o n”

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always bewitching the wife’s parents out of jealousy over their son’s earnings.” The housing activities associated with marriage, such as building, staying, and hiding, bring about transformations in the ways in which potential spouses, as well as their children, parents, and other kin, imagine one another’s commitments and sentiments. Indeed, legal decisions about the status of a marriage may hinge on arbitrators’ assessments of whether husbands have been staying with and thus caring for their wives (Griffiths 1997:134–57, 253–63). When referring to a divorce in the family, grown children commonly say, “Our yard is broken to pieces” (Lelapa la rona le thubile), signaling their hurt at disputes among parents who ought to have been able to maintain their house for the good of their children. While marriage is ideally a means for spouses to ensure one another’s and their children’s security, it is likely to involve them in new entanglements with siblings, affines, and stepparents. Recall, for example, Botlhale’s remark that it is better to be an orphan than have your parent remarry, since your stepfamily will be jealous of you. By the same token, people may consider the children of unwed mothers to be more capable of drawing on grandparental care than those of married women. The following case describes how MmaMaipelo reflected on the long-term security of the children of a church member by assessing in whose house and with which relatives they would likely stay in years to come.

Case Three: Who Is an Orphan? For the purposes of demographic projections and social welfare programs, the Botswana government has adopted definitions of orphans as children under the age of eighteen one of whose parents have died. In local usage, if one parent of a child dies, the child is known as a lesiela, one who has been left behind; a child who has lost both father and mother may be known as a khutsana, a potentially pejorative term meaning one stricken by sorrow. Yet neither of these terminologies reflects the housing activities that may be involved in the question of who should be considered an orphan. Orata, who was born in 1973, was a distant cousin of RraMaipelo and lived in a yard a short distance from the Baitshepi Church. She began attending the church in 1993, soon after developing a marital relationship with a Baitshepi pastor named Tshepo. She bore two children by Tshepo, a boy in 1992 and a girl in 1995. Tshepo then died after a brief illness in 1996. The two small children were staying with Orata in 1998, along with her own mother and father, one older sister, and six children of Orata’s 116

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older siblings. Orata’s father worked as an electrician, and her siblings derived income from factory work, selling beer, migration to Johannesburg, and renting out rooms on plots of their own. Orata herself left school after form 1 and never worked for a wage. I commented to MmaMaipelo during 1997 on the difficulty of Orata’s situation, namely, that she had to care for two children who had been orphaned by the death of their father Tshepo. I expected her to say that the children were not really orphans because their father rather than their mother had died, and that their situation was similar to that of the many children whose mother and father break off marital connections. However, MmaMaipelo’s reply surprised me. Orata’s children were in fact doing well, she said, because Orata’s older siblings were staying in their own yards. Orata, she explained, would remain in her parents’ yard indefinitely, since she was their youngest child (ngwana wa gofejane) and therefore stood to inherit it. Since Orata’s older brother and sisters had left their parents’ yard, they were no longer drawing on their parents’ resources to the extent they would otherwise have done, and Orata’s children were benefiting from this arrangement. One of Orata’s older sisters was staying in a compound adjacent to hers, where she rented a room and sold beer. Although the sister was living a very short distance away, she had nonetheless moved out of her parents’ yard. “Her parents might help her and her children,” MmaMaipelo said, “but not in the same way they would if she were still in their yard. There’s a difference.” Orata’s children would really be suffering, she went on, if she and Tshepo had officially married and built a house of their own. In that case, support from Orata’s parents would not be readily forthcoming. Issues of staying, building, and visiting were likewise central to Orata’s thinking about what her children should know about the identity of their father. Orata told me that she often spoke to her children about their father Tshepo because she wanted them to “remember” or “think of” ( go gopola) him. MmaMaipelo objected to this on the grounds that Orata might marry eventually, and her children should regard her future husband as their father. If her children were to think of Tshepo as their father, they might refuse to obey Orata’s future husband, and complain that he was not their father when he punished them. “Orata is thinking about what is,” she said, “but I’m thinking about what might come.” Since Tshepo had never stayed with Orata in her yard, but only visited her in the evenings, the children had never really known him. Rather, MmaMaipelo said, they had been “accommodated” or “given birth to” (ba tshotswe) by Orata’s own mother. “g o w i t h m e t o b a b y l o n”

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MmaMaipelo’s assertion that Orata’s children were being well cared for because her older siblings were not staying in their parents’ yard reflects the attention generally paid to how children’s well-being depends on housing arrangements among their kin. MmaMaipelo explained that orphans (masiela) are small children whose mothers had married and built, and who are themselves scorned (sotlega). If a child is being well cared for, people will say, “She’s not an orphan. Her orphanhood has been taken away from her.” On the other hand, if a child of living parents is being obviously mistreated, it might be said, “She is living the life of an orphan.” Again, if a child spends his time just looking around without responding to people, it might be said, “He’s behaving like an orphan [lesiela]. Whom is he remembering [o gopola mang]?” On a different occasion, a woman staying in Old Naledi but building a house in her home village explained, “I want my daughters to have a home [legae]. Without a home you might as well call them orphans [masiela].” In sum, MmaMaipelo assessed the well-being of Orata’s children by reflecting on how the activities of building and staying associated with marriage were more likely than visiting to produce long-lasting attachments between fathers and children, but had the potential to attenuate commitments between a woman and her parents. My point is not that such assessments and speculations are necessarily borne out by actual outcomes. Rather, Batswana tend to reflect on people’s life chances by considering not only individuals’ capacities to “do for themselves” but how their housing activities affect and are influenced by the care, love, scorn, and jealousy they feel for one another over the years. h ow yo u a re a n d w h e re yo u a re

When Batswana greet or ask after one another casually, they ask “O kae?” meaning both “How are you?” and “Where are you?” The usual response is “Ke teng, ke tsogile,” which means, “I am here, I have risen [i.e., am fine].” To be sure, it is usually clear from context whether a person’s whereabouts or his or her well-being is the subject of inquiry, but there were some instances that confused me. I once witnessed a minor car accident in Old Naledi and reported the collision to a neighbor around the corner. She asked me, “Ba teng?” which I took to mean “Are they there?” “Yes,” I replied, “they’re right over there.” “No!” she said, shaking her head in exasperation. “I mean, are they still alive?” 118

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I learned of MmaMaipelo’s death when I happened to call the family on the phone and asked, “Where/how is MmaMaipelo?” Her sister MmaDineo did not want to break the news to me. She replied, “She’s gone out” (O dule), and asked me to call back in a few hours, because Maipelo had something to tell me. It is common to speak of death as the departure of a person’s spirit from the house of his or her flesh. The semantic connections between a person’s aliveness and his or her physical location signal, I think, a recognition of how one’s well-being is affected by particular places and by the persons with whom one associates there. The bodiliness of housing activities is a subject of the following chapter, but we have already seen how Batswana commonly construe practices of building, staying, visiting, and hearing as methods of loving. MmaMaipelo’s approach to maintaining love among members of her church drew upon broadly shared understandings of how housing activities shape the caring or scornful sentiments people feel toward one another. As we saw in chapter 1, sustaining caregiving sentiments is a principal moral stake in local discussions about the sources and nature of suffering. Here I have aimed to illustrate how the interests of Batswana in imagining and influencing the qualities of one another’s caregiving sentiments have shaped, and been shaped by, the domestication of inequality. Given that Batswana have experienced the impact of material inequalities along lines of gender, class, and generation within their domestic arrangements; and that they conceive of love simultaneously as sentiment and action affecting the welfare of others (as opposed to a feeling divorced from performance), they tend to construe the consequences of inequality in terms of the influence of particular persons’ love or jealousy over one another’s well-being within domestic spaces. Thus, elders understand the willingness of children and servants to undertake domestic labor in terms of their responsiveness to calling, a housing activity by which seniors organize the work and well-being of the yard. Marriage processes, prolonged as a consequence of long-standing gender inequalities in access to resources, demand that spouses, their children, and other kin work out the terms of their familiarity and affection over many years through the housing activities of visiting, staying, and building. Such housing activities are governed by interpersonal moralities that frame people’s understandings of social inequalities and possess a capacity to mitigate their impact. As far as church members are concerned, for instance, it is impossible to show love to the sick and bereaved—sufferers, in many instances, from diseases brought about by inequality—without spending extended periods of time “g o w i t h m e t o b a b y l o n”

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singing for them, praying for them, nursing them, and participating in funerals for them in particular places. In employing the concept of the domestication of inequality in a double sense, I have aimed to indicate the plural nature of the moral frameworks through which Batswana experience and evaluate the effects of inequality, and at the same time to demonstrate the centrality of housing activities to local enactments of both love and self-sufficiency. Consciousness either of your own self-sufficient capacity to build, or of how another person’s love has enabled you to build, rests on the presupposition that your well-being is linked to acts of building, that “without building there is no life.” Thus, church members’ methods of fostering love draw upon shared yet deeply contested understandings of the power of housing activities to shape and transform relationships over time. Indeed, debates among Baitshepi members about who has loved and cared for whom tend to revolve around presumptions that where you are affects how you are, both in terms of your relationships to others and, as we shall see in the next chapter, your physical well-being. Placing yourself with or away from other people expresses the condition of your love for them, as various episodes related in this chapter have illustrated. MmaMaipelo identified children of God as those willing to hear the word of God, obedient children who heard the requests of their parents about the house. She regarded Kerileng’s staying away from church in order to study for school as a personal affront, showing that Kerileng had forgotten the spiritual parent who had helped provide for her. According to MmaMaipelo, her sister MmaOfile had no right to bring her granddaughter Mavis away from the church to work for her in her own compound, since MmaOfile had not provided well for Botlhale, Mavis’s mother, while Botlhale was staying with her. Maipelo took his role as family provider very seriously, and resented his mother’s willingness to devote money to the upkeep of “spiritual children” about the house. Maipelo once gave voice to his frustration with his cousin (MyZD) Dineo for not having prepared his dinner for him, as a sister should for her elder brother. “My mother wants to keep up the pretense that Dineo is just a sister in this house,” he grumbled to me, “but she’s actually paying her for the work she does around the yard. What my mother says may be true, that spiritual children never forget you, but before you feed your spirit, you have to feed your flesh first.” When I visited Baitshepi in 2000, I inquired after one of Dineo’s sisters named Betty, whom I had known well two years previously, and who had then been as active as anyone in church. “Where/how is Betty?” I asked. 120

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“It’s said that she’s staying in West” (Gatwe o nna ko West), her sister said, meaning Gaborone West, a nearby suburb. “Her spouse goes to ZCC,” the Zion Christian Church, she added. Had I been quicker on the uptake, I might have made further inquiries. It was not until five years later, when I brought a photo album and saw that church members were flipping past Betty’s picture without comment, that I realized that Betty had become entirely estranged from her mother’s family, and that her sisters had not seen her for the previous seven years. I do not know what caused this rift, but I would not be surprised if witchcraft accusations had been involved, especially given that the ZCC is well known for divination. This young woman seems to have broken off connections to most if not all of her maternal relatives and to have effected the rupture merely by moving a few kilometers away. At any rate, her sisters spoke about the estrangement by mentioning where Betty was staying. However compelling the notions of “self-sufficiency” and of “developed persons” may be in contemporary Botswana, people are continually made aware of how their life chances hinge on their all too precarious love for one another, and they evaluate their love by considering where and for whose sake they build and visit, stay and hear.

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“Cleansing the Spirit” The Bodiliness of Sentiment and Faith

one of the more painful episodes of my fieldwork occurred in the peri-urban village of Tlokweng when I thoughtlessly intruded, together with my wife Laura, who was three months pregnant, into the house of a woman named Poifo in confinement with her three-week-old son. I should have remembered from my reading of Isaac Schapera (1941:217, 234) and A. M. Merriweather (1992:66) that women in the early months of pregnancy are considered to have “hot blood” (madi a mogote). If such women enter a house of confinement, the infant inside the house may contract an illness known as khujwana, in which the area around the navel swells. The child may subsequently develop a deformity or die. When Poifo saw Laura in a maternity dress, she became very upset. She explained that Laura’s blood had been made “hot” as a result of sexual intercourse. Her blood was in the process of “forming” ( go bopa) a baby, whereas the blood of a woman in a later stage of pregnancy would be “cool,” having already formed the child. The heat of Laura’s blood had been transferred to the infant’s. Poifo sent me to bring to her yard a senior woman herbalist. The herbalist reassured us that she could treat ( go alafa) the khujwana if it occurred, and asked Laura to spread ashes from Poifo’s hearth on the baby’s forehead, palms, and soles. Poifo told me that her child did in fact develop a raised area around the navel, and woke her at night with his cries. She said 122

that the lump around the navel was moving around and causing pain by bumping against the skin. Over the ensuing months, I gave Poifo money to purchase herbal and pharmaceutical medicines for the condition. The child thrived, and Poifo remained on good terms with us. The herbalist told me that the swelling around the navel was caused by megare coming to the surface and leaving the body. The term megare (pronounced mayKHA-ray) is usually translated as “germs,” and is commonly used in public health messages in reference to HIV. The herbalist told me not to worry about Poifo’s child, because “a disease like that causes the child to grow.” Even so, the khujwana persisted. Poifo took the child to an Apostolic church, where a prophet-diviner told her that her baby had “sores” (dintho) inside his stomach, and that she should purchase red and white yarn blessed by a pastor to tie around his waist. When I related this incident to Baitshepi Church leaders, they dismissed Poifo’s concerns. The prohibition against women in early pregnancy entering a house of confinement is one of the meila ya setswana, Tswana objects of avoidance, to which they pay no regard. “You don’t believe / have faith in khujwana, do you?” they asked me. “How can heat from a pregnant woman make a baby sick? When we Baitshepi members are in confinement, anyone may visit us; we don’t frighten them away.” Neither do they practice divination or tie strings around joints to heal an ailment. Some months later, when our own son Adam was a few weeks old, there was a flu going around in the winter, and I hoped that he would not contract it. I remarked to some Baitshepi members that we were keeping Adam indoors so that he would escape the flu. “That’s a good idea,” said a young woman. “In the flat where you stay, the cold doesn’t enter into you [serame ga se tsene mogo wena].” I replied in terms of germ theory, because I had never heard megare mentioned in connection with the flu, and was curious to hear their reaction. I said, “I mean that Adam might be able to escape the flu because he doesn’t come into contact with many people. If few people touch him, he might escape the flu megare.” An elder woman replied angrily: “That is sekgoa [a European way], not setswana. If you’re sick, I’m not going to refuse to nurse you. I’m not going to refuse to go into your house because you’re sick.” “But don’t you think that flu megare may be spread by shaking hands, or drinking from the same cup?” I asked. “No!” she snapped. “The flu is just from God!” Yet it seemed to me that she was objecting not so much to the idea that the flu might be spread as I had suggested, but rather to the poor sociality that would result from acting “c l e a n s i n g t h e s p i r i t”

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upon such suggestions. Refusing to shake hands, to share drinking water in church, and to enter houses of the sick all indicate jealousy and scorn. Such episodes alerted me to the ways in which heat and coolness, dirt and cleanliness, and darkness and light are conveyed from houses to bodies, from bodies to houses, and from one body to another. Batswana disagree with one another, sometimes very strongly, about the nature and consequences of such transfers, yet consider them intrinsic to the growth, wellbeing, and injury of the body. People’s willingness and refusal to take part in such transfers of substance in particular places, or to speak about their consequences in certain ways, affect not only the conditions of their bodies but their sentiments of love, care, scorn, and jealousy. The senior woman of Baitshepi refused to speak of the flu as a disease spread by megare because such diseases are often seen to arise from irresponsible behavior. AIDS megare, for example, are felt to be conveyed through “promiscuity,” which inspires accusations as well as fears that care will be denied. Poifo, on the other hand, recognized that her child had been put in danger by my own and Laura’s irresponsibility in matters pertaining to procreation, but did not wish relations between us to be ruptured. The herbalist aimed to sustain a footing of love and care among us by giving assurances that the megare were coming to the surface of the child’s body. For their part, Baitshepi leaders’ refusal to have tumelo in either hot blood or khujwana signals their conviction that excluding people from houses of confinement is poor sociality on a par with refusing to enter the house of a sick person. The premise of such local disagreements and debates is that many substances ingested into, brought into contact with, or transferred between people’s bodies have power over their physical and moral conditions, and link their sentiments and bodily well-being to others with whom they have shared these substances.1 Such phenomena—including imbibed water and beer, sexual fluids, food, medicines, bathwater, clothing, and voices that move between the bodies of persons in churches and in divination sessions— have a capacity to orient people’s sentiments. For example, I was told that witchcraft medicines placed in people’s food work by perverting the purpose of communal eating and drinking, namely, to make people happy with one another by nourishing them. Witchcraft not only introduces a harmful substance, sejeso, which eats people’s bodies away from the inside, but causes them to become bitter and accusatory as a result of having eaten together. In cleansing their insides of witchcraft substance, sufferers aim to rid their bodies of harmful material so that they may benefit from the love of other people and ancestors. By the same token, church mem124

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bers say that a phenomenon so apparently immaterial as spirit (moya) may be cleansed ( go tlhatswega) if they come into contact with substances that enhance love in appropriate places. If people can be sickened by one another’s jealousy and by the substances that convey it, they can be healed by one another’s love and by the substances that communicate it. Deciding whether and how to partake of such substances thus entails imagining what other people’s sentiments and bodily states might be, and behaving accordingly. Baitshepi members insist that you must decide whether to have tumelo either in water blessed in church or in herbal medicines used by Setswana doctors—and in so doing, to allow them to enter your body and thus alter your sentiments. “Cleansing the spirit” by drinking water in church is one of numerous methods of sharing substances in order to work out the qualities of caring relationships. There is a broadly shared ideal that such substances—water, beer, sexual fluids, food, bathwater, herbal medicines— ought to renew people’s love for one another upon entering or contacting the body. Yet people have a keen sense of danger about these transfers as well, and of the ambivalence of the sentiments that they are liable to elicit (Peletz 2001). The alternative to tumelo or faith, therefore, is not skepticism so much as “refusal” ( go gana). According to Baitshepi leaders, a person should have tumelo in water, hospital medicines, and words of prayer while “refusing” to take Setswana medicines or drink beer. A person who thus “refuses” will avoid beer gardens and diviners’ houses, staying away from the places where his or her body is likely to be soiled by undesirable substances and sentiments. The question of where a person imbibes water or beer, feels brightness or darkness, cleanses or bathes the body, and conveys heat or becomes cool is significant, because these activities are apt to transform the sentiments one feels toward others within or outside those spaces. In a review of the anthropological literature on emotion, John Leavitt (1996) argues against discussing emotions in terms of either meaning or feeling, either language or sensation, either sociality or individual experience, and either mind or body. Yet “it is precisely emotion terms and concepts that we use to refer to experiences that cannot be categorized in this way” (1996:515). For example, Leavitt points out that anxiety is both a bodily sensation (a fluttery feeling in the stomach) and a culturally defined meaning (associated, for instance, with making a formal presentation). Emotion is both feeling and an element of discourse, a combination not easily grasped through analytical models casting sensations as inward, confined to individual bodies, and words and meanings as public (see Brennan 2004). “c l e a n s i n g t h e s p i r i t”

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Batswana likewise speak of love and jealousy as qualities they “feel” ( go utlwa) in their “hearts” (dipelo), and as something they can communicate to other people through words, among other means. Persons’ sensations and sentiments—felt in their bodies and articulated in words—are not exclusively their own, but are influenced by others’. When people reflect on the sociality associated with entering a house of confinement, for example, they not only pay attention to whether they feel heat in their blood, but also imagine the impact of their feelings of heat, and of speech about these feelings, on caregiving relationships. The impact of people’s sentiments on the qualities of their relationships to one another, not only on discourse or physical sensations, is of great popular concern in Botswana. As we have seen, housing activities, such as building, staying, and sending, shape people’s sense of the possibilities that they will receive love and care from others. Likewise, Apostolic church members conceive of the “church house” (ntlo ya kereke) as a place of nurturance where they must literally “place their faith” ( go baya tumelo) in order to give and receive love through the sharing of water and voice. Churches are comparable to other spaces of nurturance such as beer gardens. As does praying, the housing activities of drinking, bathing, and divining all problematize relations of love and care. The first half of this chapter explores a variety of ways in which nurturing and destructive substances flow between bodies, transforming people’s sentiments in the process. Sexual commitment may be paradigmatic in this regard. Sex is an exchange of “sweetness” and of fluids, which ideally procreate and nurture. I suggest that sex may be locally understood less as an expression of prior sentiments than as an act that creates love and forms a basis for further exchanges of love and care. Yet sex is dangerous because it causes partners to share blood, which may be rendered “hot” (mogote) or “dirty” (leswe). Blood is one of a range of beneficial and harmful fluids that course through or come in contact with the body, connecting people’s physical and moral conditions to one another. For instance, bathing indicates how a person’s welfare or suffering depends on the care provided by others in particular places (Durham 2005a). The second half of the chapter focuses more explicitly on issues of place. Particular places where transfers of substance occur—churches, diviners’ houses, beer gardens, bars, houses of confinement, and hospitals—exercise transformative effects on the body, as well as on the sentiments of those who enter them. These spaces possess what James Fernandez calls an architectonic quality, that is, a “significance and feeling tone that a structure 126

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has by virtue of the enlivening activity that takes place within it” (1982:377). The built environments of churches, together with the sentiments of persons who enter them, structure other people’s physical placement and sentiments in gendered ways.2 Apostolic church leaders’ love arranges their followers in a hierarchical pattern within the rectangular form of church buildings, quenches their thirst with healing water, and provides them with clean uniforms, which strengthen their bodies. Yet before considering the places where substances flow from body to body, it is necessary first to discuss bodily flows themselves in more detail, along with the sentiments arising from them. I begin with sexual commitment, which comes about through essential but often dangerous exchanges of blood.

s e x ua l c o m m i t m e n t: f l e s h ly love a n d s e l f - p rot e c t i o n

Critics of Apostolic churches frequently charge that male leaders have sex with women followers. Within many Pentecostalist churches, preaching often centers on abstinence from sex before marriage and monogamy within it, and Pentecostalists often dismiss Apostolics as lax in this regard. A nonchurchgoing man suggested that Apostolics may understand sexual liaisons in terms reminiscent of how male bishops and prophets “fill” congregants with the Holy Spirit during Sunday services (see below). Some Apostolic men and women, he suspected, likewise consider sex a means of transmitting and receiving the spirit. A woman who became disaffected from Baitshepi gave me a long list of male pastors and female youth who had had sex with one another in the past. She had herself taken messages to arrange these liaisons, for instance telling a particular woman, “Pastor so-and-so is calling you to his house.” A common euphemism for sex is “entering a house” ( go tsena mo tlung). Some of these relationships occurred while at least one of the partners, usually the man, but in some cases the woman, had a recognized spouse. Undoubtedly, young women are often intimidated into having sex, yet my informant asserted that women as well as men desired such attachments. She said that MmaMaipelo was aware of these arrangements but did not want to expose anyone for fear of driving them out of church. MmaMaipelo dropped some hints to me suggesting the same. If some Baitshepi members have multiple sexual partners concurrently, much evidence indicates that they are no different in this respect from many Batswana, churchgoers or not. Schapera’s writings (1933, 1941) show that “c l e a n s i n g t h e s p i r i t”

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boys and girls have long been expected to engage in sexual play during adolescence, and that premarital pregnancy became the norm early in the twentieth century, once arranged marriages and sexual segregation preceding male initiation had been abandoned (1933:65). Especially once the marriage process had lengthened substantially during the colonial period, it was necessary for women to bear children to demonstrate their fertility and suitability for marriage. As was the case in the 1930s, married men continue to take lovers routinely, while their wives are formally instructed by their affines at weddings not to complain when they do so. Yet wives commonly take lovers themselves, often out of frustration at their husbands’ infidelity or prolonged absences. Jo Helle-Valle shows (1999) that because unmarried Bakgalagadi women in Botswana benefit materially from multiple lovers, sexual liaisons are not necessarily seen as exploitative of women, or as indicating “promiscuity.” As long as women “present the material well-being of themselves and their children as the reason for their non-formalised sexual involvement with men” (1999:378), they are not regarded as “promiscuous.” Women are more likely to be deemed “promiscuous” if they spend money received from lovers on beer instead of food for their children. Helle-Valle argues that sexuality in Botswana is “a transaction in which the wife ‘gives’ the husband sex in exchange for material support” (1999:379), and that women therefore arrange sexual liaisons for material ends. Many people in Old Naledi corroborate Helle-Valle’s point that men must care for their lovers through material support. “Men want sex, and women want money,” I often heard from men and women alike. “Women are always trying to break up marriages in hopes that they will get something in return at the end of the day, and this makes for jealousy.” A young woman who gave birth at age eighteen explained, “You’re shopping downtown with a friend, and she buys something special for herself. You ask where she got the money for it, and she tells you that it came from her lover. Then you think, well, maybe if I have sex . . .” (see Hunter 2002). Yet the fact that care involves feeling as well as action should caution against neat dichotomies between material and emotional motivations. How does sexual intercourse create commitments of care and love? What is the “power of sex” (Heald 1995) to create and transform relationships? There is a substantial amount of preaching within Baitshepi against “promiscuity” (boaka); that is, against having more than one sexual partner concurrently. Such preaching usually appears to be motivated by concerns about AIDS, about jealousies springing from multiple liaisons, or about fla128

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grant behavior showing disrespect for elders. Baitshepi leaders sometimes speak of “promiscuity” as resulting from fleshly love (lerato la senama), as opposed to spiritual love (lerato la semoya). Whereas fleshly love characterizes relationships between lovers, it ought to be replaced over time by spiritual love, which is less passionate and more forgiving. “When RraMaipelo and I were younger,” MmaMaipelo told me in 1993, “I used to be jealous about him, worrying about where he was going and whom he was seeing. Now our fleshly love has ended but our spiritual love has grown, and we are like brother and sister. Spiritual love does not end.” She often quoted 1 Corinthians 13 in this connection: “Love perseveres in patience, it is kind; love is not yellow-hearted [i.e., envious].” Men and women who have only fleshly love are apt to quarrel, sleep with others out of resentment, and eventually separate. Indicating a man and woman whose marital relationship she hoped to promote, MmaMaipelo remarked, “They have spiritual love for one another, because they have forgiven each other for having other lovers.” Whereas spiritual love is built up through forgiveness, harmonious words, and relations of care, fleshly love is built up largely through sex. While the distinction between fleshly and spiritual love may be particular to church discourses, the principle that sexual intercourse has a capacity to create love is of broader relevance. Evidence comes from the classic ethnography of Isaac Schapera (1941), who relates an account originally written in Setswana for him by a young man, a schoolteacher, in the 1930s. My reason for quoting the following description of sexual intercourse is that it evokes the “power of sex” not merely to give pleasure to individuals but to create love between them. To clarify, I do not mean to imply that Batswana are more inclined than any other group of people to have sex, but merely that there is great cultural attention given to the acts and processes that build up love among persons over time. The boy and the girl sit together outside her hut talking, until her parents go to bed. Then he pleads with her to sleep with him, and because she is shy she will at first refuse, but when he says that if she refuses it is because she does not love him, she will consent. . . . As they lie together like this, the girl turns her back on the boy, while he faces towards her. Then he begins to trouble her by feeling her body, he fondles her buttocks and breasts, and all over, stroking her. She keeps stirring her body uneasily, and she will keep on saying: “What are you doing? Leave me alone, why do you keep feeling me all over?” The boy will keep reassuring her, saying, “What are you afraid of? I am just admiring your body.” . . . “c l e a n s i n g t h e s p i r i t”

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When they are both hot, the boy gets on top of the girl. . . . The boy presses hard on her, he breathes deeply and perspires freely. . . . If she is still young, she feels sore, and she will begin to cry, saying, “You are hurting me, be gentle, be slow, it is enough;” but the boy will just continue, and then she keeps quiet, she is feeling the sweetness of it. . . . The boy, as he keeps pushing, talks softly of the pleasure he is getting: “Oh, you are treating me well tonight, my wife, my love; when I used to say you must love me, I meant that you must treat me like this; oh, how nice it is! One can die of it.” And just when he ejaculates, he says, “Man, it is so nice that I could cut off my neck; oh, what a wonderful sweetness, it is coming out of my ears!” . . . Now they lie down again next to one another. . . . They keep quiet for a while, then the girl embraces the boy, and says: “You boys have it hard, you keep on breathing hard and working at this.” And the boy will say, “Yes, it is hard work, but it is also very nice, so much so that one could cut off one’s neck.” And the girl says, “Oh, is that so? But you boys can’t even lie quietly for a short time before you must be at it. . . .” Sometimes he copulates with her three or four times that night, and then he leaves early in the morning so that he may not be seen by the people. And once they have slept together like this, they begin to love one another very much almost as if they were man and wife. (Schapera 1941:190– 92; emphases added)

What is striking here is that sexual intercourse is depicted less as an expression of prior sentiments of love than as an act that produces it.3 Given that love is a performative sentiment in other respects, it is unsurprising that fleshly love is created through sexual acts. Indeed, a common euphemism for sexual intercourse is “to love one another” ( go ratana). In having sex, men and women alike say that they “eat” or “feed” one another; women say of good lovers that “they feed us well.” Sex is an exchange of “sweetness” (monate) and of fluids, which, ideally, procreate and nurture.4 This forms a basis for further exchanges. In the Baitshepi Church, whose leaders aim to create marital unions among their followers, sexual relationships among members may possess a certain unspoken legitimacy. Early in my fieldwork, when Baitshepi members were assessing my own love for them in a variety of ways, one of the male pastors asked me whether there were any girls in the church I wanted to sleep with. While some Baitshepi members have multiple lovers, monogamy is a powerful ideal. This is particularly the case for Baitshepi women whose recognized unions are considered to be “on the road to marriage,” since they stay together with their partners in the same compound. Given the efforts 130

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made by church leaders to promote marriages among their sons and daughters, the fact that particular children have been begotten by men other than their mothers’ current spouses is not openly acknowledged by such couples. This is due not only to possible shame about “promiscuity,” but to the fact that relations between children and stepparents are typically difficult. By contrast, nonchurchgoing women with little interest in marriage informed me readily that their children had different fathers. The capacity of sex to create love helps to account for certain ways in which men speak about sleeping with women other than their acknowledged spouses. Some men told me that they were sleeping around in order to “protect themselves” ( go itshireletsa), ironically the same phrase used in health campaigns to promote condoms. Most men, church members or otherwise, appear to be familiar with this expression, whereas women professed ignorance to me. “Self-protection” appears to be a matter of safeguarding one’s emotional well-being in the face of dissatisfactions or potential breakups. If a man suspects that his principal girlfriend is sleeping with other men, he may “protect himself” by sleeping with other women. In such instances, it seems that the “sweetness” arising from sex with these women compensates for the suspicion that a man’s spouse is not loving him. One man told me, “I’m the kind of man who wants protection if my girlfriend and I have to break up. If I catch her cheating on me, and she does not ask forgiveness, I’ll have to fall back on another woman, who will be my protection.” The discourse of “self-protection” also seems to resonate with the ways in which Batswana aspiring to middle-class status speak of their romantic relationships as “investments,” which often fail to pay off (Livingston 2007b). A growing consumerist ethos compels men and women to devote to romantic partners ever more resources, in the forms of houses, cars, and payments for English-medium day care for small children, and often to take out bank loans for these purposes. “Protecting oneself” by sleeping around may be a way of hedging one’s bets on all these outlays for particular relationships. After RraMaipelo died in 1997, his son invested large amounts of money in building a house for his mother, as I related in chapter 2. This investment troubled Maipelo’s unmarried spouse Oteng, who had been with him for six years and had brought her own son into the church network. “She was always saying that she wanted to get married,” Maipelo told me in 2000. “She was afraid of insecurity. She saw how much I was giving to my mother, and was also worried that I would find another woman more educated than she is. But I couldn’t get married until I had built the house “c l e a n s i n g t h e s p i r i t”

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to take care of my mother. One day I caught her with another man, and we broke up. I think she was trying to protect herself—she wanted a shoulder to cry on.” Why should such dissatisfactions lead a person to have sex with another man, risking a complete break in the process? The apparent presumption is that sex creates sentiments of love that may compensate for their absence elsewhere. Even when “self-protection” is not an issue, men tend to speak of sex with multiple partners in terms of the “sweetness” they derive from each woman. Incredulous that I would refuse to seduce a young woman walking by, a certain man asked me if my wife were pregnant or nursing. When I told him that she was not, he remarked derisively, “What, you want to eat nothing but maize meal every day, without any relish?” My refusal would have made sense only if I had been concerned about ensuring that my wife’s blood and breast milk would remain “clean”—unmixed with the blood of another woman—for the sake of my child’s health. c l e a n s i n g t h e b o d y, i n s i d e a n d o u t

Cleansing the interior and the surface of the body, and ensuring that its dirt (leswe) and heat (mogote) do not injure other people or oneself, are deemed matters of domestic and civic morality in Botswana. The difficulties of limiting the injuriousness of dirt illustrate the dangers people face as they try to create and maintain love through transfers of substance. Illnesses caused by dirty or hot blood are seen to signal moral breakdowns in intergenerational and sexual relationships (Livingston 2003a), while failing to bathe properly signifies improper love within a house or yard, an offense against civil behavior (maitseo) in public space, and even a threat to other people’s health (Durham 2005a). Baths, enemas, and emetics administered within many churches of the spirit, as well as by diviners (Ashforth 2000), are intended to cleanse the bodies of sufferers of witchcraft substance and to renew other people’s love for them. Baptism, a cleansing of sin, is likewise a form of moral renewal. In short, Batswana commonly make efforts to influence how others imagine them by cleansing the interiors and exteriors of their bodies. In engaging or refusing to engage in these various dirtyings and cleansings, and in speaking about their consequences in particular ways, MmaMaipelo and other Baitshepi leaders expressed convictions—many of which are not shared by their neighbors and members of other churches—about the measures people should take to love one another. In 1995, Mma132

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Maipelo drew my attention to a Bible passage that she said she had not known when I had met her two years previously, but whose importance she now wished me to grasp: “This is the one who has come by water and by blood, that is Jesus Christ; not by water alone, but by water and by blood. The Spirit is that which testifies, for the Spirit is truth. Thus there are three who testify: the Spirit and water and blood; and all three testify alike” (1 John 5:6–8). MmaMaipelo understood this passage to describe the composition of a person’s body: “Blood [madi], water [metsi], and spirit [mowa] work together in the body, but the spirit is the greatest [motona] of the three.” In chapter 4, I discuss what MmaMaipelo meant by spirit, and why she considered it to be the “greatest” component of the body. The point to recognize here is that MmaMaipelo drew on broadly shared local concepts of how a person is affected by the blood and water in her body. Blood, MmaMaipelo said, heats ( go gotetsa) the body as a fire is lit, while water cools or heals ( go fodisa) it. In casual talk, MmaMaipelo emphasized the life-giving capacities of blood while “refusing” speech about its becoming hot or dirty. She stressed the necessity to have tumelo in water blessed by the name of Jesus, imbibed either at the conclusion of Sunday church services or in private prayer sessions, so that one’s body may be cleansed of sickness and one’s sentiments oriented toward love.

Dirtying and Cleansing the Blood Even before AIDS became widespread in Botswana, it was popularly associated with boswagadi, a sexually transmitted illness of bereavement (Ingstad 1988). Widows, widowers, and women who have had abortions are said to have hot or dirty blood, and to transfer those dangerous conditions to sexual partners. Boswagadi reflects a more general phenomenon, namely, that men and women who have had sex with each other are said to be “of one blood.” This sharing of blood (madi ) occurs during intercourse, when “a woman’s ‘blood’ enter[s] the man’s body through his penis and summon[s] his own ‘blood’, i.e. semen” (Schapera 1979:10). This sharing of blood is essential to life, but if improperly regulated, it poses hazards not only to sexual partners and their children but to the public at large. Local conceptions of public health have long revolved around the perceived necessity of regulating the spaces in which people come into contact with one another’s heat and dirt. As Jean Comaroff notes (1985:57), in precolonial Tswana polities the heat associated with female procreation restricted the mobility of women within public spaces such as open pathways “c l e a n s i n g t h e s p i r i t”

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and the chiefly court. Particular spaces continue to be made hot by women who are pregnant or menstruating. For instance, the khujwana incident described above alerted me to the close identification of an infant’s body with the house of confinement. Poifo explained that Laura’s hot blood would not have given her child khujwana had the child emerged from confinement; it was the fact that he was contained in the house that made him vulnerable. In effect, the house of confinement is a second womb, which may be heated by the hot blood associated with the early pregnancy or menstruation of other women, who are said to “loom over” ( go okama) the infant.5 By the same token, some pregnant women refuse to visit a sick person in his or her house lest their unborn babies fall sick from the heat of the sickroom (Merriweather 1992:69–74). During the post–World War II period, as we saw in chapter 1, “Tswana medical diagnoses began to place an increasing stress on the hidden nature of the womb—of the womb as a space where one never quite knew what kind of toxins and trouble might be brewing” (Livingston 2005:167). New epidemics led people to identify TB, for example, with the illness thibamo, brought about when men have sex with other women while their own spouses are pregnant or nursing (Ingstad 1989:263–64; Livingston 2005:172– 75; Schapera 1941:236). If a man has sex with other women at these times, or with a woman who has had a miscarriage, the dirtiness of the women’s blood will be transferred to his, and then to his spouse when he “enters her house” ( go tsena mo tlung) to have intercourse with her. If the child is still in the womb, he or she may develop thibamo, which manifests itself when the baby’s head faces upward during birth. Unless the blood of both parents is cleansed by a healer under the supervision of the mother’s affines (Merriweather 1992:64), the father of the child may himself develop a severe cough and lose weight. While the etiology of thibamo appears to place the onus mainly on men, Julie Livingston makes clear (2005:173) that its prevalence was deemed an outcome of declining patriarchal surveillance over the sexuality of women as well as of young men empowered by cash earnings. Nowadays, elders comment on the dangers to public health posed by girls’ early menstruation and by the propensity of hospital staff to deliver adolescent girls’ babies by cesarean section (Livingston 2003a). Cesarean sections leave dirty blood in the wombs of girls, who become dangerous to men who have sex with them. As in the past, conditions of hot and dirty blood brought about by improperly regulated maturation are often seen to account for the deaths of young adults and infants, and to require efforts at cleansing. 134

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Lesego, the young woman who told me that she would refuse to believe in witchcraft if someone bewitched her, felt herself to have suffered for many years from dirty blood. Having given birth to her first child when she was fourteen years old, Lesego was acutely conscious of how childbirth at such a young age had affected her menstrual patterns and the cleanliness of her blood. She told me that giving birth ought to cleanse ( go tlhatswa) the mother’s blood of dirt accumulated in the absence of menstruation, and suspected that the vacuum extraction procedure by which she gave birth to her first child had left dirty blood inside her. When a woman is pregnant, Lesego told me, dirt builds up in her blood because she is not menstruating (cf. Renne 2001). This is dangerous because it can lead to swelling and even a stroke. Eating beetroot, she continued, helps to “cleanse the blood” by increasing its volume, in the same way that adding clean water to a glass of dirty water dilutes the dirt. Lesego told me that she had learned this in school; she showed me her notes, copied in English, which described the cardiovascular system in biomedical terms. On another occasion, Lesego remarked that dirty blood was causing her pain under her breasts. “The blood is congealing there [madi a gatsela gone],” she said. She told me that she had recently figured out why it is possible to get AIDS if you use oral contraceptives (which are readily available in clinics) rather than a condom. Both menstrual blood and the fetus are composed of “dirty blood,”6 and if you take a contraceptive pill, this dirty blood scatters throughout the body rather than coming out in menstrual periods or congealing to form a baby. Thus, if a man’s blood is dirty with AIDS, the AIDS megare will scatter throughout the body of a woman taking oral contraceptives unless he uses a condom. It seems clear that megare is a form of infectious dirt. Adults who see dirt in a child’s porridge will prevent him from eating by saying, “That porridge has megare in it.” Given that HIV has always been identified as megare in public health campaigns, it is not surprising that AIDS was widely associated with hot or dirty blood— and thus with “promiscuity”—even before there were numerous AIDS illnesses. People tend to speak of illnesses arising from hot or dirty blood as signaling women’s unwillingness to care properly for their children, since it is their responsibility to ensure that babies grow properly. During the late 1990s, the deaths of infants drew people’s attention to the sexual conduct of men as well as of women, since both fathers and mothers must be careful not to endanger a baby’s health during periods of confinement and breastfeeding. One mother whose infant had died explained that her milk “c l e a n s i n g t h e s p i r i t”

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had “congealed” ( go ipopa) inside her baby’s stomach, rather than coursing through his entire body. This condition had been caused by her spouse, who had slept with another woman while the child was nursing, and the resulting dirt had been transferred to the mother’s breast milk. Indeed, some women say that a key purpose of postpartum confinement is to prevent men from sleeping around, and to encourage them to continue to care for their children and spouses with gifts of diapers and food. Concerns about dirty breast milk congealing inside babies reflect more general understandings of the ways in which fluids move within and between bodies. Sinews or veins (ditshika) transport food and fluids through the body, across joints (ditokololo) that hold the body together. Mothers commonly tie colored strings, known as dithapo, around the wrists, necks, and ankles of their small children. These strings assist in “molding” the body of the child—go bopa, a term also used in reference to shaping a clay pot—and help the baby’s veins to concentrate breast milk and food within certain areas of the body. In addition, mothers exercise or rub ( go sidila) infants’ limbs so that their “sinews move freely” (ditshika di phutholole).7 For their part, men often watch the growth of their babies carefully in order to assess the likelihood that their spouses have been having sex with other men. One woman in Old Naledi told me that some men wish to have children precisely in order to prevent their spouses’ sexual infidelity, on the assumption that women will not risk the health of their babies by sleeping around. In a very injured tone, this woman remarked that clinic nurses are apt to tell you to your face that your baby is not growing well, impugning your willingness and ability to care for your children, and hinting that you have been promiscuous. AIDS-related illnesses in babies have thus reinforced popular attention given to the life-giving or life-depriving substances and sentiments of both mothers and fathers8—as well as to the ongoing need for grandmothers to engage in the work of feeding and otherwise providing for their daughters who are in confinement. In keeping with her reluctance to attribute illness to “promiscuity,” MmaMaipelo did not identify hot or dirty blood as a cause of sickness, encourage her followers to cleanse their blood, or exclude people with hot blood from houses of confinement. Church members who have stayed with her for much of their lives are not necessarily well acquainted with local cleansing procedures. For instance, many men drink an herbal medicine known as monepenepe after having sex. One such man explained to me, “I don’t know what the girl’s condition is, and I need to be cleansed in my veins, so that my sinews may move freely.” When I mentioned monepenepe 136

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to MmaMaipelo’s 35-year-old niece Dineo, she said that she did not know the meaning of the term, and another woman church member (who had never stayed in MmaMaipelo’s yard) had to explain it to her. MmaMaipelo did once tell me that people’s blood “changes” ( go fetoga) as they get older, so that it is impossible for medical staff to determine the paternity of adults, as they can for babies.9 She clearly had in mind that sexual intercourse produces a change in blood, but even so did not mention dirt in connection with sex. In accordance with her emphasis on maternal love rather than the pathologies of dirty wombs, MmaMaipelo’s talk about blood centered on its capacity to bring forth new life. “How many persons do you think it takes to make a baby?” she asked me on multiple occasions. “Three—the mother, the father, and God. RraMaipelo and I have only one child, even though we tried many times to have another. This shows that people cannot make babies on their own; babies come from God. There is nothing I can make that has blood in it. The only living things I can make on my own are lice, which have no blood, only fat (mafura). Only God can make things with blood. Now, since God makes babies, what do you think I should say to a girl who gets pregnant from a lover I don’t know about? I might scold the mother and the father, but do you think I can scold God?” Although MmaMaipelo disapproved of the fact that her neighbor and church colleague Lesego had become pregnant at age fourteen—since Lesego would have to drop out of school and her mother would have to care for her as well as for the infant—MmaMaipelo did not speak of dirty blood in connection with this or any other pregnancy. Perhaps she was reflecting also on public health messages implying that death is the consequence of irresponsible sex. Saying that God is the source of the blood of which a fetus is composed shifts attention away from a mother’s neglect of the dangers of dirty blood and attributes her death to the will of God rather than to her “promiscuity.” More broadly, this is a God whose power is procreative, indeed ancestral. The precolonial Tswana concept of Modimo, translated as God by British missionaries, may have connoted an original ancestor, as Paul Landau suggests (1995:5n.7). In the next chapter, I discuss how the experience of being called by God transformed MmaMaipelo’s relations to her own ancestors, and in so doing gave her followers “spiritual ancestors.” The ways in which Baitshepi members conceive of ancestry lead them to downplay the dangers of hot blood arising from bereavement, whereas bishops in many other churches of the spirit prepare ritual baths for widows and “c l e a n s i n g t h e s p i r i t”

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widowers to cleanse their blood and body surfaces of the dirt of death (Amanze 1998:174). As do other kinds of bathing, this ritual washing makes people physically apprehend one another’s caregiving sentiments and capacities.

Bathing and Love MmaMaipelo’s younger brother Mokgale had a hard life. He had been a prosperous mechanic, but around 1990, he started experiencing “heart thumping” ( pelo e itaya), a phrase conveying depression and anxiety, and began hearing threatening voices. He left his spouse and children—from what I gather, his wife may have thrown him out—and began to drift among his siblings’ yards. During 1997, he came to stay with MmaMaipelo. “Look at him now,” the neighbors would say. “He used to be living well, and now he’s a madman [setsenwa].” In church, Mokgale appeared a pathetic figure, clapping softly while staring straight ahead, and speaking inaudibly when called upon to preach. MmaMaipelo soon began complaining to visiting cousins about Mokgale’s conduct. He would visit the neighbors, she said, without having bathed. “I tell the children to bring him water for bathing, but he refuses to take a bath. He goes about dirty to the neighbors’ yards. Does he want people to think his sister scorns him? He lacks love.” Soon afterward, Mokgale was taken to his other sister MmaDineo’s yard at the fields, since MmaMaipelo had gotten tired of him. As Deborah Durham points out (2005a:191), the importance of bathing in Botswana is less about “the need to keep dirt always at bay than about a moral and civic personhood, about making oneself into a kind of person through the act and consequences of bathing”—and about making others into such persons as well. While people get dirty as they cook over fires, sweep their courtyards of loose soil, and knead mud with cow dung to repair house walls, there are many occasions when they must appear well bathed and cleanly clothed: excursions to downtown, public meetings, evening visits to neighbors, church services, and burials. Durham argues that bathing does not fit people into social contexts by ridding their bodies of “matter out of place” (Douglas 1966) so much as it creates contexts where people will feel attracted to others and nurtured by their love. “A wellcared-for body, bathed and clothed, is reciprocal evidence both of being the object of positive sentiment and of creating that sentiment in others” (Durham 2005a:201). When Mokgale visited the neighbors without having bathed, more was at stake in MmaMaipelo’s eyes than his individual 138

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predilections. The fact that he did not care about repelling the neighbors showed that he lacked love for them, as well as for his sister, who had sent the children to prepare baths for him. Those who are most capable of taking substantial time to bathe and to dress themselves are best able to present themselves as economically and physically “self-sufficient.” They do not have to do the heavy and timeconsuming labor involved in preparing baths for many other people, as do girls and other dependents who must rush to bathe themselves at dawn before preparing baths for seniors in the yard, making and bringing them tea, sweeping the floors and courtyard, and washing clothes—all supposedly out of love for their elders. In Old Naledi, bathwater must be transported from taps in the street, courtyard, or kitchen to be heated over a fire or gas stove; large metal tubs have to be carried to the rooms where people bathe; and the tubs must be emptied down the latrine and scrubbed out before the next person bathes. MmaMaipelo usually sat in bed receiving visitors until late in the morning while the young women staying in the compound cleaned the house and prepared food. In the middle of the day, she would ask them to bring water for her bath. A wife’s willingness to prepare her husband’s bath makes him literally feel loved, as do washing and ironing his clothes and having sex with him. Durham (2005a) relates a newspaper account of a woman who inadvertently turned her husband into a snake by putting love medicines in his bathwater. She wished to recapture her husband’s affections by enhancing the attractive power of her own love embodied in the bath she had prepared for him, but her failure to follow the herbalist’s instructions to leave the bathwater cold caused the medicines to backfire. In effect, this woman’s love for her husband was possessive and resentful—what MmaMaipelo would likely have called “fleshly love”—verging, in other words, on jealousy, so that her husband ended up hurt by her sentiments rather than attracted to her. The herbalist in Tlokweng who consulted Poifo about her baby’s khujwana spoke of the power of bathwater to affect the well-being not only of bathers but of anyone in their yards. She remarked that the deaths in Tlokweng these days were caused by renters, coming from Zimbabwe and elsewhere in Botswana, who use herbal medicines (ditlhare) in their bathwater stronger than “our medicines.” “If I had any renters in my yard, I would tell them to leave when they took their baths!” The herbalist thus identified an interplay between the conditions of yards and bodies; anyone staying within a yard may be hurt by injurious substances that enter it. Thus “c l e a n s i n g t h e s p i r i t”

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witchcraft medicines buried within a compound are said to injure those who step across it (Schapera 1934:295). Members of the Zion Christian Church in particular treat ( go alafa) such yards by dancing on the compound (Comaroff 1985:245). Given that people communicate their love and jealousy to one another by bathing and preparing baths, the act of cleansing is often explicitly directed at these sentiments. For example, the sorrow of an elder offended by scorn or neglect, which is known as dikgaba, can lead to illness (Lambek and Solway 2001). The ancestors, themselves angered or saddened by the elders’ sentiments, cause the offender or his children to get sick. Indeed, some elders will refuse to complain about the conduct of their grown children, lest the ancestors afflict the juniors with dikgaba (Benedicte Ingstad, pers. comm.). When dikgaba has been diagnosed by a diviner, the offended elder must blow water on the person who has caused him sorrow, saying “Go away, dikgaba!” (Tswa dikgaba!). Alternatively, the elder washes the sick person with water mixed with herbs themselves known as kgaba. Schapera describes such a ritual carried out in the 1930s: “The patient, who is inside the hut, then has to strip completely, and the person said to have ‘seized’ him with kxaba . . . washes him all over the body with the mixture which has been prepared in the pot. As he does so he repeats the following prayer to the ancestors after the magician: . . . ‘My fathers, release the child with your hearts, if it is we who have caused his illness by our speech’ ” (1934:300). Here, the act of washing cleanses the sorrow, anger, and jealousy that have given rise to illness, as well as the words that have conveyed these sentiments. Cleansing is a dominant image in baptism as well. In an extensive discussion of baptism in independent churches in southern Africa, G. C. Oosthuizen describes how people travel great distances to be baptized in the ocean at Durban. Baptism “washes away the sins,” while drinking seawater in order to vomit “cleanses the stomach . . . it strengthens one’s manhood. . . . We can have another baby again . . . baptism gives one inner wellbeing” (1989:180–82; see also Amanze 1998:155). As J. P. Kiernan (1978) shows for Zulu Zionists, baptism is one of a set of practices by which substances such as water, salt, and ashes cleanse and cool the body’s interior and exterior. Most Apostolic churches in Botswana prepare mixtures known as sewacho, composed of water and salt, together with ashes or burned cow dung, for participants to drink as an emetic when ill. Like the Zulu isiwasho, the Setswana word sewacho derives from the English “wash,” and is understood to cleanse the stomach (mala) of sores (dintho) 140

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and dirt (leswe). Sores are often caused by sejeso, witchcraft medicines placed in the victim’s food. The word for soap (molora) is the same as that used for ash; as the cooled remnants of burning, ash possesses a cooling, cleansing, and whitening influence. Some nonchurchgoers in Old Naledi rub their hands in ash from their hearths each day so that people who attempt to transfer witchcraft substance to them by shaking hands will themselves get sick. On occasion, I have heard church participation described as “cleansing the spirit,” an expression that may derive from drinking sewacho. In the Holy Sabbath Apostolic Church, young men known as “children of the spirit” (bana ba mowa) divine illnesses and other misfortunes by receiving visions during the service, a process known as “prophesying” ( go perofeta) or “examining” ( go tlhatlhoba) (see R. Werbner 2008). The bishop of Holy Sabbath told me that some of these diviners had never attended a church previously, while others had gone from church to church prophesying before becoming members of Holy Sabbath. Upon being baptized into Holy Sabbath, some prophets enter trance states when they hear the words “and the Holy Spirit.” For these men, the bishop prepares an emetic composed of water, salt, and vinegar, which “cleanses their spirit” ( go tlhatswa mowa), enabling them to divine with civility (maitseo) rather than flinging themselves against the walls or striking people with the staves (dithobane) they carry to bring the spirit into their bodies (see Comaroff 1985:226). The bishop implied that these prophets have manipulated plants used in witchcraft, or have jealousy in their hearts. By having the interiors of their bodies cleansed by the emetic, the bishop said, the “children of the spirit” take him as their “parent.” Here the image of parenthood centers on obedience, an assertion of the bishop’s authority over prophet-diviners, between whom compromises often have to be made in the conduct of services (Kiernan 1982a). In the Baitshepi Church, on the other hand, there is no water baptism. Instead, male pastors lay hands on the head and upper body of a new member while praying forcefully, thereby baptizing him or her “by the spirit.” In some Apostolic churches, each Sunday service culminates when bishops or prophets “filled” with the spirit heal the parched, sick bodies of their congregants by pressing on their heads. Participants “quench their thirst” as they receive the Holy Spirit from the bishop, a “well” (sediba) of healing (Comaroff 1985:212). In Baitshepi, baptism is the only public occasion at which pastors who have been “entered by the spirit” ( go tsenwa ke mowa) lay hands on members in this fashion. Because baptism by laying on of “c l e a n s i n g t h e s p i r i t”

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hands is practiced only by a minority of Apostolic churches in Botswana (Amanze 1998:154), Baitshepi leaders feel it necessary to preach at length on Bible passages that support the proposition that true baptism is of the spirit—Matthew 3:11, Acts 1:5, and especially Acts 19:2–6: [Paul] said to them: “When you became believers, did you receive the Holy Spirit?” They said, “No, we have never heard that the Holy Spirit is given to anyone.” Then he said, “Into what then were you baptized?” They answered, “Into John’s baptism.” Paul said, “John baptized with the baptism of repentance, telling the people to believe in the one who was to come after him, that is, in Jesus.” After they heard this, they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. After Paul had laid his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came upon them, and they spoke in other languages and prophesied.

Preaching in Baitshepi on this passage stresses that baptism by the Holy Spirit transforms the voice of the believer, so that she or he is able to speak “in the spirit,” as I describe in the following chapter. Baitshepi leaders’ insistence that proper baptism consists of calling aloud the name of Jesus rather than immersion seems to reflect the broad presumption that the voice possesses a capacity to cleanse people’s sentiments, as does water. In everyday contexts, people often say “Let me cleanse your words” in order to correct someone with whom they agree in general terms but adopts an improper tone. Words can also dirty a person. During a service at Holy Sabbath, a diviner prophesied that I would become sick after drinking the water shared by all participants at the conclusion of a Baitshepi service because the pastors blessing it would not be on friendly terms, and the bad spirit of their words would enter the water. For an antidote, I should mix some salt in a small quantity of water to drink three times a day. When I related this to Baitshepi leaders, they laughingly dismissed the prophet’s words, but not in a way that questioned the power of either voice or water over my body and sentiments. They told me that the name of Jesus would “cleanse” any evil spirit between their pastors, and were at pains to point out that it is not water in which we have tumelo, but in the name of Jesus. “If you don’t believe that the water will heal you, there is no way it can.” The name of Jesus cleanses the spirits of the pastors who bless the water, so that their voices carry the love of Jesus into the water and into the bodies of everyone in the congregation. When I asked MmaMaipelo to explain the necessity of being baptized by the spirit, she drew a comparison between the everyday act of bathing 142

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and the experience of having one’s voice or spirit cleansed through baptism. “You wash your flesh morning and night,” she told me, “but you don’t say you’re being baptized. Just imagine telling the children to bring bathwater by saying, ‘I’m asking for water to baptize myself!’ ” She laughed uproariously at the thought. It is as though bathing were a prerequisite for stimulating and receiving love—it contributes, perhaps, to “fleshly love”—but does nothing for the voice, which must be cleansed through baptism, so that a believer will pray and sing with “spiritual love.” At one Sunday service, a pastor visiting from another church of the spirit maintained that true baptism takes place through water immersion, thereby inducing each Baitshepi pastor to rise in turn and denounce the idea. Again, the ardor behind controversies reflects the presumption that cleansings shape people’s affections and relationships, and that they must be carried out correctly lest those who bathe and are baptized cease to love. Baitshepi leaders also oppose the use of sewacho. This objection appears related to their broader disavowal of herbal medicines (see below), rather than to an opposition to cleansing bodily interiors per se. On everyday occasions when they are feeling ill, they ask a child to bring a cup of water, speak a prayer over the water, and then drink it in order to “cool” ( go fodisa, also to heal) the sickness. This is also done when they are feeling troubled about something they must say. In such instances, the water “calms the heart” ( go wetsa pelo; literally, causes the heart to fall) before speech. In addition, it is common for Batswana mothers to give their small children enemas to cleanse their insides of sores and dirt, and Baitshepi children are no exception. Yet MmaMaipelo refused to instruct the sick to take emetics or enemas on a routine basis. What she knows, she said, is the power of prayer to Jesus, not how to cleanse other people’s bodies—in spite of the fact that she enjoined her followers to drink water blessed by the name of Jesus to cool their sicknesses. On one occasion, Baitshepi leaders visited a married couple considering joining the church. They told them, “We in Baitshepi are pray-ers [barapedi],” implicitly distinguishing themselves from churches where stress is placed on healing ( go alafa) by such means as sewacho. By contrast, Jean Comaroff (1985:219) quotes a ZCC leader as saying, “All we do is heal [re alafa hela].”

Faith in Witchcraft MmaMaipelo always drew a stark contrast between faith in the power of water, unmixed with herbal medicines and blessed by the name of Jesus, to make people feel one another’s love, on the one hand, and what she “c l e a n s i n g t h e s p i r i t”

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regarded as the deeply immoral faith of prophets and diviners who detect and attempt to combat witchcraft, on the other. Again, this stance reflects convictions about the sentimental, physical, and social consequences of different kinds of cleansings. In MmaMaipelo’s view, it was immoral to imbibe herbal medicines or undergo cleansings under the auspices of a diviner, because these acts make people feel hostile, resentful, and jealous of each other. Yet Adam Ashforth shows in his detailed accounts of witchcraft in Soweto that diviners and clients commonly conceive of their procedures as methods of restoring love, methods that work only if sufferers have faith in the power of the medicines. Ashforth’s friend Madumo decided to undergo treatments prescribed by the non-Christian diviner Mr. Zondi, who had persuaded him that his misfortunes had been caused by witchcraft. “If [Mr. Zondi is] knowing the right herbs, then those herbs can do miracles,” Madumo told Ashforth. “But it depends on the power of mind, too. My mind. These herbs are helped by my belief, by my faith in Mr. Zondi. I can use millions of herbs, but without any belief, they won’t work out. . . . Because there’s no point in going through these things without faith. Without confidence. It would be just throwing money away” (Ashforth 2000:65, 68). Madumo’s words here exactly echo those of Baitshepi members who say, “Unless you have faith in the power of the water we drink to heal you, there is no way it can.” In order to receive the love of Jesus, they must feel and act on the conviction that the water blessed by his name will heal their bodies—and that the pastors who bless the water have the love they profess for the congregation. Likewise, for Madumo, “faith in Mr. Zondi” means feeling and acting on the conviction that the diviner will be able to restore Madumo’s relatives’ love for him: “[Mr. Zondi] said that with these herbs there would be an automatic reconciliation without needing a round table to solve these problems” (2000:65). As a result, “A general improvement should happen. With this treatment, life should just come okay. No problems, like. Good fortune should come to me, instead of this suffering” (2000:64). Later, Madumo advises Ashforth to undergo Mr. Zondi’s treatments himself to gain the approval of his own superiors: “He wants to give you power, so that when you go back to America you should be liked by your seniors and have success in your life” (2000:119). Madumo is keenly conscious of his relatives’ lack of love for him, and is convinced that his very survival depends on restoring it: “Madumo’s voice was on the verge of breaking: ‘Because I’ve been rejected, too much. And it’s all because of this witchcraft’ ” (2000:66). 144

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At the same time, Madumo’s insistence that “he has one hundred percent faith” in Mr. Zondi (2000:68) amounts to saying that he senses in his own body what the diviner has diagnosed—that is, the enmity of other people—and desires what he promises, namely, vengeance against them as well as their love. The purgations, steamings, baths, and incisions that Mr. Zondi administers cause Madumo to apprehend both his ancestors’ loving protection and his own power to wreak vengeance on the relatives who have bewitched him. As Mr. Zondi stabbed Madumo with porcupine quills, he told him: “This is so that whatever you do in the future will not be disturbed by witches, or by jealousy. . . . People will appreciate your presence. They will not be short-tempered, angry, or bored with you” (2000:111). Each morning for two weeks, Madumo steamed himself with a boiling concoction of herbs and vomited in order to purge his insides of witchcraft substance. As a result of such treatments, Madumo told Ashforth, “that witchcraft will go back to that one who sent it. They will be the one suffering misfortunes” (2000:66). After Mr. Zondi rubbed a mixture of herbs and mercury into incisions he had made with a razor in Madumo’s joints to protect him against future attacks, “Madumo felt strangely invigorated. . . . ‘Serious, Adam,’ he said, ‘I felt like fighting because of that stuff. Even now, I just feel like . . . I don’t know. I feel bossy. And I’m not used to that, picking fights with somebody. But it’s what I want to do’ ” (2000:117–18). As do other kinds of cleansings, witchcraft cleansings provoke reflection about the kind of person one is, and about the sorts of persons one imagines others to be. People commonly recognize that the blood, water, medicines, and other substances that enter or come into contact with their bodies are likely to transform their feelings about others, and the feelings of other people toward them as well: “I felt like fighting because of that stuff.” The physicality of this moral imagination accounts for the need people feel to have tumelo in particular substances—to take into their bodies substances that will shape their sense of one another’s sentiments, and make them feel and act accordingly. Hence Madumo felt that he had to have faith in Mr. Zondi’s medicines in order to feel loved by his ancestors, as well as sufficiently powerful to fight off witchcraft. MmaMaipelo insisted that members of her church have faith in the healing power of the water in order to receive the love of Jesus and others in the congregation. Yet even as Batswana aim to renew one another’s caregiving sentiments by sharing blood, drinking water, bathing, and vomiting, the difficulties of moral renewal are apparent in that none of these measures always and indisputably “c l e a n s i n g t h e s p i r i t”

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enhance love. Each is apt to foster ambivalence (Peletz 2001) in people’s relations to one another and in their reflections upon one another’s sentiments and motivations. Sexual intercourse performed under the wrong circumstances can kill one’s children; water distributed in church may make a drinker sick if the preachers who bless it are on bad terms; wives may prepare their husbands’ baths in a spirit of possessiveness and resentment; and emetics intended to cleanse witchcraft substances can make a client desire vengeance and act like a witch. Clearly, the meanings of Christian faith in this setting cannot be understood without reference to the range of substances people take into their bodies so as to mold their own and others’ sentiments. In saying that they “refuse to have faith” in diseases of hot blood such as khujwana, to baptize by immersion, or to ingest medicines for cleansing their insides of witchcraft, Baitshepi leaders adopt a particular method of enhancing love. Fundamental to this method is the architectonic quality of church ritual, which places people in physical relation to one another in a fashion intended to nurture their love. As a house of nurturance, church space induces a particular kind of tumelo, distinct from that elicited in other places of faith such as beer gardens and diviners’ houses.

“t h e w i n d s a re b low i n g” : c h u rc h a s a h o u s e o f n u rt u r a n c e

One of the most evocative descriptions I have read of the joyful activity in a church of the spirit is Obakeng Otladisang’s fictional portrayal in his novel Ya le Nna Babelona (Go With Me to Babylon). In the passage below, Otladisang (1993:5–7, my translation) eloquently conveys the imagery of nurturance used by participants—feeding, whitening, and cleansing—to describe what happens to their bodies within the “church house.” Otladisang frames this imagery in terms of a very common subject of preaching, the need for children to “hear” or “obey” the words of their parents. In a context of widespread concern about possibilities of care, such preaching expresses an understanding of church as a place where the young should learn to hear and love their elders. . . . [Pastor Lesedi] wiped the sweat from his brow, for the sun was melting the land. The house of the church was crowded to overflowing, and it was hotter inside than a pot on the fire. “The name of God be praised!” 146

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“Hallelujah!” The congregation roared with white hearts. The people of God did not feel the heat; they were being suckled by the holy word from their father the pastor. “Why did the Lord Jesus tell his apostles that they should start in Jerusalem?” he continued. . . . “He meant that before you can preach to people at large, you first have to preach to those in your own yard.” “Hallelujah!” “I speak about this to you, elders of the congregation. Let us not study to do God’s work and goodness for ourselves alone. Before we can say that we know God’s work, we must preach to our children first. Let us teach the children of the congregation to do God’s work. The little ones of the congregation will be our leaders [bagogi, literally, pullers, attracters] tomorrow. It is they who will open new branches of this our church. Now if we elders just make ourselves right, where will we leave them?”

“Amen!” exclaimed MmaMaipelo at this point, when I read the passage aloud to her. “Hallelujah Amen!” The congregation shouted with happiness. It was obvious that they agreed with what the pastor was saying. What parent would not want his or her child to be one of the church leaders? What parent would not want his or her child to be clean, not only in the flesh, but in the spirit? One of the ladies began the hymn that goes, suffer the little children to come unto me, because the kingdom of heaven is theirs. The congregation took it up skillfully. The ladies with white headscarves clapped so loudly that their clapping overpowered their voices. One of the men, called Anterea, jumped like a spring hare; one moment you saw him going up, at the next he was dancing bent over at the waist. His red robe flared out like the wings of an ostrich. Kobamelo, the pastor’s wife, burst out with a song of praise. She sang: Thus spoke the Lord Jesus! He spoke to his congregation! Whose is the kingdom of heaven, If not those who are like unto it?

She was cutting a slice of fat for the people. Everyone danced, each person jumping and gliding. They wiped off their sweat but remained soaked. As they danced, they exclaimed, Sho! Sho! Sho! Sho! in time to the rhythm. Some danced to a well-known rhythm, called TB! One danced in circles here, another there. “c l e a n s i n g t h e s p i r i t”

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Soon a lady cried out; she had been seized by the spirit. She called out, Hiiirrriiirrriir! She jumped and then stamped her foot on the ground. As soon as she regained consciousness, she exclaimed, “The voice of God says that the little ones will go into temptation. And by doing this, friends in the Lord, the end of the world will be brought closer! Hiiirririiirii!”

In this passage, Otladisang evokes two essential qualities of a successful Apostolic service: dancing and continual calling, responding, and singing within an enclosed space. When Baitshepi participants have been particularly pleased with a service, they remark, “The winds were blowing!” The “wind” is spirit, which they say “blows where it likes, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes” (John 3:8). The image of wind conveys how voices and bodies move in relation to one another within the space and time of a Baitshepi Church service, in a nurturing process structured by the love of its leaders. Voices are the “winds” that move people’s bodies. The Baitshepi “church house” (ntlo ya kereke) is a rectangular structure, about four by twenty meters, of plastic and metal sheeting on a wooden frame, located within MmaMaipelo’s yard. Apostolic churches usually begin within such informal structures, before resources are accumulated to construct a house of concrete within the bishop’s yard, and eventually a church building on a plot of its own. Within the Baitshepi church house (see figure 2), there are wooden benches along the perimeter; at one end there is a table, upon which lie Bibles and a candelabra with seven holes for candles. Underneath the table there are a bucket of water and cups for drinking. The seating arrangement reflects separation by gender and a precise order of hierarchy determining where each person sits. Directly behind the table sat the bishops, MmaMaipelo and RraMaipelo. To the right of the leaders are the highest-ranking male pastors, followed by male evangelists, male youth, and finally the younger boys. To the left are the female elders in descending rank, female youth, and younger girls. At the end of the church opposite to the table, small girls sit on the floor. The entrance to the church, a doorway where a piece of burlap is suspended, is located next to the places of the younger boys. Immediately next to the doorway stands the gatekeeper, one of the male youth, who closes the entrance during times of simultaneous prayer and opens it at the end of each service. At services, all Apostolics dress in uniforms with colors distinctive to their church. They always clean and press these uniforms carefully, and it is important likewise for participants to bathe thoroughly, since they can 148

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East

Female

Most senior

Bishops

Elders

Junior women

Most junior

Table

Ministers

Girls

Junior men

Boys

Male

Figure 2. Plan of the Baitshepi Church

become clean in spirit only once they have cleansed their clothing and bodies. On one special occasion, a Baitshepi elder exhorted members to take exceptional care to come to church in clean, pressed uniforms so that “we may all be of one spirit.” The uniform’s undergarment invariably consists of a white robe (for men) or blouse (for women). Women wear calflength skirts and headscarves. Over the robe or blouse, a member wears a sash suspended over the right shoulder, a cape extending the length of the back, and a cord made of two intertwined strands of yarn, with tassels at the ends, tied around the waist. Common colors for these garments are “cool” ones, such as white, blue, yellow, and green. Kiernan suggests that for Zulu Zionists, white undergarments show that “they have been processed and recreated as new persons, in a state of inner cleanliness which is nothing more or less than the Zionist ideal” (1991:32). Zulu Zionists add colored clothes to their white undergarments as they experience episodes of illness, healing, and renewal. In the Apostolic churches I became familiar with, male prophet-diviners do likewise, sewing symbols such as hands, crosses, and crescent moons to their robes after encountering them in dreams. “c l e a n s i n g t h e s p i r i t”

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Baitshepi uniforms are sewn free of charge by elders, but the cost of the cloth, about P70, must be provided by new members, who thus make a substantial investment in the church. Usually, some weeks elapse between a new member’s baptism in the spirit and acquisition of a uniform, as funds are accumulated and the dress sewn. During dressing ceremonies, new members are seated in the space at the center of the church, where the elders dress them while certain biblical passages depicting new clothing as signifying life transformation—Zechariah 3:3–5, Jeremiah 13:1–2, and Exodus 28:2–5—are read aloud. New members show their love for church by purchasing cloth, while church leaders give love in turn by sewing it into the “garment of a soldier” (seaparo sa lesole). Church members are “soldiers” because the experience of wearing their garments diminishes the jealousy in their own hearts, and protects them from that of others. The garment enables them to repel bad words and intentions. New members are instructed to treat their uniforms with great care. For instance, a young woman whose conduct had been disorderly was preached to as follows during a service: That garment [seaparo] is like a yoke [joko], don’t take it lightly. That garment is not a game. That garment does not go to discos. It is not for going to parties, it is for your defense [phemelo]. It forestalls troubles [Se emetse mathata]. If you get into trouble with people, you must take this garment and wear it—it’s for your defense. When you walk among strangers in your garment, you have seriti [dignity or presence, from the same root as the word for shadow; see chapter 4]. No one will bother you as long as you are wearing your garment. If you have faith in it, the garment will heal you as well. It’s strong as the angels of God are strong, so you must have a strong heart to wear it, or you will be lowered. I hope that the child of God has heard everything that has been said.

Whereas under ordinary circumstances, girls and young women usually forgo the headscarves that senior women always wear, in church they must ensure that their hair is covered as a mark of respect. Both male and female members “tie themselves” ( go ipofa) around the waist with a two-stranded cord (moitlamo) resembling an umbilical cord, thereby strengthening the central joint of the body with an object indexing ancestral sources of life. Critics of Apostolic churches sometimes say that members “feel that they have to conduct themselves properly only when they have tied themselves, but once they take off their uniforms, they go about drinking.” 150

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Each Sunday service at Baitshepi is supposed to begin at eleven o’clock and end at two o’clock. However, most participants arrive after the starting time, and the most senior members usually enter last. Services are begun by the youngest members, who begin singing and dancing before their elders come, thereby ensuring continual sound at all times. In addition, these young members light a candle on the table, brightening the space of the church, evoking “white-heartedness” (bopelotshweu)—kind-heartedness, generosity, and love—and driving away the darkness associated with jealousy. After a substantial number of people have arrived, the pastor or elder responsible for conducting the service will kneel on the ground, facing east, the direction of life and the rising sun.10 The elder then begins praying loudly, and the other participants all do the same, so that an unintelligible combination of individual prayers is heard. During this time, members often call the names of their ancestors “in order to wake them up” (see chapter 4). When individual prayers are ended, everyone recites the Lord’s Prayer in unison, and then all rise. After welcoming the congregation, the pastor or elder organizing the service asks another member to read aloud a certain Bible passage. After this is read in an ordinary tone of voice, the person in charge of the service preaches on the passage, usually reiterating it with only brief interpretation, but in a forceful voice whose “earnestness” (tlhoafalo) shows that he or she is “in the spirit.” At this point, he or she directs people a particular group— male or female children, youth, or evangelists—to preach on the passage. Baitshepi members take pride that “in our church, everybody preaches,” even children, who do not do so in most Apostolic churches. It is highly intimidating for a seven-year-old girl to stand before her assembled elders and attempt to recite a Bible passage. Yet this is done so that children will develop the habit of learning the Bible through hearing and repetition. “A person, a person of flesh and blood,” MmaDineo once remarked, “can’t really grasp [go tshwara] spiritual teachings by hearing them only once. We have to hear [go utlwa] them again and again, and repeat them ourselves, to truly understand [go utlwa] them.” When a child forgets the words, the congregation will take up a hymn, giving her time to collect herself. The preaching proceeds in order of ascending seniority, according to the seating arrangement. After the children preach, it is the turn of more senior men or women, and services would culminate in preaching by MmaMaipelo. Members often interrupt their own preaching, or are interrupted by others, with a hymn, whose rhythm they mark by clapping. (Unlike in many Apostolic churches, there is no drum in Baitshepi, because drumming “c l e a n s i n g t h e s p i r i t”

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is associated with divination.) During the intervals between each member’s preaching, men and women dance together in the central space of the church, their robes, capes, and skirts swirling as they turn. The service culminates in a benediction (mohau) spoken by the bishop or one of the most senior elders or pastors, as the congregation again faces east, this time standing. The tone and rhythm of the benediction is distinctive; it is spoken in the spirit, with a falling cadence and pronounced pauses between each statement, as a final prayer for healing and well-being for the entire congregation. After this, male evangelists stand over the bucket of water, praying in the spirit, while the congregation sings the following hymn (Lifela tsa Sione 89): Se teng sediba sa madi, Aletareng ya tefelo, Diba see e le setlhare, Mmatla sona ke bophelo. Here is the well of blood Aletareng ya tefelo,11 This well is medicine, Its power is life.

This hymn is continued as girl children, showing love for their elders, carry water from the bucket in cups for all to drink in order of descending seniority. The initials of the real name of the church are interspersed with the words of this hymn, reinforcing how central the cooling, cleansing, and healing properties of the water are to church practice. Church members do not identify the water they drink as the blood of Christ, but as an intrinsically cooling substance blessed by the spoken name of Jesus. The water carries the loving qualities of the leaders’ hearts (dipelo) to the rest of the congregation. In some other Apostolic churches, it is the mothers who distribute the holy water (Lagerwerf 1982:63) and nurture everyone else. The service concludes with a communal handshake, which signifies and reinforces love among all those within the church building. After the last child has drunk the water, the most senior female youth member proceeds down the perimeter of the building, dancing while shaking the hand of each person, who follows her in turn. At last, the pastors and bishops seated behind the table shake one another’s hands. As they shake hands, all sing: 152

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Ba ba tshwerweng ka matsogo, Ke letlhogonolo. Those who take one another by the hand, That is blessing / good fortune.

The service thus culminates in the fundamental expression of sociality for Batswana, the handshake signifying agreement and reconciliation. By ending the service with a communal handshake, Baitshepi members deny the presence of jealousy among them, and make each other recognize the blessings they have received from the love of Jesus and one another.

a lt e r n at i ve fa i t h s : b e e r a n d d i v i n at i o n

Saying, “We in our church work the spirit, and water, and the hospital” (Re berekisa mowa, le metsi, le sepatela), Baitshepi leaders contrast themselves to other Apostolic churches in which prophets engage in divination and in some instances work as diviners in their own homes. They work the spirit by praying, preaching, and singing, but not by divining; water by drinking but not by baptizing; and the hospital by taking medications given by clinicians, not by herbalists or diviners. In choosing to go to a church emphasizing praying but not divining, participants decide to whom—and thus where—they will turn for well-being. As we have seen, in Apostolic discourse, such decisions are commonly framed in terms of tumelo, which is less a matter of assent to propositions than a form of social loyalty and agreement. In “placing faith” ( go baya tumelo) in certain medicines or other healing and nurturing influences, you must also have faith in the particular people and places—churches, hospitals, diviners’ houses—where it is provided. Baitshepi leaders regard beer drinking and divination as the two great wrongs. Both involve transfers of nourishing and destructive substances among bodies in particular places, transfers that Baitshepi leaders reject as improper. In their eyes, to lack faith means to leave church buildings and compounds so as to place oneself in a beer garden or a diviner’s house and to experience well-being or suffering in ways distinctive to those places.

Beer and Nurturance Baitshepi members explain the preponderance of women in churches in terms of men’s reluctance to give up beer. “Men are used to working from “c l e a n s i n g t h e s p i r i t”

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eight o’clock to four o’clock, and then they want to relax by drinking beer,” one woman said. She suggested that women, who are less likely to be involved in wage labor, do not typically divide their time between periods of work and relaxation in the same way as men, and therefore feel less burdened by the time devoted to church. Thus, both beer drinking and church attendance cause people to reflect on the social consequences of sharing certain substances (beer or water) with others in a given place and at particular times. David Suggs (1996) sensitively explores connections between places of drinking and conceptions of gender and work in the village of Mochudi. As in “the precapitalist tradition of men drinking upon the completion of labor,” Suggs shows, “men continue to seek out the company of their fellow age-mates after a day’s work, and they share the act of drinking alcohol when they can” (1996:603). At outdoor shebeens where women brew sorghum beer (bojalwa), or where they sell the variety packaged in cardboard containers by Botswana Breweries, the customers are primarily men, who pass around the filling beer to all present. They sit facing one another, placing the beer at their feet or holding it in their hands. A man who knew me as a Baitshepi member laughingly remarked on a Sunday, “I’m going to church,” indicating the beer gourd in his hand and the shebeen to which he was headed. Suggs shows that men and women alike regard drinking places as primarily male spaces. Those who drink in beer gardens are chiefly men; smaller numbers of poor women do so too, but more prosperous women drink privately in their own homes. If women enter a bar, men assume that they are interested in sex, since “men simply cannot see why women would want to come to the bar without relating it to the masculinity inherent in public drinking” (1996:608). While men view the cost of beer as an expense necessary to being a man in fellowship with other men, women who have been successful in the cash economy see their own drinking as a privilege earned, an activity to be indulged in privately once their children have been provided for. (Recall that women who spend money received from lovers on beer rather than food for their children are apt to be considered “promiscuous.”) Many married women see their husbands’ drinking as a waste of resources that ought to spent on household provisions. Suggs quotes a man whose wife hated his drinking as saying, “Why does she want to deny me this little thing? She has her furniture. She has her brooms and things. Why can I not have this little thing?” Suggs comments that “as a woman needs ‘furniture’ and ‘brooms and things’ to be the woman 154

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society expects her to be, a man needs alcohol to be the man society expects him to be” (1996:607). More specifically, by talking of beer in conjunction with furniture and women’s daily sweeping of the yard, the man seems to speak of drinking as a nourishing process, comparable to household furnishing and cleaning; sorghum beer in particular is very filling. The speaker may be protesting his wife’s refusal to let him nourish himself with other men in masculine space. For MmaMaipelo, ceasing to drink was a very sudden decision. An erstwhile beer brewer who is now an elder of Baitshepi pointed out to me the exact spot on the street where she saw MmaMaipelo throw aside a beer container in 1982 and walk away. MmaMaipelo heard a voice telling her, “Leave off beer!” (Tlogela bojalwa!), and did so from that moment. Yet if her own change was sudden as opposed to deliberate, it resonates with a widely held image of conversion as a physical turning aside; the word for conversion ( go sokolola) also means to turn someone around. At times, men who knew me as a church member would tease me, saying “Preach to us, moruti! Convert us!” I would defuse the situation by taking them by their shoulders and turning them around, a move that would produce hilarity. I now wonder whether, beyond wordplay, men saw my action as funny because they associated it with efforts made by church members—or their own spouses—literally to turn them away from bars and beer gardens. When I asked church participants how they had been converted, women as well as men very frequently replied that someone had convinced them not to drink beer. Apostolic men and women share the view that drink prevents a person from properly caring for others. “A man is supposed to think and plan [go akanya] for his yard. If you drink, the beer will enter your blood, and it will destroy your ability to think.” For male church members, the decision to give up beer has deprived them of a principal forum in which men create fellowship with one another. On the other hand, church allows them to assume leadership positions that are otherwise unavailable to them, given that most have had limited education. As for women church leaders who had once been shebeen owners, conversion has replaced one set of productive relationships in space, based on beer, with another based on vocal communication of the word of God. As I mentioned in the Introduction, they concede that beer brings many people to one’s yard, but only those who have love will come to hear the word. Indeed, from their point of view, church may be a transformed shebeen. As Hans Feddema (1990 [1987]:20) points out, it is important for shebeen owners in Old Naledi to know how to deal with customers “not “c l e a n s i n g t h e s p i r i t”

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only because a good atmosphere draws clientele, but particularly because drinking is apt to lead to irritation and fist fights. Anyone who would start a shebeen will need to possess a measure of authority or humour to ease tensions.” As a church leader, MmaMaipelo said that it was her duty to reconcile members to one another, and especially to ensure peace among those in her own yard. While Christian believers are said to have been “called” ( go bidiwa) or attracted to church by the sound of singing coming from the building, the odor of beer brewed by a woman may also be said to “call” or physically attract customers into her yard.12 As church members deny their jealousies by drinking water together, middle-class men drink beer so as to occlude the jealousies arising from competition within the cash economy under feelings of masculine fellowship (Suggs 2002:56–62). Like churchgoers, middle-class drinkers make conscious efforts to orient their sentiments toward fellowship, efforts that themselves reflect the difficulties of preventing jealousy. Beer consumption in bars is supposed to create harmony and is yet liable to make men jealous of one another’s accomplishments, just as hearing the voice of a diviner during a séance is supposed to restore love among the living and their ancestors but is apt to foster jealousy by making clients feel others’ ill-will within their bodies.

Vocal and Monetary Transactions in Healing If, from the point of view of Baitshepi leaders, beer drinking is a transaction of fluids that destroy rather than nurture, divination is an improper vocal transaction. In a study of the poetics of divination in the Tswapong region of Botswana, Richard Werbner (1989: ch. 1) demonstrates how the divination process centers on the embodied quality of the voice. Over the course of a séance, “the diviner challenge[s] the patient to recognize the concrete representation of the unstable states of the patient’s own mind” (1989:58) by guiding him through an interpretation of the fallen lots. In a methodical yet improvisatory fashion, the poetics of divination reshape how the patient understands not only the social relations contributing to his affliction, but his own bodily states. The diviner directs the patient’s attention, for instance, to the “darkness” in his mind by making gestures signifying how particular persons may “lie on top of one another,” “not face one another,” or “hold on to one another” (1989:40–41). “They grasp your darkness of face,” says the diviner. “It is dark even while you go about as you do. You do not see anything [you want], and even if you go to work, you do not get anything. . . . It says that while you go along your mind [mowa, also spirit] gets black and depressed. Then your mind seems to be 156

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waking up again, and even your eyes get dark, and they seem to be popping out and changing for the worse” (1989:40). Werbner makes clear that the diviner’s house is a liminal space where each participant must be “suspended from his or her ordinary condition” for the sake of “extraordinary communication” (1989:34). Within this space, the diviner and the lots themselves—which evoke key events in the life of the diviner and his accumulated wisdom—must be given the capacity to speak, and the diviner must incorporate the voices of the lots into his own body. This is accomplished by means of a rite widespread in southern Africa: It is recognized that there is a separation between the diviner as a man, and the parts of other creatures and things with which he seeks to communicate. To bridge that separation, a diaphragm [of an animal] is used. The various parts are contained within the diaphragm and roasted together, covered by hot embers. They are thus ritually transformed into lots for divination, being brought into a metonymic relation with the container of the animal’s breath, the essential for speech. The diviner eats the cooked diaphragm which again is bitter and unpleasant [evoking the diviner’s past suffering, through which he has gained knowledge of blackness and bitterness]. As I understand it, the logic is that by consuming the diaphragm, the diviner incorporates it in himself; he makes it his own, and thus comes to contain within himself the capacity to speak with the diaphragm of the icons as well as his own diaphragm. (R. Werbner 1989:33)

In order to hear the voice of the lots speaking in that of the diviner, the client adopts a posture that “confounds the conventions for age and gender,” namely, on the ground below the diviner, level with the lots, barefoot, with the left leg outstretched and the right leg folded under it (1989:34). This posture subordinates the client, whatever his or her ordinary status, to authoritative words in the space of divination. Likewise, when prophets in most Apostolic churches—not including Baitshepi—divine an affliction by means of the spirit, those to whom they address their words, even their superiors the bishops, usually kneel before them. To summarize this portion of Werbner’s account, diviners and clients discover who loves or is jealous of whom through acts of vocal transformation particular to the space of divination. The voices of the lots are incorporated into the body of the diviner, while that of the patient is perhaps also incorporated into the lots as the client blows into the bag containing “c l e a n s i n g t h e s p i r i t”

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them. The diviner’s voice, in turn, makes the client feel the nature of his affliction through poetic and dramatic description. Divination thus involves the apprehension as well as the disclosure of other people’s sentiments, such as the jealousy of a relative who has placed a witchcraft substance in one’s food, causing one’s “spirit” to become “dark.” What makes such apprehension possible is a transfer and incorporation of a vital phenomenon— in this case, the voice—between persons grouped together in a house where they speak with the ancestors and God/Modimo.13 Livingston (2005:228) quotes a critique made by an elderly man named Peter Mokwena of the Botswana government’s policy of erecting hospitals: “But that hospital it has no mouth to say something or to communicate with Modimo, it’s just a building standing there.” In Rre Mokwena’s view, healing can take place only in a house, such as a church or a diviner’s house, where people can bring one another’s voices to bear on sources of affliction. It is significant that Baitshepi leaders often frame their denunciations of Setswana doctors and diviners with the assertion, “Bones [marapo] do not speak. Bones are just flesh [nama fela]; it is only spirit that speaks.” By bones, they mean the lots used in divination. Yet their engagement in such polemics reflects a broadly shared understanding of the power of the voice to influence bodily well-being, and thus to transform caregiving sentiments and relationships. In the following chapter, I explore how hymn singing in church stimulates a particular kind of “remembering,” leading participants to feel other people’s love for them rather than the jealousy that recollections of insults are apt to evoke. Here, I focus on why Baitshepi leaders regard divination as an improper vocal transaction. A discussion with Maipelo, who wrote his undergraduate thesis on the biochemistry of acetic acid, alerted me to the ways in which church members view taking medicine as a matter of faith. “Going to Setswana doctors is itself a sin,” Maipelo told me, “because it shows that you are placing your faith in them rather than in God.” He admitted that a sick person might get better after taking an herbal medicine given by a Setswana doctor, “but this would be because God decided to heal you. At another time, God might decide not to heal you, and you would then doubt whether the medicines had worked.” The same principle applies to hospital medicines, which can heal only if God allows them to do so. I asked him why there should be hospitals at all, if healing depends entirely on the will of God. Maipelo’s answers centered on the reliability of

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medical knowledge; the fact that biomedical doctors must take responsibility, since their actions would be open to scrutiny in a malpractice case, unlike those of Setswana doctors; and the efficacy of hospital medicines. Yet he did not place much weight on the last of these. “You may be given a painkiller one day, and you will get better, but the next day you won’t. Why? Marina Hospital is full of dying patients, even though they are being given medicines. Why? Because it is the will of God.” Similarly, when Maipelo’s mother said that she “respects” ( go tshaba) biomedical as opposed to Setswana doctors, she did not stress that hospital medicines work—far too often, they do not—but that biomedical doctors make an honest effort to heal. In her view, Setswana doctors are deceivers. Yet even in their polemics, Baitshepi leaders acknowledge of the power of diviners’ voices over the bodily well-being and sentiments of their clients. “False prophets,” Maipelo told me, “have a psychological influence on those who consult them. A person comes predisposed to believe what they say about how his or her body is feeling, and then accepts that the sickness is caused by a certain relative.” Significantly, “a person doesn’t even have to be feeling pain in order to believe the diviner’s diagnosis, since the diviner may be referring to a future illness, or to a condition imperceptible to the patient. Setswana doctors are trained in their apprenticeships how to manipulate people psychologically.” Thus, diviners and their critics appear to share a premise that persons may be made to feel well or ill by hearing words in a séance that evoke the qualities of relationships. MmaMaipelo always insisted that jealousy is the main consequence of diviners’ words. “A Setswana doctor will always try to get you to believe that your relative or neighbor has bewitched you. If you believe in witchcraft, you will be suspicious of people—when you sit down with them, you’ll look away from them, and you’ll barely shake hands.” Perhaps most egregiously, “You never see a Setswana doctor rise at a funeral to console people. Instead, he will come the next day to the bereaved and offer to take vengeance.” By the same token, Baitshepi leaders refuse to speak of illnesses in terms commonly employed by Setswana doctors. As we have already seen, MmaMaipelo claimed not to have tumelo in dikgaba, an illness that she said arises from a failure to resolve problems through harmonious speech. Likewise, she refused to attribute illnesses to improper conduct in relation to Setswana objects of avoidance (meila ya setswana). According to Baitshepi leaders, avoiding entry into a house of confinement and refusing to shake the hand of a widow for fear of hot blood create inappropriate sentiments

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of avoidance and jealousy. Therefore, such meila should not be observed, or spoken about as the cause of affliction. For Baitshepi leaders, monetary exchange summarizes the differences between church, hospital, and divination. Diviners and herbalists say that power to heal comes from their ancestors, who appear to them in dreams, directing them to the plants that they harvest for medicines. For instance, the herbalist in Tlokweng who consulted with Poifo received her knowledge of plants (ditlhare) from her ancestors, royalty of the Batlokwa. When clients receive medicines from herbalists, they usually place money on the ground as “thanks” (tebogo) to the ancestors; only subsequently do the doctors take the money off the ground, in a gesture acknowledging their ancestors’ role. Setswana doctors therefore insist that they are not “paid” for the medicine, since it is not theirs to exchange in the first place. Rather, the offering of money pleases the ancestors, who enable the medicines to heal, and who care for their descendants by allowing them to take money. A parent who gives money to a Setswana doctor for healing a child may say, “I’ve bought the child’s death for him,” since the ancestors would cause the child to die had the money not been offered. Baitshepi leaders reject these connections between plants, money, and ancestors. They often say that herbal medicines have megare, infectious dirt. In this respect, their stance appears similar to that of Zulu Zionists, who contrast the cooling properties of water with the dangerously hot conditions produced in those who handle herbs and roots, “powers derived from earth” (Kiernan 1978:30). Maipelo conceded that diviners are called by ancestors (badimo) in dreams, but claimed that such badimo must be angels of the devil, not of God. The evidence is that they cause doctors to divine for money, an activity that, Maipelo observed in connection with Acts 8:18–23, was rejected by Jesus’ apostles. “How can ancestors have anything to do with money?” Maipelo asked me rhetorically. Money given to a Setswana doctor, he asserted, is made to an individual who has collected medicines free of charge, whereas church fees support a group. He contrasted payments received by diviners to the P2 user fee paid by clinic attendees. These fees do not reimburse doctors and nurses for their services, Maipelo said, a fact that shows that they are not doing their jobs in order to extract resources from the sick. In any case, it is the president’s picture that appears on the currency. It is appropriate to “render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s” at the hospital, an institution of the government. In many Apostolic churches, each participant contributes a small amount of money to the church fund at the end of each service. Jean Comaroff 160

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contrasts such contributions to the alienation associated with wage labor. “Rather than being a medium of self-estrangement, then, money becomes a vehicle, in the ritual context, for regaining control over the self in the gift, a personalized contribution to the fund of power of the collectivity” (1985:236; see also Pfeiffer 2006). In Baitshepi, however, there is no such collection at the end of a service. Baitshepi leaders wish to avoid the implication that they are “forcing” people to pay, as do Setswana doctors in their view. Instead, there are lengthy harangues following services on the necessity to pay P2 monthly church fees, on which many members are in arrears. The thrust of such speeches is that contributions ought to be made as voluntary acts “showing love,” since the church does not demand payments for healing. Once more, the qualities of caregiving sentiments, and the means by which they are conveyed among persons—as opposed to the efficacy of treatments in the abstract—are subjects of intense local concern and polemic. “The spirit is that which gives life; the flesh is useless” (Mowa ke one o rudisang, nama ga e thuse sepe) (John 6:63), Baitshepi members often repeat in the course of their preaching during weekly services. The formulation possesses particular resonance at a time of widespread death, when Batswana speak words of consolation by reminding one another of the eternal life of a person’s spirit as distinct from his or her flesh. And yet Apostolic Christians do not speak of the spirit as a disembodied phenomenon, unaffected by the substances that come into contact with the flesh. The insistence of Apostolic church leaders that proper tumelo consists of willingness or refusal to cleanse, to imbibe, and to hear provides an example of how Christian tendencies to posit antagonisms between the soul and the body have developed, as Fenella Cannell notes, “in tension with contrasting strands of Christian thinking on the physical” (2005:341; see also R. Werbner 1997). Such varieties of Christian thinking include, as Cannell relates, Mormon conceptions of physical resurrection and of eternal kinship in heaven. In contrast to more ascetic forms of Christianity that locate “kinship primarily in the realm of the earthly and natural” (2005:349), Mormon believers reconstruct genealogical connections in order to enjoy the eternal love of their kin, who will be resurrected in their physical bodies. For her part, as we shall later see, MmaMaipelo helped bereaved people to “give up” on their deceased kin by insisting to them that a person is resurrected in the spirit, not in the flesh. Yet like Mormons, members of “c l e a n s i n g t h e s p i r i t”

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Baitshepi feel an imperative to develop methods, however contested and prone to failure, for restoring love among kin and for creating new kinship connections through love. In so doing, they draw upon broad presumptions among Batswana about the embodied and emplaced nature of social personhood, and assess caregiving relationships in ways that coexist in tension with the normalizing tendencies of official discourses. Rather than devaluing the body so that the spirit may transcend it and reach God, Baitshepi practice is based on housing the spirit correctly—that is, on bringing people’s bodies into contact with particular substances, in particular places, and in the company of certain persons, so that they may love one another and thus reach God. As Cannell argues (2006:41), “If transcendence is not necessarily exclusively Christian, then it is even more clearly true to say that Christianity is not exclusively a religion of transcendence.” Indeed, some Apostolic church leaders evangelize people by telling them that “the flesh is the house of the spirit,” a statement whose implications I explore in the next chapter. Batswana often work out the grounds of their interdependence by housing one another’s spirits in various ways: by bringing baths to their houses, “entering their houses” in order to have sex, confining infants in their houses, drinking holy water in “church houses,” partaking of beer together in a yard, and hearing the words of a diviner speaking to ancestors and to God within a house. The physicality of each of these activities, as Durham (2005a) points out in relation to bathing, creates a particular context, which shapes how people imagine and attempt to influence the qualities of their care and love for one another. Likewise, the power of prayer to heal and to reconcile rests on the capacity of asking and singing to shape the sentiments of hearers as well as of speakers.

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“Spirit, Follow the Voice!” Voice and the Making of Intersubjectivities Moya, moya, moya, moya, Moya, moya, o latele lentswe! Lentswe, lentswe, lentswe, lentswe, Lentswe, lentswe, le latele moya! Moya, moya, moya, moya . . . Spirit, spirit, spirit, spirit, Spirit, spirit, follow the voice! Voice, voice, voice, voice, Voice, voice, follow the spirit! Spirit, spirit, spirit, spirit . . . popular hymn

in a number of my initial encounters with church leaders in Old Naledi, I was evangelized through instruction about the transformative power of the voice. When I first met MmaMaipelo, she forcefully stated the beginning of the Gospel of John: “In the beginning,” the very beginning, she stressed, “the Word was continually present, and the Word was with God, and the Word was himself/herself God,”1 and was not satisfied until I could repeat the words in Setswana. In reply to my question, “What is the word?” she told me that the word (lefoko) is the voice (lentswe) or spirit (moya) dwelling or building ( go aga) within the flesh (nama). To illustrate, MmaMaipelo told me about how she had founded the church. She had been living in Old Naledi, “smoking, drinking, and selling beer,” when in September 1982 she became ill for several weeks. Her illness

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began while she was staying at her husband’s home village of Molepolole, where she was awoken from sleep by a voice telling her to rise and preach in Gaborone that a severe drought would occur. She wandered the streets of Old Naledi calling for people to pray. “Everyone called me a madwoman [setsenwa], and my husband helped to force me into a pickup truck, which took me to the mental hospital, where they stabbed me with needles.” However, her prophecies were borne out by the drought of 1983, she recovered from her illness, and a number of women came to pray with her. Hearing the voice at first caused MmaMaipelo to be scorned or hurt by some of her neighbors and closest relatives but then transformed her into a healer, enabling her to preach the word of God to others needing help, and bringing many of her kin into the church she founded. “So the spirits of my spiritual children [bana ba semoya] have been built up [agilwe] by me, because I caused them to hear the word.” Soon after her calling (pitso), MmaMaipelo had lengthy conversations with a cousin who had joined the Twelve Apostles Church of Africa, a large-scale church based in South Africa whose antecedents extend to the Scottish Albury apostolic movement of the 1830s.2 MmaMaipelo told me that Twelve Apostles teaching had influenced her own thinking, although she did not entirely agree with it. Twelve Apostles members often remarked to me that before they had joined their church, they had approached the Bible as “just a series of stories,” whereas they now understood that it demands a search for concealed meanings. A member of Twelve Apostles, a young man studying to be an accountant, evangelized me as follows: “Have you ever seen a person [motho]?” “Have I ever seen a person?” I answered. “Yes, of course.” “Point to a person,” he told me. I pointed toward his leg. “That is a knee. Point to the person.” Perceiving my surprise, he continued, “Now you understand that a person is not seen. It’s just the same with everything else—a car is not seen; only its parts are seen, such as its wheels and windows. A person is the word which builds in the flesh. As it says in John 1:14, ‘And the Word became flesh, and he/she dwelt [a aga, built] among us.’ ”

Yet while teaching me to understand the word, a relatively poor member of the Twelve Apostles Church warned me that study alone might not en-

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able me to hear: “It’s difficult to understand/hear [ go utlwa] the word of God if you are rich, because you don’t need anything and don’t ask for anything. But if you’re poor, you ask people for help and will hear the word from them.” These Christians urgently seek to persuade potential converts that they need to hear the word of God, and that a person is the voice that dwells in the flesh. Their arguments that a person is the word or the voice constitute statements both about the nature of human subjects and about the nature of speech. These metalinguistic claims are intended to elicit moral reflection about one’s own and others’ sentiments, premised on broadly shared assumptions about the effects of spoken words on other people’s thoughts. In explaining their teachings to me, the men from Twelve Apostles quoted the well-known Setswana proverb “The word does not return, only the finger does” (Lefoko ga le bowe, go bowa monwana). That is, it is possible to extract one’s finger from the ear of another person, but a spoken insult cannot be retrieved in the same manner. Prayers to God—together with the related vocal genres of asking, calling names, and singing—induce these Christians to reflect on the impact of words upon sentiments, and direct their attention to the sentiments of other people as well as to their own. The statement “The word does not return, only the finger does” may be taken to reflect a particular linguistic ideology, that is, “a cultural . . . system of ideas about social and linguistic relationships, together with their loading of moral and political interests” (Irvine 1989:255; see also Robbins 2001b). As Webb Keane (2007:17) points out, the term “ideology” here stresses “the productive effects of reflexive awareness” about language as an “object within experience.” Retaining the emphasis on reflexivity, I prefer the phrase “linguistic ethos,” which highlights moral sensibility and implies fewer presumptions about the importance of objectification. Where “the word does not return,” at stake is not only recognition of the presence of divine and human subjects, or of the efficacy of words and things, but intersubjectivity (cf. Engelke 2007; Keane 2007). Bridging the gap between philosophies of language focused either on how we do things with words, or on how language speaks us, Denise Riley (2005:3–4) poses the felicitous question of “How Words Do Things with Us.” Riley’s aim is to apprehend “language’s affect as that outward unconscious that hovers between people, rather than swimming upward from the privacy of each heart.” Batswana are in fact often quite conscious of how words do things with persons, much as do water, beer, blood, clothing, and divining lots.

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Styles of religious discourse informed by this popular Tswana linguistic ethos often cause believers to reflect on how spoken words help to constitute their relationships with other people. These styles differ from other kinds of Christian discourses that focus believers’ attention on distinctions among agents who generate words. Three comparative cases of varieties of Christian linguistic ethos that compel believers to recognize such distinctions will elucidate these points. In establishing styles of speaking and hearing by which believers apprehend God, forms of Christian linguistic ethos have played crucial roles in shaping conceptions of morally correct forms of agency and subjectivity (Asad 1996; Crapanzano 2000). For example, Keane (2007) relates how Protestant doctrines express a linguistic ethos geared to making believers conscious of who and what truly possess agency: humans and God, not spirits and fetishes. In Sumba, Indonesia, converts to Calvinist movements make a point of closing their eyes when praying so as to signal that their words reflect their own interior thoughts. These Protestants claim that their sincere speech, in which words express prior thoughts, allows them to recognize their own interiority as the source of agency, unlike Catholics and ancestral ritualists, who they argue displace agency onto icons or fetishes. Yet for both Protestant converts and ancestral ritualists in Sumba, determining who counts as the speaking agent appears to be key to processes by which “human subjects know themselves and make themselves recognizable to others” (Keane 2006:311). While conversion to Protestantism in Sumba is a way to “flamboyantly insert oneself as a newborn subject into a particular historical trajectory, declaring oneself to be part of the modern” (2002:78), Keane describes how Protestant converts and ancestral ritualists are alike concerned with recognizing and distinguishing the sources of authoritative speech. For Protestants, that source is to be found in interior thoughts, originating solely in oneself and expressed sincerely in language; for ritualists, in formal couplets deriving from ancestral origins (Keane 1997a). Unlike Sumbanese Calvinists, African American saints of multiple denominations regard themselves as vessels for God’s words, insisting that the words of prayers are not their own (Hinson 2000). “Because, when I pray, in most all instances,” Deacon Eldridge told Glenn Hinson (2000:78), “I never know what I am going to say. It just comes to me. As I attempt to deliver a prayer.” Hinson comments: “The words come to, flow through, and go out. Without addition. Without change. That which is uttered is the Word of God, mediated (at least ideally) only by the mechanisms of the human voice. If the self does not intervene, authorship of the mes166

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sage’s content rests solely with the Spirit” (79). It is important for these saints to recognize distinctions between their own emotions and words, on the one hand, and those provided by the Holy Spirit on the other. Saints say that the Holy Spirit may be “on” a person caught up in the enthusiasm of a service, but unless the Spirit comes to be truly “in” a person, the lifeguiding meditation stimulated by prayer and song will prove transient once the service is over (20). Prayer thus directs these African American saints’ attention to distinctions between the words and concerns of God and those of the individual believer. Song likewise helps believers to recognize and “achieve a spirit of worshipful union,” in which “individual concerns are replaced with collective conviction” (Hinson 2000:90; emphases in original). Moreover, song causes hearers to reflect on the ways in which they have experienced God in their own lives. Lena Mae Perry told Hinson (2000:105), “When you sing a song slow, people sit and listen. Then the thoughts are rolling over and over in their mind. And things will pop up in their mind that they have experienced.” Even so, by Hinson’s account, listening to songs does not cause saints to reflect on the experiences of the singers themselves. As among Sumbanese Calvinists and African American saints, Christian linguistic practices compel Urapmin of highland Papua New Guinea to attend to distinctions among agents who speak and hear words (Robbins 2001a). Unlike Batswana, Urapmin express profound mistrust of the capacity of words to convey a speaker’s real intents, so that converts to evangelical Protestantism have to struggle, in confessing sins, to “accommodate a traditional listener-oriented semiotic to the speaker-oriented one of modernity” (2001a:909). For Urapmin, “people’s minds are private places, and invading their privacy by finding out what they really think would, were it possible, be a serious personal violation” (Robbins 2006:8). Thus, Urapmin address confessions to God while insisting that ministers are merely overhearing their sincere words. “[C]onfessors are here construing the act of listening to a person’s sincere speech and interpreting it as such as dangerous and overwhelming. In their prayers, it is as if they insist they have not heard that speech at all” (2006:10). In maintaining that their prayers are ways of speaking to God rather than to other people, Urapmin distinguish carefully between agents who speak, who hear, and who overhear. In each of the above cases, misidentifying or rendering ambiguous the sources of words or the nature of their hearers presents profound moral problems to Christian believers. By contrast, Apostolic hymn singing in “s p i r i t, f o l low t h e vo i c e ! ”

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Botswana often confounds distinctions among speaking subjects, as during Rosina’s preaching at Tebogo’s funeral. In singing Tebogo’s hymns, Rosina said that she “took the position Tebogo had had in life,” thereby enabling Tebogo to say farewell at her own funeral. The reason such ambiguities do not appear problematic to many Apostolics is that their aim in speaking the word of God is to bring their voices to bear on the intents and the well-being of other people, and in hearing the word of God to allow others’ voices to affect them in turn. The popular Tswana linguistic ethos expressed in the saying “The word does not return, only the finger does” lends itself to religious valorizations of intersubjectivity—that is, of “the reciprocity between the addresser and the addressee” (Jakobson 1990:96). Even in the many instances when they do ascribe unequivocal identities to divine and human speakers and hearers, Apostolic Christians in Botswana cultivate methods of apprehending and reshaping their sense of who they are in relation to other people, since they are keenly aware of the power of their own and others’ voices to affect each other’s sentiments and bodily conditions. In the three comparative cases described above, however, Christian practices authorize reflection on one’s own subjectivity rather than on the subjectivities of others. There are profound differences between the linguistic ethos of Sumbanese Calvinists whose sincere words express their own prior thoughts, that of African American saints whose prayers express God’s intents rather than their own, and that of Urapmin Christians whose thoughts are rightfully unspeakable by other persons.3 Yet in each of these cases, religious discourses authorize distinctions between the speech, hearing, and written words of God on the one hand, and the speech and hearing of the individual on the other, for reasons having as much to do with the particularities of each linguistic ethos as with the universalizing doctrines that shape them. The construal of God’s word as intersubjective within churches of the spirit like Baitshepi presents a striking contrast to these instances. MmaMaipelo would often comment while listening to someone read the Bible aloud to her that “the Bible shows that the word has been putting on and taking off flesh since the time of Abraham.” One implication of this remark is that the persons whose words are written in the Bible spoke the word of God in their own voices, and we must all do the same. Girls who gather in the church building at the outset of a Baitshepi service frequently begin with the repetitive hymn, “Spirit, follow the voice! Voice, follow the spirit!”4 MmaSeobo explained the meaning of this hymn 168

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to me as follows: “If you hear the voices of people you know coming from an adjoining yard that you can’t see, you will walk into that yard to find them; you will follow their voices. You hear with your spirit; if the spirit is gone, you are a corpse and you don’t hear anything. You have to hear the voices of other people speaking good things so that your spirit will become happy/good [moya wagago o siame]. And if your spirit is good, your voice will follow it, so that your voice will speak love. Then, if someone else is speaking bad things, you will refuse to hear; you will say, I don’t want those things.” MmaSeobo construed hearing the voice as an act of moving from one location to another, and of placing yourself in certain people’s company so as to allow their voices to affect your spirit. Those who are willing to hear the hymn “Spirit, follow the voice!” are physically attracted to church, since their spirits want to be in proximity to the singers’ voices. In contrast to Muslim believers in Egypt whose methods of ethical listening foster receptiveness to the divine message conveyed in the words of sermons (Hirschkind 2006), Baitshepi leaders advocate forms of ethical hearing and speaking that consist of placing oneself with particular persons who put God’s love into words, and of “refusing to hear” or accept the words of those persons who do not. Such practices make hearers aware of the sentiments of those who speak God’s word, not only of their own relationships to God. Thus, each member of the congregation in Baitshepi, as in many other churches of the spirit in the area, is expected to preach God’s word in turn; authority to do so is not confined only to bishops or prophets (for a contrasting instance, see Engelke 2004b).5 For participants in churches of the spirit like Baitshepi, speaking and hearing God’s word are ways of sustaining particular forms of intersubjectivity: “The word in language is half someone else’s. . . . [I]t exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions: it is from there that one must take the word”—specifically, the word of God—“and make it one’s own” (Bakhtin 1981:293–94). The ritual practices of the Baitshepi and Twelve Apostles churches foster different approaches to hearing the word of God from other people. Both authorize specific forms of intersubjectivity. In Baitshepi, the principal aim of hearing words is to orient one’s sentiments toward love, while in Twelve Apostles it is to discern meanings. There seems to be less of an impetus in Twelve Apostles than in Baitshepi to reflect upon other people’s sentiments, and a greater emphasis on becoming “self-sufficient” through acquiring knowledge. Yet the shared emphasis in these two churches on “s p i r i t, f o l low t h e vo i c e ! ”

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identifying God’s word with the persons who speak it reflects a common set of imperatives to bring the words of other people, and of divine and ancestral sources of life, to bear upon the well-being of believers. As we saw in chapter 3, the sharing of substances creates spatial and physical contexts that shape persons’ relationships with one another. Likewise, in hearing and speaking the word of God, Baitshepi and Twelve Apostles members foster certain kinds of intersubjectivity among spiritual providers and dependents within church spaces. They do so through a range of religiously marked speech genres, including teaching, studying, preaching, praying, and singing. Yet the Twelve Apostles member’s remark that “If you’re poor, you will ask people for help and will hear the word of God from them” signals that believers do not always mark clear distinctions between what does and does not count as the word of God. The speech genres of everyday asking and calling out people’s names, while not usually marked as “spiritual” (semoya) forms of language, often intersect in prayer. Thus, styles of speech expressing moralities of caregiving, provision, and consumption around people’s yards inform speech directed to God and to ancestors.

“we a l l a s k to g e t h e r w i t h a pe r s o n” : s o n g a n d re m e m b e r i n g

In the ethnographic film Shade Seekers and the Mixer (2007), Richard Werbner documents how Moremi villagers in the northeastern Tswapong region of Botswana visualize through the image of seriti the importance of balancing individual achievement with concern for the common good. Derived from the same root as the word for shadow (moriti ), seriti refers to presence or dignity. Seriti is a relational phenomenon, as ancestral blessing confers the shadowiness of seriti upon a person (P. Werbner 2009). Those persons whose forgetfulness of parents or selfish actions have caused ancestors to turn their backs on them are said to be in a state of senyama or sefifi, occult blackness. Alternatively, they may be said to have been left overexposed to the sun. Moremi villagers aim for a condition of shadowiness lying between extremes of darkness and overexposure. The saying “Abandoned in the sun, get yourself into the shade” expresses the efforts Batswana make to induce one another to see their conduct in the best possible light, and more generally their awareness of how their own well-being depends on others’ respect and blessing.

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A comparable awareness, and a similar imperative to hear of one’s own and other people’s conduct in the most agreeable tones, motivate church members to “speak to their God” by singing hymns. In Apostolic churches, all members have one or more personal hymns, which they sing as they begin preaching. They refer to these songs as “the hymn that I love very much,” “the hymn by which I enter” preaching, or sometimes in English as “my worshipping song.” A personal hymn is a praise name that names a person in relation to God and to the church community rather than to his or her ancestors; it may be explicitly called “my praise” (mopaki wame), or “the hymn by which I praise God.” The melodies of these songs remind listeners of the character of the singer, and of their experiences with him or her. One of the first concerns of Baitshepi leaders upon meeting me and Laura was to identify hymns that we loved, and that they could sing to remind themselves of us once we had left. Even in casual conversation, people may be identified by the hymns they sing. A woman told me that a certain pastor’s preaching often makes the spirit enter her: “I forget his name. You know, the one who sings ‘Your yoke is easy’ [ Joko ya hao e bobebe].” Beginning a hymn in a service is referred to as “bringing it out” ( go ntsha), an expression also used to describe formal speeches, at which speakers “bring out words,” as well as large-scale contributions involved in marriages and funerals. An implication is that hymns constitute personalized contributions to the collective undertaking of praising God (see Kiernan 1990a). Upon rising to preach from their respective positions around the perimeter of the church, members often begin by “bringing out” their hymns, or the congregation may begin singing them for them. If participants become confused during preaching, others will sing their personal hymns, or perhaps hymns that elaborate thematically on the preaching, in order to give them strength to continue. A clear sign of being troubled is an inability to continue preaching even when others sing your personal hymn. The Baitshepi youth leader, who has composed over fifty songs for the church, related the purpose of personal hymns to me as follows: “This is the hymn that a person sings in order to enter into a covenant with God, and to be received by others. When we’re in church we each pray for something different. You may ask for work, someone else for marriage, and so forth. But when we join in a person’s song we all ask together with that person.” In other words, singing a person’s hymn makes others aware of his or her experiences and needs, and joins them in the act of asking God.

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While there is no institutionalized practice of confession in Baitshepi, song is often associated with introspection and contemplation. A personal hymn causes the singer, as well as others who join him or her in singing, to “remember” or “think about” ( go gopola) past experiences and conduct. While her husband was ill with tuberculosis, MmaMaipelo told me that she was repeatedly encouraging him to “speak to his God” by singing, implying that he should reflect on any misdeeds and ask forgiveness. Like personal hymns sung in women’s gatherings of the Church of the Nazarites in South Africa (Muller 1999:251–56), those in Apostolic churches often reflect experiences of suffering or conversion.

Hymns and Moral Reflection: A Case Study Lesego, a young woman in Baitshepi, described “speaking to her God” as a way of reflecting on her attempts to manage her own and others’ sentiments in contexts of sickness and healing, childrearing, and the competing demands of church and household. Lesego spoke about how singing made her consider what other people thought of her, and provided her not only with a sense of her shortcomings but with hope that she might bring her conduct in line with her ideals. Baitshepi is by no means unique in terms of encouraging people to engage in moral self-reflection through song; I have heard comparable accounts of hymns from members of other churches of the spirit, including Twelve Apostles. “When I sing the hymn ‘I am carried by Jesus’ [Ke sikiloe ke Jesu],” Lesego told me, “I feel my body change, I mean my body is happy, I feel that I have been born anew.” I first met Lesego in 1993, when she was a twelve-year-old girl with what struck me as a curious intensity in expression. At the time, she had been a member of Baitshepi for about a year, after having been healed of a severe illness that started at school. On a Sunday service in July 1993, Lesego began her preaching on the Book of Jonah by singing hymns recalling this suffering, which was familiar to everyone present so that there was no need to refer to it directly. Appendix 2 presents a transcription of her preaching, which may be heard on file 2 of the online audio annex, at www.ucpress.edu/9780520259669. I discuss below Lesego’s reflections about particular passages in the preaching and about the significance of song. These remarks were made much later (at various times between 1997 and 2000), and must be considered in light of subsequent events that altered her relations with church and kin, and in terms of her own ambivalence toward these commitments. I was generously assisted in the transcription by two Batswana women studying in the United 172

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States, Hillary Koodirile and Bontogetse Pelaelo, who are themselves committed Christians and expressed amazement that a twelve-year-old could preach with such assurance. In the transcription, quotation marks indicate passages in the preaching that incorporate the words of hymns. Lesego’s preaching voice tends (especially after about line 28, when she is fully in the spirit) to have a rhythm based on very rapid groupings of three or four syllables, rising slightly in pitch to the penultimate syllable of a phrase, which receives the greatest stress, followed by a release. (This pattern also appears characteristic of some Zionist services in South Africa; see Blacking 1995:216; Kiernan 1990a:197.) Thus the emphatic phrase at line 72, go bua le Morena Modimo, “to speak to the Lord God,” go BUa le moREna moDImo. In everyday speech, stress is also placed on the next-to-last syllable of a word, so that this style of preaching in the spirit gives words force through exaggerated intonation. The often-repeated phrase “par-pardon” (tshware-tshwarelo), spoken as an excuse for verbal slips, is followed by Amens and Hallelujahs from the congregation. It is important to sing hymns in church about your past, Lesego told me after listening to the recording of her preaching seven years after it was made, because in so doing you show others in the congregation that they must trust God rather than “give up” ( go itlhoboga) in times of trouble. “Before I pray, I speak to God by singing, so that I may be in a covenant with him before I tell him my problems. Song cleanses you; it removes your understanding [tlhaloganyo] and heart [pelo] from distracting thoughts, such as so-and-so has done something to me. By singing, you drive Satan away, telling him that it’s not his time.” In other words, it is necessary to approach the task of praying or asking with love, not with self-pity or jealousy. After rising and signaling that she will preach, Lesego begins the hymn “Athe Jesu o n’a mpona” (Yet Jesus Saw Me), in which she is joined by the congregation. Hymns may be sung to a variety of melodies and rhythms, some of which are preferred by particular churches or are appropriate for certain occasions. Hymns in Baitshepi services are sung in multiple-part harmonies, with men making embellishments by singing off rhythm. Lesego begins “Yet Jesus Saw Me” in a solemn manner, slowly and with falling melodic lines, reminiscent of the way it is often sung at funerals. The solemnity reflects how the song makes “my conscience strike me” (line 11), reminding her, she told me, of her despairing of finding healing in 1992, and stands out in this particular service, during which most hymns were “s p i r i t, f o l low t h e vo i c e ! ”

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accompanied by joyful clapping and dancing. “Yet Jesus Saw Me” is not sung with a strong rhythm and does not draw forth any clapping, unlike subsequent hymns, especially “Tumelo ya ka” (My Faith), lines 59–61, which elicits a prolonged circular, whirling dance. Both “Yet Jesus Saw Me” and the subsequent “In the Deep Well of Sorrows” (lines 15–26), Lesego told me, are hymns that console ( go gomotsa) her by reminding her that, notwithstanding her own troubles, there are many people who are not living well, and that rather than becoming angry at others and taking vengeance, she must have patience (bopelotelele). The hymn “In the Deep Well of Sorrows” brings her “face-to-face” with her time of suffering, and with that of her “parents” as they recognized that she was “immersed in the deep well of sorrows” (lines 28–38). Yet the song also brings her a “powerful angel that can pull a person to God” (lines 41– 45). Lesego identified the “angel” to me as the strength (maatla) and faith (tumelo) necessary to be healed. Underscoring the principle that the voice exerts a congregating influence, the angel “pulls” her to church, away from the yard in which she stays. She told me that “throwing away” faith (lines 63–74) means refusing to go to church, “just staying” ( go nna hela) in her own yard. Lesego introduces the topic of Jonah quite abruptly (line 80, also lines 96–97), through the exhortation to “listen well to that voice,” meaning the Bible. (When quoting passages from the Bible in services, Baitshepi members usually begin with the comment, “The voice says . . .”; MmaSeobo explained that since the Bible is the word of God, its words are God’s voice.) Lesego identifies Jonah’s confession to the sailors as the point when he “brought out his voice” (line 103). For the prayer in the whale, Lesego substitutes the Lord’s Prayer (lines 114–15), the sanctifying words that the congregation recites three times in unison at the beginning of a service, after having called out their personal prayers. Reinforcing the sanctifying tone, the congregation soon begins the hymn “Se teng sediba sa madi” (Here Is the Well of Blood), which is sung while water is blessed at the conclusion of the service. Lesego does not engage in interpretation of Jonah, instead finishing abruptly with an indirect compliment to herself (line 129). Yet later in the service, an elder preached that Jonah was like MmaMaipelo and Lesego herself in having the voice come to him; if the voice orders you, you can do nothing for yourself. At a certain point in her preaching, Lesego stumbles slightly (line 87), upon which the congregation begins to sing the hymn “Uyele somandla” (You Are Holy) to strengthen her. This hymn is of special significance to 174

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Lesego, who preaches that it is the song “through which I found rest” and by which she was healed (lines 89–95); at the conclusion of her preaching, she asks that it be sung again as she returns to her place (lines 131–34). This hymn, Lesego told me, was the one to which she awoke after falling in a faint while in church in 1992, so that she regards it as the song that healed her. Lesego spent much of her childhood with her maternal grandmother, a domestic worker in Kimberley, South Africa. However, Lesego went to school in Mogoditshane, a village adjacent to Gaborone, where she stayed with her mother’s younger sister. Her maternal grandfather’s people are Bakalanga from Tutume near Francistown, Botswana. She had long considered her grandmother to be her mother, and her mother’s siblings to be her own, knowing her mother, who was living near Tutume, only as someone in the family. She never knew the man who begat her, but referred to her maternal grandfather as her father, and to his siblings as her paternal uncles and aunts. Lesego was eleven years old when her grandmother told her that she was not actually her mother, in response to a joke Lesego had made along such lines. Lesego said that she had not been upset to hear this at the time, but relations soon changed as a result of a severe illness. While staying in Mogoditshane with her aunt, a book was taken from her at school and subsequently returned to her. Lesego suspected that witchcraft medicines had been placed inside by the parents of a jealous fellow-student spurred by the competitive atmosphere within schools (see Burke 2000). When she opened the book, Lesego suddenly saw green everywhere, fell in a faint, and upon waking in the hospital found a woman she did not know, perhaps the person who had bewitched her, claiming the right to care for her as her mother. At this point, Lesego’s mother came to live with her in Mogoditshane, since the hospital personnel did not want a relative other than the mother to be listed as a caregiver. Lesego could not continue at school, because she would hear voices and scream, “The voice is calling me—I’m leaving, I’m going to pray in the hills,” and people thought her mad or a witch. “My head would hurt, and then I wouldn’t see properly. I’d see things double, and I’d be seized by dizziness. Then I would have a vision of three elderly people I don’t know commanding me to run off. If I refused, they would beat me. Those voices are darkness to me [mantswe ale a lefifi mogo nna], I don’t know where they come from. They just call me from the winds, ‘Go and pray in the hills!’ ” Lesego’s grandmother brought her to Setswana doctors, whom they paid as much as P10,000 to perform sacrifices, but “s p i r i t, f o l low t h e vo i c e ! ”

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their efforts were unsuccessful. Then she heard a voice telling her to run to the yard in Old Naledi where her MFyB was staying. This yard happens to be adjacent to MmaMaipelo’s own compound. Lesego was attracted by the singing coming from the Baitshepi Church, and determined to go there. Lesego had never attended church consistently in the past, yet when her grandmother had accompanied her to different churches during the period of her illness, she had “choked” ( go hupela) and fallen over upon hearing hymns. Fearing for her safety, her relatives did not want her to visit any more churches. In order to attend Baitshepi, Lesego sneaked out of the yard, concealing the head scarf that all women and girls wear in church. She did faint in Baitshepi as well, but awoke to the hymn “You Are Holy, God.” After drinking water that MmaMaipelo had blessed, she became well enough to go back to school, although if she did not go to church regularly, her illness would return. Her relatives thus began to encourage her to attend Baitshepi consistently, although they did not become members themselves. Lesego never stayed in the church compound; she lived until 1995 with her uncle in the yard adjacent to the church, and subsequently until 1999 in a nearby compound together with three younger siblings and their mother, who had found work at a printing shop. For Lesego, house and church did not overlap as they did for those staying with MmaMaipelo. She spoke of church attendance as an activity that drew her away from her own yard, and unlike those who stayed in the church compound, she was not familiar with the term “spiritual parents.” In late 1994, when she was fourteen years old, Lesego became pregnant. She always insisted to me that she had had no idea at the time that sexual intercourse might lead to pregnancy. Her becoming pregnant at such a young age was the subject of much disapprobation on the part of church leaders, relatives, and neighbors. Parents are accustomed to, if not happy about, the pregnancies of somewhat older school-age girls, but in Lesego’s case people remarked that “as soon as girls nowadays develop breasts, they get ruined [senyegile].” Lesego spoke of having “sneaked around” ( go ngwangwaela) with men with embarrassment, combined, perhaps, with some bravado. “No one sneaks around as we Batswana do,” she told me laughingly, heavily pregnant, sitting with some neighbors. “Not whites, not Zimbabweans, not Zulu.” She named her daughter Neo, meaning “gift,” and in mid-1997 preached in Baitshepi that her pregnancy had been a punishment from God for her sin of “sneaking around,” yet was a good punishment because she now had a beloved child. In February 1997, in the context of a discussion about her beginning sexual relations at age thirteen, she taught me to sing what had be176

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come her personal hymns, “Ke sikiloe ke Jesu” (I Am Carried by Jesus) and “Ke na le modisa” (I Have a Shepherd), explaining that when she sings them, she reflects that she has “cut off” her present life from her past. The songs “speak of my forgiveness; before I believed in God, I did such-andsuch, but now that I’ve changed, I’ve given myself to God.” Lesego’s mother was particularly unhappy that she had been forced again to leave school; she told me that she had been counting on Lesego’s earning a wage in the future, and that she would now be forced to provide for both her and the baby. After Neo was born, Lesego worked in the yard all day, tending the child, preparing food for her siblings, and washing clothes. Lesego’s relations with her mother deteriorated over the following few years. She would refer to and even address her by her first name Kelebogile, a mark of great disrespect, while calling her grandmother “my mother.” In November 1997, she lamented to me, “Kelebogile has been abusing me [o mpogisitse]. I work for her, I work hard for her, but she calls me a dog, she scolds me; last Christmas, she bought gifts for my siblings but nothing for me. Really, I wonder why God doesn’t kill me—I pray that I will be hit by a car.” Rather than sending her back to school and hiring a domestic worker, Lesego complained, her mother was depriving her of an education in order to have someone do the housework. By 1998, however, relatives had put pressure on her mother to pay for classes at the Naledi Adult Education Center, and by 2000 Lesego was in form 3. Lesego’s participation in Baitshepi declined during 1997 and 1998. Because she had to do so much housework, she had little time to attend services, youth meetings, or choir practices. This brought Lesego into conflict with the youth leader, who demanded regular attendance and excluded her in ways she found insulting, for instance by not allowing her to pray along with the youth for MmaMaipelo after her husband passed away. “She let me shake MmaMaipelo’s hand only after the others had already left the room,” Lesego recalled in a tone of great offense. Then she recounted in high glee an incident in which the youth leader had insulted one of the pastors in a comparable fashion, and he had belted her across the head. Yet to the extent Lesego did not participate in Baitshepi, her mother would scold her, fearing a return of her illness. In the meantime, Lesego had ceased hearing voices after having gone in mid-1997 to Kimberley, where her grandmother had directed her to the grave of Lesego’s MMF, from which she had taken some soil and mixed it with some water to drink. This was done without consulting Baitshepi leaders, who disapprove of offerings made to ancestors apart from calling their names in church “s p i r i t, f o l low t h e vo i c e ! ”

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(see below). Soon after consuming the soil, Lesego saw an old man in a dream who told her “I’m leaving now.” In the context of poor relations with her mother and church network, Lesego made efforts to bring about a marriage with the man who she considered her child Neo’s probable father, Modise, a soldier whom I was never able to meet. Lesego cultivated a friendship with Modise’s sister, and urged me not to tell her about her own uncertainty about Neo’s paternity. Soon after the birth of Lesego’s child, she said, Modise had formed a more public union with another member of Baitshepi, whose child had, however, soon died, and the union had collapsed. Then Modise had approached Lesego through his sister, seeking a reconciliation. In March 1997, she had sex with him “because I want to be his wife” but insisted that he use a condom, not only out of concern about AIDS but because she did not want to have another child until she was officially married, since she might get a substantial settlement from divorce, whereas pregnancy compensation was only P40 per month. On another occasion, however, she remarked that she would like to have another child, since nowadays you could not be sure that your child would not die at a young age. Lesego soon found that Modise had formed a liaison with another young woman, and she suffered malicious comments on the subject from neighbors, especially from yet another of Modise’s former girlfriends, whom Lesego later managed to embarrass publicly, so that, she told me triumphantly, the former girlfriend had become very polite. “I still love Modise, though, and that’s why I feel sorry to see him going with other women.” Another grievance Lesego had against her mother was that she disliked Modise. “Whenever she sees him pass by the yard, she throws boiling water at him.” During this time, Lesego told me, upon waking in the morning, she would always sing her personal hymns. “I wasn’t just attracted to these hymns by their music. When someone has been mean to me, instead of feeling bad or arguing I think of the hymn, ‘I am carried by Jesus, I am in his bosom, I am refreshed.’ Or I think ‘I have a shepherd, what can I need, since I call the living God.’ That is why I like hymns so much, because they show me what is good and what is evil. I find words that console in them, and while I sing, I ask myself if I have refused to help people, or insulted or argued with them. If I have done so, what kind of Christian am I, since Jesus whom I say I follow never did such things and always prayed for those who insulted him, saying ‘Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do.’ So you see that hymns help me live with other people in love and peace, and to ask others for forgiveness if I have not spoken well 178

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to them. I sing these hymns aloud at home every day, so that others can hear me. People who have love or the desire to sing with me may come to me, and hear me preach as well.” What is striking in this account is the disjuncture between the sentiments Lesego wished to feel—forgiveness, love, and sympathy with other people’s suffering—and what she acknowledged to have been her actual sentiments and actions, namely “promiscuity,” jealousy toward Modise’s other girlfriends, and resentment toward her mother and the youth leader. Clearly, she did not feel continual regret at having had sex at a young age, getting the better of her rivals, insulting her mother, or seeing the youth leader humiliated. Yet she wished that she had not felt and done these things, because they did hurt her relations with others. For Lesego, hymn singing was a way of reflecting on her past sentiments and actions so that she might “live with other people in love and peace.” Song “made her conscience strike her” and “changed her body,” so that she felt “born anew” before she “asked God” to help her through prayer. The sound of her hymns—that is, of the names she chose for herself in relation to her God— caused her to reflect on what other people thought of her, and in so doing helped to renew the love she wished to have at heart. For Lesego, the problem hymn singing addressed was not so much how to bring about a rupture with her past as how to love.

“s p i r i t ua l l e s s o n s” : t h e b o d y a s a h o u s e f o r t h e vo i c e

On an occasion during my absence, the Baitshepi youth made a videotape of a performance in which they reenacted MmaMaipelo’s calling by the voice in 1982. Playing the role of MmaMaipelo, Oteng (Maipelo’s thengirlfriend) spoke “in the spirit” (mo moweng) with a voice coming from deep within her body, reeling about and proclaiming that a great drought was coming, all the cattle would die, and everyone must pray and repent. When MmaMaipelo’s sister MmaDineo watched the video, she collapsed in a faint. Oteng explained to me that hearing words spoken “in the spirit” had caused MmaDineo to recall her own pain at the time of her sister’s illness. “She would not have fainted if I had just spoken in the flesh [mo nameng], saying [in an ordinary tone], ‘A great drought will come, the cattle will die, we all have to pray.’ ” Words spoken and sung “in the spirit” have a special influence over the sentiments and bodies of those who hear them. Yet it is the whole-body quality of the voice in general, and its effects on “s p i r i t, f o l low t h e vo i c e ! ”

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other people’s sentiments and intents, that give speech “in the spirit” its particular power. The relevant contrast for speech “in the spirit” consists of speech “in the flesh,” not words spoken only by the mouth and heard only in the ear. In this section, I discuss how Baitshepi and Twelve Apostles leaders elicit moral reflection among members of their congregations by providing “spiritual lessons” (dithuto tsa semoya) about the body as a house for the voice. Drawing on the model of formal schooling, these church members characterize conversations about the spirit, carried out within sitting rooms, bedrooms, or yards, as “lessons” or “study” (Landau 1995:15–19, 77–80). A Bible is often but not always present on such occasions. In teaching that the voice dwells in the flesh as a person dwells in a house, and that God cleanses the voices or spirits of those with tumelo by building within their bodies, church leaders draw on popular understandings of how the activities of building, staying, and cleansing affect people’s well-being. “The evil spirit is knocking,” the Baitshepi youth leader admonished school-age girls during a Sunday church service in October 1997, “and you have to make sure not to let it in.” The choir leader was preaching on Luke 11:24–27, which concerns the return of an unclean spirit to the house from which it came. Evil spirit (mowa o o maswe) comes from someone who has not behaved well in life and is now a “ghost [sepoko] looking for rest in the wilderness,” but if your house is clean and put in order you will not let the evil spirit inside. “You must not be jealous, you must not gossip.” Another elder preached of good spirit and evil spirit as pleasant and foul odors emanating from the same house; it is necessary to suppress the foul odor lest it overpower the good. Love is a pleasant odor attracting other people to your house, whereas jealousy is a stink that repels them.6 Preachers in Baitshepi thus speak of activities about the house—building, calling, congregating, closing, opening, cleaning, smelling good and rotten food—in order to make their hearers reflect on their sentiments toward others, and especially on how coming to church builds up their love. MmaMaipelo once told me that in order to convince a new member of the Baitshepi Church that God is the voice, she had asked her rhetorically how one receives ( go amogela) the word of God. The answer appeared selfevident: through the spoken word. The voice dwells or builds in the body and acts at a distance on the bodies of others, transforming their sentiments in the process. Leaders of the Baitshepi and Twelve Apostles churches elaborate on this argument in ways reflecting widely divergent ritual practices and mores regarding love and self-determination. Yet teachings about the 180

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voice in these churches have two themes in common. First, the voice is not confined to the throat, mouth, tongue, and ear, but rather moves or animates ( go tsamaisa) the entire body, cleanses it, and brings it from one place to another—but only if it is heard. Second, the word of God builds in the flesh, so that a person’s words may also be God’s words.

Baitshepi Evangelism Very early in our acquaintance, MmaMaipelo asked me whether in America the dead are buried or burned, clearly approving the former because “the flesh is the house of the person, so that burning it would be like someone burning my compound here in Old Naledi once I have built in Molepolole,” the village of her affines. In disparaging actions destructive to the body, she spoke about the purposeful destruction of a house in which she lived for many years. In order to explain how prayer helps people, she told me about the capacity of the voice to “build up” the body. After her comment on burial, MmaMaipelo continued: “God is spirit. God is voice. God builds in the person. So when we pray, we do not pray to a God above but to a God who is within each of us and between each of us. When we pray we enable ourselves [re a ikgona] and ask help from others. When we speak to one another [in everyday talk], we build up one another’s spirit [re agana moya], and that is also how we teach one another in church. When we speak to one another, your voice builds [ go aga] in me, and my voice builds in you. This is because the voice builds in the flesh. “When you are quiet,” she went on, “you are in your flesh only, and it is like death.” I asked whether you are dead when you are quiet. “No, because your voice is still inside you. But you can be close to death,” she said, pretending to start from a trance and making sure that she was still alive. “God created the world in six days with his words but on the seventh day he rested and was only in his flesh.” At this point she closed her eyes and sat silently. “This is why study [thuto] is not sufficient, even though it is important. Studies, books, even the Bible, are flesh, and can die. But spirit does not die. So at a funeral, we show great respect to the body as the house of the spirit, but we know that it ends while the spirit lives.” As spirit, the voice permeates the entire body; it is what gives it life. This principle became clear to me when I suggested to MmaMaipelo that the spirit could not be distinguished from the flesh, because if I were sick, I could not get better simply by willing it. In refuting my argument, she used an image of the body as a house to describe the pain a sick person feels. “The flesh is the house of the spirit. When you are sick, it is your “s p i r i t, f o l low t h e vo i c e ! ”

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flesh that is ill but your spirit that feels the pain. Your spirit feels pain because its house has been attacked. It’s just as when you see your house breaking down,” indicating a crack in the wall of her sitting room, “your spirit feels pain.” She imitated a person appearing passive and depressed, staring at the crack spreading down the wall. Recall from chapter 1 that Tebogo was unwilling for me to do a taped interview with her, since she did not want me to remember her by the voice she had had when she was ill. Her refusal was likely motivated by her sense that sickness hurts a person’s voice, tearing down the house of the flesh and giving pain to the spirit or voice building within it. “If someone broke into your house and stole your furniture,” MmaMaipelo continued, “you would be unhappy and confused. You would feel dizzy, just as you would if you had been stabbed and your blood flowed out. So you see that blood and spirit work together in the body. But spirit is greater than blood, since if you were to cut a corpse, which has no spirit and no voice, the blood would not flow.” Baitshepi members often say that prayer with MmaMaipelo has the effect of “cooling the spirit” (mowa o nna tsididi ) and “purifying the blood” (madi a itsheka). When I suggested to MmaMaipelo that medical doctors do not believe in the existence of spirit, she replied, “Then they must treat the spirit without realizing it. What is flesh without spirit? Its name is just corpse. Have you ever seen anyone try to cure a corpse?” In addition to building within and building up the house of the flesh, the voice brings together people who hear it. In turn, whether or not people hear the word depends on their love for one another, so that causing them to hear is a way of giving and receiving love and care. In 1993, Baitshepi leaders often raised this theme in distinguishing between “spiritual children”—young women migrants who stayed in the church compound, as well as pastors—and “fleshly children,” relatives who are demanding and unreliable. It was pointed out to me repeatedly that whereas a “fleshly child” is liable to abandon you, “spiritual children” will never forget you. At one point I asked a group of pastors whether they could choose their “spiritual children.” They laughed, saying that I could not add two and two, and read Luke 8:21, “My mother and my younger brothers are those who hear the word of God, and do it.” MmaMaipelo explained: “It is the voice that heals and that I have heard; it is not my name but the name of Jesus that is important. People who hear the word come together because they have love for one another. I don’t know why the voice called me; I have been called by people.” 182

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On another occasion in 1993 MmaMaipelo told me very forcefully that the “fleshly family” ends, since all flesh dies, but the “spiritual family” does not end. “When I am gone, my spiritual children will live after me and tell people who I was, that I preached, that I was thought crazy. I gave birth to one child only, but I surpass women who have fleshly children because I have so many spiritual children. If I’m sick they don’t leave me, they care for me in the yard. They give me clothes and money. Many fleshly children will not take care of the parents who gave birth to them. Babies are beautiful seeds, but you don’t know what fruit they will bear as they grow up. My spiritual children, though, really take care of their mother.” Many Batswana, she said, are under the mistaken impression that “fleshly love” is the most important kind of love. “Maipelo is my fleshly child, but I love my spiritual children as much as I do him. Their parents see that they live well here. I don’t allow them to go to bars at night. If there is a child here, I accommodate [go tshola, also meaning ‘to give birth to’] her as my own child. When a person has a child he or she usually discriminates, saying, ‘He isn’t my child’ or ‘She is my child,’ but I take them all, and their parents like me to be with them.” She illustrated the difference between spiritual and fleshly children in terms of the unconditional love a small child has for a parent. If a mother punishes a small child, he or she will nevertheless come physically back to her, saying “Mama,” whereas an older child whose “spirit has changed” may refuse to do so. Thus, spiritual children who hear the voices of their spiritual parents are like small children, “born anew,” emulating Jesus, who “refused to be offended” by others. MmaMaipelo often referred listeners to passages from the Bible in order to substantiate such teachings. (Recall that she was unable to read, but had memorized large portions of the Bible from listening to other church members read it aloud, and would direct them to particular chapters and verses.) Some other Apostolic leaders in southern Africa refuse to read the Bible, conceiving textual knowledge as a source of colonial subjugation, or perceiving the Bible as a static object that interferes with unmediated reception of the spoken word of God (Engelke 2007; Fabian 1991 [1979]; see also Comaroff and Comaroff 1991:311). In many churches of the spirit, prophets employ the Bible as a means of divination, “as a book that diagnoses relationships and promotes the healing of relationships between people and the divine powers” (Dube 1999:57; see also Dube 1996). For her part, MmaMaipelo regarded the words of the Bible as validating her own experience of being called, which I describe in more detail below. She would often comment that the Bible had shown her that past prophets, such as “s p i r i t, f o l low t h e vo i c e ! ”

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Jonah, had likewise been called by the voice of God and undergone terrible suffering. While Baitshepi and Twelve Apostles members comment extensively on the words of the Bible, they do not generally interpret it in figural fashion, as do Baptists in the American South (Harding 2000:55) who tell stories showing how biblical narratives of sin and redemption prefigure events in their own lives (see also Simpson 1998). Rather, they read particular passages so as to elicit moral reflection on one’s own and others’ words and deeds. Those biblical passages that most appealed to MmaMaipelo, I think, involve how the word of God can become a person’s voice. After she passed away in 2006, I spoke with a Baitshepi pastor who had studied with her for many years. He talked with me about what MmaMaipelo had taught him about the Bible: Our mother [MmaMaipelo] always told us that a person does his works by reason of the word that is within him. Your word has to be cleansed in order to do good works, and a person is cleansed in the word by singing, by preaching, and by discussing the word of God. The Holy Spirit will come into you and will build inside you, it will truly be God himself. Let’s read John chapter 14, verse 23: “If a person loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our dwelling in him.” And the word says, Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who are indebted to us. If you don’t know that a person is the word who dwells in the house of the flesh, your word will not be cleansed, and the Holy Spirit will not build within you. When I first met our mother, she converted me by telling me that when we preach the word of God, we are sowers, as Matthew 13 says. The word of God, she told me, is a seed within us for us to bring forth [ go tshola], by planting the word in other people. She had me read Matthew chapter 13, verse 23, which says that the seed that grows in good soil is the one who hears the word and understands it. I asked her how a person can be compared with soil, and she explained that God formed a person’s flesh from soil and breathed the spirit of life into it, as it says in Genesis chapter 2, verse 7. All flesh dies, but once a person’s spirit leaves, it may enter into flesh again, living flesh, if God permits, so that the spirit will cause another person to do good works. As it says in John chapter 14, verse 10: “Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father is within me? The words that I speak to you I do not speak on my own; but the Father, since he is within me, is doing his works.” So you see that the word has been putting on and taking off flesh since the time of Abraham. 184

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As I relate below, Twelve Apostles members also construe life after death in such ancestral terms; this Baitshepi pastor had never attended Twelve Apostles himself. It was an evening in July 1993, and the candles were lit in MmaMaipelo’s sitting room, where she asked some pastors to read aloud Bible passages she had selected. In speaking about the life-giving power of the spoken word, she stressed that people whose love enables them to hear the word of God are born anew as spiritual children. “Truly, truly, I tell you, the Son can do nothing on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing; for whatever he does, the Son does likewise” (John 5:19). MmaMaipelo observed, “The spirit is the father of the flesh, so that the flesh can do nothing without the spirit. What is the flesh without a spirit? Its name is just corpse.” On John 1:14, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us,” she remarked that the word creates ( go bopa) the person, as Adam was created by the spirit of life (Gen. 2:7). On John 1:3–4, “All things were made by him/her, and without him/her there was nothing made that was made. In him/her was life; and this life was the light of all people”: “The word has made all things, and is itself life. The word dwells in all people, but most people don’t realize that the word does everything. As it says in John 1:10–11, ‘He was in the world, the world was made by him, but the world did not know him. He came to his own home, but his own people would not take him in,’ people thought me crazy as well when the voice called me.” On Luke 1:35, “And the angel answered her, ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the strength of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore that which is holy that you will bear, will be called holy, the Son of God,’ ” she commented: “The word is what creates, and enables people to give birth [go tshola]. In order to safeguard the word, you have to love by the spirit and advise people when they do wrong. For instance, I love my spiritual children even though they are not my birth children [batswetswe].” Thus, becoming a child of God by being “born of the spirit” is a matter of reconfiguring one’s convictions about the sources of one’s well-being. A person willing to hear the word of God from other people becomes their child, and recognizes them as sources of blessing, protection, and love.

Twelve Apostles Evangelism Twelve Apostles members emphasize to a much greater extent than Baitshepi leaders the importance of studying ( go ithuta) how the voice builds or dwells in the flesh. After each Sunday service I attended at the Twelve “s p i r i t, f o l low t h e vo i c e ! ”

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Apostles church in Old Naledi, I was questioned by men about teachings (dithuto) at the core of church practice. Twelve Apostles members speak of themselves as “messengers of God” and do not refer to Twelve Apostles as a church at all, but rather as “a place of lessons,” often using the word “church” in a disparaging way about other places of worship. “The first sin [boleo],” they often told me, “is not knowing who God is.” As I understand it, much of the appeal of this statement rests on the popular notion that a person who scorns someone else “does not know God,” a point that Twelve Apostles messengers appear to have elaborated into a principle that one needs to study hard, as in school, so as to know who God is. Twelve Apostles appeals to the relatively well educated, although by no means exclusively so, and has an elaborate hierarchy of Overseers, Elders, and Deacons, with wives assuming offices parallel to their husbands, at multiple sites in Botswana and South Africa. The messenger who evangelized me by showing that a person cannot be seen had himself been converted by a friend who told him that in Twelve Apostles, people study and teach, rather than just “shouting” their preaching as do those in churches of the spirit. I am not able to present a complete account of their teachings, having been gradually introduced to lessons by a group of men who met each Sunday afternoon and twice on evenings during the week. Once it became apparent that I would not leave Baitshepi to become a member of Twelve Apostles, they grew reluctant to tell me more. In terms of doctrine, what follows elaborates on the schematic description presented by Amanze (1994:296–98). After demonstrating to me that a person is the word dwelling in the flesh, the Twelve Apostles men insisted that God is therefore the person or word (referring to John 1:1), not a being in the sky. A person is not God, rather God “builds” in the person, to the extent made apparent by his or her deeds, if they are carried out with humaneness (botho) and civility (maitseo). Since according to the Bible, heaven is the origin of the word and the person, they continued, heaven cannot be the sky but rather a father’s semen—the source of a person’s being. It is the sperm rather than the egg from which a person originates, the men told me, since if the sperm does not have enough “strength” to break the egg, conception will not take place. A woman, by contrast, is a “workshop” or “factory” in which a baby is created in a way comparable to the building of a house: its eyes and ears are like windows, the mouth is a door, the legs are the foundation, and the nose is an air vent. In order to convince me that the spirit dwells in the flesh of the person, a deacon used the identical house/body imagery related by 186

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MmaMaipelo. When sick, the flesh is ill but the spirit feels the pain: his upholstered chair would feel no pain if it were slashed, but he would feel pain looking at it. Whereas Baitshepi services follow a pattern typical of churches of the spirit, with preaching carried out by each member in turn, Twelve Apostles services are conducted by pastors facing the seated congregation from a raised platform, as in mission churches. Men wear suits and ties, women white dresses. Services begin with singing from the hymnbook Lifela tsa Sione on the part of the full congregation, ended by the male pastors’ entrance. Sermons in Twelve Apostles take the form of arguments from first principles, delivered in a dispassionate voice. On a Sunday in September 1997, a pastor preached substantially as follows in Setswana: “Churches in this land will tell you that God is in heaven, up in the sky. Now there is nothing in the sky, and the God who dwells there is not known. You might think that rain comes from the sky, but it does not—it is water from the oceans that has evaporated.7 We read in the Book of Genesis that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. All things were created by God. Who is God? (Congregation: The word.) Yes, the word. We read that God created the person in his image, male and female. After the word finished creating the heavens and the earth, it entered flesh and became a person. Then the word created others out of the dust of the ground, as it says in Genesis 2—these are people who refuse to hear the word of God. So everything in this world was made by the person, in which God and the word live. For instance, an airplane was made by the word and by God, since it was by words that it was created. “To love belongs to God. You do not choose to love God, it is God who chooses you. Why do you not refuse to be Apostles? (Congregation: Because we are chosen by God.) Yes, you are chosen by God. We are called by a single call, and there is only one road to the kingdom of God. But it is an extremely narrow road—getting in is as hard as going through the eye of a needle.” Twelve Apostles members speak of study, evangelism, and attendance at services and choir rehearsals as practices that instill “self-understanding” (itlhaloganyo), habits of evaluating one’s actions and discipline in work. Thus, the deacon of the men’s group told me that he used to drink before converting to Twelve Apostles along with his wife in 1979, as a result of being convinced that a person is the word dwelling in the flesh. Now he is a prosperous builder and has constructed a handsome compound. Similarly, a young woman stressed that since joining Twelve Apostles, she no “s p i r i t, f o l low t h e vo i c e ! ”

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longer goes to bars or gets into fights. She told me that she is now “serious” (English), earning a wage as a waitress at a restaurant, and meeting with other messengers every day for evangelism or choir practice. “A person is fed by the word,” she told me in reply to my question of why it is necessary to meet every day of the week. At one point, when a disheveled and inebriated man interrupted the men’s group’s lessons, the deacon approached him: “Listen to me, sir, listen. Have you ever seen a person?” There is a strong ethos of self-determination involved in Twelve Apostles’ lessons, in that the purpose of discerning the meanings of metaphors, such as “heaven” and “person,” is to learn who one is, and to act in the world with self-knowledge. Moreover, in the sermon quoted above, the Twelve Apostles preacher taught that those who refuse to hear the word of God do not know who they are and are therefore not fully persons, having been formed out of the dust of the ground rather than in the image of God. Such arguments commonly antagonize nonmembers, who sometimes engage in disputes with Twelve Apostles messengers in public settings. On the other hand, messengers do not regard the word as self-generated, but describe rather how they have been “fed” by the word of God spoken by others. They are thus apt to refer to their superiors in the hierarchy as their parents (batsadi ), recognizing how they have helped them to obtain selfknowledge and knowledge of God. For example, men who came to lessons in the deacon’s yard would ask him such questions as, “Why did Joseph flee with Jesus into Egypt?” I could not follow the ensuing discussions in Setswana or grasp the significance of these questions, which were premised on metaphorical understandings of biblical figures. However, it was clear that the men valued one another’s words for the knowledge they provided about the spirit. Furthermore, the men insisted that it is important to know that a person is the word in order to get into “heaven”—that is, a man’s semen— after death. If you know that a person is the word and behave with selfunderstanding, they told me, your spirit will reenter flesh upon your death.8 Thus, for Twelve Apostles members, a principal stake in knowing God involves reconfigurations of ancestry. For Baitshepi members as well, asking and thanking by name are ways of reconsidering sources of blessings, and thus of recasting relationships to ancestors. a s k i n g b y n a m e : re c o n f i g u r at i o n s o f a n c e s t ry

As I showed in chapter 3, Baitshepi leaders consider themselves above all to be “pray-ers” (barapedi ). Significantly, the verb “to pray,” go rapela, also 188

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means “to entreat.” People may ask help from someone of superior status or greater wealth by saying, “I am entreating/praying to you, sir [Ke a go rapela tlhe, rra].” Praying or entreating thus entails placing oneself under the shelter ( pabalelo) of patrons, chiefs, elders, ancestors, or Jesus, and recognizing them as givers of blessings. In addition, making entreaties to God or ancestors always involves calling aloud names, either the name of Jesus, the name of the ancestor, or the relevant relationship term (e.g., “my father”). Thus, praying is a form of asking whereby people speak aloud either the names of those who provide for them, or the relationship terms that denote the connections between them. Early in my acquaintance with Baitshepi, church leaders instructed me that a person’s name (leina) is itself voice or spirit. “The name builds in the person, and is spirit,” they said. “The name is the voice.” That names may be said to pervade and animate the body in the same sense as voice or spirit indicates that the act of calling aloud names, especially in making requests, may affect the bodies and sentiments of those who speak and hear them. In this section, I explore how vocal genres associated with asking and with calling names create particular forms of intersubjectivity that are valued by Baitshepi members. Asking and calling names shape in important ways people’s sense of who has provided for their well-being. In church contexts, these speech genres frame participants’ understandings of the sources, value, and potential dangers of ancestral care. In both Baitshepi and Twelve Apostles, believers rename ancestors by calling them as angels (manyeloi ) into church space. In referring to MmaMaipelo as their “spiritual parent,” Baitshepi members cast her during her lifetime in ancestral terms, as a person who provided God’s blessings to descendants. Church members’ efforts to elicit blessings thus lead them to consider the terms of their relatedness to one another as ancestors, parents, or children, in ways that reflect domestic moralities expressed in asking and calling names. Figure 3 summarizes relationships among certain speech genres associated with asking and calling names. Praying and entreaty involve calling aloud either personal names or relationship terms in order to elicit help from those who are in a position to care for others. However, praying is not the only way of calling names in order to make requests. Adults often call aloud children’s names in order to send them on errands; sending is a kind of request, albeit a peremptory one. Further, there are many forms of asking that do not involve calling or speaking names—in particular, as I discuss below, bantering requests and refusals. Of course, people also call aloud one another’s names when they do not intend to ask them for “s p i r i t, f o l low t h e vo i c e ! ”

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ASKING Bantering

Praying

Sending

Singing personal hymns

Thanking

CALLING NAMES

Figure 3. Vocal genres of asking and calling names

anything, for instance, in naming ceremonies for infants, witchcraft rites, and funeral speeches. The verbal transactions that lie at the intersection of these genres— asking by calling names—have a particular power over the sentiments and bodies of speakers and hearers. As we have seen, praising God by singing personal hymns involves calling out one’s own name in relation to God, an act that puts a believer in the proper spirit for asking and engages others in his or her act of asking as well. More generally, in both Baitshepi and Twelve Apostles, hearing one’s name is a core image of conversion, since calling and hearing cause people to congregate in church.9 Hearing one’s name connotes moving from place to place, while “refusing to hear” means staying put. Children who refuse to hear are those who do not come at the sound of their elders’ voices when they call their names to send them on errands. Becoming a child of a particular parent thus involves coming at the sound of his or her voice, while the act of calling the names of ancestors in order to thank them for blessings brings them into church space as angels. 190

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Spiritual Ancestors In Baitshepi services, participants commonly call aloud the name of Jesus, to whom they pray ( go rapela) for healing and help, and the names of angels whom they deeply thank ( go lebogela) for “making me go” or “animating me” ( go ntsamaisa). In animating church members, the angels enable them to speak in the spirit, with a force they feel welling up from the abdominal regions of their bodies. Sometimes they speak of angels as synonymous with the Holy Spirit, or as the “spirit that works” (mowa o o berekang). Often, however, they identify angels by the first names of RraMaipelo’s father, MmaMaipelo’s father, and her father’s father. For instance, an elder might preface her preaching by saying, “I thank the angels of bo-Segaetsho,” the prefix bo- signifying an unspecified number of people associated with the name Segaetsho. “They are our spiritual ancestors [badimo ba semoya],” I was told by various church leaders. “We call out their names to wake them up. We remember/think about [ go gopola] them so that they will come to us in dreams and help us out, and so that God will not be offended by our neglect of them. The power comes from God, not from the ancestors, but the ancestors are very important. In the same way that our living grandparents will curse us if we do not take care of them, our ancestors will be angry if we do not remember them.” Baitshepi leaders insist that they make prayers or entreaties only to Jesus, who alone has the power to heal, whereas they “remember” or “think about” the ancestors. Yet calling aloud the names of spiritual ancestors, the fathers of MmaMaipelo and RraMaipelo, is a way of thanking them for their care, so that they will continue to give blessings to the living. In 1994, a Mennonite missionary visiting Baitshepi suggested to MmaMaipelo that ancestors’ names should not be called out in church. This exchange, which occurred in my absence, evidently irked MmaMaipelo to such a degree that she sent me a letter about it. She couched her argument in terms of how names perpetuate relationships between the ancestors and the living. I asked him after whom he is surnamed [o afana ka mang]. [This is the usual way of asking what a person’s surname is.] He told me whose surname it is, I asked him where he [i.e., the person who had had the name originally] is, and he told me that he was dead. I said to him, “If this is the case you should abandon your surname, since you are telling us that we should not speak to the dead people who are our parents.” I told him that “s p i r i t, f o l low t h e vo i c e ! ”

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in order for a person to know that those who are dead were once here, we have to learn about our own fathers, and only then will we believe that [the Apostle] John and others [whose words are written in the Bible] were once alive. For our part, we now have tumelo because we have seen our fathers who have left us and passed away.

In other words, the ancestors are not “dead” because their living descendants have their names. Denying the presence of ancestors is tantamount to denying one’s own name, and thus to doubting that the deceased, including those who wrote the Gospels, had ever lived. Ultimately, the authority of the words of the Bible rests on knowing that one’s name came from particular ancestors. Underlying this argument is the fact that a person’s surname (sefane) is the first name (leina) of a male ancestor, who may be referred to as the “owner of the name” (mong wa leina). Until recent years, a child was usually given his or her paternal grandfather’s first name as a surname. When a woman married, she took her husband’s surname, and her children took his father’s first name as their surname. Thus, when MmaMaipelo and her siblings (born during the 1930s and 1940s) were children, their surname was different from that of their mother and father. More recently, Batswana have tended to give children the surname of their mother’s husband, as opposed to the first name of his father, when their mothers marry. A person’s first name, likewise, often derives from relations among the ancestors and the living. Mothers, fathers, and grandparents may give children several first names: English names for use in school, Setswana ones bestowed in naming ceremonies at emergence from confinement, and Setswana nicknames reflecting character traits. Setswana names have meanings reflecting mothers’ expectations and experiences. A child may be named Obusitswe (he has been returned) if an older sibling has recently died, Bathusi (helpers) to convey a parent’s hopes for a caring child, Onalenna (you are with me) to thank God for the child, Kenalemang (who am I with) to reflect a need to consult the ancestors about sickness or other difficulties, or Matlakala (garbage) to discourage the ancestors from taking the child back (Mogapi 1991:18–19). A well-known proverb, “An evil name is a running sore” (‘ina lebe seromo), expresses the power of a name to shape a child’s character; an evil name will make a child disobedient and ultimately villainous. In addition, parents often give their children the first names of ancestors or living elders. This practice, known as go releela, is an important means of 192

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showing respect ( go tlotla) to the elders, ensuring that their names do not “die.” Although most Setswana names are not gender-specific, boys were always named after men and girls after women in the instances I documented of go releela in Old Naledi. First- or last-born sons are often named after their paternal grandfathers, while girls are commonly named after their maternal grandmothers or other female elders. Names have the capacity to reinforce marriages and to turn neighbors into kin. For example, an unmarried woman may give her spouse’s surname to her son as a first name, in order to “show respect to my affines.” A woman may name her child after a person who helped her during childbirth. Because MmaSeobo, the most senior elder of Baitshepi, helped MmaMaipelo’s niece Dineo to the clinic when she delivered her daughter, Dineo gave her daughter MmaSeobo’s own first name. Naming a child after an ancestor is thought to revive in the young the praiseworthy qualities of the deceased (cf. Beidelman 1974). The value of the practice of naming a child after a deceased elder, people say, is to “revive the dead person” ( go rudisa moswi ). Such children are taught to behave in a manner befitting their names, and in fact to identify themselves as the “owner of the name” in relation to others. “No one will scorn such a child,” I was told, “because it would be an insult to the ancestor’s name. If other children make fun of that name,” I was told, “the elders will be called [to punish the wrongdoer]!” In general, naming is a way of recognizing the care and blessings bestowed by particular parents, and of perpetuating such sentiments in the next generation by bestowing kinship connections upon children. Knowing that I was interested in this subject, church members asked Dineo’s five-year-old daughter who her children were. They told me that she had replied by listing the names of MmaSeobo’s children, since she is named after her. In short, there is a historicity attached to a person’s name, since it expresses relations among the ancestors and the living over time. Names tend both to reflect and build up sentiments of love on the part of all those involved—the named, the namer, and the owner of the name. MmaMaipelo told me that a deceased person’s name lives on in “streams of blood” (dinoka tsa madi) among his or her descendants. Streams are sources of life in an arid environment; a standpipe in Old Naledi may be called a “stream” (noka) in casual conversation. Thus, a person derives life from “streams of blood” coming from the ancestors. Ancestry consists of passing on blood and names to children, a point conveyed by the term for bilateral kindred, losika, which means vein. “The ancestors live in you,” MmaMaipelo told “s p i r i t, f o l low t h e vo i c e ! ”

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me, “both in your blood and in your name, and they help you because of your blood and your name.” Venerating ancestors (badimo) was a central element of the precolonial social and political order among Batswana. As Jean Comaroff points out (1985:82–83), kings (dikgosi) derived power from royal ancestors, whom they had to propitiate to ensure rain. Within extended families, senior men were responsible for making animal sacrifices on behalf of juniors on the graves of the badimo, so that the wrath of these men was particularly feared. However, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, missionaries and allied dikgosi attempted to transform ancestral veneration into prayers to the Christian God. During the colonial period, certain dikgosi became suspicious of sacrifices because local ancestors appeared a political threat, an alternative to the worship mandated by official churches (Landau 1995:26, 86). As Musa Dube shows (1999), the missionaries Robert Moffat and Alfred Wookey literally demonized the ancestors by translating the word “demons” in the Setswana Bible as badimo (cf. Volz 2008). Yet veneration of ancestors is an important element within many churches of the spirit in contemporary Botswana. Amanze (1998:190–93) documents a variety of understandings about relationships between God, the ancestors, and the afflicted. In some churches, ancestors are considered “saints,” to whom oxen and goats may be sacrificed, especially when a prophet determines that sickness is due to dikgaba or ancestral wrath. During sacrifices, the names of the ancestors of the sick may be called aloud to invoke their aid. Alternatively, the ancestors may be offered food to intercede with God; the spirit of the animal sent to the ancestors may plead for recovery on behalf of the sick; or the ancestors may be asked to “eat the smell of the offering” rather than afflicting the spirit of the sufferer. In each of these cases, Amanze’s discussion suggests, church participants entreat the ancestors by calling their names and giving them food. Apart from such church-sponsored rites, senior members of extended families routinely give offerings to ancestors during family gatherings at home villages over the Christmas holidays so as to entreat ancestral protection for the following year. A family whose senior members stay in a compound in Old Naledi adjacent to Baitshepi gathers in their home village of Thamaga, near Gaborone, at the New Year. The eldest woman is in charge of the ceremony, and gave me the following account. They slaughter a cow—if there is not enough money, they may use a goat instead— and roast its stomach and kidneys in a fire, over which they sprinkle salt, sugar, and sorghum meal. Everyone who is to receive the protection or shel194

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ter of the ancestors walks around the fire. Then they brew beer, which they bring the following day together with the burnt offering to the cemetery where her parents are buried, and place the food at the head of the graves, entreating ( go rapela) them for their care. One of this woman’s granddaughters is a Pentecostalist Christian, whose church opposes sacrifices on the grounds that they constitute “ancestor worship.” The senior woman told me that the ancestors would “turn their backs” ( go huralela) on her since she refused to acknowledge their care, but that the sacrifice would be effective for those performing it. Baitshepi leaders refuse to make sacrifices or entreaties to the ancestors. Jesus, they say, was the last sacrifice. In December 1997, a few weeks before extended families would gather to make offerings to their ancestors, an elder in Baitshepi preached that no sacrifice would be effective without prayer, so that sacrifice might as well be abandoned in favor of prayer. She insisted that prayer be addressed only to Jesus; the ancestors are only to be thanked and “remembered” or “thought of.” MmaMaipelo, likewise, insisted that “my name has no power, only the name of Jesus has power.” Reverence for ancestors notwithstanding, people often fear the power and capriciousness of the deceased, since they have the capacity to kill their descendants through dikgaba, or by withdrawing their blessings and leaving them vulnerable to witchcraft (Ashforth 2000; Kiernan 1982b; H. White 2004). On one occasion, a young woman came to pray to Jesus with MmaMaipelo after having seen her own recently deceased older brother in a dream. In the dream, he told her that he was feeling afraid, and that he wanted her to accompany him. (On the other hand, some say that if they dream about deceased younger relatives, they just tell them to get lost: “Voetsek!”). Prayer to Jesus may thus counteract ancestors’ power to hurt the living. Allan Anderson (1993:32) shows that members of some churches of the spirit in Soshanguve, Pretoria, regard ancestors as “unfair, because they helped or harmed a person at will without warning.” Shona Zionists often identify ancestors who cause illnesses as “evil spirits” opposed to the Holy Spirit (Daneel 1987:233). In Baitshepi, the harm ancestors might cause seems to be neutralized by casting them as angels. Members call the names of angels in order not only to thank MmaMaipelo, RraMaipelo, and their ancestors for the care they have given, but implicitly to subordinate the ancestors to Jesus. In the process, they transform them from ancestors of the bishops alone into angels presiding over the entire congregation. The places where the ancestors are invoked are key to this transformation. Whereas graves are sites for “s p i r i t, f o l low t h e vo i c e ! ”

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offerings and entreaties to ancestors, Baitshepi members make ancestors into angels in church as they thank them by name before preaching about the Bible. In so doing, they do not take the ancestors’ names, but in a sense rename them, claiming them as “spiritual ancestors” as they show respect to the bishops. Especially in light of the reluctance of Baitshepi leaders to attribute illness to dikgaba, the angels of the church appear benign. The most dramatic transformation of MmaMaipelo’s connections to her ancestors occurred during her calling in 1982. When she first heard the voice, it called her by name in her sleep, and then told her, “Arise and go! [Tsoga o tsamaye! ]” Hearing her name moved her body. She arose and went for days without food, telling people to repent. During this time, she told me, the voice “taught me everything I know about spiritual things.” About a week after she was first called, the voice instructed her to go from Old Naledi to her family’s fields in the Kgatleng District where she had lived as a child. She could not be restrained, and spent an entire day walking swiftly under the influence of the spirit after her husband drove her part of the way. MmaMaipelo associated her family’s settlements at the fields, especially the now-abandoned compound that her parents built, with her ancestors. “I think that the voice told me to go to the fields,” she told me, “so that I could inform my ancestors that I was now a messenger [morongwa] of God.” A morongwa is literally “one who is sent.” As a child is sent on errands by his or her parent’s voice, Apostles are sent by Jesus or God to preach. As a person thus “sent”—set in motion from place to place—by Jesus, MmaMaipelo was no longer exclusively under her ancestors’ protection or shelter. She would henceforth pray only to Jesus, thanking her ancestors as angels but no longer entreating them with sacrifices. Maipelo summarized this transformation in telling me that the voice his mother heard was that of her own deceased father, who had been a diviner. “His voice told her things—for instance, about the Bible and the evils of Setswana medicines— that he would never have said in life. That is how we know that the voice did in fact come from God.” In addition, MmaMaipelo’s calling transformed her standing within her bilateral kindred from a child to an elder, a person to whom juniors owe thanks for causing them to hear God’s word, in much the same sense that ancestors are owed thanks by their descendants for distributing blessings. A substantial number of people in her own and RraMaipelo’s extended families became committed members of Baitshepi. These include MmaMaipelo’s mother, younger sister, younger sisters’ daughters, and a few 196

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daughters of other siblings. RraMaipelo’s MBW and MBS joined as well. Many of these people were raised from childhood as church members, while some joined as a result of disagreements with other kin. Even those siblings and cousins of MmaMaipelo who do not belong to the church recognized her authority, and showed deference in family councils held at funerals. A different kind of transformation involving ancestry appears to occur within Twelve Apostles. Men in Twelve Apostles explain that knowing that the person is the spirit or voice dwelling in the house of the flesh is crucial for getting into “heaven” after death. Given that “heaven” is a man’s semen, salvation means being reborn in the flesh of another, in accordance with John 3:7, “you must be born anew.” If you have not understood that God is the word that dwells in the flesh, you will not reenter flesh; instead you will become a “ghost” (sepoko) giving rise to illnesses such as malaria or AIDS. According to Twelve Apostles teachings, writes Amanze (1994:297–98), A person is born with a new flesh joined with a soul which was looking for a body. The soul enters into one of the closest or nearest relatives depending on the intensity of love between the deceased and the relative in question. There will come a stage when the soul will come into being in a new flesh when a child is born to that person. People who have not yet embraced Christ live and die in darkness but may one day be baptized in one person—a niece or brother or sister. When the Apostle gives the seal of the Holy Ghost to new members he calls all the souls whose relatives are there receiving the Holy Ghost. He then baptizes them in an unknown name.10

My own lessons at Twelve Apostles never proceeded far enough for it to be made explicit to me why a person may be born anew to a particular relative, nor did anyone tell me that an ancestral spirit had entered the flesh of his or her child. Yet it seems clear that Twelve Apostles leaders have developed a theory of reincarnation based on the popular understanding that a child “revives” an ancestor upon receiving his or her name. Moreover, according to Amanze’s account, Twelve Apostles leaders appear to give new names to the ancestors of those they baptize, a practice reminiscent of renaming ancestors as angels in Baitshepi. The wives of Twelve Apostles officials routinely engage in a form of spirit mediumship after the pastor’s sermon. They are suddenly “entered by the “s p i r i t, f o l low t h e vo i c e ! ”

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spirit,” whereupon they rise from their seats on the platform behind the pastors and speak tearfully, pausing between each word. On one occasion, the wife of the deacon repeated in Setswana, “I . . . see . . . the . . . servant . . . the . . . way . . . is . . . narrow . . . the . . . door . . . is . . . closed,” for about ten minutes. It was later explained to me that she was speaking in the voice of a recently deceased pastor who had not conducted himself properly, so that although he possessed knowledge, he was denied access to heaven. Instead, he had become a ghost. Framing understandings of dikgaba in their own terms, Twelve Apostles members make clear that young children are particularly vulnerable to such ghosts. When this occurs, Twelve Apostles pastors do not perform a sacrifice but rather tell the spirit in the name of God to leave. “The name of God has power,” the men told me. “If you are a spirit you should not enter someone without permission.” Again, the name of God counteracts the dangers inherent in ancestry. Twelve Apostles members sometimes incorporate nonchurch ancestors into church practices. A young woman called Kgomotso from the village of Tlokweng explained that her “parent,” a woman who is her immediate superior in Twelve Apostles, routinely interprets her dreams. After the death of her mother, who had not been a member of any church, Kgomotso had dreams in which she saw her lying in the yard with dirt in her nose and mouth, or standing in the doorway with a grotesque grimace on her face. According to Kgomotso’s parent, such dreams signified that her mother was having difficulty getting into heaven. “We don’t want her to be looking like this. She should be at a party looking happy and eating meat.” Kgomotso had failed to go to Twelve Apostles for several months previously, and attributed her mother’s failure to arrive in heaven to her own lack of discipline. The Twelve Apostles’ prayers, and Kgomotso’s subsequent attendance, succeeded in putting an end to the unpleasant dreams. Thus, Twelve Apostles leaders may call the name of God to stymie improper ancestral intervention, and yet pray to assist the spirits of nonmembers to enter heaven.

Spiritual Children So far, I have concentrated on how names express a range of connections among the living and the ancestors and explored how acts of calling names aloud may transform such ties. Ancestors who hear their names called aloud, in thanks or prayer, may come to the sound of the voice, or sometimes be sent away by those calling aloud the name of God. At this point, I focus more explicitly on the meanings of asking, so as to further characterize the 198

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relationships involved in hearing different kinds of requests. Like the relationships of angels to church members, ties among “spiritual children” and their “spiritual parents” in Baitshepi depend on a certain kind of asking by name, by which particular people are brought to the sound of the voice. MmaMaipelo once illustrated the meaning of love to me by calling out “Gladys!”—the name of a young woman staying in her compound— whereupon Gladys appeared in the bedroom, bringing tea. MmaMaipelo explained that Gladys’s spirit, that is, her name, had preceded her flesh to the bedroom, and that Gladys had come with food out of the love she had for her spiritual parent. “The flesh follows the spirit,” MmaMaipelo explained, “which loves or desires [go rata], wants [go batla], and acts [go dira].” Again, the voice is a full-body phenomenon, in that calling and hearing bring people physically from one place to another. “Spiritual children” like Gladys have love, explained MmaMaipelo, unlike beer drinkers, who will come to a yard in large numbers for drink but not to hear the word. This conversation made me reflect on how forms of giving and asking are related to the act of calling names, and to the remaking of kinship ties among speakers and hearers. In an insightful article on the “spirit of asking” in Botswana, Deborah Durham (1995) demonstrates that in a wide variety of requests—including playful bantering among friends, serious demands for support among kin, and fund-raising on the part of village councils—people pay much attention to their relative capacity to demand or to deny. Durham argues that the act of asking is as important as exchanges of material goods to everyday negotiations of equality and hierarchy, especially since no item is usually expected in response to playful requests. She illustrates bantering requests typical among friends (ditsala) as follows: In a fairly prototypical example of one of these interchanges, a group of young women would encounter an acquaintance while walking downtown. After greetings, which introduce all meetings in Botswana, the acquaintance might demand of one of the women, ‘buy me some bread in town, I am starving’. And then be told, ‘ao! This money here, it is my aunt’s money and I must bring her some meat’. ‘Then after that you will buy me bread’. ‘Look—look at this money. Two pula! It is not enough, it is too little, we are hungry at home’. ‘Where is your money? You must return home and get some. Let us go now’. ‘We are walking to town now, I want to make a phone-call, it is too far’. ‘Ao! You are refusing! I will come to your house tonight to receive my bread’. ‘All right’. Laughter, anger, indignation and frowning indifference colour the various statements. (1995:113) “s p i r i t, f o l low t h e vo i c e ! ”

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Durham points out that such playful requests and refusals create footings of equality among friends, in that each woman may refuse what the others ask without causing offense. By contrast, the answers people give to the serious demands made by relatives or lovers carry a great deal of weight, since they express recognition of mutual dependence or, alternatively, outright denials of the legitimacy of a person’s needs. Relations of friendship or kinship are thus created in part through the playful or serious ways in which requests are made and answered. I was often struck by the contrast between the bantering requests, such as those Durham describes, that I received from nonchurchgoing acquaintances and the very different kinds of asking in which committed church members engaged. Among church members, even young women of equivalent age, bantering seemed to me to be far less frequent than among nonchurchgoers I knew. I surmise that refusals, even playful ones, among Baitshepi church members are dangerous in light of the emphasis they place on having love for one another and on hearing one another’s words. Denying a request might imply scorn, especially if one were to say to another playfully (as in Durham’s account), “You are refusing!” The phrase “refusing to hear” implies disobedience and wilfulness, especially of a child in relation to a parent. “You’re refusing to hear” can be said seriously or mildly. Telling a child that he or she “refuses to hear” may constitute a serious rebuke, or alternatively an expression of affection and resignation (as when a young mother ruefully remarked “he refuses to hear” after her oneyear-old son knocked over a wheelbarrow). As for church leaders, they commonly attribute particular people’s lack of tumelo to their “refusal to hear” the word of God. If church members were to accuse one another, even playfully, of refusing a request, they would risk calling into question their willingness to give love. MmaMaipelo often told me that she did not like to “ask for” ( go kopa) things, and that many church members followed her example. Instead, she let people know when she needed something, and if they “heard” her they would buy it for her. For instance, Violet, the church elder who owns a dressmaking factory, consistently cared for her with gifts of money during emergencies. By contrast, church members say that their “fleshly kin” in their extended families are always demanding things of them. “If you give them five of something, they will ask why you didn’t give them six. They’re always jealous of what you may be giving to others.” Improper asking commonly nourishes witchcraft suspicions, because asking is an important means by which people become aware of the sources of their well-being. 200

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Women who continually express dissatisfaction with the things they have demanded from their kin are liable to be suspected of witchcraft (R. Werbner 2004b), as are women whose pride has been offended by kin who never ask them for anything (Ashforth 2000:178–79). “I’m living well now,” MmaMaipelo told me, “because the love I give has brought people to me. I don’t go about saying, ‘Mothusi, buy me some sugar!’ ” Mothusi is the name of a pastor in Baitshepi, RraMaipelo’s MBS, who stayed in a room in the church compound for many years while working as a builder. Yet MmaMaipelo would routinely call other people’s names in order to make requests, in particular those of Gladys and other women staying in the church compound, asking them to bring food, water for bathing, and much else. Whereas Mothusi worked for a wage, most women staying in the church compound during the 1990s did so only intermittently. MmaMaipelo, who received money from her husband and from Violet, would give them cash to make purchases for the yard. Gladys, for instance, was from a very poor family in Molepolole; she had a chronic eye ailment, which improved when MmaMaipelo prayed for her. She spent a number of years in the church compound without earning a wage, performing numerous tasks around MmaMaipelo’s yard. Thus, MmaMaipelo’s reluctance to ask Mothusi for things and her willingness to make requests of Gladys reflected the different ways in which they provided for one another. In calling Gladys by name to bring things, she treated her as her child, so that Gladys’s love consisted largely of her willingness to hear and be sent. On the other hand, MmaMaipelo’s refusal to call Mothusi to ask for things was a means of forestalling the jealousy liable to arise from unfulfilled requests, and also of emphasizing his own love in occasionally providing for her without being asked. In sum, everyday forms of calling and asking in MmaMaipelo’s yard helped to create a spiritual family whose members’ love and hearing took multiple forms. Church members’ reluctance to engage in bantering requests distinguishes their daily conversation from the usual pattern among friends, since to them even playful refusals may be dangerous. MmaMaipelo perceived her own unwillingness to ask wage earners for money as distinguishing the church leadership from “fleshly relatives,” who are apt to be jealous of one another if their demands are unmet. Yet those who had immediate and less immediate access to resources possessed different standings within this spiritual family. For young women staying in the church compound while earning little cash, hearing their names called aloud moved them from place to place on errands. Given the close identification between “s p i r i t, f o l low t h e vo i c e ! ”

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childhood and being sent, it is not surprising that these women were most likely of all members to identify themselves as spiritual children of MmaMaipelo. In fact, I heard much less talk about spiritual children once Maipelo, who was uncomfortable with the unrelated women staying in the compound, gained a greater say over who could live there after his father’s death in 1997. Clearly at stake in all of these forms of asking and calling names are the qualities of people’s love for one another. People assess one another’s love by perceiving how they respond to requests, and by hearing how others make requests of them. Baitshepi’s arrangements authorize certain kinds of intersubjectivities among askers and hearers, while casting others as morally problematic. For example, it is right to thank ancestors, but not to entreat them; it was right for MmaMaipelo to let people know when she was in need of things, but not to ask for them; it was right for her to send a dependant woman on errands, but not to ask a wage-earning man in the compound to make purchases for her; it was usually not right for church members to make playful demands and refusals. Each of these styles of asking and calling names has the potential to signify tumelo in God. God may make his presence known much more directly and forcefully than is the case in these instances. Yet even when this occurs, at stake in believing in God are the qualities of speakers’ and hearers’ love for each other. o n b e l i ev i n g i n g o d

In 2005, when I returned to Botswana after a five-year absence, MmaMaipelo wanted to find out whether I believed in God. I had been complimenting her on the improved health of her niece (oZD) Botlhale, who had been bedridden for months but who had recently become well enough to do housework. In November 2004, Botlhale had been taken to the hospital by a Baitshepi elder. The hospital staff allegedly told Botlhale that she had no blood left in her body, and that she might as well make preparations for her funeral. Scandalized by these words, the elder brought Botlhale in the middle of the night to MmaMaipelo’s house, where MmaMaipelo encouraged her hard ( go kgothatsa thata), telling her that life and death are in the hands of God alone. “It’s God who molded [ go bopa] all the parts of your body, liver, lungs, and so on. God arranged that the food you eat would go to one place in your body rather than another. God is a healer who surpasses all other healers. You must not give up; you must just place trust in God.” 202

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Complimenting MmaMaipelo on the love she had been showing Botlhale, and assuring her that Botlhale had gotten better because of the encouragement she had been giving her, I asked MmaMaipelo for her opinion of the government policy instituted in 2004 mandating that all clinic attendees be offered an HIV test. She replied that doctors were doing well in encouraging people to take such tests, but worried that some people might “give up on life” upon receiving a positive result. “Life and death are in the hands of God alone. Even now I can’t tell what AIDS is. Sometimes people cough, and they say it’s AIDS. Sometimes they throw up, they call it AIDS, sometimes they get thin, and they call it AIDS. I encourage people to do as the doctors instruct, and I pray to God to give the doctors power to heal and to encourage the sick.” As usual, I thought, she’s accommodating official agendas while pursuing her own. “You haven’t changed, Mma,” I said. “Me?” She smiled and shook her head. “I know what God can do. “Sit down,” she continued. “There are some things about my calling that I never told you, but I told the congregation in 2003, and I think you ought to know too.” Unfortunately, I failed to ask her why she had told the congregation about the visions she went on to relate. However, after she passed away in 2006, I did ask her close friend MmaSeobo why she thought MmaMaipelo had decided to tell the congregation about them. MmaSeobo speculated that she had meant to give the congregation a warning, reminding them that God is present and has enormous power. During the previous years I had been with MmaMaipelo, she had avoided discussing these visions with me, in large part I think because it was painful to remember them, and very likely also because she was worried about my response to her words: When I was first called during September 1982 in Molepolole [the village of her affines], I heard a voice calling my name from outside the house. It called my name again, and then said, “Arise and go!” I went outside, and heard my name being called from a certain house in the village. When I came to that house, it turned out that it belonged to someone I knew from Old Naledi, but I didn’t know that she was staying there, and she had not been calling me. The voice told me to go to Old Naledi and call people to pray and repent. I walked around the streets crying out, “A great drought will come, the cattle are going to die, and there will be deaths!” I had no rest at all, because I kept hearing the voice calling my name from outside the house, and I was always rushing outside to see who “s p i r i t, f o l low t h e vo i c e ! ”

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was calling me. I kept hearing the sound of trumpets blowing. So I had no food, water, or sleep for seven days. On the sixth morning after I first heard the voice, after my husband had gone to work, I came out of the house. The sun was about there in the sky [indicating a point slightly above the horizon]. I turned around, and saw that the house was on fire. I shouted to MmaDineo to run and get the sewing machine out, since the house was burning. But when she came out with the sewing machine, I looked and saw that there was no fire after all. I went and rested under a tree in the yard. After some time, I felt as though a child’s head were resting on my shoulder, but there was no one there. I then went into the outhouse. As I sat there, I saw facing me the head of someone I did not know. It had no body, and [she sobbed with horror] it was on fire! Then I saw another head—it was my own, and I saw myself smiling and laughing. Then there was a third head—it looked all astonished and joyful, but I could not see it very clearly because I was dazzled by the great light coming from it. At first the light came from in front of me, then from the sides, then from behind me, and finally it pierced through me. And after all these passed, I saw a rainbow stretching across the space in front of me.

I asked her at this point what she thought the three heads signified. The first head, she said, was baptism by fire, the second her own joy in the word of God, and the third the glory of God. She also said that the burning house showed that her sins (dibe) were being taken away (ntshiwa) from her. The next day, the voice ordered me to my family’s fields. RraMaipelo drove me as far as the village of Oodi, and I walked the rest of the way. As I walked, I saw visions of people offering me food by the side of the road. When I got to my own house in my parents’ compound at the fields, I saw a woman about my own age walking about two paces ahead of me, who entered the house ahead of me. I asked her who she was, and she replied, “Mary.” “Mary, Mother of God,” I said to her, “help me!” She told me that there were three people in Molepolole trying to kill me, and that I must pray very hard. Then she asked for food. I left the house to find food, but returned to find her gone. But then I saw a vision of people dressed in what is now the church uniform, and I held in my hand a lere [the metal rod tipped with a small sphere that she held as a sign of her authority as bishop]. Then I heard a voice saying, “You have been forgiven.” The following day was when RraMaipelo helped to force me into the pickup truck that took me to the mental hospital in Lobatse, where they 204

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stuck me with needles. But when I returned to Old Naledi, I kept calling people to pray and repent, because there was going to be a great drought. It actually rained hard early that spring, and people laughed at me, saying, “MmaMaipelo is just a madwoman [setsenwa].” Some of them called me a witch. But the rains didn’t continue, and the ground dried up. That was when MmaSeobo and a few other neighbors came to pray with me. The voice told me that I should look in the Bible for a story about a rich man who lost everything, but who refused to deny God. MmaSeobo found the story of Job in the Bible. So she began to read the Bible to me, and we found in the Bible that the voice had also called other people, like Jonah, Jeremiah, and Isaiah.

MmaSeobo had attended a Catholic school as a child, so that she knew the Lord’s Prayer. This previous knowledge aside, she followed the instructions that the voice gave MmaMaipelo about how to pray. MmaSeobo had had pains in her throat for many years, but once MmaMaipelo prayed for her in 1983, the pains vanished for good. The voice called MmaMaipelo again in December 1982 but did not do so subsequently, although she had many prophetic dreams over the years afterward. I asked her what she thought was happening at the time of her calling. “I didn’t know. The voice told me, ‘I am your father.’ In Exodus it says that Moses heard the voice of God coming from the burning bush, saying ‘I am the God of your father.’ It’s up to other people to look at my works, and then decide who my works show has sent me. Read John chapter 10, verse 37: ‘If I am not doing the works of my Father, then do not believe me. But if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works.’ “Now, how do you feel? [O utlwa jang?]” was MmaMaipelo’s question to me. As a matter of fact I had felt my body go cold during her narrative. Her niece Dineo took one look at me afterward and said, “You have a lot of spirit [O na le mowa o montsi]. I can see it around your eyes”—referring to visual aspects of spirit about which I know little. The play of candle light and shadow in all-night Easter services; the illumination that church members provide to their deceased colleagues by holding lit candles as coffins are carried into and out of houses of mourning; prayers rendered on account of dreams and visions; and diviners’ discernments of persons’ shadowiness or seriti (R. Werbner 2007; P. Werbner 2009) indicate the range of efforts people make to authorize visual aspects of intersubjectivity. “I’m shivering, Mma,” I replied to MmaMaipelo. “All the things that God commands us to do are hard for us to do.” “s p i r i t, f o l low t h e vo i c e ! ”

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“They are hard!” MmaMaipelo agreed. “And most people don’t believe that the word of God can come from you,” she added, wiping a tear from her eye. “Tell me, do you believe that it was God who called me?” I hesitated. “I suppose you could say it was God,” I replied. “That’s just what the Mennonite missionaries said when I told them about this,” MmaMaipelo answered, clearly dissatisfied. “ ‘I suppose you could say it was God.’ ” Centrally at issue in MmaMaipelo’s insistence that I acknowledge the activity of God in the world was my feeling toward her, and what kinds of effects her words had on me. The key question MmaMaipelo asked me in order to assess whether I had tumelo in God was how her story made me feel. She was deeply concerned with whether I acknowledged God’s presence and God’s power to change a person’s life, but the reasons she was so concerned had to do with the qualities of my relationships to herself and to others. In asking me to say whether it had been God who called her, she was hoping that I would value “the reciprocity between the addresser and the addressee” (Jakobson 1990:96)—that is, her willingness to be “sent” by God, and to accomplish God’s work. If I had told her, as did some of her neighbors, that her visions had come from madness, or that her deeds were not God’s work, I would have been scorning her.11 More generally, she worried that I would not act with love for people if I did not believe in God. For MmaMaipelo, persuading people to believe in God was a way of shaping their sentiments toward herself and toward one another. “God is very strong, and we fear God greatly,” she and MmaSeobo admonished me, in some final words before I left for the airport at the end of a stay. “God gives you love and patience. If you believe in God and ask that you be healed, he will give you strength. If you hear the word of God, you will be able to repent and ask forgiveness from others. But if you refuse to believe in God, you will puff yourself up; if you’re rich and a poor person asks you for money, you will say, ‘Hey, why don’t you just go get a job?’ ” I wondered how a salaried wage earner might speak of the importance of believing in God and of love for others. I told Maipelo, who has a university degree and stable employment, that I imagined that most men in his position would say to themselves, “I’m self-sufficient [ke itekanetse]. Why should I bother about God?” Maipelo agreed with my assessment, and explained that what had made him understand the importance of God was seeing what happened to his parents once his mother had her calling. She had stopped smoking and drinking suddenly upon hearing the voice; 206

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he saw that God can change a person immediately. In reference to his own current situation, he continued: Most people don’t understand where wealth comes from. Many people try to strengthen themselves by going to Setswana doctors or by praying for money at one of the prosperity gospel churches. But there are two things that money cannot buy, that come from God alone: love and life. You can get a woman to stay with you by giving her lots of money, but if she doesn’t love you, all the money will eventually lead to jealousy and arguments. And life comes from God: God decides whether a child is a boy or a girl, and God decides when people will develop treatments for diseases such as leprosy, TB, and AIDS. Also, money can’t buy life: only God decides when you will die.

Maipelo’s references to love and life speak to ongoing predicaments rather than resolutions. As a wage earner with obligations to support numerous people, he has worried that his girlfriends have not really loved him, and that they have been more interested in their own security. Yet in 2006, he was paying P15,000 (about U.S.$2,500) per year for English-medium schooling for his six-year-old daughter, whose mother he had not yet married. “This is my child, my work in the world,” he told me in the course of our conversation about God. “I hope that she will think of what I have done for her—just as I remember how my parents struggled to put me through school in the 1980s, when a term of form 1 cost P3000.” Maipelo attributed his success to his schooling, and his schooling to his parents’ work on his behalf; I was struck that he did not mention his own hard work and discipline. When I raised this point with him later, he said that he did have to work hard, but that without the “supportive environment” his parents provided as a result of his mother’s calling, he never would have succeeded. “When you’re studying away from home, you should just be missing your parents, and not be always worrying about their fighting or drinking. In fact, I’ve been preaching to some of the poorer parents in Baitshepi, telling them that they have to allow their children time to study and not send them on errands during exam time.” He claimed credit for a number of passes among church members, including a very poor woman’s daughter who was going to university. Schooling for self-sufficiency has not led Maipelo to value self-discipline and self-determination over love, or to cast money earning as a precondition for love.12 Rather, for him, schooling has prompted reflection on the necessity for intergenerational love even as it has recast its terms. “s p i r i t, f o l low t h e vo i c e ! ”

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As for life: “The value of believing in God lies in going to heaven rather than hell when you die,” Maipelo told me. “In order to go to heaven, you have to have love for people and forgive them their debts [melato]. We must realize that God has instructed us that we are going to die, and that we have to make preparations—just as you bought a round-trip ticket from the States. If you say the Lord’s Prayer and claim to have forgiven other people’s sins but really have not, that’s a great blasphemy, because you’re not just talking to another person, you’re talking to God.” We shall see in the next chapter why preparations for death are so important, and how such preparations involve forgiving other people’s debts. For now, note once more that “talking to God,” even when distinguished from “talking to another person,” involves thinking about one’s relationships with other people, and about their own sentiments and intents.

c o n c lu s i o n s Leaders and ordinary followers in these [Zulu and Swazi independent] churches feel that they have indeed made a very decided break with their past, trying, through what they refer to as ‘Holy Spirit’ to drive out the evil spirits of magic and to temper the whims and demands of the departed. (Sundkler 1961:297) . . . it would seem to me that the alleged confusion between the ancestors and the Holy Spirit in independent churches is (or at least was) a storm in a teacup which has no real foundation. Quite to the contrary, many of the Spirit-type independent churches have challenged the ancestor cult with its orientation to the traditional spirit world by their message of the power of the Holy Spirit to liberate from the oppression of malevolent and capricious spirits that daunt the African person’s everyday life [sic]. (Anderson 1991:96)

The above excerpts from the works of missionary researchers Bengt Sundkler and Allan Anderson point to some abiding concerns within studies of Christianity in Africa. Sundkler and Anderson, it is clear, wish South African Christians to make a “very decided break with their past,” in that they would prefer converts to cease feeling ancestral influence over their well-being. These writers frame their respective arguments in terms of long-standing debates among missionaries and other theologically minded researchers about whether African Christians properly distinguish ances-

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tral spirits from the Holy Spirit (for a review, see Anderson 1991:74–99). These debates have been motivated by what Webb Keane (2007) identifies as a specifically Protestant purification agenda, according to which believers need to learn to distinguish between who possess agency (the Holy Spirit and humans) and who do not (ancestral spirits), so that they may act with self-determining freedom themselves. The Holy Spirit ought to “liberate” Christians from the malevolent and capricious demands of the deceased, so that they will no longer hear or respond to their requests. As a result, it is implied, believers will no longer feel subject to sicknesses and other misfortunes brought about by ancestral wrath, or shoulder the financial costs and social burdens of sacrifices (see Ashforth 2000; H. White 2004). To be sure, Christians in many parts of Africa possess a keen sense of the dangers inherent in ancestry, work the Holy Spirit so as to limit those dangers, and regard Christian commitment as a break with “the past.” Birgit Meyer shows that Ewe Pentecostalists in Ghana, “remembering in order to forget,” are repeatedly delivered from their past engagements with ancestral spirits, so that the perceived necessity of making a “ ‘complete break with the past’ often boils down to a break with one’s family” (1998:332, 329). Matthew Engelke (2004a) describes how prophets from the Masowe weChishanu Apostolic church in Zimbabwe prayed for a man named Gaylord whose misfortunes had been caused by spirits of people victimized by the witchcraft of his own great-grandfather. “[K]inship ties are used to articulate affliction: it was the misdeed of [Gaylord’s] great-grandfather that helped to bring about his predicament in the first place, and the weChishanu prophets were helping him move beyond all that” (2004a:99; see also Maxwell 1998). Engelke makes a persuasive case that “the analysis of religious rupture has been sidelined” (2004a:83) in studies of Christianity in Africa, in part as a result of the preoccupations of such missionary writers as Sundkler (1961) with whether converts were continuing to engage in traditional practices, including communication with ancestors. Yet Engelke follows Sundkler in framing religious commitment in terms of continuities and discontinuities with past patterns of thinking and acting. Engelke (2004a:106) quotes Joel Robbins (2003:230) in concluding, “There is value in simply recognizing ‘they are trying to change’ because narratives like Gaylord’s ‘give the lie to unsophisticated continuity arguments based on incautious judgments of similarity’ ” between practices carried out before and after conversions, or by Christians and non-Christians.

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A potential problem with theorizing the impact of Christian conversion in terms of continuities and discontinuities is that the approach risks conflating the historicity of believers’ sense of religious commitment with trajectories of historical change, much as missionary narratives themselves often do. Equally significant, in my view, is the unacknowledged influence of purification agendas, whose analytical consequence may be to foreclose the question of whether the object of Christian believers’ moral passion is to demarcate their individual subjectivities or, alternatively perhaps, whether they perceive God as reshaping their sense of how they feel about others, and of how others may feel about them. To the extent that the purpose of moral passion is presumed to consist of liberating the individual from the influence of other people’s words (e.g., Keane 2006), Christian moral sensibility is likely to be theorized in terms of provisional or total ruptures (i.e., continuities or discontinuities) with various forms of sociality conceived as interfering with self-determination. Bringing about such ruptures is indeed often the aim of specific kinds of conversion in Africa (see, e.g., the convincing account in Simpson 1998). In such cases, churches are likely to provide “an intermediary space for members to move back and forth between the way of life they (wish to) leave behind and the one to which they aspire” (Meyer 1998:339). Yet the common doctrinal emphasis on a new life in Christ must not be construed as overdetermining the kinds of moral passion involved in reconfigurations of ancestry, or in hearing the word. Bennetta Jules-Rosette describes conversion among Maranke Apostolics as “a powerful clash resulting from the shift from one realm of thought and action to another, a moment of specific shock” (1975b:135, emphasis in original; see also van Binsbergen 1991). Nothing could be more characteristic of such an experience of rupture with past habits and conduct than MmaMaipelo’s calling. Her calling profoundly altered her sense of herself (cf. Engelke 2007:152), transforming her from a beer seller whose yard was crowded with customers into a pray-er (morapedi ) who elicited God’s blessings on behalf of the afflicted while calling other people to pray and forgive as well. Nonetheless, neither MmaMaipelo nor other church members conceived of such reconfigurations of self as liberating them from the necessity to take into account other people’s requests, sentiments, and intents. Rather, they have authorized particular forms of intersubjectivity through a range of procedures including cleansing, dressing, drinking water, asking, and calling names. Each of these activities brings participants’ sentiments to bear on one another’s well-being and valorizes such pro210

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cesses in religious terms. For Baitshepi and Twelve Apostles members, ancestors may indeed be troublesome, so that church participants make efforts to reconfigure their connections to them through such methods as renaming them as angels, or thanking them while praying to Jesus. Their ideal, however, is not to liberate themselves from obligations to remember ancestors (or, for that matter, living kin), but to remake relationships of blessing. When God demonstrated his power to MmaMaipelo during her calling, the consequence was dramatically to recast her ongoing relationships with ancestors and other kin, rather than simply to break down those relationships or narrow their range. Rijk van Dijk (1998:176) shows that the name of an urban Malawian Born Again movement, Abadwa mwatsopano, means “being ‘born in the now’, ‘being born in the immediate present’—[conveying] a sense of estrangement from any participation in national projects of social memory.” These young Born Again Pentecostalists sought to deny the authority of the gerontocracy governing the Malawian state, claiming that the Spirit had made them into teachers while elders had become learners. By contrast, the discourse of being “born anew” among the Apostolic Christians I encountered appears to reflect their awareness of how other people’s love affects their own life chances. When speaking about being “born anew,” church members mean that their love has been renewed, not that they had made a complete break with past relationships.13 For instance, MmaMaipelo said that “spiritual children” were “born anew,” comparing them to small children who are like Jesus in that they are not offended by other people’s scorn. Lesego spoke of feeling “born anew” upon singing her hymns, which refreshed her love for others. Twelve Apostles members teach that a person with proper knowledge of God is “born anew” or reincarnated as the offspring of a relative whom he or she had particularly loved. These discussions of spiritual parents, children, and ancestors imply the possibility of being “born anew” repeatedly, to multiple sets of parents who provide care and love. This form of Christianity, in short, does not frame kinship solely as a domain of affliction, but rather as an object of and a set of idioms for efforts to inspire caregiving sentiments. More than “We are trying to change” (or for that matter, “We have not really changed”), Baitshepi members are saying, “We are trying to love.” Their sense of the importance and the difficulties of maintaining love motivates their endeavors to shape one another’s sentiments by means of the praying, teaching, asking, calling, and singing voice. Those endeavors in turn reflect certain presumptions about how words constitute relationships “s p i r i t, f o l low t h e vo i c e ! ”

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among persons, a sensibility summarized in the saying “The word does not return, only the finger does.” Because words have power to transform sentiments, bodies, and relationships, hearing the word of God provokes reflection on the sentiments and acts of those who speak it, as well as on one’s own. Hearing and speaking the word of God are ways of making other people’s words of God into one’s own words, so as to give and elicit love and blessings.

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“It Is All Right as Long as We Feel Sorrow” Care for and by the Dying

each year on september 29, Baitshepi members spend all night in church, observing the anniversary of MmaMaipelo’s walk to her family’s fields during her calling. At this “church conference,” leaders recall the founding of the church, promote members from one rank to another, announce the financial state of the burial society and the general church fund, and describe growth or decline in participation over the past year. It is a time for assessing the state of the church and occasionally airing grievances, for example about the use of funds. Toward the end of the 1997 conference, when dawn was breaking, MmaMaipelo gave a passionate speech in order, she later told me, to wake up those who were nodding off. She remarked that this was the first conference at which they had been without RraMaipelo, who had died the previous month, and about whom she had not yet had any dreams. She then reminded the congregation of Tebogo, “my evangelist,” who had died the previous May but had not been mentioned over the course of the night. “Truly I feel grief when I see the people of Baitshepi not considering that they too might lose their loved ones [baratiwa] soon. How many people here now will pass away before the next church conference? Remember, Dineo!” she exclaimed, clapping her hands before her eldest niece’s face.

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Do you imagine that what the Bible says are just fables? Most people who have not been called think so—they read about Jonah and Paul but do not take what they read seriously. It is as a person who had never known RraMaipelo would know of him if someone were to tell him about him, or show him pictures. That person would not really know RraMaipelo, never having heard his voice. But I know what it is to be called, and I know that everything that happens in the world is written in the Bible. Now, everything the Bible says about death is true. Each of us is going to die, and we must feel sorrow [ go utlwana botlhoko] and have compassion [ go tlhomagana pelo] for one another. I will soon follow my husband, I do not have many years left, but it is all right [ho lokile] as long as I know that we feel sorrow for one another, and repent while the flesh and spirit are still together.

MmaMaipelo drew the Sesotho expression “Ho lokile” (It is all right) from the hymn (Lifela tsa Sione 110) she sang in church during her husband’s illness and after his death: “That which you have lent me, when you say to return it, I will try to say: It is all right, it is all right!” I find it difficult to grasp the magnitude of the AIDS catastrophe—the devastation it has wreaked with appalling suddenness in Botswana, as elsewhere—through statistics alone. What can convey the relentlessness of death brought on by this epidemic? I must remind myself of Violet’s aunt, who lost each of her four daughters, one every other year, over a period of eight years; of MmaMaipelo’s shock that there had been nearly twenty funeral gatherings in her immediate neighborhood in Old Naledi during the single month of January 1998; of mortuaries running out of space for corpses; of remarks at a funeral in 2000 to the effect that death had become so commonplace that it was difficult to feel anything at all; and of the closing statement made by a pastor at a burial: “Our work here is done. Now let us return, for we must not neglect the sick.” When I returned to Botswana in 2005, I was hoping that people would speak about a significant decline in the number of deaths in light of the antiretroviral (ARV) therapy programs recently introduced by the government. There can be no doubt that the situation would be much worse in the absence of these treatment programs, yet the most MmaMaipelo could say was: “Maybe things are a little better.” One of the women elders of Baitshepi had, MmaMaipelo told me, lost three of her adult daughters (none of whom had attended the church) within the past year. “Three children in a single year. I tell you, I fear to look at her [ke tshaba go mmona]! I fear to 214

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look at her. But she comes to me saying, ‘Please console me!’ and I have to look at her with a cheerful face and assure her that the spirit has eternal life, and that she will be with her children again.” In the face of all this death, MmaMaipelo had to struggle to convince herself as well as others that there is hope in God. Hard as it was for her to do so, she always insisted on the necessity of believing in God. For what reasons do Baitshepi members perceive faith in God to be a matter of urgency under such circumstances? In contexts of severe illness and death, as in other situations I have described, tumelo is a method of orienting your sentiments toward other people in particular ways. Yet Christian believers’ motives for maintaining faith in God at times of death are not self-evident. A comparison between Baitshepi and fundamental Baptist churches in the American South helps to show how the imperative to sustain love underlies tumelo during the AIDS epidemic. Susan Harding (2000:3–4) relates how fundamentalist Baptists in rural Virginia set up a Christian haunted house, known as Scaremare, each Halloween. Those who enter the house view actors depicting dead and mangled bodies, and subsequently listen to a preacher who invites them to accept Jesus and receive eternal life. There is nothing peaceful or orderly about depictions of death in Scaremare; the scene displays death as arbitrary, and presents this arbitrariness to the viewer as an existential problem demanding resolution. Thus, the key question Reverend Campbell, a Baptist minister, asked Harding in order to evangelize her was “What if you died today?” (2000:51). What would happen to her soul? “Then he told me a story,” Harding continues, “of a man he buried a few weeks before who had choked to death on some food. Had no idea he would be sent out into eternity [Campbell said]. . . . Life is just an uncertain thing” (2000:51; italics in original). Baptist conversion hinges on compelling nonbelievers to recognize death’s arbitrary nature and convincing them that they need to be saved from a purposeless death. As Baptist converts become aware of the arbitrariness of death, they realize that their “sin natures” have made them lead purposeless lives (Harding 2000:45). Telling stories to the effect that Jesus died for you provides not only meaning but a sense of purpose (cf. Tomlinson and Engelke 2006:20–21) to both your life and your death; you learn to narrate your life’s purpose in terms of an “epic of each individual in the face of inevitable death” (Harding 2000:47). Deaths are particularly purposeful if they are sacrifices that enable others to live. Baptists tell how Jesus’ sacrifice saved all humanity, while also narrating deaths of believers as sacrifices “it is all right”

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demanded by God. Reverend Campbell told Harding of having killed his own son in an accident, and of telling God that he did not understand why he had taken his child from him. “And God didn’t speak with a voice that I heard in my ear but he spoke to my heart. He said, ‘Melvin, you know maybe you don’t understand what I’ve done at this particular time, but, can you accept it?’ And I said, ‘yes, sir, I can accept it’ ” (2000:52; italics in original). Harding reflects (2000:57) that Reverend Campbell told her this story so that she could believe that faith in Jesus allows a person to accept the death of one’s own child as purposeful, even if that purpose is unclear. Through telling stories about sin, sacrifice, and redemption, Baptists both pose and resolve the problem of death’s purposelessness. Once Reverend Campbell heard God ask him to accept the death of his child, he spoke to his wife Shelby. Now I went and shared it with my wife. I said, “Shelby,” I said, “God said all things would work together for the good to us because we loved him.” And she said basically the same thing I did, “Well, I don’t understand. This isn’t good.” But I said, “Yeah, but God said it is good.” And I shared with her, and when I shared this with her, she came of the same opinion. And we watched them close the casket on that little fellow and my, he was just super. I mean, he was almost my heart throb, you know, that was my baby. And yet he died in my arms. And yet I looked at God and I said, “Lord, I’m going to love you if you take my other son. I’m going to love you if you take my wife. I’m going to love you if you take my health, if you strip me of everything I’ve got, I’m going to love you.” (Harding 2000:52–53; italics in original)

The source of Reverend Campbell’s consolation—that is, his sense that there was a purpose behind his child’s death—is his conversation with God, about which he subsequently tells his wife. However important it is to him that Shelby share his sense of consolation, the moment at which Reverend Campbell is redeemed from feeling the arbitrariness of his child’s death occurs when God speaks to him, not when he shares the assurance of God’s purposes with his wife. Moreover, what consolation accomplishes, as far as Reverend Campbell is concerned, is to reinforce his love for God, not for Shelby. In her preaching at the church conference, by contrast, MmaMaipelo reminded the congregation of her experience of hearing the divine voice not in order to narrate the goodness of God’s purposes but rather to impress them with the special knowledge of suffering, as well as of the need for compassion, that she derived from her calling. Having suffered and 216

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been abandoned by her kin and neighbors during her calling made her understand both the necessity and the difficulty of feeling love for others. Unlike Reverend Campbell, whose sense of consolation derived from God’s speech to him, MmaMaipelo stressed that consolation depends on hearing words from other people. That is, her capacity to say and sing “It is all right” depended on hearing words which let her know that “we feel sorrow for one another.” Given that the movement of voice among participants’ bodies is supposed to create love within the church building, the absence of speech by and about the deceased in this place was troubling. Not having heard or seen RraMaipelo in a dream was a cause of some disquiet, suggesting the absence of his ancestral blessing. The silence about Tebogo at the church conference was particularly worrying to MmaMaipelo, because it revealed a lack of love among her own followers. We must realize, she urged, that each of us will soon lose a loved one, since only by bearing this fact in mind will we have compassion for one another. The alternative to accepting the inevitability of your own death, she later told me, is to go to a Setswana doctor for medicines to strengthen yourself. In so doing, you would not be loving others but yourself alone—and futilely at that, since God alone decides when our work (tiro) here in the world is finished. For Baitshepi members and indeed for many Batswana who wish to hear words of consolation at funerals, the primary purpose of consolation is to sustain love among survivors, rather than their love for God or their convictions of the goodness of God’s purposes. What bereaved people need to be redeemed from is not a sense of death’s purposelessness, but rather jealousy and resentment. For Batswana generally, speech implying that God had a purpose in causing death is liable to give offense. It is much less disruptive to attribute death to “the will of God” (thata ya Modimo) in a general sense than to risk implying that God has punished someone for promiscuity, hurting an elder’s feelings, or other transgressions. A Christian performance of death along the lines of Scaremare would be virtually unthinkable in Botswana, where the principal aim of preaching at funerals is to make survivors feel not sinful or frightened but resurrected, so as to diminish the sorrow and resentment in their hearts. (I conveyed my understanding of Reverend Campbell’s approach to consolation—and of how it differed from her own—to MmaMaipelo, explicitly telling her that I thought her purpose in consolation was to reconcile survivors to one another rather than to God, and she replied that I had grasped the matter correctly. “You’re really thinking,” she told me.) “it is all right”

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Yet if Reverend Campbell and other Baptists encounter and overcome difficulties in narrating the deaths of their loved ones as elements of a divine plan, MmaMaipelo and her hearers face no less difficulty “feeling sorrow for one another.” Preaching about the need for compassion reflects the difficulties in giving love at times of sickness, as well as in recognizing and valuing the love of particular caregivers. Within Baitshepi, tumelo in the context of sickness and death is a discourse on the terms of provision, dependency, and blessing. In making efforts to house the spirit and hear the voice when they or others are seriously ill, Baitshepi members imagine and reshape the qualities of their love for one another—especially the love (or its absence) with which women have or have not dedicated themselves to nursing. It is primarily women who devote time, money, and energy to house the spirits of the sick as they nurse them in their compounds; as they gather around them to pray; as they visit them in their yards or in the hospital; and as they provide for children left behind by the deaths of their parents. And it is primarily women who elicit words about dying in faith: not stories about sin, sacrifice, and redemption, but rather hymns with which the dying “speak to their God” and instructions by which they bless their caregivers. It has been difficult for Batswana in general to make one another feel and act with love at times of sickness because many have been finding it increasingly hard in recent years to undertake nursing labor for their kin, as obligations have mounted and resources have dwindled. One feature of the contemporary domestication of inequality in Botswana—that is, one way in which people experience in their domestic arrangements the inequalities brought about by the capitalist labor market—consists of the tensions that have arisen over the moral terms of intergenerational nursing care. Elders who are no longer “self-sufficient” wage earners have increasing difficulty commanding nursing care or monetary support from their grown daughters, who in many instances have migrated to cities where they are faced with the time demands of wage labor, child care, and nursing AIDS victims (Livingston 2003b). In the idealized past, the elderly gradually became frail with accumulated wisdom and spiritual power, retaining supervisory roles in productive activities such as plowing. Yet nowadays, mature women say that the stresses of wage labor make them suffer from “high blood” (madi a matona)—a diagnostic category overlapping with high blood pressure, stroke, and diabetes—when they are comparatively young. Such chronic and acute debilities force family members to question the grounds of intergenerational care among women, who are most 218

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responsible for carrying out the work of nursing.1 In general, “older women increasingly strive to reinforce their daughters’ sense of responsibility and care-giving ethos as they anticipate requiring that care themselves” (Livingston 2007a:178; see also Bruun 1994; Ingstad 2004). In helping to define young adulthood as the period of productivity and seniority as one of retirement and dependency, the capitalist labor market has intensified women’s awareness of how their chances of receiving or providing nursing labor hinge on their sentiments toward particular kin. In this chapter, I explore how the perceived importance of “feeling sorrow” in the time of AIDS likewise reflects the attention women and men pay to possibilities of receiving and giving care as they anticipate their own and other people’s deaths. As for the elderly, it can be difficult for the sick to draw on relatives’ nursing care. To one degree or another, to be a sick person (molwetsi ) is to lack “self-sufficiency” and thus to be vulnerable to neglect by those who can or must direct their resources elsewhere. When younger adults become seriously ill themselves, they are bound to pay attention to the qualities of certain people’s love: their mothers’ love, the love of kin and friends in their age cohorts, and their own love as well. In so doing, they too reflect on the material and emotional burdens involved in nursing labor, and on the possibilities that particular women’s caregiving sentiments will affect relationships over the long term. “Long ago” (bogologolo), MmaMaipelo’s niece Botlhale (see chapter 4 above) told me several times, “we young people [basha] did not visit the sick as we do now. Visiting was something our elders did, because it was the elders who were ill.” AIDS has given rise to novel configurations of caring work among young women, and to new imperatives for managing the impact of their sentiments on the well-being of others. Such forms of caring work represent efforts to domesticate inequality in the other sense I have suggested: to comprehend social inequalities in moral terms arising from housing activities—such as nursing, visiting, and praying—and in so doing to mitigate the consequences of inequality. Indeed, in insisting that we grasp that we are all dying and hence must care for the sick if we wish to receive care ourselves, MmaMaipelo articulated a view of personal capacity and obligation very much at odds with the ideology of “selfsufficiency.” Rather than valuing persons in terms of their ability to earn money, or equating care with willingness to provide cash, MmaMaipelo’s preaching reflected the broad attention that the AIDS pandemic has directed to younger women’s caregiving sentiments and nursing labor—as well as to the need for dying people themselves to love their caregivers and “it is all right”

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survivors. In some respects, the pandemic may even have reconfigured intergenerational blessings, in that the frailty of AIDS victims may endow them with a certain spiritual potency comparable to that of elders. For example, Baitshepi members speak of tumelo in God when they are sick as a spiritual exercise compelling them to ensure that they do not foster jealousy among their caregivers or further injury to themselves. I remarked to Botlhale, who was bedridden intermittently from early 2004 until her death in September 2005 at the age of thirty-nine, that it must be burdensome (bokete) to be sick. She agreed, explaining that as a sick person she must assure all her visitors that God’s power will heal her, lest they feel pain (botlhoko) and communicate their pain back to her when she sees it on their faces. Above all, she went on, “I have to make sure I don’t feel resentment [dingalo] against anybody. For instance, I mustn’t say to myself, ‘How come I heard so-and-so’s voice in the yard outside but she didn’t come in the house to visit me?’ I’ve got to believe her when she says she thought I was asleep, and forgive her. Otherwise there will be jealousy.” Botlhale spoke of the capacity of her visitors’ sentiments to affect her pain, and of her own obligation to avoid resentment, in terms reflecting the logic of dikgaba, the anger or sorrow of an elder. Even as Botlhale’s fears about not being visited reflect sick people’s vulnerability to abandonment, her comments show that it is important not to offend people who are frail, and for the frail themselves to avoid resentment, because the power of their hearts can cause injury.2 By the same token, the importance of “leaving instructions” to caregivers increasingly rests on the capacity of dying persons’ hearts to bequeath love to their parents as well as to children. At the same time, Botlhale’s remarks about visiting reflect preoccupations with questions of where—that is, in whose houses—the sick are nursed. Along with their increasing participation in wage labor, the work young women devote to nursing and to visiting AIDS victims tends to focus their own and their relatives’ attention on their daily movements from one place to another, as well as on the constraints they face in caring for particular persons. One has to have some access to money in order to provide proper nursing love, yet familial disputes over caregiving center not only on cash outlays but on who has labored for whom in particular places. Ideally, nursing and praying communicate the love of those who are able to “rise to their feet” to the less mobile bodies of the sick—and in so doing induce sick people to recognize caregivers as their mothers. Refusing to nurse or to be nursed in a particular house may be tantamount to a denial of such relationships. After discussing how AIDS has brought about a shift in 220

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Baitshepi practice from healing to ensuring proper deaths, I turn to the ways in which government antiretroviral treatment programs have engaged with popular caregiving imperatives, albeit in partial and contested fashions. Evidence showing that women are more likely than men to volunteer for HIV testing (Steen et al. 2007) may reflect men’s and women’s divergent expectations and experiences involving nursing and child care in their houses. n u r s i n g a s a h o u s i n g ac t i v i t y

If, according to MmaMaipelo, the ability to feel and act with compassion now depends on grasping the certainty of death, others’ remarks indicate doubts about the possibility or desirability of feeling sorrow about every death. At one point in late 1997, I heard Dineo remark off-handedly to another church member, “You know, there are so many deaths these days, but most of them don’t really make me feel much at all. The only one which made me look back suddenly [ go gadima] was that of RraMaipelo.” She proceeded to name a few other relatives—her own mother, MmaMaipelo, and their elderly mother—whose deaths would make her “look back” and “think too much” about her sorrow (see chapter 6), but in response to my question as to whether she had felt sorrow when fellow church members like Tebogo had passed away, she replied, “Not too much. I thought, ‘Too bad,’ and that was all.” It later occurred to me that the people whose actual or anticipated deaths Dineo said would cause her most sorrow were those parents (her M, MM, MoZ, and MoZH) in whose various compounds she had been cared for as a child, and where she was then caring for them. Although they expressed entirely different feelings, Dineo and MmaMaipelo both spoke on the premise that powerful sentiments arise from caring for the sick in a given yard. Dineo said frankly that she would feel sorrow mainly about the deaths of those she had cared for in a compound, whereas MmaMaipelo in effect urged her congregation to generalize such sentiments of sorrow and compassion to those church members for whom they have not provided in such immediate fashion. In her speech, MmaMaipelo implied that it was particularly incumbent upon herself to extend the care she gave to her husband during his illness to all church members. As the parent of the entire church, she had to feel sorrow for all. Even so, she too had difficulty feeling strong sentiments on behalf of those whom she had not helped to nurse either in her own compound or in others she “it is all right”

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visited regularly. In itself, this difficulty was often (but not always) a cause of sorrow for her. In conceptualizing care for the ill as a housing activity, it is necessary first to take into account their physical immobility. Being a “sick person” (molwetsi ) means that you are relatively immobile and incapable of work, so that others must work for you. A person who is sick stays ( go nna) in a compound, lying on a bed or on a mat outdoors, or else is laid down (go robadiwa) on a hospital bed. In everyday talk, people greet one another with the polite question “How have you risen?” The usual reply is simply “We have risen.” Saying “We have not risen”—in effect, we are immobile— implies a death in the family. In the middle of the night preceding Easter Sunday, Apostolics stream out of their churches into the streets of Old Naledi, waking the neighbors with their joyful shouts “The Lord is risen!” In many instances, these church members had attended burials the previous morning. Nursing the sick is hard work. People say that it is very difficult, because the sick are irritable, they refuse to eat most foods, and they complain when they have to be moved. You have to take them to the clinic, bathe them, cook for them, feed them, give them water to drink, turn them over on their beds, and accompany them to the latrine. In addition, treating sickness demands very substantial resources. When RraMaipelo’s prosperous cousin was ill, the cousin’s wife devoted a year’s profits from his store and the proceeds from the sale of ten cattle to pay Setswana healers. Again, a woman whose primary source of income was renting out houses on her plot in Old Naledi for P300 per month told me that in order to treat chronic pains in her breast, she had spent over P350 on herbal medicines, P300 on pills from the pharmacy, and another P300 on expensive “foods with vitamins” that the doctors at the hospital suggested, including fish, liver, and chicken. When asked who has been a sick person’s nurse (mooki ) or caregiver (motlhokomedi ), people give very specific answers, mentioning those responsible for the day-to-day needs of the sick, and the dates when a person became a molwetsi and needed to be nursed. Nursing the ill is primarily women’s work; men may take care of other men, but never of women other than their wives, whereas women may take care of both men and other women. Rather than attending to the bodies of the sick, men’s care of the ill usually consists of providing resources necessary for food, for treatments by Setswana doctors, and for transport to and from clinics. People want to be nursed in places where they will be properly cared for, because the sentiments of those who stay in a yard with sick persons have 222

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a direct impact on their welfare. Nursing is often a semi-public affair, focusing the attention of the sick themselves, their immediate caregivers, other relatives, and inquisitive neighbors on the question of who “feels sorrow” for whom, and thus on the issue of how and by whom decisions are made to care for the ill in particular places. In Old Naledi, renters with close ties to plotholders are sometimes cared for in their yards with the help of relatives from home, as was the case during Tebogo’s illness. The leaders of the Holy Sabbath Apostolic Church in Old Naledi cared for a renter who was not even a member of their church, since “there are just boys in the family, you can’t count on them for anything.” In some instances, sick people express a desire to be taken away from a yard where they are being neglected. For instance, the head of a ward in Tlokweng told me that his mother and brothers had scorned his father during his final illness in the early 1990s.3 He returned from a trip to find his father covered in filth and lice. His father had said to him, “Move me away from here, I don’t have a caregiver.” The son took his father to his own yard, where his wife cared for him. The expression “to move away” ( go fuduga) usually refers to the permanent relocations associated with marriage. By asking to be moved away, the father made clear that his marriage was over. He then gave instructions to his son: “Don’t bring me back to your mother’s yard for burial. I don’t want to marry her again.” The sick suffer in places where people are scorning them; indeed, they are likely to die because they cannot leave on their own volition. Thus church leaders are often suspected of bewitching people they have treated, especially those they have nursed in their yards. It is absolutely essential for church members to attend their funerals so as to limit insinuations of witchcraft. People view hospital care through the same evaluative lens— that is, in terms of whether the sick are being given love in particular places—and frequently do not like what they see. Although clinics are always crowded with people seeking treatment, there is a great deal of ambivalence about the care they receive. Before the introduction of ARV medications, there was little hope that hospital medicines would do more than temporarily limit pain. People are often reluctant to commit the sick to the hospital, since the overworked hospital staff has a very poor reputation for scorning their patients. Almost any casual discussion of care at Princess Marina Hospital precipitates great indignation about the sentiments of manurse, the pejorative popular appellation for the nurses. “They’re too lazy to wash the patients. It’s their job, but they leave it to us to come and do it unless they know that there will be an inspection. And they’re always “it is all right”

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scolding the sick.” In addition, a person lying in a hospital ward is surrounded by the discouraging sights and sounds of severe illness. “The only reason to go to the hospital is if the pain becomes unbearable,” I was often told. Sick people must never be left entirely in the hands of the hospital staff. Each afternoon before visiting hours at Marina, there is a long line of people at the doors carrying water for bathing the sick, along with more nourishing food than the hospital provides. Young women’s whereabouts as they nurse the sick are subjects of much concern and evaluation. For instance, during July 2005, MmaMaipelo’s niece Dineo, who was staying in the church compound in Old Naledi (in rooms E and F in figure 3), was caring for an unrelated Baitshepi member in confinement with her new baby, and at the same time nursing her bedridden and increasingly emaciated cousin Botlhale. MmaMaipelo had by this time moved away from Old Naledi, and she had given Botlhale her old sitting room (room I in figure 3)—for which, she made a point of telling me, she was not charging rent while Botlhale was sick and unable to earn money. The old sitting room was now crowded with Botlhale’s possessions and strewn with medications. When Botlhale expressed a wish to be nursed by MmaMaipelo in her new house, MmaMaipelo arranged for another church member, who owned a car, to transport both Botlhale and Dineo. Dineo subsequently traveled twenty kilometers by kombi in each direction every day to take care of both Botlhale and her church colleague who remained in confinement in Old Naledi, together with her own children at school there. Neither Dineo nor many of the other young women in Baitshepi who have cared for the ill had wage employment while doing so; Dineo was in effect drawing on her cousin Maipelo’s salary in order to undertake the work of nursing and confining. Women thus tend to evaluate one another’s nursing care in light of their willingness to labor for particular people in particular houses, rather than in terms of how much money they are earning. On the other hand, when another of MmaMaipelo’s nieces found wage work as a sales clerk in Gaborone, MmaMaipelo stopped routinely sending her to the village of Molepolole to look after her own elderly uncle (HMB), who was staying only with renters in his compound. The uncle was suffering from high blood pressure and general frailty but was not undergoing an acute crisis, and MmaMaipelo seemed to feel that frequent phone conversations would suffice to show concern. In general, the ever-growing demands on women’s nursing care, as well as their anticipation that they will need care themselves, increasingly lead 224

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them to reflect on the circumstances under which their kin will “feel sorrow” for them, and on the possibilities that unrelated people will become their kin by caring for them at times of crisis. Thus, the day after Tebogo’s funeral, MmaMaipelo said to me, “You see how I’m the parent of the children of the church, rising to my feet [ke ema ka dinao] in order to nurse and console them when they are suffering?” In this context, “rising to one’s feet” connotes energetic activity, moving about for the good of others who have been immobilized by sickness or grief. Pity for orphans is sometimes expressed by reference to the absence of parental care during future illnesses: “One day when she is sick she will miss her father. She will say to herself, ‘If only he could be here now to get me something, make my bed, or help me to the toilet.’ ” The very common rhetorical question “If I don’t have children, who will care for me when I’m sick?” expresses the presumption that all people who do not encounter a sudden death will be ill or infirm at some point in their lives, and that having children makes it more likely that someone will “rise to their feet” for them. The fact that women do most of the work involved in taking care of the sick and elderly is one reason that it is important to have a daughter who will look after you in your old age. Those who have no parents to rise to their feet or children to be sent on their behalf are most unfortunate. Lesego once explained the importance of having children in the context of widespread illness—even fatal sexually transmitted illness—by stressing the predicament of the sick or elderly who have no children. “You can’t ask someone else’s child to run errands for you if you’re sick. You will make her mother jealous that she is taking care of you instead of her.” The broader implication is that you find out who your parents or children are by seeing who cares for you, and where, when you are ill. In “rising to her feet” on behalf of Baitshepi members, MmaMaipelo’s aim was to house otherwise unrelated people, transforming them into spiritual parents and children by causing them to imagine one another’s love in particular ways. Such efforts are not always successful, as was the case during the illness of a young woman named Mandu, a distant cousin of RraMaipelo’s. Mandu was childless in her mid-twenties, and I heard hints that she had been sleeping with multiple partners in an effort to become pregnant, hoping that she was not infertile. She had been a committed member of Baitshepi, lived in the church compound for a number of years, and participated very actively in the youth group, but she abruptly disappeared from church in March 1997. After a few months, word came to MmaMaipelo that Mandu “it is all right”

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was hospitalized at Princess Marina Hospital. MmaMaipelo told me that Mandu’s mother had not informed her that clinic workers had decided to take her to the hospital until almost a week after the fact. In response to my inquiry about her illness, MmaMaipelo seemed fairly indifferent: “They say she’s having trouble breathing [Gatwe o hupetse].” Mandu was being nursed by her older sister in Gaborone West, but not properly, MmaMaipelo implied, since she was always leaving her alone to go to work—in other words, she lacked a non-wage-earning caregiver. At any rate, MmaMaipelo felt no need to send the youth to visit her in the hospital. Occasionally, some of the youth would say prayers for Mandu in church, but the elders never did so. One of Mandu’s cousins speculated that she had left the church on the insistence of her mother, who had preferred that she not stay in a Baitshepi compound during her illness. This would imply that Mandu’s mother suspected the church of bewitching those who stay in their yards, a suspicion that would help to account for MmaMaipelo’s lack of involvement. Mandu’s funeral in August 1998 coincided with MmaMaipelo’s emergence from mourning the death of her husband, a labor-intensive occasion, which all Baitshepi members were exhorted to attend. The neighbors speculated that MmaMaipelo would send some of the youth to Mandu’s funeral, but in fact no one from Baitshepi went. MmaMaipelo told me frankly that because none of the family had come to inform her of the death, “we’re not forced to go to her funeral.” In striking contrast to the passionate words church members spoke and sang at Tebogo’s funeral, remembering her in order to give up, Botlhale said to me with apparent unconcern, “Mandu has left us.” Mandu was no longer a child of the church, having in effect disclaimed MmaMaipelo as her parent. Yet seven years later, when Botlhale was herself sick, she said to me, as we looked at some old photographs of Mandu singing with the church choirs, “I’m remembering [ke gopola] Mandu a lot nowadays.” I could not help suspecting that having been unable to go to Mandu’s funeral had made things harder for Botlhale.

v i s i t i n g , s pe a k i n g , a n d s i n g i n g : s e n t i m e n ta l c o n s e qu e n c e s o f i l l n e s s

During serious illnesses, the sick and those who care for them experience acute anxiety, sadness, frustration, and anger. According to some, the emotional demands of nursing the ill mirror those involved in childbearing. MmaMaipelo often compared the experience of caring for her sick hus226

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band with being pregnant. “When you’re pregnant, you don’t know how the baby will turn out—will he be crippled [segole], will he be sick? Will your labor be hard?4 You have to resign yourself to God’s will. In the same way, you don’t know if the sick person you’re nursing will get better, or when. You must not lose patience. You have to place your tumelo in God.” Having patience is akin to having love, in that a patient person does not become angry during trying times. The parallel between childbearing and caring for the sick reflects understandings of how sentiments influence the well-being of those who are comparatively helpless in their immobility—the sick, the very elderly, and infants, all of whom lack the “joints” necessary to rise. The tasks of bearing and nursing an infant require patience on the part of the mother, whose confinement may be referred to as “brooding over a child” [ go elama ngwana] as a hen broods over her eggs. The same words may be used of a widow confined to the house in mourning after her husband’s death: “The woman is brooding.” As a parent’s patience and care are necessary for a child to reach maturity, the sentiments expressed at times of illness and death may generate new relations among survivors, and between the living and dead. An implicit refusal, like that of Mandu, to be cared for in a particular yard may thus be construed as a denial of past and present relations of caring in that place. Such refusals are disruptive, because nursing people when they are sick is a way of recognizing the care and love they have previously given to others. This became clear to me in the context of RraMaipelo’s illness. RraMaipelo’s work in the South African mines gave him tuberculosis, and he had been intermittently ill for many years. He took a regimen of pills prescribed by the health clinic, and clinic staff monitored the children staying in the church compound for signs of tuberculosis. In early 1997, RraMaipelo became seriously ill, emaciated and bedridden in the hospital. MmaMaipelo came to the hospital every day to bathe and massage him, holding him by the hand while taking short walks. Each day, church members came to the hospital to visit ( go tlhola),5 bringing food and speaking with him at the bedside. The expenses involved simply in visiting are significant. From Old Naledi to Princess Marina Hospital, a person must take two kombis in each direction; if one brings food to the sick every day for a month, transportation expenses alone come to about P120. (By comparison, monthly salaries for low-wage workers were about P300 during 1997–98.) In addition, attending the sick and their caregivers takes time from other activities (Ngwenya and Butale 2005). During RraMaipelo’s illness, “it is all right”

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MmaSeobo spent so much time with him in the hospital, and visiting MmaMaipelo in her own house, that she was unable to find time to sew clothes to sell. Yet women must incur the expenses involved in visiting the sick lest they be seen as scorning both them and their caregivers; witchcraft accusations commonly revolve around perceived refusals to visit. I once accompanied Lesego to Marina to see one of her cousins who had been admitted two days previously. When we saw the receptionist to find which ward he was in, she snapped at Lesego, “You say he was brought in two days ago— why didn’t you visit him yesterday?” Lesego was clearly embarrassed by the question. When a prominent person is seriously ill, the relatives usually come to stay for an extended period in the compound in order to “give love.” During RraMaipelo’s illness, the church compound was crowded with senior relatives, who are supposed to reassure the sick, as well as those responsible for his care, by saying that “he will get better” or “cool down” (o tlaa fola), a phrase that must be repeated in response to any inquiry on his health. I was struck by the contrast between the outpouring of support for RraMaipelo and the much more limited help given Tebogo during her illness by church members other than those staying with her in the yard. When I mentioned this to MmaMaipelo, she told me that Tebogo was not being helped to the same extent as RraMaipelo because she had not “given to others” to the same extent. As co-bishop, RraMaipelo was said to give love to all his followers. As his illness advanced, there was a corresponding decline in the joy and enthusiasm of church services. For instance, on a Sunday one week before RraMaipelo’s death, his niece Dineo rose in church to pray that God would take the bishop in his hand and give him healing, but she collapsed in tears and had to sit down. When attending the ill, it is crucial to speak properly, since disparaging comments on their appearance may cause them to “give up.” MmaMaipelo felt particularly strongly about this issue, telling me that while some visitors to the sick might say “Ao, shame” to express their sympathy, she made every effort to appear cheerful and encouraging. Caregivers sometimes explicitly request helpful words from visitors, such as reassurances, prayers, and songs. Songs incorporating words of the Bible, MmaMaipelo told me, are particularly soothing to the spirit of a sick person. When their colleagues are ill, Baitshepi members gather in the rooms where they are lying, often crowding quite uncomfortably, in order to sing and pray for them. Church leaders speak about the healing power of song under these circumstances in terms of how the spirit is physically inside the flesh, feeling pain 228

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in the same way that a person dwelling inside a house feels upset when her house is in poor condition. “It’s the spirit, not the flesh, that feels pain,” MmaMaipelo reminded me. When people sing, their voices enter the bodies of the sick person, “cooling her spirit.” The assembly of singers and preachers within the sickroom resembles a gathering in the church building for a Sunday service. In a sickroom as in church, members attempt to sit in hierarchical order to the extent permitted by the confined space. Each person preaches in turn, and the prayer session culminates with a communal handshake. In either instance, love arises from the movement of voices among bodies within an enclosed space. As we saw in chapter 3, Baitshepi members describe a successful service using the phrase “the winds are blowing,” meaning that the voices of participants move one another’s bodies about within the church building. Both the church building and the bodies of participants are conceptualized as houses of voice (equated with spirit), not fully containing the voice but enabling it to “build up” other people’s bodies. Likewise, the purpose of prayers and songs in a sickroom is to raise the ill from their bedridden positions, bringing them to their feet by enabling them to hear voices expressing love. In November 1997, I attended a prayer session for Gladys, a longtime member of Baitshepi who was suffering from an eye infection. As mentioned in chapter 4, Gladys was from a very poor family in the village of Molepolole, and she had stayed in MmaMaipelo’s compound for some years. Gladys’s mother, who had joined the church as well, was caring for her at her own yard in the village. Because Gladys’s mother and twin sister were also committed members of Baitshepi, her relationship to the church remained close in spite of the fact that she was being nursed far from Old Naledi. During the prayer session, Gladys’s friends among the Baitshepi youth encouraged her to sing the hymn “Faith in You Is a Shield, It Will Defend Me from Death” (Lifela tsa Sione 53) in order to expel the spirit of sickness from her body, the house of her voice. At the end of the prayer session, Gladys was able to dance with her colleagues, to their great delight. Gladys’s illness illustrated the difficulties involved in visiting people at a time when acute sickness is rampant. Her sickness worsened over the next several months, yet MmaMaipelo did not visit her or again send the youth. MmaMaipelo had her hands full. After RraMaipelo died in August 1997, his very elderly grandmother (MM), who had raised him as a child after the early death of his mother, herself became very ill. “She’s speaking with her heart [O bua ka pelo],” the neighbors said, indicating her grief at RraMaipelo’s passing. The grandmother had been staying with her “it is all right”

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only surviving child, RraMaipelo’s uncle in Molepolole, but he brought her to MmaMaipelo’s compound to be cared for. “He is a man living alone, how can he take care of a woman who is sick?” church members said. The grandmother had trouble swallowing food, and her skin was turning yellow. MmaMaipelo told all her visitors proudly that the grandmother preferred to be nursed in the church compound. Because relations between daughters-in-law and mothers-in-law are stereotypically tense, the elderly lady’s preference to be nursed in Baitshepi—even though she had long been a member of the mission church UCCSA—reflected well on MmaMaipelo’s love. Yet eventually the task became too burdensome. MmaMaipelo did not tell me directly that she was committing the grandmother to the hospital, but rather that she would be bringing her to the clinic for some pills and would have to abide by the doctors’ recommendations about admission. A few weeks later, however, MmaMaipelo said to me, “We had been breathless [re ne re hupetse], having to wake up in the middle of the night to make food for her.” According to the doctors, she said, the grandmother’s “liver was being eaten by a sore that had spread throughout her body.” Church members visited the hospital every day, even when she was beyond speech. “Her joints are gone now,” they remarked, yet MmaMaipelo would stand over her bed saying, “You will get better! Do you hear? [O tlaa fola! O a utlwa?]”. While in Molepolole for the grandmother’s funeral in June 1998, MmaMaipelo went to visit Gladys. MmaMaipelo told me that Gladys had said to her, “My mother, why haven’t you come to visit me before now?” MmaMaipelo then informed her of the grandmother’s illness, whereupon Gladys asked forgiveness for complaining. A few weeks later, Gladys died. Yet rather than traveling back to Molepolole for the funeral, as did nearly all other Baitshepi members, MmaMaipelo remained in Old Naledi to care for her sister and sister’s daughter, both of whom were ill with the flu. “My spirit is tired out [Mowa wame o lapile],” she told me in a soft voice. p re pa r at i o n f o r d e at h i n b a i ts h e p i p r ac t i c e

Much has changed in Baitshepi ritual and teaching with the increased centrality of death. Many changes resulted from the deaths of particular members. Dancing became far less active in church after the death in 1996 of a particular pastor who had used to lead the dances. Other changes sprang from the sickness and death of RraMaipelo. On many occasions during 230

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my stays in the church in 1993 and 1995, there was a continual traffic of people into MmaMaipelo’s bedroom, where she would pray to Jesus to heal their afflictions, placing her hands on their shoulders and giving them water to drink. For instance, on a weekday evening in 1995 a relative of RraMaipelo stumbled through the sitting room with severe pains in her stomach and chest. She had been given pills at the hospital, she said, but they were not helping. The day after praying with MmaMaipelo and drinking the water she had blessed, she appeared entirely well. During 1997–98, however, I did not witness a single such instance of a person coming to MmaMaipelo’s house for a private session of prayer. In all likelihood, this change had to do with RraMaipelo’s tuberculosis, which became acute in mid-1996; many are reluctant to seek healing in a church whose bishop is himself very sick. Thus in Baitshepi, there has been a marked but by no means complete shift of emphasis away from healing, in the specific sense of curing illness, and toward assuring followers a proper death. When I asked a thirteen-year-old boy in 1998 why he attended Baitshepi, he replied, “Many of my friends have died, and when I die I want to be with Jesus.” This was hardly a complete account of his reasons for joining, since he had a number of friends from his home village in the church. Yet the fact that he explained church participation as a way of preparing for death reflects the stress placed on resurrection in Baitshepi preaching, especially on Sundays following funerals. Church leaders feel the need to console their followers—and, clearly, themselves as well— with the knowledge those who have faith in Jesus are resurrected “in glory” (ka kgalalelo). At spare moments in her sitting room, MmaMaipelo often asked that 1 Corinthians 15 be read aloud to her: “Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?” The nature of resurrection (tsogo ya baswi, literally, raising of the dead) became a subject of much discussion among church leaders during 1997. It was also a subject that forced me most uncomfortably to confront my own presumptions of neutrality. MmaMaipelo asked me, “Do you believe that Jesus rose in the spirit or in the flesh?” A safe reply might have been “I don’t know,” but I answered honestly (thinking perhaps of early Christian controversies on the subject; see Bynum 1995) that I do not judge people, and that any position on the subject would be acceptable to me. MmaMaipelo reproached me for my arrogance: “You are a person who goes about asking questions. How would you like it if, every time you asked me a question, I answered, ‘I don’t judge people’? Now I’m asking you a question, “it is all right”

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and you answer!” Over subsequent months, MmaMaipelo often referred to this incident as an occasion when she had “counseled” me (go gakolola), in the same way that I had “counseled” her when I suggested, after a drama on AIDS performed by the youth (see chapter 1), that a person who had led a fully Christian life might die of AIDS. MmaMaipelo recognized that in both instances, each of us was trying to have the other see the importance of an issue. She had clearly been giving much thought to resurrection and felt it necessary that her followers understand the subject correctly, in the same way that I felt it important to help end the stigma attached to AIDS. MmaMaipelo argued that Jesus rose in the spirit, notwithstanding my pointing out that his tomb was open and the body gone, since only those who had known him in life beheld him after his resurrection but before his ascension. “If you’re in the flesh, anyone at all can see you, but once the spirit and flesh have separated, only those who knew you in life will be able to see you in their dreams.” During 1997–98, much preaching in church was devoted to elaborate interpretations of passages in the Gospels that lend themselves, at first glance, to the idea that Jesus rose in body. For example, preaching about Luke 24:36–43, in which the risen Jesus tells his disciples to touch him in order to dispel their doubts about eternal life, stressed that the episode must be understood as evidence of the power of “things of the spirit” to give people extraordinary perceptions. Such teachings about resurrection reflect Baitshepi leaders’ concerns with the sentiments they feel in relation to death. The reason it is important to understand that the spirit rather than the flesh is resurrected is that a person taught otherwise will see that the dead are not in fact walking about, and may thus despair or “give up.” (Recall that the sick are liable to die if they despair.) Baitshepi leaders stress that the dead are resurrected not at a distant Last Judgment but immediately upon death. In fact, resurrection is perhaps a misnomer, since as members of all churches commonly reiterate during funeral vigils, “the spirit does not die” (mowa ga o swe) at all. Instead, it separates (go kgaogana) from the flesh at the moment of death. According to Baitshepi leaders, the spirits of all people endure after death, but only those who have had tumelo in Jesus are raised in glory. The spirits of the faithful are compared to pleasant odors that attract people, in much the same way that “giving love” physically attracts others to the giver. As we have seen, such spirits include the church ancestors, who are said to animate the bodies of participants in church when their names are called aloud.

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By contrast, those who have led bad lives become foul odors, shunned by everyone, and are condemned to wander in the wilderness. Baitshepi leaders commonly liken death to a person’s move from one place to another, leaving the “house of the flesh” for his or her permanent home (legae) with God. As MmaMaipelo was increasingly forced to help many of her followers make this move properly, there was a certain shift in emphasis in her talk about the housing relationship between spirit and flesh. In 1995, as I related in the previous chapter, she taught church members gathered in her sitting room that when a person is ill, it is the flesh that is sick but the spirit that feels pain, in the same way that a person inside her house feels sorrow when gazing at a wall that is cracking. By 1998, however, she was giving a new teaching, namely, that the spirit itself has wounds (dintho) during an illness. A person with sores may leave his house, but will remain sick. By the same token, a spirit departing the house of the body will continue to be wounded unless it has faith, in which case Jesus will heal it at the moment of death. It is above all when death is imminent that one must have faith in Jesus. In many instances, MmaMaipelo encouraged dying church members to speak or sing words expressing recognition that they have received Jesus’ love and her own. For instance, MmaMaipelo told me that when MmaSeobo’s elderly mother was in the hospital before her death in 1994, she was so sick that she was unable to recognize her own child. MmaMaipelo asked her, “Do you know me?” She replied, “Yes, you’re my mother.” MmaMaipelo commented, “She heard my voice easily [ka pele]. That showed that she had been struggling against her illness [o ne a leka] and wanted to rise [a batla go tsoga]. The love I give as the parent of the church makes people feel better, so that they will go peacefully [ go tsamaya hela, just go]. But if they were to hear someone speak jealous words when they are sick, they would think, ‘You’re killing me!’ and be full of resentment.” Again, when Gladys’s twin sister Rosina (who gave the speech at Tebogo’s funeral vigil) was hospitalized in 1999, she “suddenly saw black everywhere” according to MmaMaipelo, who had been nursing her in the church compound and was at her bedside at the time. MmaMaipelo told her to sing the hymn “We Are Visitors in This World, We Have Our Home in Heaven.” After Rosina sang, she was able to see again, and proceeded to leave instructions (go laela) about her funeral, specifying that it be conducted by Baitshepi leaders and her church uniform laid in her coffin. Such explicit

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instructions make clear in the public setting of funerals that the deceased has received love from a specific church and that she considered herself one of its children. The fact that both of the twins, Gladys and Rosina, left such instructions helped to strengthen connections between their mother and the church network. After Rosina’s death, the mother was left with two sons, who had married and moved elsewhere; she was being looked after by the leader of a recently formed branch of Baitshepi in her village. It is thought highly desirable in general for a sick person to leave instructions in the days preceding death. Two weeks before he died, RraMaipelo told me that by leaving instructions a person lets others know that “he does not have any problems with them, and has passed away without resentment.” Typically, the sick give instructions to caregivers and others attending them at the bedside, speaking openly of their own imminent death in a manner that contrasts strikingly with the usual insistence that they will get better. It has long been said in Botswana that “the voice of a dead person is not transgressed,” meaning that a dying person’s instructions concerning inheritance, funeral arrangements, and relations of care among survivors are taken very seriously (Schapera 1938:230). For example, RraMaipelo instructed the sisters MmaDineo and MmaMaipelo to continue to “love one another,” so that their children would do so as well. After a death has occurred, caregivers commonly recount such instructions to those who come to visit them in their bereavement. The nature of a person’s instructions may also become publicly known over the course of a funeral, when arrangements are carried out according to his or her wishes. Baitshepi leaders often asked me whether I believed that a person may realize when he or she is about to die and leave instructions accordingly. The solemn approval I received when I said yes made me wonder whether others denied the possibility, and I made a point of inquiring generally on the subject. I found that many people die without leaving instructions, and that survivors tend to speak of the absence of instructions with some irritation at the curmudgeonly attitude of the departed. If the deceased has not left instructions, he or she may have been aggrieved, and is apt to afflict junior relatives with dikgaba (Lambek and Solway 2001:59). Even though Baitshepi leaders refuse to identify sicknesses as dikgaba, their interest in leaving instructions reflects their involvement in broad concerns about the difficulties of feeling sorrow and acceptance in the context of death. 234

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At times, Baitshepi leaders come close to speaking of the realization and acceptance of imminent death as a precondition for entering heaven, even as they insist that a sick person who has not reached such a point should refuse to “give up” on the power of God to bring about recovery. “It’s not just anyone who can leave instructions,” Maipelo once told me. “Only a person who has faith can accept death,” he said, “because only the faithful are convinced that they will have eternal life.” In effect, a person must say in the words of the hymn, “It is all right! [Ho lokile! ]” Thus while Maipelo was concerned about the salvation of the individual believer, he spoke of salvation as hinging on a dying person’s ability to leave instructions intended to perpetuate caring relations and sentiments among the living. RraMaipelo took the unusual step of leaving written instructions about his funeral with his wife in a letter dated seven years before his death. Before her husband died, MmaMaipelo had shown this letter only to her close friend MmaSeobo. She told me that she had not wanted to trouble her son Maipelo with discussion of his father’s death. My people, I inform you all that when I die I have no commands other than that my wife and children have all the inheritance. There is no one who may give commands [ go laola] other than they. Also at the burial, they will give commands, you must not command anything at all but listen to everything they say. I do not want arguments [dikgogakgogano] at my funeral. I say this because I have seen many such things among the people. I do not want anything in this message to be transgressed, and furthermore I want it to be read aloud at my funeral. I have done, the writer is [his name]. [stamped] 15–06–1990

Although RraMaipelo intended to forestall arguments by leaving unequivocal instructions on who would be in charge of his funeral, it led to a long-standing dispute between church leaders and MmaMaipelo’s neighbors. Some weeks after the funeral, MmaMaipelo began complaining to me that none of her neighbors had come to visit. Whereas church members always kept her company, and one of the women elders slept in her bedroom every night during her year-long period of mourning, the neighbors were conspicuous by their absence. MmaMaipelo singled out the senior woman in the adjacent compound, two of whose granddaughters were Baitshepi members. “This is the second time in my life that I have been really aggrieved by her,” MmaMaipelo told me. “In 1982, she called me a “it is all right”

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madwoman and a witch to my face, but later she asked forgiveness. Now she’s staying away from my yard when she knows perfectly well that she ought to come greet me in my bereavement.” I refrained from pointing out that she was herself “remembering” past grievances rather than forgiving them. My own knowledge of what motivated the neighbors’ avoidance rests on gossip by third parties. Although I think that I remained on good terms with all concerned, no one would have been likely to tell me, as a church member, anything against MmaMaipelo. I heard that the neighbors were avoiding MmaMaipelo because they believed that she had bewitched her husband in order to gain access to his resources. They had been convinced of this by seeing that no diviner had been called to examine RraMaipelo, and also because in their view MmaMaipelo did not appear in proper mourning clothes (see chapter 6). I surmise that the neighbors had been watching church members’ treatment of RraMaipelo with disapproval, and that they considered the absence of a diviner as evidence that MmaMaipelo had something to hide. Witchcraft insinuations directed against widows are very common, but the complete estrangement arising from this episode was striking. Even three years after the dispute began, no senior Baitshepi member or dweller in the church compound would engage in the basic sociality of entering certain neighbors’ yards in order to greet them. Most of the neighboring children who had been Baitshepi members left the church, and MmaMaipelo advised the leaders of a new church branch not to trust their neighbors, since “neighbors remember you from before your calling, and cannot believe that you are sincere in preaching the word.” The poor relations between MmaMaipelo and her neighbors were a likely impetus behind her departure in 2000 from Old Naledi. RraMaipelo’s unequivocal instructions about his funeral were in keeping with his decision to place his therapy in the sole hands of Baitshepi leaders, who are adamantly opposed to divination on the grounds that it creates jealousy. Ironically in light of such concerns, the relations of care and love that RraMaipelo effectively bequeathed turned out to be quite exclusive and in many respects disruptive. Concerns about the relationships arising from care for and by the dying continue to motivate discussion about the qualities of particular persons’ love at a time when effective treatments for AIDS have become available in Botswana. The ubiquity of death over the past decade and the resulting attention paid to the qualities of care for and by the dying

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continue to structure the divergent predicaments women and men face in speaking about, treating, and preventing HIV infections, and such concerns about care are likely to do so for years to come.

“ k n ow yo u r s tat u s” : n ew m e d i c at i o n s a n d o l d s o r row s

“I recall that long ago when we were nursing Tebogo,” I said to Dineo in 2005, when antiretroviral medications had become widely available in Botswana, “you said that you didn’t approve of HIV tests, because if they turned out positive a sick person would give up and be unable to think of anything else. Do you still feel that way?” Dineo laughed loudly, I think because she had not realized that I had been paying close attention to her words at the time. She said that what she had disapproved of was the absence of counseling at the hospital, but that nowadays clinicians are continually encouraging you (ba kgothatsa thata), insisting that anyone can get AIDS, and that there is nothing wrong with someone who has it. Also, there are medicines nowadays that can treat AIDS. Dineo went on to say, in reply to my inquiry, that she had agreed to have an HIV test before giving birth to her third child in 2002, because “the hospital people followed me around and encouraged me very hard” to protect her child’s health by making sure the baby would receive ante- and peri-natal medications if necessary. Then I asked whether anyone else had ever told her their HIV status, and she said no—this is something you tell only your parents, since they are the ones who have to nurse you once you get sick. She herself would not let just anyone know, because people are not all alike, there are some who just talk. She would trust only her spiritual family (losika la semoya), she said, and she proceeded to speak at length about a number of unrelated women church elders on whom she could always depend to encourage her and pray for her, whereas some fleshly relatives might say, “Why pray for that person who has offended me? I’ll just leave her.” When Dineo spoke of the merits of HIV testing, she was concerned about how diagnoses affect caregiving activities and relationships: the chances that she and her child would receive care, and the implications of diagnoses for the sentiments others might feel—and that she might feel herself—if she were faced with illness and death. Dineo’s concerns in this respect had not changed since 1997, when she said in the context of Tebogo’s illness that she disapproved of HIV testing altogether. Yet the availability

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of treatments—and, crucially, the counseling and support provided by maternity staff (see Creek et al. 2007)—had transformed the conditions under which she and her children might be cared for, and hence had altered her feelings about testing. I found in 2005 that women and men considered HIV testing and disclosure in light of the question of for whose good they were or were not being diagnosed, as well as in light of the relationships and sentiments they anticipated bequeathing to their caregivers and survivors. As was the case during the late 1990s, styles of speech about HIV infection were continuing in 2005 to constitute ways of speaking about the qualities of caregiving relationships, yet the availability of treatments had shifted the terms of discussion. ABC (“Abstain, Be Faithful, Condomise”) prevention campaigns had tended to reinforce presumptions that HIV infection was a sign of personal failure, since they implied that “self-sufficient” people would be able to avoid sexual pathology. By 2005, ABC campaigns had been largely overshadowed in Botswana by messages exhorting people to “Know Your Status,” as well as the HIV status of their sexual partners, so that they might receive government services if necessary.6 After having been launched in four sites in Botswana during 2002, the national ARV program had expanded by April 2005 to thirty-two clinics across the country and was dispensing medications to a total of 36,422 patients, out of 40,772 people who had either presented in clinics with CD4 cell counts below 200 or who were children infected with HIV.7 In 2006, the national ARV program, which tracks clients upon enrollment, estimated the twelve-month survival probability for patients after first receiving medications to be 83%.8 These campaigns appear to have engaged, albeit in partial and contested ways, with local imperatives to sustain caregiving relationships, and thus to have encouraged large numbers of people to receive HIV tests, which since 2004 have been offered to all clinic attendees. Yet women have been more receptive to testing than men. In 2005, the number of HIV tests administered to women and girls in Botswana was 109,713, while those given to men and boys numbered 48,181 (Steen et al. 2007:486).9 The availability of treatments has likely weakened the conceptual linkage between HIV infection and promiscuity, given that promiscuity is seen to consist of irresponsible sexual behavior that makes people sick or otherwise diminishes their well-being. Thus a young woman Baitshepi member who had not seen Lesego for several years could ask her, when we saw her bedridden in 2005, whether she had had an HIV test. I cannot 238

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imagine this question having been asked in such a casual fashion by a sick person’s visitor five years previously, since it would have implied both an expectation of imminent death and a suggestion of promiscuity.10 Yet if the connection between AIDS and promiscuity has weakened, people remain concerned about the ways in which HIV-positive diagnoses are likely to affect crucial caregiving relationships. In Uganda, prescriptions of ARV medications involve family members in extremely painful decisions involving who will pay for whose care, and at whose expense (Mogensen in press; Whyte et al. 2006). For Batswana who have benefited from subsidies making ARVs available free of charge to all citizens since 2002, discussions of care and love do not revolve around payments for these medications so much as around the question of how the knowledge of one’s own or another’s HIV status may affect nursing, child care, and other domestic activities and relationships. There is much continuity in this respect with long-standing concerns about who is able to feel and act with compassion for the sick. Women’s and men’s concerns about who is likely to feel sorrow for the sick and for survivors—as well as their efforts to manage such sentiments on their own and one another’s parts—continue to shape the respective ways they speak about HIV diagnoses and caregiving relationships in the era of ARVs. For instance, when in 2005 I visited Sophie, an older sister of the Baitshepi member Orata (whose case is discussed in chapter 2) in her yard in Old Naledi, she informed me—without my having broached the subject— that she was herself HIV-positive, as was one of her own children and a daughter of Orata who had been left behind by her mother’s death the previous year. Sophie spoke about being HIV-positive in the course of a conversation about the medical and social services to which she and her children were entitled on the bases of their respective HIV and orphan statuses, and was commenting on the inadequacy of these services to provide for the twelve children in the yard. Sophie was looking after three orphans (masiela), children of Orata, for each of whom she was entitled to receive a supply of food each month from government social workers, but this was not enough for all the children. “I’ve gone to the social workers, but they’ve told me that I’m fit—and it’s true that my soldiers [masole, i.e., CD4 white blood cells] are still around 500—so I should be able to find work and earn money. Okay, so even if I can find work, who am I going to leave the children with while I’m working?” (By 2005, people were speaking of their immune cell counts as the number of “soldiers” in their bodies, no doubt as a result of the counseling they have received from clinicians. “it is all right”

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Once the number of your soldiers drops below 200, Sophie explained, you go into treatment.) Sophie told me that she had urged her sister Orata to get an HIV test, but that she had refused until the disease had advanced so far that it was too late to treat her. I remarked to MmaMaipelo on the difficulty of Sophie’s situation, but she seemed less than fully sympathetic. She told me that Sophie (who had never been a church member) was indeed suffering, but not really more than anyone else these days—she had a boyfriend, and her father was also helping out with cash even though he was staying with another woman after his own wife’s death a few years previously. Also, MmaMaipelo continued, Violet, the Baitshepi member who owns a garment factory, was providing clothes to Orata’s orphans—although not, I gathered, to Sophie’s own children. In a tone of great offense, MmaMaipelo related that when Orata had been very sick in 2004, Sophie along with Orata’s other sister had abandoned her and gone to stay elsewhere, so that Orata’s father had had to call in the help of the church network. He asked MmaMaipelo to send Dineo and another young woman church member to help Orata’s twelve-year-old son nurse and bathe her before she died. I decided not to ask Sophie for her version of these events. The source of my information would have been obvious to her, and I feared that inquiries on my part would exacerbate tensions. Sophie did remark to me, however, that although everyone has so many problems in their own yards these days that it’s hard to help out anyone else, people will tell you, “You don’t have love!” even when it’s impossible for you to help them. The jealousies left behind by Orata’s illness and death had clearly affected caregiving relations between Sophie’s family and the church network. Moreover, Sophie’s own concerns and expectations about jealousy among the children reflected her sense of how her own anticipation of death might be shaping caregiving sentiments within the yard. She told me that she needed to stay alive until at least one of the children was five feet tall and could take charge of the household, and had therefore gotten HIV tests for herself and for all the children, so that they could receive medications while they were still “fit” (using the English word). Because she expects to pass away herself in the foreseeable future, she has to make sure that the oldest daughter (one of Orata’s orphans, who was ten years old) can light the hearth, bring water for cooking and bathing, prepare tea and food for visitors, and bathe and spread out blankets for the smaller children. Consequently, she makes a point of sending Orata’s orphans as well as her own children on errands. “But an aunt is not like a mother. Even if 240

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she gives lots of love, at some point she will send a child to do something she resents, like fetch water, and the child will come back with torn shoes and think, ‘Why is she sending me? She is not my mother. If only my mother had been here, I wouldn’t have to be doing this.’ So you’ll see that my own children are going to be clever [botlhale] while the orphans will be lazy [matepe], because my children will follow my instructions to do the chores while the orphans will complain. “Now I’m going to a funeral overnight,” she went on, “and I’m leaving one of Orata’s daughters in charge of the yard while I’m gone, so that she will learn to take care of things. That way, once I’ve passed away, she will be able to rise to her feet.” “You do well,” I complimented her. “Yes, I know I do well. But the next-door neighbors, they don’t see that I do well. Some of them say I’m neglecting the orphans by leaving them on their own, and some people in my family too—they say I’m scorning them. Batswana have a thing called jealousy. When they see a child doing things that you have taught her to do, they will say, ‘That child is clever!’ [i.e., not giving her mother any credit for teaching her]. But if you had just left her alone, not teaching her to do anything for herself, they would say you’d been neglecting her.” Sophie spoke of jealousies among the cousins more as an expectation than as an actual outcome: “I haven’t yet noticed that they are seeing too many differences among themselves.” Yet she was clearly sensitive to the ways in which Orata’s death had bequeathed sympathies and antipathies among her survivors—and to the ways in which her own anticipation of death might be doing likewise, by shaping the manner in which she was preparing the children to take over the domestic labor of the yard. Sophie’s core concern involved who would feel love and compassion for whom in the future: it is all too likely that orphans will feel scorned by their aunts and alienated from their cousins. “There is a difference between the children of a mother and the children of her sister,” Sophie said. “That difference lies in the eyes of other people, in my eyes, and in their own.” To the extent that AIDS treatment programs engage with such concerns about caregiving—by, for instance, providing means for mothers to forestall and to treat HIV infections in their children and in their sisters’ children— they are likely to encourage mothers to agree to be tested for HIV, and perhaps also to tell sexual partners that they are infected. As for Sophie, she said that she had told her boyfriend that she was HIV-positive, but that he had refused to be tested himself, or to use a condom for fear that the plastic “it is all right”

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would enter his blood upon ejaculation. “Why is it that men are afraid of getting tested, Kagiso?” she asked me. When I described Sophie’s situation to a local health outreach worker with a great deal of experience with Botswana’s ARV treatment programs, she shook her head sadly. “Even though she might be taking medications, soon the boyfriend may reinfect her with other strains of the virus, as well as with other sexually transmitted diseases, and eventually her immune system will be so compromised that we won’t be able to treat her.” This health worker attributed disparities in men’s and women’s willingness to be tested for HIV infection to gender roles in nursing and child care. Women may fear receiving an HIV-positive diagnosis, she told me, but they face an imperative to stay well and care for their children, since if they are sick or are bearing sick children their spouses are apt to abandon them. Also, she suggested, men—especially more elite men—who have not had direct experience nursing the sick may not appreciate how much pain is involved, and thus be unwilling to face the prospect of taking pills for the rest of their lives until they are very sick, when it might be too late to treat them effectively. Clinicians and counselors clearly expect women to take primary responsibility for getting themselves and their children tested for HIV and for administering medications, and may thus tacitly discourage men from doing the same.11 A conversation I had with Maipelo in 2005 on the desirability of HIV testing appeared to substantiate the health worker’s suggestions about men’s reluctance to learn their status. He opposed the government’s policy of encouraging everyone to “know their status,” arguing to me that the only circumstance under which a person should get an HIV test is upon deciding to conceive a child. “ARVs are not cures for AIDS—they just prolong your life,” he said. So getting an HIV-positive diagnosis will make you think that you are going to die sooner rather than later. That can really mess you up emotionally. Suppose you have a five-year plan for your life, and then you find out that you are HIV-positive. Then you won’t be able to plan things well, you might squander your money, and you might even commit suicide. I know some guys who have done that. In fact, going for a test is presumptuous, because you are trying to find out for yourself what God has in store for you, and you must not tempt God. What you should do is wait until you start feeling unwell, and then go for a test and take ARVs if they are prescribed to you. You can’t take them anyway if your CD4 count is

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over 200. Going for an HIV test when you’re feeling well is selfish, because it shows that you’re thinking only about your own death, not about the deaths of others. When you intend to have a child, you should go for an HIV test together with your partner, because you have no right to kill the kid. I believe that you should always use protection and stick to one partner, but not go for a test unless it’s necessary.

What accounted for the divergences between Maipelo’s and Sophie’s views on the desirability of being tested for HIV infection were their different conceptions of how anticipating their own respective deaths would affect their love and care for other people. In undergoing an HIV test even when she felt “fit,” Sophie appeared to have been motivated not so much by the prospect of living to old age—in fact, she spoke of her death as occurring in the foreseeable future—but rather by the necessity to care properly for the children in her yard. She had suspected that some of her own and her deceased sister’s children might be infected with the virus. If so, they needed to receive medications, and Sophie would have to count on taking ARVs herself so as to care for them as long as she could. In addition, she spoke of the work of mothering—that is, preparing the children to run the household—in terms of what they must be able to do once she is no longer with them. Although Maipelo spoke of the necessity of undergoing an HIV test before begetting a child, he did not envision himself as having to nurse sick children, and therefore did not face the same kind of imperative Sophie confronted to find out whether he has been infected. As far as Maipelo was concerned, anticipating death would interfere with his capacity to earn money, plan for the future, and act as a provider. Furthermore, although Sophie and Maipelo were alike anxious about the possibilities that they would feel and foster love, their concerns in this matter reflected their divergent experiences with and imagined prospects for caring for others in their yards. As the principal wage earner in his yard, Maipelo worried that he would not continue to be able to bring in money if, instead of feeling sorrow for other people who are sick or bereaved, he were to give way to self-pity in anticipating his own death from AIDS. On the other hand, Sophie’s speculations that her own and her sister’s children would become jealous of one another, and that she might become alienated from the orphans in her yard, stemmed from the work she undertook in organizing their labor around the house. At some point, she feared, her

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sister’s children would begin to dislike being sent, and there would be jealousy in the yard. As Susan Reynolds Whyte et al. point out (2006:259), “treating AIDS is so much more than antiretroviral medications. It is ensuring proper care for tuberculosis, skin disorders, and all the other opportunistic infections [and cancers; Livingston 2007b] that make people suffer. It is good food . . . , something that many families feel is difficult to provide for chronically ill members. It is emotional support and nursing care and all the rest.” Although the introduction of ARVs in Botswana has significantly transformed prospects for living with HIV and has perhaps encouraged disclosures of states of infection, I was struck in 2005 by the extent to which people were continuing to engage with problems arising from care for and by the dying, and in the process to shape one another’s imaginings of who loves whom, on what moral—and physical—grounds. As during the late 1990s, people perceived the difficulties of feeling sorrow and compassion for one another in terms of the challenges involved in housing them properly—that is, in visiting them, praying for them, nursing them, and sending them from place to place. As resources have dwindled and obligations have mounted, women in particular feel in their domestic arrangements the effects of the social inequalities that have both contributed to and been exacerbated by the spread of AIDS. Yet they comprehend the effects of inequality through those very domestic arrangements, as problems of sustaining love and feeling sorrow for others by housing them in particular ways. Such problems do not lend themselves to easy resolution. It is not easy to house the sick properly: to devote large amounts of money and labor to nursing care, or time and money to visiting; and it is all too likely that some will feel scorned. Consequently, MmaMaipelo and others have devoted great energy and thought to methods of fostering love: becoming a parent of a sick person by rising to one’s feet on her behalf, cooling her spirit by singing for her, encouraging her to leave instructions, and consoling survivors with the knowledge that the spirit has eternal life. For church members and nonmembers alike, whether love has been given, recognized, and bequeathed is in many respects the principal moral stake involved in nursing care, to a greater extent perhaps even than health outcomes, because caregiving sentiments have long-term consequences. Thus, MmaMaipelo became uninterested in Mandu’s illness once Mandu refused to be nursed by her; the neighbors refused to console MmaMaipelo over the 244

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death of her husband on perceiving that she had had no love for him; and Sophie expected that caring for her own as well as for her deceased sister’s children would be difficult, because the orphans would feel the absence of their mother’s love. Such issues inform the work carried out in the eminently public domain of funerals, whose political styles reflect the obligations of survivors to recognize and negotiate competing claims to love.

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six

“You Must Not Look Back” Civility in the Place of Death

as the coffin is lowered, and as men shovel soil into the grave, the people around the burial site sing hymns in unison. A church minister or senior woman calls out each line, and the assembly responds. The hymns most often sung on such occasions express resignation to death and trust in eternal life. “We are only passing through this world,” people sing, “how can we love it?” “You tell me to look up and trust in heaven,” goes another hymn. “A traveler does not become weary, he is carried by God. / Indeed this is so, since you have loved me, / You have cooled my regrets, and now I am glad.” Other hymns emphasize the community’s love: “Sleep well our beloved, / Rest your head in Jesus’s bosom. / He loves you more than we do; / Sleep well.” When singing the final words of this particular hymn—“Those who have died in Jesus will say to one another, / ‘Welcome friend’ ”—everyone extends his or her right arm toward the grave in a handshake. The only people seated during the burial are the immediately bereaved— the deceased’s spouse, parents, children, and perhaps some aunts or grandmothers. They sit on chairs or matting next to the grave and watch in silence, occasionally wiping away tears. Other women relatives, standing among the assembly, commonly cry out in grief or fall in a faint, and must be helped away. Throughout, the group sings on, in a public effort to console the bereaved through the sound of their voices. 246

In Botswana, funerals are eminently public occasions. There is no obligation greater than to attend funerals, because helping to bury the dead is one of the most important of all acts of care and love. The prospect of being left alone in the darkness (sefifi ) of death, without assistance to bury a parent or child, is horrifying. Elders commonly worry that the numerous deaths of young people nowadays will leave “no one to bury us,” that is, no one to perform the final act of care for a parent. A poorly attended funeral is a keen embarrassment and injury, because sparse attendance may indicate that the deceased had not had love for others, and that few people wish to give love in turn. In particular, the bereaved depend on the love and care of the wider community in order to “give up” or “resign themselves” ( go itlhoboga) to death. Members of many churches encourage “giving up” as they console the bereaved during night vigils, for instance by preaching about King David’s resignation to the death of his child by Bathsheba. Death is apt to make survivors look back, asking themselves who had had a grudge against the deceased, or why they were slighted by certain people while in mourning. A dying person often leaves the instruction “You must not look back behind you” (o seka wa gadima) out of concern that sorrow will make survivors listless and depressed, even insane. Thus, spouses and children of the deceased “remove the darkness” ( go ntsha sefifi ) of death from their bodies through such treatments as bathing and vomiting that help them to avoid “thinking too much.” Perhaps most important, “giving up” is desirable because it helps the bereaved to sympathize with the grief felt by others. A few months after his father’s death, Maipelo told me that in order to “give up,” he had to hold back expressions of his own sorrow. “You have to realize in these times that you are not the only one who is suffering. You have to cry inside, not outside. You will weep openly only if you are selfish enough to think that it is only you who is suffering, and your tears will be for yourself alone.” In other words, not making an effort to “give up” reflects a self-pity akin to jealousy. Thus, helping the bereaved to “give up” is one of the most important ways of showing love. What makes “giving up” both difficult and necessary is what Renato Rosaldo calls the “emotional force of a death” deriving “from a particular intimate relation’s permanent rupture” (1989:2; emphasis in original). For Rosaldo, “the notion of force involves both affective intensity and significant consequences that unfold over a long period of time” (1989:20). In Botswana, death may perpetuate love among survivors who have been given “you must not look back”

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“instructions,” or alternatively make them feel that others have been jealous or scorned them at times of acute need. The ways in which people console others, or fail or refuse to help them “give up,” often induce them to reevaluate relations of kinship and marriage. Indeed, saying “I have given up” may be a way of claiming kinship with the deceased, since it is necessary to “give up” only if you are grieving over the death of a person to whom you have given love and care. I never heard church participants say that they had “given up” following the funerals of nonmembers whom they had not known well. In focusing on the emotional force of death, Rosaldo objects to anthropological tendencies to neglect bereavement in favor of mortuary ritual: “the general rule seems to be that one should tidy things up as much as possible by wiping away the tears and ignoring the tantrums” (1989:15). Concentrating on ritual as opposed to grief “masks the emotional force of bereavement by reducing funerals to orderly routine” (1989:13). Rosaldo writes that he could not understand the emotional force of death until he was bereaved by the death of his own wife. Implicit in Rosaldo’s discussion, then, is a concept of bereavement as an individualized sentiment that cannot be readily communicated to others, especially those who have never suffered a loss. Yet seeing grief as an individualized sentiment, and bereavement as an intrinsically private process distinct from public rituals, forecloses the issue of how “giving up” may hinge on the sentiments expressed by a wide range of persons in the public spaces of funerals. People say that if a funeral is poorly attended, if there is no proper coffin, or if no one gives cash gifts to survivors in order to “enliven” ( go tshedisa) them, the bereaved will not be able to “give up.” Since the bereaved can “give up” only if others provide the care and love necessary for a proper funeral, it is not a “particular intimate relation’s permanent rupture” alone that gives death its emotional force. By the same token, open disputes and accusations at a funeral may make it impossible for the bereaved to avoid “thinking too much” about the injurious sentiments of others. Whether survivors are able to “give up” depends upon what occurs in the public space where most funeral activities take place, namely, a compound physically transfigured by death. When going to a funeral or visiting a house affected by death, people do not say, “We are going to soand-so’s house,” but rather “We are going to the death” (Re ya ko lesong); the expression emphasizes the physical location of bereavement (Durham 2002:157). Because the bereaved in the place of death need care from the 248

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widest possible range of persons, funerals subject people’s sentiments to broad attention. As I have shown in previous chapters, certain places associated with the transfer of nurturing or destructive substances—houses of confinement, churches, beer gardens—shape the sensations and sentiments of those within them. Likewise, people aim to enliven those within the place of death through acts of care, but may also prevent them from “giving up” by engaging in open disputes. Such outcomes often depend on the ways in which sentiments and substances are transferred from one person to another. Speaking, singing, preaching, whispering, or remaining silent about feelings of sorrow, resignation, or spite may have long-term consequences. Likewise, transfers of substance between bodies in the place of death, such as those involved in wearing mourning clothes, viewing the corpse, and undergoing cleansing, may create or destroy generational and marital ties, as well as relationships within churches. The injuriousness of death requires communal efforts to enliven the bereaved, an imperative that underlies the activities of burial societies. “Giving up” is a complex process of forgetting, concealing, or being purged of emotional and bodily connections to the deceased, yet also of retaining them. Treatments that remove or retain the deadliness of a person’s passing are ways of publicly recognizing or recasting connections among a range of kin—widows and their affines, ancestors and descendants, parents and their deceased children. Because death makes “looking back” unavoidable, all those involved in a funeral must act with civility so as to manage the impact of their sentiments on others and limit the dangers of retrospection. Two cases examined below illustrate how speaking, preaching, and whispering at funerals can shape survivors’ capacity to “give up” and their sense of who loved or scorned them. e n l i ve n i n g t h e p l ac e o f d e at h

Recent transformations in practices surrounding death in Botswana have made funerals increasingly important occasions for giving care. The scale of funerals has expanded dramatically in recent years. Before mortuaries were introduced to Botswana in the mid-1970s, the length of time between death and burial was quite limited, and it was less common than it is today for people to travel long distances to attend funerals. Nowadays, arrangements for most funerals are announced over national radio, so that those who had not been informed of a death by word of mouth or by telephone may attend.1 However, the expansion of mortuaries led to a steep “you must not look back”

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increase in costs, as demand for elaborate coffins rose. In a discussion of the lavishness of Akan funerals in Ghana, Sjaak van der Geest argues (2000:107) that families make far greater outlays upon the deaths of the elderly than for their upkeep while they are alive, because funerals “provide occasions for the living to demonstrate their social, political, and economic excellence.” For Akan, a cheap funeral is a “disgrace” because it reflects poorly on the prestige of the family. While neglect of the elderly is wrong, it is a private matter, whereas an improper funeral brings disgrace by demonstrating the absence of family solidarity and achievement. If applied to Botswana, this argument would overlook the key reason that funerals are such public occasions, namely, that people recognize that close relatives are injured by death, and that everyone should acknowledge their sorrow and help them to “give up.” When people do not wish to go to a particular funeral, they sometimes say, “I don’t have to go to that funeral—I haven’t killed anyone.” In other words, it is particularly incumbent on those whose jealous feelings might have killed a person to attend the funeral, lest they put themselves beyond all proper sociality by refusing to recognize the injury felt by the bereaved. In turn, the public nature of death has made it possible, especially since the introduction of mortuaries, to display wealth and prestige at funerals. Even when there are no such displays, a proper funeral demands considerable material outlays, because death is an injury that requires care from everyone. For this reason, I begin by discussing the darkness into which death plunges the house of the deceased and the bodies of survivors, and then consider efforts to enliven them. When speaking about the moment of death, people say that the spirit separates from the flesh (“Mowa le nama di a kgaogana”), leaving the corpse behind as an empty house. The body must be composed in a manner that shows respect for the house of the spirit. In particular, the eyes must be shut, since open eyes signal alertness. I have heard it said that an advantage of dying in a hospital is that the clinic staff will close a corpse’s eyes, whereas those at home may be so horrified by such an image of life in a dead body that they will run off. When RraMaipelo collapsed in his bedroom and died, his MBW and MM carefully closed his eyes and smoothed the surrounding skin. The impact of a death upon the body of a spouse is immediate, because spouses share the same “blood” by virtue of having borne or begotten children (Schapera 1979). At the moment of death, the blood of a spouse becomes dangerously “hot.” MmaMaipelo told me that 250

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when her husband died in her presence, she felt her entire body “burning,” her “joints” lost their strength, and she collapsed to the floor. The compound of the deceased becomes a place of death (lesong ). In order to signify the departure of the spirit from the flesh, the room in which the deceased had stayed or slept is emptied of furniture, which is then squeezed into other rooms or houses in the yard. The eyes of the house are shut: whitewash is smeared on the windows, and the curtains are taken down. No one sweeps the floors. A house remains in this state of darkness (sefifi ) and dirt (leswe) until the burial, when senior women of the extended family clear the windows and sweep the floors while others are at the cemetery. Furniture is usually not moved back into the house for another two weeks. Funeral spaces are widely considered dangerous. Many regard them as “hot” places, hurtful especially to children. The heat of funerals is tracked on the ground by the feet of those who have attended it, so that in coming into contact with infants, visitors are often asked to spread ashes—a substance embodying the cooling down of something previously hot—on the child. When mothers attend funerals, they spread ashes from the funeral fire on their children’s clothing before returning home. In addition, funeral meals are often considered prime opportunities for witches to poison their victims’ food. The bodies of widows and widowers, like their houses, are immersed in the dirt and darkness of death. The room emptied of furniture is known as a “house of sorrow” (ntlo ya khutsafalo), in which a widow remains on a mattress until the morning of the burial, which usually takes place after about ten days. Women relatives lie with her on mats scattered about the room. The women’s proximity to one another is supposed to “make their hearts fall,” or calm their sorrows. Yet MmaMaipelo was disturbed by having to lie next to RraMaipelo’s cousins before his funeral, since they would speak only of their sorrow rather than console her, and pushed aside the women of Baitshepi who wanted to lie next to her. Although many men enter a house of sorrow to give condolences, the only man who remains in one is a widower. Unlike the women who lie on the floor about him, a widower sits on a chair. (In public gatherings, men always sit on chairs whereas women often sit on the ground with legs outstretched.) Before the burial, widows and widowers leave the house of sorrow only to use the latrine, and even then are accompanied by female relatives to ensure that they do not spread the “heat” in their blood by walking about. Neither do they bathe during this period. On the other hand, when an unmarried “you must not look back”

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person dies, his or her mother lies in the house of sorrow with other women but may leave whenever she wishes, since her blood is not hot. A house in darkness demands care from everyone, even as its heat and dirt pose dangers to those who enter it. Schools provide chairs, tables, and iron pots for cooking, while the army routinely lends tents and electric generators (Ngwenya 2000:209). There should always be many people “at a death,” with groups of elders discussing financial arrangements, junior women preparing food for visitors, and church leaders conducting prayer services with the neighbors every evening at six o’clock. Almost every evening, it seemed during the late 1990s, people made efforts to arrive in Old Naledi from their jobs in time to attend prayer services in neighbors’ yards. A person who acquires the reputation of refusing to come to funerals may be neglected when death strikes his or her own house. In addition, relatives, colleagues, and friends who can afford gifts must make substantial contributions of cash or livestock known as matshediso (enlivenings). Because even relatively modest funerals demand great expense, matshediso gifts are crucial. This is apparent in the table, showing the major expenses and contributions for one such funeral, held in Old Naledi in December 1997 for the wife of one of MmaMaipelo’s brothers, who gave me the information. Although both his and his wife’s respective burial societies provided generous amounts, expenses would have exceeded contributions by nearly P2200 in the absence of matshediso. (Recall that a month’s salary for an entry-level factory worker in Gaborone at the time was about P300.) Particular persons’ contributions or refusals may be remembered for many years as key acts of care or scorn. In conversations with me, people recalled precisely what had been given by whom for funerals ten years previously, as well as excuses for contributing nothing— usually that a son or mother’s brother of the deceased was earning a wage and should manage everything himself. The increasing costs of funerals have driven a rapid proliferation of burial societies, whose purpose is to give love to the deceased and enliven the bereaved. Many burial society names, such as Segotso (hearth), Leseding (place of light), Thuso (help), and Koketso (increase), express their purpose to enliven the place of death. “A burial society is your mother and father,” I was told, because it will take care of you when you most need help. Sandy Grant (1987) records that the first burial society in Mochudi was founded in the 1930s, and that more were set up during the 1960s. However, most societies in Botswana are of more recent origin, proliferating since the introduction of mortuaries in the 1970s. 252

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ta b l e 1 Expenses and Contributions at a Funeral Expenses P1600 for coffin P800 for cow P1,250 for sorghum and maize meal P500 for metal grate over grave P140 for funeral programs P150 for hearse P50 in mortuary fees Total expenses: P4,490 ($1,275)

Contributions P1,500 from deceased’s burial society P800 from widower’s burial society P700 from deceased’s younger siblings P400 from widower’s yB P400 from son P200 from son’s spouse P160 from widower’s FZ P14 from spouse of widower’s yB P20 from neighbors P45 from attendees at prayer gatherings P20 from school-age daughter P10 from widower’s MBS P500 from widower’s siblings and MB for support of his children, but taken by deceased’s siblings, ostensibly to pay for metal grate over grave Total contributions: P4,769 ($1,350)

Burial societies are organized under many different auspices. Some are operated for a company’s employees, others for church members, for those in an extended family, for people belonging to a particular ethnic group, or for anyone in a given village ward or urban neighborhood. Societies provide cash for the funerals of members, and, usually, lesser amounts for five other family members: two parents, two children, and a married spouse. If a member is unmarried, most will contribute to the funeral of a sibling. When as in the above case, family members have enrolled in multiple societies, the leaders of each society will negotiate the amounts to be disbursed. Most burial societies require members to pay both a one-time joining fee and a monthly subscription fee, adjusting the fees in relation to funeral costs, numbers of disbursements, and efforts to attract recruits or limit membership. Many people join churches for burial society benefits, since churches with wealthy societies are able to offer very low fees to new members. This is the case at Twelve Apostles, where members pay P2 each month to be enrolled in the society. On one Sunday, a deacon admonished “you must not look back”

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the congregation, “If you join the church, pay your two pula, and then die next month, we will pay P650 for your coffin, but if you have been a member for a long time and miss four months of payment, it shows a lack of faith, and we won’t pay anything.” In a study of burial societies in and near Gaborone, Barbara Ngwenya (2000) draws attention to the public ways in which members show others at funerals that they have cared for the deceased and the bereaved. Like church participants, members of burial societies make themselves visible as a group by wearing distinctive uniforms at a funeral. In addition, they do much of the work associated with serving food to the guests, preparing shredded beef, crushed corn, gravy, vegetables, and ginger ale during the night of the vigil to be consumed the following morning. The family may thank a society for its care by giving members a special bowl of food and seating them apart as honored guests during the meal. Formal introductions of members of the burial society to the bereaved are likewise important gestures of gratitude (Ngwenya 2000:322–24). By enlivening people who have been injured by the deaths of their loved ones, burial society members may create new forms of relatedness. The fact that burial society members feel hurt by one another’s suffering and act to alleviate it may, for example, turn co-workers into kin. It is an embarrassment to a deceased worker’s colleagues to find his family in such poverty that they cannot afford a proper funeral. Ngwenya quotes a man belonging to a workplace-based burial society as follows: A worker dies and we go to their homestead and there is nothing. . . . No food was given to visitors [baeng]. We quickly organized on-site contributions and used the money to buy sugar, tea, and some food. It was really heart breaking. In another nearby village, one boy’s parents had died. There was nothing. Nothing absolutely. We had gone with our co-workers to other villages time and time again and we find practically nothing. You find the place deserted, forlorn. There is no one and there is nothing to help anyone with anything. (2000:273)

Confronted with such shame, co-workers who had seen themselves as “strangers” have become “relatives” by forming and participating in a burial society: Our co-workers [badiri ka rona] have become our relatives and friends. We are now used to having them around and we share many of our every254

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day concerns not with our cohort [ba nkani] in the village but with our fellow workers. Even from those we went to primary school with, we have grown apart and sometimes feel lost and disoriented in their midst. Our relatives in the village have become strangers, and strangers in the workplace, our relatives. (2000:274) If your burial society attends a funeral, it shows your parents that you are among caring people and that you are not living with strangers. It is important for our parents to witness and experience support from your burial society. (2000:275)

The injuriousness of death is felt so deeply that “giving love” at funerals, and making it possible for others to do so, becomes a basis for reevaluating relationships.

t re at i n g b o d i e s , s e n t i m e n ts , a n d re l at i o n s h i p s

So far, I have focused on how death creates public obligations to congregate in the yard of the deceased in order to “give love.” A compound transfigured by death is a place of both care and danger, in that people come together to alleviate the darkness afflicting the bereaved, but also expose themselves to the heat of death and possibilities of witchcraft. Even as death demands love from the widest possible range of persons, it also concentrates public attention on how life-giving and death-giving substances move (or have moved) among particular persons’ bodies. Some of these transfers help people to “give up,” but others kill. The public nature of funerals and mourning often contributes to controversy, as survivors’ bodily and sentimental attachments to the deceased, and conflicted feelings toward one another, become objects of wider attention (see the evocative fictional account in Dow 2000:33–47). The most contested issue, perhaps, involves how the deadliness of a person’s passing is incorporated into the bodies of those survivors who share their “blood” or “spirit.” The darkness (sefifi ) arising from these vital connections must be first recognized as present in the bodies of the bereaved, and then removed from them by certain treatments involving blood, clothing, water, medicines, and voice, lest they too fall ill or die. In many instances, such treatments are ways of publicly recognizing or recasting kinship and marriage, since those who undergo them share bodily substance with the deceased. Furthermore, these treatments have a power over people’s “you must not look back”

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sentiments, leading them to feel that others have consoled them and helped them to “give up”—or increased their sorrow, “cut their hearts,” or killed their loved ones. The color of a widow’s dress, the heat of her blood, the location of a grave, the placement of the deceased’s clothes, and the manner in which the spirit of the dead is removed from the bodies of survivors all draw public attention to the issue of who is a parent, child, sibling, or spouse in relation to whom, and to the sentiments of those who define (or refuse to define) one another in such terms. For Baitshepi members, some of these treatments of the body are matters of tumelo, since they channel the sentiments of survivors in desirable or undesirable directions. Specifically, church members evaluate such treatments in terms of whether they console ( go gomotsa) survivors, helping to perpetuate love among the living, and between the living and the deceased. I discuss these issues in three sections: placing and viewing the corpse; the impact of a widow’s dress on her own sentiments and those of the people who see her; and removing the spirit of the deceased from the bodies of survivors.

Placing and Viewing the Corpse At a funeral, the polite way to refer to a grave is as “the final house” (ntlo ya bofelo). This phrase refers to the shape of the grave itself. At a burial, most of the men pass shovels from one to the other, filling the grave with soil dug the previous night, showing that the work of burial does not belong only to one man.2 They then place over the grave a rectangular metal grill purchased by survivors who can afford the approximately P500 cost. The name of the deceased is usually written on a sign mounted on the grill, which is covered by a piece of canvas shaped as a roof. The grill thus resembles a house erected over the grave, with the canvas providing shade for the deceased. People say that it is important to have a grill so that the grave does not collapse in the rain, and so that they will be able to identify its location. Thus, even though in most locales adults are now buried in communal cemeteries rather than underneath their houses or cattle kraals, it remains important to house them under a durable grill. The “final house” identifies where—and thus with whom—the deceased has a permanent home (legae). Once a man has built for himself in his home village, usually in mature adulthood following marriage, the village is unquestionably his legae, and he will be buried in the village cemetery. The location of the grave of someone who has not yet built may be open to conflicting claims, especially if his or her parents are divorced or separated. 256

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Such parents commonly take one another to court over the right to bury their child in their respective homes. Usually, such cases turn on assessments of the care that each parent had given the child. A 1998 High Court decision on such a matter found that because the father had paid his deceased son’s school fees and medical expenses, he had the right to bury him in his own village.3 The mother had argued that she had the right to bury him because he had passed away while she was nursing him. The viewing of the deceased (pono ya moswi ), usually held from 6:00 to 7:00 a.m., while people are washing and dressing following the night vigil, is such an important aspect of a funeral that some people come only to the viewing and leave before the burial. People file into the house of sorrow, circling slowly around the coffin, gazing at the face underneath a pane of glass. Many pause in silence to look at the body for the last time. Without identifying the body at the viewing, many say, they would not be able to “give up” as they should, because they would not know that the person was actually dead. Seeing the face of the deceased is a way of ensuring that he or she has not been made into a zombie (letholwane) by a witch. The mother of a young woman killed in a car crash told me, on the basis of a very brief acquaintance, that her own sister had made her daughter into a zombie and sold her to another witch as a domestic worker. As evidence, the mother showed me a photo of the coffin at the funeral, closed ostensibly because her child had been badly mutilated, but according to her because there was no body inside. She indicated her sister sitting next to her in the photo: “You see the little witch?” I later found that this particular woman had acquired a somewhat notorious reputation for repeating this accusation to everyone. Whatever grievances she might have had against her sister before the funeral, the closed coffin appeared to have sharpened her grief to such an extent that she would defame her sister to anyone who would listen. Not having seen her daughter’s face, people said, had made her incapable of “giving up.” On the other hand, some elders attribute widespread deaths among young people to the fact that nowadays they attend funerals and view the face of the corpse. “Seeing a dead person’s face gives children megare (infectious dirt),” I was told, “and makes them think too much.” Many elders told me that when they were young, they had known nothing about death; they were sent elsewhere during funerals and were forbidden to mention the name of the deceased. Their parents would tell them that the dead person had been eaten by a hyena or had gone to Johannesburg. “If you called out his or her name, we were told, the hyena would come and “you must not look back”

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eat us too. So we just didn’t think of them, we were afraid of the hyena.” A woman born in 1954 told me that she attended her first funeral when she was twenty, after she gave birth to her first child. An elder woman relative escorted her to her first funeral, telling her that she would have to recognize the signs of death if her own child were to pass away. It is generally agreed that young people nowadays know about death because so many of their own cohort are passing away. Whether they should attend funerals, or even know that a relative has died, is a matter of some controversy. Some say that young people nursing the sick need to know when death has taken place, and that children “give up” more easily once they know that someone has died. An opposing view is that young people become sick and lose the fearful respect they should feel toward their elders by coming into contact with the bereaved and viewing corpses. “In the past death was an object of avoidance (le ne le ilwa), but this is no longer the case today,” I was told by a 22-year-old mother, who attributed the large number of deaths to the phenomenon of childless young women making their blood hot by attending funerals, or getting drunk and stumbling into them. The ambivalence people feel over viewing the corpse reflects a broader concern with how survivors retain the presence of the deceased in their bodies, and how they remove it. Some emphasize that seeing a corpse incorporates deadliness into the bodies of the living, while others imply that viewing helps survivors to comprehend the fact of parting. In the next section, I explore how “giving up” may involve widows’ retention of their deceased husbands’ presence in mourning dress.

Dressing to Mourn Perhaps the most immediately visible indications of the widespread death in Botswana are the numerous women dressed in mourning for their husbands. Most mourning outfits are black, and consist of a full-length dress, a head scarf, shoulder throw, stockings, and umbrella. Widowers also dress in mourning, but far less conspicuously than widows, wearing only a hat and a piece of black cloth pinned to their shirts. Worn for an entire year following the death of a spouse, mourning clothes signal the heat in the blood of widows and widowers alike, yet mark women’s bodies as particularly dangerous to those who come in contact with them, because menstrual flows are associated with heat and dirt (Comaroff 1985:57; Pauw 1990). A widow first appears in public outside the “house of sorrow” dressed in her mourning outfit on the morning of the burial. Most widows will 258

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not shake people’s hands or touch children for fear of transferring heat to them. When away from their own yards, many scatter an herb known as mogaga so as to prevent the land from becoming hot and prone to drought. Women say that a mourning dress is extremely burdensome, because it is hot and uncomfortable, you are not supposed to take it off during the day or repair its tears, and it is a constant reminder of the death of your spouse. In signaling the presence of “hot blood” in a widow’s body, mourning dresses publicly display—and indeed carry out—movements of sentiment and substance between persons. Mourning clothes extend the place of death beyond the funeral, because for an entire year, widows carry the darkness of death from their compounds to the places they travel and to the persons they meet. Women speak of the dress as altering both their own comportment and the sentiments of people with whom they come in contact, since everyone who sees them thinks immediately of death, sorrow, and heat. Moreover, a mourning dress is a public statement on the part of a widow’s affines to the effect that she and her deceased husband share the same blood. A mourning outfit (which costs about P500) is a gift given a widow by her husband’s classificatory parents,4 who recognize that her blood has been made hot as a result of having borne a child with him. “Dressing” ( go apesa) a woman in mourning is thus a decisive statement about the status of a marriage. It is very common for a man’s parents to refuse to dress an unmarried spouse, because in so doing they would be recognizing a marriage and laying themselves open to claims on resources. In showing that a woman has “hot blood,” a mourning dress focuses attention on her body’s retention of her deceased husband. I was told that a man’s spirit will wander unhappily if he sees that his widow is not wearing mourning for him, since her refusal shows not only her denial of the presence of his blood in her body, but lack of respect for his parents. In the context of marriages in which the partners have separated but not divorced, the man’s parents may ask his widow to wear black so that his spirit will not wander, and in order to prevent her from spreading boswagadi. Such a case occurred among my acquaintances in Tlokweng: a widow estranged from her husband refused to dress in mourning, not wanting to be burdened with her husband’s presence or to feel that her blood had been made hot because of him. Given that a mourning outfit concentrates the attention of a widow, and of everyone who sees her, on the blood she shares with her husband, do “you must not look back”

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the clothes help a person to “give up”? Baitshepi women distinguish between black and blue dresses in this regard. In most churches of the spirit, widows wear blue, or in some cases green, mourning dresses rather than black ones. “Blue clothes,” MmaMaipelo told me, “show that your spirit is free [mowa wagago o phuthologile hela], so that you’re not always thinking about death, and yet people know that you’ve lost your husband.” In addition, widows in Baitshepi who wear blue clothes do not comport themselves as do many women who wear black. Widows in Baitshepi shake the hands of those who greet them, and they refuse to scatter mogaga when walking away from their yards. Thus, after RraMaipelo passed away, his MBS bought blue cloth for MmaMaipelo’s mourning, and MmaSeobo sewed it into a dress during the night of the vigil. When MmaMaipelo was in mourning, she said, “I’m not trying to avoid anyone or keep anyone away from me. All I want to do is give love. I’m not refusing to shake people’s hands, and if children come close to me, I receive them.” From this perspective, black clothes interfere with the ordinary social contacts that build up love. On one occasion, MmaMaipelo compelled a widow who entered her house dressed in black to shake hands upon greeting, holding out her own hand until the widow felt obliged to take it. A blue dress, on the other hand, does not “remind you of what has happened” to the same extent. “It’s almost as though your blue clothes are just a decoration,” Baitshepi elders told me. Yet MmaMaipelo’s neighbors, who suspected her of bewitching her husband because she had not brought a Setswana doctor to treat him, were further antagonized by her refusal to abide by mourning restrictions. Like black dresses, blue clothes do cause a widow to retain the substance of the departed in her own body. This became clear to me when MmaMaipelo refused to take off her blue dress to go into mourning for RraMaipelo’s grandmother (MM), who died in June 1998, before a year had elapsed since the death of RraMaipelo. As I related in chapter 5, the grandmother chose to come to MmaMaipelo’s yard to be nursed because she had no daughters of her own, and because she knew that she would be well cared for in the church compound. The grandmother had been asleep in the same room as MmaMaipelo when she first heard the voice in 1982, and during each annual church conference recounted this experience in bearing witness to her calling. Even though the grandmother never gave up her long-standing membership in the UCCSA, Baitshepi members acknowledged her as one of them. This relationship provided a basis for the respect felt by many of MmaMaipelo’s affines toward her church. 260

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When the grandmother passed away, the Baitshepi burial society contributed P350 toward her coffin, even though she had not been a member of the society, and MmaMaipelo made a contribution of P1,000 from her own savings, whereas some nonchurchgoing close relatives did not even attend the funeral. Soon after the grandmother’s death, there was discussion regarding whether MmaMaipelo would come out of her own mourning early, before a year had elapsed since her husband’s death, because if a close relative dies during a mourning period, survivors must come out of their first mourning and enter their second. “Deaths do not conceal one another,” it is said in this connection. Yet in this case, the issue involved not only who had died, but where and with whom. Discussion about whether MmaMaipelo would end her mourning for her husband turned on the fact that RraMaipelo’s clothes were being stored in the same yard as that in which his grandmother—his “parent” (motsadi ) who had raised him as a child—had subsequently died. On the day after his burial, women in the extended family had washed all of RraMaipelo’s clothes in order to cleanse them of the dirt of death, and placed them in the wardrobe in MmaMaipelo’s bedroom. The clothes were to be distributed among the extended family on the day of MmaMaipelo’s “undressing” (kapolo), when she would come out of mourning a year after her husband’s funeral. The presumption here is that a deceased person is present in his or her clothes, so that the placement of these clothes within a compound affects the bodies of the bereaved in the yard. Thus, a married person’s clothes are distributed only once the presence of death is finally removed from the body of his or her spouse a year after the funeral. Similarly, a mother removes a blue or black head scarf worn in mourning for an unmarried child six months after the funeral, at the same time that the child’s clothes are distributed among the family. Although RraMaipelo’s grandmother had passed away in the hospital, there was implicit agreement that the place of her death was the yard where she had been nursed, namely, the church compound. Since, I was told, the clothes from an earlier death were already present in MmaMaipelo’s house, she might have to take off her blue dress so as not to “conceal” the grandmother’s death. The decision was formally in the hands of MmaMaipelo’s affines (the deceased’s S, her HyBS, yZD, SS, and two SWs) who had gathered in council at her house to make arrangements for the funeral. It was clear, however, that MmaMaipelo wanted to retain her husband’s presence in her dress for a full year. An ingenious solution was soon reached. Church “you must not look back”

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elders took the grandmother’s clothes to the compound in Molepolole where she had lived with her son and where the funeral would be held. It was then decided that because the clothes had been removed, the deaths had not occurred in the same compound after all, and that there was no question of their “concealing one another.” MmaMaipelo remained in her blue dress. The central issue in this instance was MmaMaipelo’s love for her husband, expressed in her desire to retain the clothing—her blue dress as well as his garments in their wardrobe—through which he continued to be present in her blood and in the bedroom where she slept. Even those who disliked this outcome focused on where the garments of the deceased had been placed. One of MmaMaipelo’s brothers, with whom she was not on good terms, later complained to me that she ought to have come out of mourning for her husband. He reasoned that since RraMaipelo had not built for himself in his home village, MmaMaipelo’s compound and that of her husband’s grandmother were actually one and the same. In other words, MmaMaipelo’s brother cast aspersions on her decision to go on mourning her husband by suggesting that her yard was not distinct from that of her affines. MmaMaipelo clearly felt that she needed to retain her blue dress for a year in order to “give up.” She told me that on the night before her “undressing”—when she took off her blue dress and bathed in the presence of female relatives in order to remove RraMaipelo’s presence from her body—she dreamed of her husband telling her, “We are getting married now.” She took this as a sign that they were together in the spirit if no longer in the flesh.

Cleansing the Body of Deadliness If mourning clothes cause the deceased to remain present in the bodies of the bereaved, practices that “take out” the darkness or misfortune ( go ntsha sefifi) of death from children and siblings stress removal and forgetting. Such practices vary by locality, in accordance with the “tradition” (ngwao) of particular Tswana ethnic groups. For instance, in the village of Tlokweng, a senior female relative shaves the heads of the children and younger siblings of the deceased on the day after a burial, then covers their heads, left arms, and left legs with Vaseline (in the past, milk fat was used). An herbalist told me that the smearing recapitulates the way in which God forms a baby in the womb, starting with the head, then forming the arms, and finishing with the legs. Often, children also eat an herb mixed with sorghum meal. They are then given black or, if they are members of 262

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churches of the spirit, blue strings to wear around their necks, and/or small rectangular pieces of cloth of the same color to pin to their left shoulders. In Tlokweng, this ceremony is carried out with great solemnity and silence in front of the extended family. Elders told me that the purpose of the shaving, washing, and eating medicine is to make children and younger siblings “forget” ( go lebala) the deceased, so that they will not be frightened by his or her appearance in dreams. Smearing children’s bodies with Vaseline, for instance, “calms their hearts” so that they do not “think too much” about their parent. In addition, children may be washed or given an emetic to make them “forget who their father is.” Once their mother finds a new spouse, I was told, they will accept him as their own father. In addition, “taking out the darkness” may be a way of creating proper sentiments between the deceased and the living. This was suggested to me by a 30-year-old Baitshepi member named Thandi, whose mother passed away in 1998 after a long illness. After the funeral, Thandi refused to have her head shaved with a razor or to eat medicine, unlike her siblings, who were so treated in front of the assembled relatives. Instead, she went by herself to Baitshepi, where MmaSeobo gave her some water mixed with salt as an emetic, cut her hair with scissors, and finally tied a blue string around her neck, all the while chatting about indifferent topics. This procedure took place on a weekday in the church building, in the absence of any other members of the congregation. Thandi explained her decision to me in the following conversation. thandi:

fk: thandi:

You see, people in other churches, like Roman Catholic, Twelve Apostles [churches which her siblings attended], they use Setswana medicines, Setswana charms [dipheko tsa setswana]. Now in our Setswana way of doing things, when your mother passes away, someone has to go and dig up a certain root [segwetsana], which is put into your porridge, and you eat it. Everyone else in the yard did this, only I did not. I mean that I don’t have anything to do with Setswana medicines. After they ate the medicines, they were shaved, but I went to church to vomit with water which had nothing else in it, only salt. Why is it important to vomit? You see, because I was with my mother when she passed away, her spirit entered into me, so I had to vomit to take hers out of me. I take out the spirit of the deceased, so that only my spirit remains. “you must not look back”

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fk: thandi:

fk: thandi: fk: thandi:

fk: thandi:

Is the spirit of the deceased a spirit of sickness? Yes, so that I won’t get sick, because otherwise, I might be frightened and then get sick, because I would be thinking about her. Those in church see to it that this doesn’t happen to me, that I am cleansed, so that I live just as I have before. Those who take Setswana medicines, do they do so in order to have the spirit of the deceased taken out of them? Yes, the medicine they use, that is the one which causes them to forget sickness. But you don’t believe/have faith in this? [Mme ga o dumele jalo? ] I don’t know! It’s what they say, but I don’t have faith in what they do. I don’t think it can be as they say. Their faith is that when a person is dead, he or she can come to you and trouble you [ go tshwenya]. Now my daughter and I don’t have that faith, because of what we’ve been taught in Baitshepi. So the others believe that a dead person can trouble you and cause you to get sick? Yes, that’s what they say, according to their faith. As for me, I’ve been with the dead, so she might come to me, but she won’t cause me to be bewitched [ ga a kake a ntoafatsa]. Maybe she will tell me something she wants done, but I won’t get sick, because if you don’t believe you can get sick, you won’t. It’s just the same as when on the day she died, the others spat with coals, because they say if they don’t, they’ll get sick and lose their minds [botlhale]. These are faiths/beliefs that are not ones [Ke ditumelo tse e seng tsona].

Thandi spoke of her refusal to eat Setswana medicine as a matter of tumelo, as a way of shaping her sentiments toward her deceased mother. She did not claim that eating Setswana medicines is inefficacious. On the contrary, her siblings “forget sickness” by taking such medicines. Yet Thandi went to Baitshepi in order to be “cleansed” and to have the spirit of her mother “taken out” of her body by means of water rather than medicine. Thandi implied that those who use medicine act in fear of ancestral anger, or dikgaba: “their faith is that when a person is dead, he or she can come to you and trouble you.” However, she has been taught in Baitshepi that “if you don’t believe you can get sick, you won’t.” Thus, vomiting with water

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prepared in church both cleansed Thandi’s body of the deadliness of her mother’s passing and placed her on a proper footing with her ancestral spirit. Her mother would not trouble her in dreams or cause her to be bewitched by withdrawing her protection. Instead, she might “tell me something she wants done” in a dream, perhaps a sacrifice. Unfortunately, I did not ask Thandi to elaborate on this point. Cleansing the body of a parent’s death influences the sentiments of the deceased and the living in relation to one another. Cleansing is necessary because these sentiments may be destructive, as was long ago suggested by the missionary J. Tom Brown, who wrote that the bereaved disguise their appearance with ashes and by shaving in order “to make it difficult for the deceased to recognize his relatives, and so prevent him from venting his ill will or vengeance for slights and wrongs done in the days of his flesh” (Brown 1926:70–71). For Thandi, washing the deadliness out of her body with water appears to have been a way of rendering benign her mother’s ancestral sentiments toward herself. In choosing to “forget sickness” by vomiting with water rather than by eating a plant, Thandi followed Baitshepi teachings that Setswana medicines build up jealousy because they are the materials used either to bewitch or to defend against witchcraft. Water, on the other hand, is an intrinsically cooling substance, and perhaps cooled any resentments between Thandi and her mother. Like wearing a mourning dress, seeing a woman dressed in black, and placing a corpse, cleansing deadliness from one’s body influences the sentiments of a range of persons. In the case of cleansing, it is the sentiments of the deceased toward his or her children that appear most at issue, while wearing a mourning dress may direct attention to a widow’s sentiments about her deceased husband and affines. Lying next to a coffin, and burying a person in a particular place, may “calm the hearts” of particular spouses or parents, while making others feel scorned. In each instance, there are public efforts to make the bereaved maintain or break bodily and emotional connections with the deceased. Ideally, this process allows them to so manage their sentiments as to perpetuate love toward the departed, their living kin, and the wider community. Yet very often, the public nature of caring for the bereaved makes it inevitable that they will “think too much.” This is especially the case in regard to speech, which must be carefully managed in the public place of death lest love and care be disrupted for the long term.

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civility and giving up

Nothing, perhaps, influences the sentiments of the bereaved more than what they hear. During a night vigil, people gather outside the house of sorrow in order to “calm the hearts” of the bereaved by causing them to hear consoling words. Most people in a house of sorrow cannot see the gathering, since they are lying down and are unable to look through the doorway to the outside. They must hear the energetic preaching and singing of the assembly in order to be convinced that the speakers have already “consoled themselves” with knowledge of eternal life. Hearing the voices of the gathering is supposed to animate the mourners, whose supine position is itself reminiscent of death. Hence church leaders may admonish followers who do not participate enthusiastically in a night vigil that they should not mope about “like corpses.” It was so important to MmaMaipelo to hear the prayers during the evening services preceding RraMaipelo’s funeral that she asked to move from her bedroom, where she had been lying in mourning, to her sitting room, which was closer to the front yard where the gatherings were being held. This move necessitated a large-scale rearrangement of the furniture, which had to be evacuated from the sitting room so that it could serve as a house of sorrow. Yet words of consolation, which ideally help the bereaved “give up,” also have the potential to make them “think too much” about the sentiments others have felt toward themselves and toward the deceased, and to increase their sorrows in the process. At Tebogo’s funeral, as I showed in chapter 1, this appeared to be the case for some in her extended family, whose mistrust of Baitshepi leaders seemed to have been sharpened by the ways in which they celebrated her tumelo in their church during the night vigil. Tebogo’s grandfather’s veiled accusations of church leaders showed, as MmaMaipelo put it to me, that “he was very sorrowful.” The capacity of spoken words to help the bereaved “give up” may thus depend on the ways in which people manage the impact of their sentiments on the feelings of others who may not share them. Such proper management is known as maitseo, a term which refers to the practice of civility or respectful comportment in public settings. As Susan Reynolds Whyte points out in a discussion of speech about suffering in Uganda, civility “can mean courtesy, but in its etymology it implies politics or politic behaviour, that is, practical wisdom” (2002:182). Distinct from tolerance, which under the best of circumstances connotes respect without participation, the concept of civility draws attention to “intersubjectivity—the way that people are 266

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interdependent in trying to pursue goals” (2002:182). At times of sickness and death, when people are intensely concerned with one another’s willingness to assist, “[s]howing respect to others brings respect, whereas confrontation and anger are usually thought to make people look foolish” (2002:186). Participants at funerals in Botswana recognize that they are likely to have conflicting sentiments toward the deceased and toward one another, and unlike participants in Jürgen Habermas’s “public sphere” (1989), they do not presume that they can or necessarily should imagine themselves in others’ positions (see Durham and Klaits 2002). Yet they recognize an imperative to speak in a manner that communicates their sentiments while avoiding open disputes. If everyone acts with civility toward one another, a funeral will remain a common endeavor in spite of conflicting sentiments. On one occasion, I witnessed a breakdown of civility during a night vigil, when members of the Twelve Apostles church made overly obvious efforts to convince listeners of their teachings and disputed what leaders of other churches had to say. They antagonized most of the assembly, including Baitshepi members who were also present, by preaching at length on how “the person is the word dwelling in the house of the flesh.” Although Baitshepi leaders share many of these convictions, they told me that Twelve Apostles members were trying to “teach” rather than “console.” In the opinion of Baitshepi members, “teaching” is inappropriate for funerals, at which preachers should remind the bereaved that we are only passing through this world, console them with the knowledge that the spirit does not die, and encourage them to “give up” as did King David after the death of his child. During the vigil, Baitshepi leaders openly accused Twelve Apostles members of being “Pharisees” who were more interested in converting their listeners than in comforting the bereaved. An additional likely source of antagonism was the implication of Twelve Apostles preaching that only those who truly know the nature of the word will go to heaven. At the height of this argument, a woman felt it necessary to come out of the house of sorrow to plead, “Please console us!” Baitshepi members later commented that “there was no civility [maitseo]” at the funeral, because Twelve Apostles members had preached without regard for the sentiments of their listeners. In speaking of the need to behave with civility in the context of funerals, then, Baitshepi members reflect on the importance of managing their own sentiments and acts so as to help make the work of funerals a common endeavor. When civility breaks down, it may become very difficult “you must not look back”

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for the bereaved to “give up,” because mourners depend on communal participation in efforts to console them. If a funeral devolves into open fighting among various factions, the bereaved will think about the jealousies that motivated the disputes, an outcome contrary to the ideal of not dwelling on past or present offenses. By the same token, it is important to help the bereaved to “give up” so that their own sorrow does not give rise to resentments and jealousies inimical to civility. Speaking and hearing are key to civility or its absence, as I illustrate in the following two cases. Speaking words of consolation aloud during a night vigil ideally unifies a disparate group of people—members of different churches and burial societies, people from the multiple places where the deceased had built or stayed, work colleagues—in a communal effort of giving love. On the other hand, one of the greatest threats to civility is what people “whisper” ( go sebetsa ) to one another in an undertone. People do not “whisper” words of consolation, but rather suggestions of witchcraft and other misdeeds. Such whispers pose particular dangers to civility if they break through into more open talk. In the first case study, I illustrate such an outcome, showing that a nearly complete breakdown in civility at a funeral prevented survivors from “giving up.” In the second funeral I describe, by contrast, people carefully avoided discussing a matter of common knowledge, namely, that a court had had to settle a disagreement about the burial site of a child. The fact that all parties maintained a footing of civility with one another allowed them to assert multiple claims to parenthood without precipitating a decisive confrontation.

Case One: “The Food Has Been Swallowed before Being Chewed” Deaths of relatively young adults tend to precipitate crises in processes of defining kinship relations. In this respect, funerals in the era of AIDS have come to bear similarities to points of crisis in the marriage process, such as births, weddings, divorces, and legal disputes over support. These events require spouses and their families to evaluate the terms of their familiarity with one another, and often to redefine who is a spouse, child, or parent in relation to whom (Comaroff and Roberts 1981; Griffiths 1997). Likewise, death often forces people to make difficult decisions about the status of relationships. At funerals of young men who have not been formally married, their parents must decide whether and how to recognize spouses and children, for instance by treating the “hot blood” in their bodies or recording their names on funeral programs. Deaths of young men often exacerbate tense relations between mothers- and daughters-in-law, 268

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Figure 4. Poloko’s family

who are often in competition for the man’s resources and loyalty. Especially if parents suspect their sons’ spouses of having caused their deaths through witchcraft or illnesses of the blood, the poignant and painful emotions of all concerned may have dangerously definitive consequences. This appeared to be the case at the funeral of a young man named Poloko, who had worked as a builder before his death in March 1998 at the age of twenty-nine (see the genealogical diagram in figure 4). Poloko had stayed in a yard adjacent to MmaMaipelo’s in Old Naledi, but had not been a member of Baitshepi or any other church. During the week of prayer services held before the burial, Poloko’s mother expelled his unmarried spouse from the funeral gathering. Since everyone is supposed to come to the place of death to “give love,” throwing a person out of a funeral is a terrible breach. The event precipitated a great deal of gossip about the sentiments of Poloko’s mother in connection to what she and others had not only “whispered” but openly spoken about what caused his death. MmaPoloko’s expulsion of the widow from her yard would not have given rise to such gossip and speculation had it not taken place at a funeral, where the bodies of the bereaved demand public attention and care. Poloko (1) had been nursed since falling ill in December 1997 by Masego, his unmarried spouse (2), in a plot in Old Naledi, adjacent to Baitshepi, that his mother (3) and father (4) had purchased from family members. Poloko’s parents were officially married in 1978 but subsequently separated, “you must not look back”

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the father living with a different partner (5) elsewhere and the mother receiving rent from the compound in Old Naledi while staying with her own mother (6) in a neighborhood known as Gaborone West. Much of the background was told to me by a young woman Baitshepi member who is a comparatively distant relation of 1, 3, and 6 through her father. She told me, on our way to visit Masego (2), who appeared about six months pregnant, that the situation was very sad, because even though the couple had been staying together for about twelve years and had a nine-year-old child (10), Poloko’s mother and grandmother (3 and 6) were refusing to allow Masego to take part in the funeral, which was proceeding in their plot in Gaborone West. MmaPoloko had come to Old Naledi on a Sunday to take her son to Gaborone West to nurse him there, and he had died the subsequent Thursday. By moving Poloko, my friend hinted, his mother had expressed her mistrust of Masego’s willingness to nurse him properly. When we saw Masego, she told us that she had been “chased out” ( go kobiwa ) of the prayer services preceding the funeral by Poloko’s mother and grandmother, who accused her of killing him with boswagadi. Recall that boswagadi is a dangerous disease transmitted by sexual intercourse with a widow or widower, whose blood has become hot as a result of having had a child by the deceased (Schapera 1979; Pauw 1990). If the bereaved has sexual intercourse before the end of the year-long mourning period, he or she gives the disease to the partner. Yet as Heald points out (2002:6, 9n.20), blame for spreading boswagadi falls largely on women, who are more apt than men to be accused of killing their spouses with “hot blood.” In the era of AIDS, talk about hot blood reflects the “pathologization of the womb” (Livingston 2005:145), whereby women are suspected of having sex to gain access to men’s resources, careless of possibilities that they may be transmitting hot blood or spoiled milk to spouses and children. Thus, Masego explained to us that another man (7) with whom she had had sexual relations had died some months previously, and that MmaPoloko was insinuating that the child with whom Masego was currently pregnant was this man’s offspring rather than Poloko’s. Discussion soon spread among many of the neighbors, who tried to calculate the relative timing of the conception of the baby Masego was carrying and the other man’s death, so as to assess the plausibility of this claim. Yet everyone seemed to agree that whatever grievances MmaPoloko may have had, she was scorning Masego by throwing her out of the funeral. For her part, Masego told us that MmaPoloko was responsible for afflicting her own son with dik-

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gaba, since she had been jealous of the support he had been providing Masego from his wages as a builder. Poloko’s younger brother (8), a peer educator in a nongovernmental organization aiming to promote sexual and reproductive health, later told me that Poloko had informed him that he was HIV-positive, and that during the funeral, he had tried without success to have his mother acknowledge that Poloko had died of AIDS. From my subsequent conversations with MmaPoloko on the subject, I formed the conclusion that any mention of AIDS as the cause of death would have cast more suspicion on Poloko’s own sexual conduct than on that of his widow, given that those who die of AIDS are usually thought to have been “promiscuous” themselves. By claiming that Poloko’s illness had been boswagadi rather than AIDS, his mother blamed the widow for killing him without weakening her own argument by suggesting that her son had contracted a sexually transmitted disease from another source. Moreover, in the light of the public speculation about her own character, for MmaPoloko to have accused Masego of giving her son AIDS would likely have been going too far, since it would have amounted to a public prediction that Masego herself would soon die. (According to most people to whom I spoke on the subject, women who transmit boswagadi to men do not get sick themselves, or do so only after many years. Such talk reinforces the onus placed on women’s sexual conduct.) After the funeral, MmaPoloko was able to return to Old Naledi and occupy the yard in which her son had stayed, and to which she had title. If she had completely alienated her neighbors by saying that Masego would die, they might have made life miserable for her and forced her to leave; I know of an instance of domestic violence in which a man’s neighbors became so disgusted with his insults toward his wife and her parents that they forced him from Old Naledi. In the meantime, Poloko’s father (4) refused to provide any money for the funeral, because, it was said, his own spouse (5) was jealous of his having anything to do with his children by MmaPoloko. The father (4), who has title to the plot in Old Naledi, was allowing the widow to remain there, and a brother and maternal uncle of the deceased (8 and 9) were making efforts in the funeral negotiations to have the mother and grandmother relent in their opposition to the widow’s attendance. It was the maternal uncle (9) who shouldered most of the funeral expenses, since neither Poloko nor his mother had belonged to a burial society.

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MmaMaipelo told me that she had been praying with Poloko for about a month, ever since she noticed him leaning against a tree in her yard. She explained his illness to me as “sores inside his body.” When I expressed my surprise that the mother and grandmother had taken him to their plot without his spouse’s consent, she told me that there had been more consensus at the time, since she had prayed over Poloko with his spouse, mother, and grandmother present. However, MmaMaipelo was shocked at MmaPoloko’s subsequent dealings with Masego, telling me that if MmaPoloko had had a problem with her son’s spouse, she ought to have denied them permission to get married eventually. Now, she said, “the food has been swallowed before being chewed,” meaning that the man had died before the marriage could take place. However, she hoped that the mother would provide water so that the food could go down, and that God would show her that she ought to put the widow in confinement, as a mother-in-law ought to do when a second or subsequent child is born. MmaMaipelo visited Masego in order to console her, saying that even though her affines were scorning her, she still had her own parents, and if they too were to scorn her, she should find a church, because church members look after one another. In consoling her, MmaMaipelo related her story of abandonment by her own relatives during her calling, and recounted the care she had devoted to recently deceased church members. About a week after the funeral, MmaPoloko moved her furniture, with the help of a cousin (MoZD), from her mother’s yard in Gaborone West to the compound in Old Naledi, clearly to induce Masego to find another place to stay. In Masego’s immediate hearing, MmaPoloko and her cousin made a variety of remarks to me about the jealousy and hard-heartedness of Batswana women in general. Then, in an undertone, the cousin reiterated to me that the widow had killed her spouse with the heat (mogote) of her boswagadi, having willfully refused to undergo a cleansing by a Setswana doctor following the death of her former partner.5 In order to determine the cause of the illness while Poloko was still alive, the cousin said, she along with 1, 2, 3, and 8 had consulted a diviner, who had given a diagnosis of boswagadi, but Masego had remained silent upon hearing it. Later, when Masego gave birth, MmaPoloko did not put her in confinement. The absence of civility at Poloko’s funeral made it impossible for his relatives and neighbors not to “think a lot” about the causes of his death and about one another’s sentiments. Explicit accusations—“whispers” breaking through into open speech—transformed everyone’s feelings. If there had been some consensus, as MmaMaipelo implied, about moving Poloko 272

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from a yard where he was nursed by his spouse to one where his mother would care for him, the act of expelling the widow from the prayer services prevented the funeral from being a common endeavor. Although I did not hear anyone say that the gossip had prevented Poloko’s relatives from “giving up,” MmaMaipelo implied as much when she said that “the food has been swallowed before being chewed,” and hoped that MmaPoloko would bring water to help the food go down. In other words, MmaPoloko’s accusations had made people resent one another, and it was up to her to alleviate the jealousies she had caused. As for MmaMaipelo, this controversy strengthened her conviction that people should not speak of personal responsibility for causing fatal illness. “I don’t want to hear any more of this talk—‘You killed my child, she killed her husband,’ ” she said to me. “Let’s all forgive one another, and pray to God!” Clearly, I thought, Poloko’s marriage was at an end, and published my impressions accordingly (Klaits 2005:56). In 2005, however, MmaPoloko mentioned to me that she was routinely visiting Masego and giving her children clothes. I pondered a moment and decided that it would be worth asking MmaPoloko to reflect on these events. “I’m happy to hear this,” I ventured, “because I recall that there were arguments at the funeral.” MmaPoloko looked at me hard and, not surprisingly, said nothing. I muttered an apology and soon took leave, thinking of the saying, “The feces left by a guest are enormous, but those of a child of the yard are small enough to be rolled away by the dung beetles.”

Case Two: “God Does Not Hate You” The circumstances surrounding the death in 2000 of a thirteen-year-old girl named Maggie might easily have led to a collapse of civility at her funeral. Maggie was the eldest of three children of a Baitshepi elder named Gadifele, who joined the church in 1994 and became the leader of the church youth group. Gadifele, who was born in 1964, grew up in Ghanzi, a town in the central Kalahari, and found work in 1985 as a government wildlife officer. She was first posted for work in Maun, a town in the north of Botswana, where she had three children with a man named Matlala. They were never married, and their relationship broke apart in 1992, two years after the government had transferred Gadifele away from Maun, to Molepolole and ultimately to Gaborone, where she leased a house in a neighborhood known as Phase 5. Gadifele frequently drove her car from Phase 5 into Old Naledi for church services and youth meetings, as well as to visit MmaMaipelo. “you must not look back”

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In 1993, Matlala took the children to live in Maun under circumstances which he and Gadifele disputed in the court case resulting from Maggie’s death.6 In an affidavit, Gadifele asserted that Matlala had asked to take the children to see his mother but never brought them back, while Matlala claimed that he had given bridewealth for the children (bogadi jwa bana) allowing him to take custody of them and to change their surnames to his own. In any case, Matlala subsequently married another woman who worked as a nurse in Maun, while Gadifele began living with another man in Gaborone. The children visited Gadifele during some school holidays, and she and Matlala exchanged letters about the progress of their education. Maggie and her younger brother were taken sick quite suddenly in Maun. Matlala’s aunt phoned Gadifele to say that the local clinic diagnosed the children with malaria. Maggie died within a day of being admitted, while her brother was seriously ill for a few days. Upon hearing the news, MmaMaipelo and other senior members of Baitshepi immediately went to Gadifele’s house in Phase 5, where she was lying in bed, grief-stricken over her daughter’s death. Gadifele was able to speak on the phone to her son in his hospital bed, telling him, “You’ll get better, you hear?” (O tlaa fola, o a utlwa?). The church elders sat upon the floor of Gadifele’s bedroom, speaking softly of what had transpired. During MmaMaipelo’s own period of mourning, Gadifele had made a point of sleeping in her bedroom in order to “calm her heart” with her presence, and MmaMaipelo felt it important to stay in close proximity to Gadifele in her grief. However, a dispute about where Maggie would be buried induced MmaMaipelo and the other church elders to cease lying in mourning with Gadifele after only a few days. They returned to their respective yards, leaving more junior church members to help prepare meals for Gadifele’s visitors, mainly her sisters and other family from Ghanzi. Matlala’s aunt had told Gadifele on the phone that his family intended to bury Maggie in Maun, two full days’ drive from Gaborone, within a few days. Gadifele’s own sisters, on the other hand, wished Maggie to be buried in their own home village of Ghanzi, and Gadifele filed a legal injunction to prevent her from being buried in Maun. In the meantime, Gadifele’s spouse and siblings expressed doubts to visitors about the competence of Matlala’s wife in looking after the children. They suggested that she had not acted quickly enough when they fell ill, implying that as a stepmother, she had not properly cared for her husband’s children by a former spouse. “We don’t know what was going on in Maun when Maggie got 274

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sick, and now they don’t want to give us enough time to view her body before it is placed in the coffin,” they complained. “How are we to give up without seeing our child? A parent needs to go to the mortuary to see her child’s entire body, not just her face in the coffin, if she is to give up and console herself.” Gadifele suggested that Maggie be buried in the Gaborone cemetery as a compromise, and Matlala agreed to this in his own affidavit. The legal process, however, took nearly two weeks, during which time MmaMaipelo stayed away from Gadifele’s house in order not to be seen as exerting undue pressure in the dispute. Baitshepi leaders clearly preferred that Maggie be buried in Gaborone, so that they could come to the funeral in large numbers to console Gadifele, but if they had lain in mourning with her through the entire period of the dispute, Matlala’s family would likely have resented their influence. As it was, MmaMaipelo was reluctant to talk about the particulars of the case. She lay in her own bed for much of the day, telling me that the arguments (dikgogakgogano) were making her “think too much,” weakening her “joints,” and rendering it difficult for her to preach the word. Maggie’s funeral gathering, held in Gadifele’s yard, was a careful compromise. Although it was common knowledge that there had been a court case, everyone was very careful to avoid any allusion to it, and members of Gadifele’s and Matlala’s families seemed to have planned the funeral so as to minimize the risk of disputes. For instance, Baitshepi elders returned to Gadifele’s yard to lie with her in the house of sorrow, along with her own kin, while Matlala and his wife stayed away from the night vigil, but arrived in the morning for the service preceding the burial. In so doing, they allowed Gadifele to be the bereaved mother to whom preachers addressed their words; it would have been awkward for Gadifele and Matlala’s wife to have been in the house of sorrow together, given the disagreements between them. Maggie had been a committed participant in an Apostolic church in Maun, and members of this church came to the night vigil in large numbers, along with Baitshepi members. The only moment of tension I witnessed between the two churches occurred during the night vigil, when a pastor from Maggie’s church preached about David’s resignation to the death of his child and, for a reason I do not know, mentioned that the prophet Nathan had told David that the child would die as a result of the king’s sin. MmaMaipelo then came out of the house of sorrow to preach directly to Gadifele, telling her, “God does not hate you,” and calling out to her that she must console herself, as she had consoled people at “you must not look back”

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other funerals, with the knowledge that death is the route to eternal life. Fortunately for the purposes of civility, no one from Maggie’s church took offense at MmaMaipelo’s implicit criticism of their mention of sin. At the morning service, Matlala’s and Gadifele’s respective families sat apart and avoided speaking to one another. However, they abided by the arrangement set out in the funeral program, which listed who would speak before the assembly in what capacity, for instance as “nurse” to the deceased, as her “parent” from Maun, and as her “parent” from Ghanzi. No one alluded to the court case in any of these speeches. Subsequently, the choir of each church took turns singing hymns, which they had evidently practiced carefully for the occasion. Maggie had been an active singer in her church, and her colleagues sang a harmonically intricate version of a certain hymn—I wish I had asked whether it had been her personal song. For their part, Baitshepi youth members sang two hymns that had been composed by Gadifele herself. They often sing these hymns during public events such as fund-raisers and interchurch gatherings, and take great pride in having a youth leader whose compositions are received enthusiastically by a wider audience. On this particular occasion, as they sang Gadifele’s hymn with the refrain “I have trusted in you, Father, feel sorrow for me” (Ke ikantse wena, Rara, o nkutlwele botlhoko), they seemed to sing especially to her, consoling her in particular for the death of her child, as MmaMaipelo had earlier done. Yet they were singing also to the full range of persons at the funeral, acknowledging the grief that everyone felt. In sum, Baitshepi members seemed to feel that Maggie’s funeral enabled people with competing interests and conflicting sentiments to express their love for the deceased, and to feel that their grief had been publicly acknowledged. I subsequently complimented several church members with the remark, “You conducted yourselves with civility” (Le dirile ka matseo), and received the enthusiastic reply, “Very much so!” (Thata!). In so doing, they had helped to leave the door open, as it were, for further relations between Gadifele’s and Matlala’s families, so that they might cooperate in the task of raising their children. It is both necessary and difficult to love in the face of death. Very often, survivors “think too much” about their sorrows, and about the injurious sentiments of those who might have caused their loved ones to die. Thinking too much may be deadly. The bereaved may “speak with their hearts,” showing their grief in listless despair. Or they may “look back” suddenly on their relations with kin, neighbors, and church colleagues, considering 276

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anew what they have done to help or hurt them. The darkness into which death plunges the bereaved demands a communal effort to enliven and console them, and to manage the impact of the deadliness of a person’s passing on their bodies. Yet this very communal effort subjects people’s sentiments to much wider attention than is usual, because everyone connected with the deceased or the bereaved has an obligation to “go to the death.” Because participants at funerals commonly feel conflicting attachments and loyalties, they must make great efforts to manage the impact of their sentiments on those of others if they are to maintain civility in the place of death. In order to illustrate the difficulties of managing the emotional force of death, I have shown how the task of “giving up” involves recasting one’s sentimental and bodily connections to the deceased, and to a range of kin. Very often, people speak of efforts to treat the bodies of survivors as altering their sentiments, ideally helping them to “give up” but in many instances making them “think too much” about deadly transfers of substance, such as hot blood. Such treatments—dressing a widow, washing deadliness out of a child’s body, lying next to the corpse in a house of sorrow—focus the attention of a wider public on the impact of what Rosaldo calls “a particular intimate relation’s permanent rupture” on the bodies and sentiments of survivors. In turn, the treatments survivors undergo have a potential to transform the sentiments of particular kin toward one another. For example, the question of whether and how a woman is to dress in mourning for a deceased spouse often reflects her own and her affines’ interests in maintaining a marriage by keeping him present within her body. When MmaMaipelo’s affines agreed that she would remain dressed in blue, rather than undress upon the death of her husband’s grandmother, they recognized the love she had for RraMaipelo and did not endanger their relations to the church network by asking her to come out of mourning against her will. In an ethnography of women’s improvised funeral laments in rural Greece, C. Nadia Seremetakis argues that “discoursed pain and discourse in pain constitute truth” (1990:507; emphasis in original omitted). In their antiphonic laments, Greek women make public claims to the truth underlying particular social relations, claims that cannot be readily countered by men within the female space of mourning. For example, women may advise their menfolk against remarriage, make claims to inheritance, or reject male-initiated reconciliations over killings, all by lamenting their pain in a public forum where other women “help” by responding as a chorus to the “you must not look back”

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mourner. Lamenting one’s pain is thus a means of publicly stating critical truths about social relationships. In effect, Greek lamenters say, “I am in pain, and my pain gives me the right to speak uncomfortable truths. My pain forces you to listen to me, and to accept my words as true.” The politics of funerals and mourning in Botswana, by contrast, appear to be more centered on the task of maintaining civility than on making critical truth claims. To be sure, people make implicit or explicit statements about the actual nature of social relations or of a fatal illness, for instance by “whispering” to one another about a certain person’s misdeeds. Yet such critical truth claims seem to be contingent outcomes in a public space where attention is focused on the injury caused by death and on the need to help survivors “give up.” The pain felt by the bereaved may lead them to speak disruptive truths, but pain gives no one a right to speak in a way that endangers civility. “Looking back” may be unavoidable, but it must be managed. “Giving up” is important because it is only by resigning yourself to the deaths of people you have loved that you will be able to give love to others, rather than feeling and acting with self-pity. Death may reinforce people’s capacity to give love, or destroy love between them for good. It is the involvement people feel in one another’s sentiments—their sense that the bereaved need help in order to maintain their own personhood—that makes public participation in funerals so necessary. Yet the very public nature of the occasion tends to make “giving up” difficult, in that funerals bring together people with widely different sentiments and interests. There is no transcending this problem; it can only be managed with efforts at civility.

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c o n c lu s i o n

Putting Love intoWords Somebody has died Oh! listen to that A friend, a mother, a son Another life has given way To the darkest moments Far beyond human’s reach Listen to the cry The talk, the preaching And also the whispers All seem empty and dull s e l i n a h o m ph i l e , “Moments of a Funeral”

i was never much good at consoling the bereaved. At night vigils, I would try to put together a few words in imitation of church members, but I am sure that I never gave a convincing impression of having “consoled myself” over, for instance, the death of yet another AIDS victim. At the funerals of people I had not known, I probably appeared to be reciting platitudes. I was even worse, I fear, at the funerals of friends, when my grief would sometimes get the better of me. This happened to me at thirteenyear-old Maggie’s funeral, when I rose during the night vigil to console her mother Gadifele. I do not recall what I said or tried to say, but I did not get very far, and had to stop abruptly. It seemed to me that my sadness had affected other church members as well, so that those who spoke immediately after me had difficulty preaching in the spirit. A few days previously, I had gone to visit Gadifele. I sat next to her with expressions of sympathetic sorrow, looking mournful and speaking softly. Gadifele, by contrast, spoke brightly about Jesus’ promise of eternal life 279

for believers such as her daughter. After I left, I realized that Gadifele had been trying to encourage me, by her own example, to console her. Rather than speaking only of sorrow, I was supposed to remind her, as she was telling me, that “God will wipe every tear from their eyes; death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more.” I felt ashamed of myself, and my sense of shame was not lessened when I heard that Gadifele’s spouse had brought her to a medical doctor to be treated for depression on the day after the burial. As a church member, I tried to take seriously the principle that a person who has faith should console oneself so as to console survivors, rather than making them feel so sorrowful that they cannot “give up.” Nonetheless, there were times when I became impatient with consolation and resignation. After one funeral in 1998, I asked some Baitshepi elders gathered in MmaMaipelo’s sitting room, “Isn’t there anything we can do to make sure that our children like this little girl here won’t get sick and die in a few years?” They replied that it was clear that I was asking out of the love and compassion I felt for those who were suffering. “It’s a question that comes from your love,” they assured me, likely out of concern that I was predicting the girl would die. When I pressed them for a further reply, MmaSeobo said, “We can pray.” Such uncomfortable episodes forced me to reflect on the disjunctures between what I and the people with whom I lived in Botswana felt necessary or possible to put into words. In part, it was the experience of being taken aback by such disjunctures that led me to focus on what people often wish to accomplish by putting sentiments into words—namely, building up comparable sentiments in the hearts of their hearers. For Baitshepi members, words of consolation and prayer ought to convey love from person to person, creating mutual well-being in the process. It is important to console and to pray in order to channel one’s sentiments and those of others in loving directions. Hearing and speaking are some of the many forms through which Batswana commonly aim to perpetuate relations of care and love over time. My own halting efforts to hear and speak words of consolation led me to “feel the love” of church members, and in so doing to become their “spiritual child.” Such are not the sentiments that writers adopting critical perspectives on health crises commonly feel or wish to communicate to their audiences. For example, Alex de Waal argues that many African leaders have adapted international AIDS prevention and treatment efforts for short-term political ends, saying:

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We have every reason to be angry. AIDS will not prove the political calamity that some have feared. It shows no sign of bringing about revolution, anarchy or terrorism, and it is unlikely to threaten the global order. But HIV/AIDS is a human tragedy on an awful scale, and there is no end in sight. As Susan Sontag writes, ‘That even an apocalypse can be made to seem part of the ordinary horizon of expectation constitutes an unparalleled violence that is being done to our sense of reality, to our humanity’ [Sontag 1988:134]. (de Waal 2006:123)

Would it not be merely a prerogative of privilege, and/or a political lapse, to put into words anything other than anger and pain at such violence, and at the entrenched inequalities that make the violence possible? Writing of how the legacy of apartheid has shaped the politics and historicity of AIDS in South Africa, Didier Fassin concludes: “In a world of inequality and violence, we can only be reassured on condition that we conceal from ourselves the price that must be paid for such reassurance” (2007:272). Yet the energy with which preachers reassure the bereaved of eternal life at funerals in Botswana demonstrates a political commitment on their own part, namely, to give voice to sentiments that counter the blank despair expressed by Selinah Omphile in her poem quoted above as epigraph—the sense that in the face of relentless death, all speech is irrelevant, whether a pained cry, a whispered accusation, or a call to faith. “Really, I hope that what you pastors are saying about eternal life is true,” exclaimed one woman, presumably not a church member, who rose to speak at a night vigil I attended. “Because if it’s not, I would just despair!” Veena Das has recently made a persuasive case that participation in the suffering of others is an important aspect of the ethnographic endeavor, arguing that “anthropological knowledge is precisely about letting the knowledge of the other happen to me” (Das 1998:192). In a number of writings on “social suffering,” in particular political violence (Das 1997), Das follows Wittgenstein in viewing the capacity to acknowledge the pain of others as the foundation of moral judgment. Any given person’s experience of pain is incommunicable in language, she argues, yet recognizing the pain of others is a moral imperative. “[T]o locate pain I have to take the absence of standing languages as part of the grammar of pain. To say ‘I am in pain’ is to ask for acknowledgment from the other, just as denial of another’s pain is not an intellectual failure but a spiritual failure, one that puts our future at stake” (Das 1998:192). The task of the writer should be to put pain into words so

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that a certain “unspeakable truth about society may be spoken” (Das 1995:162), namely, that suffering is perpetuated through social practices that discourage the witnessing of certain persons’ pain. Das promotes here an analytical and political project centering on putting pain into words, an agenda both like and unlike the task of directing sentiments that Baitshepi members—along with, at funerals, much wider publics—encourage one another to undertake. There is a broad local presumption in Botswana that a bereaved person depends on the love of others in order to be able to give love in turn. When death occurs, the imperative to care for the bereaved in the darkness of their grief is felt so strongly that everyone, ideally, comes to the funeral in order to guide their sentiments toward “giving up.” Recognizing the pain caused by death is perhaps the single most pressing moral obligation (cf. Richardson 2003). Yet at funerals, the task of putting love into words is regarded as more socially necessary than putting pain into words. To be sure, many of the words of survivors express pain, but such words are liable to be deemed dangerous, especially when they articulate critical or fear-inducing truth claims about promiscuity or witchcraft. If you have not been consoled, you may whisper that a certain person is responsible for the death of your child, and “think too much” about the slights you have received at the hands of others. By conducting themselves with civility (maitseo) at funerals, people who have loved and cared for the deceased—their close kin, for instance, or church leaders— encourage those with conflicting sentiments and agendas to behave likewise. Very far from being merely irenic, civility makes it possible for survivors to maintain overlapping ties of care and love to one another, so that the question “Whose child?” need not be answered in an exclusionary manner. In the concluding chapter of The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004), Sara Ahmed considers the relation of emotions to justice, asking whether it is plausible to speak of “just” emotions. Ahmed rightly warns against conceptualizing emotions as possessions of individuals, pointing out that from such a perspective “violence itself could be justified on the grounds of the absence of consciously-felt suffering” (193). Rather, Ahmed argues that it is necessary to recognize “how language works as a form of power in which emotions align some bodies with others . . . by the way they [i.e., emotions] move us” (195). While Ahmed’s subjects are racism, war, and heterosexist violence, her conceptualization of emotive language dovetails with popular Tswana understandings of how people’s voices affect one another’s sentiments, the conditions of their bodies, and their physical movements and placements. For Batswana, experiences of pain may indeed be 282

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readily communicated through language, since the voice is a full-body phenomenon, acting upon others’ bodies at a distance. For example, MmaMaipelo considered it crucial for caregivers to speak cheerfully to sick people so that they would not “give up” on prospects for recovery. Ahmed goes on to suggest that “just emotions” are those that prompt remembering of the body’s injuries, as might a lumpy scar that covers a wound but that nonetheless “always exposes the injury, reminding us of how it shapes the body. . . . [R]ecovering from injustice cannot be about covering over the injuries, which are the effects of that injustice; signs of an unjust contact between our bodies and others. So ‘just emotions’ might be ones that work with and on rather than over the wounds that surface as traces of past injuries in the present” (2004:202, emphases in original). I imagine that MmaMaipelo would have been sympathetic to Ahmed’s conclusion that sentiments ought to work with and upon one’s own and other people’s bodies, but that she would have regarded this argument less as a theory of justice than as a premise of moral reasoning and feeling. Which sentiments ought to work upon whose bodies, and for what ends? She would have wanted to know, for instance, whether a widow should “remember” or “think about” the injury done to her blood by her husband’s death by putting on either a black or a blue mourning dress, and also under what circumstances she should “undress,” removing her deceased husband’s presence from her body. More broadly, it was her appreciation of the need to communicate love to other people rather than afflicting them with scorn and jealousy that compelled MmaMaipelo to speak the word of God. Under circumstances of sickness, debility, and death, the intersubjectivity of sentiments gives rise to political problems that command sustained local attention in Botswana. Even as experiences of inequalities have fostered mutual suspicion and resentment, betrayals of trust, abandonment, neglect, and abuse, and even as church leaders and diviners sharpen practitioners’ ambivalence about the sentiments of others, Batswana have felt abiding imperatives to sustain love in the time of AIDS, in large part because the difficulty of the task is a subject of explicit social recognition. For example, a house in the darkness of death demands communal acts of care—involving large-scale food preparation, financial contributions, staying awake in the cold night to console the bereaved, washing the deceased’s clothes on the day after the burial—all undertaken on the presumption that survivors depend on other people’s love for their well-being, and in order to give love themselves in the future. More generally, “speaking truth” ( go bua nnete) in order to putting love into words

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bring about healing is not a matter, as Ahmed has it, of exposing “the ordinary and normative or . . . what has been concealed under the sign of truth” (2004:200). Rather, go bua nnete involves doing true things for other people so as to perpetuate love among them. Thus, local styles of speaking truth about sexually transmitted and fatal illnesses tend to constitute methods of working out caregiving relationships, rather than of making claims about unequal power or of assessing the worth of individuals in relation to standards of normality. Because the impact of women’s caregiving acts and sentiments upon other people’s well-being is taken very seriously as a ground of politics, it is important from a policy perspective to build up women’s caregiving capabilities, and not to construe their responsibilities to give care solely as aspects of patriarchy or as forms of political self-betrayal (see Dube 2004; Urdang 2006).1 It is essential to enable people to feel that they will be able to care properly for others, and that they themselves will be cared for properly if they learn and disclose that they are HIV-positive.2 Thus, prevention efforts implemented in the absence of treatment programs tended to reinforce popular assumptions that anyone who contracted AIDS must have been “promiscuous.” Since 2002, by contrast, Botswana’s national ARV treatment program has prolonged many lives and to some extent diminished the stigma associated with being HIV-positive—preconditions, plausibly, for encouraging people to disclose their status and for reducing incidence rates. Treatment programs have enhanced people’s capacities for caregiving, especially women’s capacities to care for children, so that women appear particularly receptive to HIV testing offered in clinics. On the other hand, it is not unlikely that a “medical profiling” logic (Briggs with Mantini-Briggs 2003; see also Biehl 2007) will come to inform health workers’ discussions of who is more or less likely to benefit from ARV therapies, especially if viral resistance increases. That is, there is a danger that patients’ prospects will be assessed in terms of their conformity to standards of “self-sufficiency,” and that the conditions that give rise to diseases—including food insecurity and malnutrition, inadequate primary health care, and housing and school fee policies that render livelihoods tenuous—will remain unremedied. It is likely that Batswana will continue to experience the consequences of social inequalities within their domestic arrangements, and that they will comprehend and often make efforts to mitigate those consequences through caring work such as burying, nursing, building, and praying. Inasmuch as varieties of Christian practice in Botswana draw upon popular presumptions that persons’ well-being depends on where they are, whose 284

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company they keep, which substances come in contact with their bodies, and whose voices they hear, the moral frameworks of such religious discourses coexist in tension with official efforts to reward “self-sufficiency” and “self-reliance.” The moralities associated with the housing activities of building, cleansing, sending, asking, drinking, nursing, and burying are simply not identical to the moralities of the wage labor market, liberal citizenship, and mass consumption, deeply transformative as these have been. Rather than devaluing housing activities as emotional as opposed to productive, Batswana tend to be keenly aware of how their well-being depends on the love, care, scorn, or jealousy with which those activities are carried out. Consequently, they often valorize such sentiments in religious as well as nonreligious terms. For example, while it is very difficult to nurse the sick properly without some access to cash, it is the sentiments with which women carry out the work of nursing that have long been subjects of intense local concern. MmaMaipelo often evaluated the tumelo of the sick themselves in terms of their willingness to be nursed in particular places and by particular people. In short, tumelo—in keeping with the significance of the term as “agreement”—is more a method of sustaining particular kinds of intersubjectivity than a means of self-determination. The broad popular appeal in Botswana of prayer and of tumelo in God, even to those who may not consider themselves committed Christians, rests on wide recognition of the numerous circumstances under which people depend on one another’s all-too-fragile goodwill, respect, and blessing. Six months after MmaMaipelo passed away in June 2006, I made a brief visit to Botswana to pay my respects. Her closest friend MmaSeobo had concluded a letter to me as follows: “We are grief-stricken [Go bohutsana mogo rona], even though she taught us all the time about death so that we would know what it is. Yes, we know it, but we have lost [re latlhegetswe]. Even so, we have been consoled by the writing: We do not wish you to be uninformed, my people, about those who sleep, lest you grieve as do those who have no hope [1 Thess. 4:13]. The hymn is 117 in [Lifela tsa] Sione, ‘In the troubles of my mind, I call to you’ [Tsietsing tsa letswalo, ke bitsa go wena].” Upon arriving, I asked a young woman church member how MmaMaipelo’s funeral had been. “We were so sorrowful,” she told me. “I never thought she would leave us, but she did.” I think that church members would want my readers to know that at the party they held to welcome me, I spoke as follows: “When I heard that our mother had passed away, I was in great pain, day and night. I mean putting love into words

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that I felt pain in my body. But after about a week, she came to me in a dream. She smiled and said in Setswana, ‘Why are you weeping, Kagiso? You see that I am alive.’ Then she took me by the shoulder and embraced me so that my head reclined on her chest. When I awoke, I wondered, ‘Has she really passed away or not?’ After that, the pain I had been feeling disappeared. I have come to bring you this testimony, so that you may see how she has consoled me, and that you may also console yourselves, knowing that the spirit has eternal life.” An elder who spoke immediately afterwards told me that the congregation had already consoled themselves, and that MmaMaipelo had left them many instructions to continue loving one another. A few days later, Maipelo took me to the family’s fields so that I could greet his maternal relatives staying there. It happened that Keletso, one of the young women I mentioned at the outset of this book, had recently given birth, at the age of nineteen, and had subsequently disappeared, leaving the infant with her father RraMpho (Maipelo’s MoB) and his new wife at the fields. Keletso had left them with a supply of formula and vanished. Everyone said that Keletso had been a willful girl (o itaotse); she would drink beer and cut school in order to smoke, even though her father had been paying fees for private school for her after she had failed her exams. Maipelo told me that as an orphan, and as the only girl of four siblings, Keletso should have learned the importance of working responsibly around the yard, and blamed her father RraMpho for being too soft on her; her mother would have taught her better. No one expressed concern about what might happen to Keletso at this point. One of her female cousins tried to reassure me: “Some day Keletso might get sick, and then she’ll go back to her parents. They will scold her, but they will take her in.” MmaMaipelo’s sister MmaDineo, likewise, told me that Keletso had offended (o kgopisitse) God because God had given her the child to nurse and to bathe. MmaDineo also wished to apologize to me for not having informed me on the telephone of MmaMaipelo’s death, and for having told me instead that she had gone out. “I couldn’t say the words. You know that I don’t preach much in church, but it’s not because I lack tumelo. It’s that I think too much about how MmaMaipelo suffered during her calling.” I had brought a photo of myself with MmaMaipelo, but MmaDineo found it too painful to look at. She went on to tell me about the instructions MmaMaipelo had left her to care for their elderly mother and younger brother Mokgale (see chapter 3 above). Mokgale was in an advanced stage of tuberculosis and had been staying at the fields with MmaDineo since his release from the hospital the previous year. All the while MmaDineo was 286

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talking to me, Mokgale sat to the side, coughing and spitting white fluid into a cup. We all went into a house in MmaDineo’s compound to greet her aged mother, born around 1912, who was nearly deaf and nearly blind. The old lady asked for Betty, her granddaughter who had disappeared from the family eight years previously, and MmaDineo replied, “I’m here, mma.” MmaDineo had apparently been keeping up the pretense that Betty was still staying with them. She then showed her mother the photo of myself with MmaMaipelo: “You see,” MmaDineo told her as she looked intently at it, “MmaMaipelo has not died.” Maipelo then asked his grandmother to bless him, saying “We will remember [re tlaa gopola] your prayer after you have gone.” The grandmother grasped Maipelo’s arm, repeatedly appealing to God (“I am asking you, God” [Ke a go lopa, Modimo]) on his behalf as he kept his eyes closed. We then stood in a circle within the house in order to pray. Mokgale, the man suffering from tuberculosis, asked Maipelo to read aloud the first two chapters of the book of Job from a battered Bible. Maipelo read: . . . Jehovah said to Satan, “Have you considered my servant Job, how there is no one like him in all the world, a man who is self-sufficient [itekanetseng], who is upright, who fears God, and who avoids evil? He still persists in his lack of sinfulness/indebtedness [bosenang molato], even though you have incited me to destroy him for no reason.” Satan answered Jehovah, saying, “Skin will be given for skin, yes, all that a person has he will give for his life. But stretch out your hand and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will deny you [o tlaa go itatola] before your eyes.” Jehovah said to Satan, “Behold, he is in your hands; only spare his life.” So Satan went forth from Jehovah and afflicted Job with loathsome sores, from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head. Job took a potsherd with which to scrape himself, and went to sit in the ashes. Then Job’s wife said to him, “Do you still persist in your lack of sinfulness/indebtedness? Deny God [Itatole Modimo], and die.” But he said to the woman, “You speak as one of the foolish women speak. What are you saying? Shall we receive the good from the hand of God and not receive the bad?” In all this Job did not sin with his lips.3

Maipelo then preached that to refuse to deny God means to do the truth, and to live with love for people. After asking me to offer a hymn and a prayer for those of us gathered in the house, MmaDineo remarked to one putting love into words

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of her neighbors that she had been nursing people ( go oka) ever since 1965, when her father died and she had had to begin looking after her mother. In preaching that denying God would be tantamount to refusing to love other people, and to incurring debts from them without asking their forgiveness, Maipelo was making the point that if you deny God, you are not denying God’s existence, but rather your often onerous responsibilities to love others as God wishes. To argue that Job’s attitude amounts solely to acquiescence in one’s own oppression would be to overlook the significance of such preaching, namely, that suffering makes it more difficult, and hence all the more necessary, to sustain love for other people. It is important from a humanitarian standpoint to recognize this ethos, with all its potential for contestation, subordination, exploitation, and indeed personal destruction, because to whatever extent AIDS control measures are going to succeed in Botswana, their success will be due in no small measure to the hard work people devote to loving and caring for one another over the course of their lives. It is in light of the importance of putting love into words that MmaSeobo’s remark “We can pray,” made in reply to my question of what we can do so that our children will not die of AIDS, needs to be understood. It is perhaps easy to dismiss prayer as useless “feeling” rather than effective “doing” from a standpoint of privilege, from which it is possible to overlook how one’s health and well-being depend on the words and sentiments of others. Clearly, prayer must not be the last word in AIDS prevention. Yet as of this writing, HIV prevalence rates are so high in Botswana that anyone who wishes to bear or beget a child stands a good chance of contracting the virus.4 Even given the widespread availability of antiretroviral medications, it remains all too likely that people will continue to die in large numbers of AIDS and other afflictions of inequality. Under such circumstances, what would be the consequence of not praying, in the eyes of church members? If there were no prayers for the sick, and no efforts to console the bereaved, suffering people would feel scorned by everyone’s refusal to acknowledge their pain. Death would precipitate even more accusations, jealousies, and fears, so that survivors would be more likely to become one another’s enemies. Prayer is a way of recognizing and alleviating the grief of others, so that sentiments and relations of love may arise even out of death. While so many people in the world are systematically scorned for not living up to standards of “self-sufficiency,” putting love into words is a way of insisting that we are all kin to one another, and therefore share a common future.

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conclusion

Appendix One

This is a transcription of a speech given at the night vigil for Tebogo in May 1997 by her friend Rosina, discussed in chapter 1 and recorded in file 1 of the online audio annex, at www.ucpress.edu/9780520259669. Sung hymns are given in roman type in the Setswana text and in italics in the translation, and double quotation marks indicate spoken words taken from hymns. Notes on particular passages refer to Rosina’s subsequent explanations to me in an interview conducted in August 1997. Line numbers at intervals of twenty are given in parentheses within the Setswana and English texts. I am grateful to three members of the Baitshepi Church, including MmaMaipelo, for helping me transcribe this speech. Joale ke bone sediba sa nnete,

Now I have seen the true well,

Sediba sa maphodi, se monate.

The well of good healing.1

[Lifela tsa Sione 338]

[Lifela tsa Sione 338]

Tshwarelo! Ke re ke batla go gopola motho wa Modimo,

Pardon!2 I say that I want to remember the person of God,

ha a kile a kena gareng ga bodiba,

who once entered deep water,

kgotsane motho wa Modimo,

this person of God,

ha a kile a fumane metse a bopheho,

when she saw the water of life,

kgotsane motho yo o kileng ya re a nyorilwe,

this person who said she thirsted,

289

290

ha a tsena gareng ga [Baitshepi].

when she entered Baitshepi.3

Tshwarelo! (Amen.)

Pardon! (Amen.)

Ke rata ke bue ka lesole

I desire to speak of the soldier4

le le kileng la re ka metlha le dipaka,

who always used to say,

“Ruri le nkgapile pelo,

“Truly I love it [literally, it has taken my heart by force],

lefatshe le lentle lela,

that beautiful country,

ke utlwa botlhoko,

I long for it,

ha ke ntse ke le gopola,”

thinking of it,”

a re “Dumelang ke a tsamaya,

she said, “Farewell I am leaving,

ke ya lehatsheng lela,

I am going to that country,

Jesu o a mpitsa,

Jesus is calling me,

o mpaakanyetsa sebaka,

preparing a time for me,

sebaka sa go dula.” (20)

a time to rest.” (20)

A re ke a re, “Ammaruri le nkgapile pelo,

She said, “Truly I love it,

lehatshe le le lentle lela,

that beautiful country,

gore ke utlwa botlhoko,

I long for it,

ha ke ntse ke le gopola,”

while I think of it,”

a re “Jesu ena

she said, “Jesus

o mpaakanyetse sebaka sa go dula.”

has prepared a time for me to rest.”

A re “Dumelang baratuoa,

She said, “Greetings my loved ones,

Ha ke mo latela gona, a re ke ha eso ka sebele.” [Lifela tsa Sione 363]

when I follow him there, I am truly at home.”5 [Lifela tsa Sione 363]

Ke gopola lesole la Modimo,

I remember the soldier of God,

le le kileng la apara diaparo tsa tlhabani,

who once put on the uniform of a soldier,6

ena [Tebogo],

that is Tebogo,

ha a kile a aba jaaka lesole,

living like a soldier,

le le mo tetelong.

being in the promise.7

Se mphete wena yo o rategang,

Do not bypass me, beloved one,

Mmoloki wa ka,

My Savior,

appendix one

Ha o ntse o sitsa ba bangwe,

You have helped others,

Se mphete le nna.

Do not bypass me.

Jesu, Jesu,

Jesus, Jesus,

Ke a go rapela,

I pray to you,

Ha o ntse o sitsa ba bangwe, (40)

You have helped others, (40)

Se mphete le nna. [Lifela tsa Sione 361]

Do not bypass me.8 [Lifela tsa Sione 361]

Tshwarelo, tshwarelo ya Jesu!

Pardon, Jesus’ pardon!

Ha sefela se se utlwala, go utlwala mokgwa,

When this song is heard, it is a sign,

kgotsane ha motho a bua,

what a person might say

ha a bona a tla tsaya loeto.

when she sees she is about to set off on a journey.9

Mo motho wa Modimo ha a kile a baakanya,

This person of God, who was prepared,10

a re “se mphete moNasara,”

said, “Do not bypass me, Nazarene,”

a re “Jesu, ha o ntse o fa ba bangwe,”

she said, “Jesus, you have given to others,”

a re le nna o mphe gannye,

she said please give a little bit to me,

a re kgotsane lesole la Modimo,

she said, this soldier of God,

Ke re ntate,

I say, Father,

a re “se o no o nkadimile sona,

“that which you have lent to me,

ha o re, ke se busetse Morena,

when you say to return it Lord,

a re ke tla nna ke re ho lokile.”

I will say that it is all right.”

[Lifela tsa Sione 110]

[Lifela tsa Sione 110]

Ha mosadi wa Modimo ka se sebaka,

This woman of God would say at times,

a re, “Ntate sone o nkadimileng sona,

“Father, that which you have lent me,

go siame ke se buseditse,”

it is all right, I have returned it,”

gonne e ne e le kadimo fela mo lefatsheng,

since it was just a loan on this earth,

appendix one

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292

fa ke ne ke adimilwe, jaanong ke a kgotlisa.

I have been lent to, and now I am bringing back.

Kgotsane motho wa Modimo a bua le Modimo wa gagwe [go simololwa go opela Lifela tsa Sione 110] — tshwarelo! tshwarelo ya Jesu!— (60)

This person of God, speaking to her God, [people start singing Lifela tsa Sione 110] —pardon! Jesus’s pardon!— (60)

motho wa Modimo a bua le Modimo wagagwe,

this person of God speaking to her God,

a re “Rara, o no o nkadimile ka lengwe la malatsi,

would say “Father, you have lent me one day,

fela ke tla go le busetsa.”

I will return it to you.”

Se o nkadimileng sona, Ha o re, ke se busetse,

That which you have lent to me, when you say to return it,

Le teng ke tla leka go re: Ho lokile! Ho lokile! [Lifela tsa Sione 110]

Then I will try to say: It is all right! It is all right! [Lifela tsa Sione 110]

Tshwarelo! Mo motho wa Modimo yo ke a mo gopola, [Tebogo],

Pardon! This person of God I am remembering, Tebogo,

motho wa Modimo o ne a tsena ka dipheho,

this person of God used to enter in the wind,11

gone mo tempeleng,

there in the temple,

kgotsane o ka re o ka opela “bonang go tlhagile maru,

as you might sing “Look the clouds have appeared,

one a a tsosang batho botlhe,

those that raise all people,

bona o tla khutla legodimong,

see, he will stand in heaven,

bona go tla phuthiwa batho botlhe.”

see, all people will be gathered.”

[Lifela tsa Sione 45]

[Lifela tsa Sione 45]

Kgotsane batho ba be jwale jaaka ena,

That is, people who are like her,

mo motlhankana wa Modimo wa moefangedi jaaka nna,

a servant of God, an evangelist like me,

kgotsane motho wa Modimo wa mosha jaaka nna,

a person of God, a youth like me,

o re “bonang go tlhagile maru,

she said, “Look the clouds have appeared,

a a tsosang batho kgale,

which raise the people of old,”

o re o tla khutla legodimong”

she said, “He will stand in heaven”

appendix one

...

...

. . . A a tsosang batho kgale;

. . . Which raise the people of old;

O tla khutla legodimong (80)

He will stand in heaven (80)

Go phutha batho botlhe.

To gather all people.

Alleluya! Dumelang alleluya!

Alleluya! Dumelang alleluya!

Alleluya! Dumelang alleluya!

Alleluya! Dumelang alleluya!

Utlwang, go tlhajwa mekgosi

Hear the loud calls

E e tsosang ba ba suleng

Which raise the dead

Ba mengwa ke Moatlhodi,

They are called by the Judge,

Ba tswa botlhe mabitleng.

All come out of their graves.

Alleluya! [Lifela tsa Sione 45]

Alleluya! [Lifela tsa Sione 45]

Tshwarelo! Ke “utlwa go tlhajiwa mekgosi,”

Pardon! I “hear the loud calls sounded,”

ha motho wa Modimo a kgatlhantshiwa ke perompeta,

when the person of God encounters the trumpet,

kgotsane terone ya [Baitshepi],

or the glory of Baitshepi,

ha a kgatlhantsha motlhankana wa Modimo,

when she encounters the servant of God,

ha a tla a kgabile jaaka monyadwi yo o kgabetseng monna wa gagwe.

when she comes adorned like a bride adorned for her husband.

Ke gona ha ke bona [Baitshepi],

Here when I see Baitshepi,

ha ke gopola terone e ntle,

when I think of the beautiful children,12

ke re ke gopola lekgarejwana la Modimo,

I mean I remember the young woman of God,

ha le kile la sepela tseleng tsa Morena,

who has gone on the Lord’s road,

kgotsane a kile a ikgethela.

which she chose for herself.

Ke gopola moefangedi wame,

I remember my evangelist,

o ne a tsena a thuthumela ka moya, (100)

she used to enter wholeheartedly in the spirit, (100)

a re “mafika a petsoha,”

saying “the hills are tumbling,”

a re “dinaledi tsone di a wela”

saying “the stars are falling”

[Lifela tsa Sione 45],

[Lifela tsa Sione 45], appendix one

293

294

o utlwala ha di a duduetsa,

they are heard singing out,

ha diperompeta di lela,

those trumpets sounding,

o a itse ga ke itse ke ka reng,

I really don’t know what to say,

ha ke gopola lesole.

when I remember the soldier.

Ke rata re bine

I desire us to dance

“utlwa go tlhajiwa mekgosi

“hear the loud calls

e e tsosang ba ba suleng.”

which raise the dead.”

Utlwang, go tlhajwa mekgosi

Hear the loud calls

E e tsosang ba ba suleng

Which raise the dead

Ba mengwa ke Moatlhodi,

They are called by the Judge,

Ba tswa botlhe mabitleng.

All come out of their graves.

Alleluya! Dumelang alleluya!

Alleluya! Dumelang alleluya!

Alleluya! Dumelang alleluya!

Alleluya! Dumelang alleluya!

Bonang, go tlhagile maru

Look, the clouds have appeared

A a tsosang batho kgale;

Which raise the people of old;

O tla khutla legodimong

He will stand in heaven,

Go phutha batho botlhe.

To gather all people.

[Lifela tsa Sione 45]

[Lifela tsa Sione 45]

Tshwarelo! Ke ne ke rata go bua ka lesole, banna, (120)

Pardon! I have been wanting to speak of the soldier, men, (120)

ke utlwa ke nna le mokgwa wa go senyega,

I know that I lead a changed life,

ha ke gopola manyeloi a a thata,

when I think of the powerful angels13

a a pepang banna le basadi.

which look after men and women.

Tshwarelo! (Amen.)

Pardon! (Amen.)

Motho yona wa Modimo ga se lesiela leha e le khutsana,

This person of God is not an orphan or parentless,

ha kene gore go tempele ya [Baitshepi].

going to the temple of Baitshepi.

Ke ena yo o nang le batsadi ba moya,

It is she who has spiritual parents,

le nna ke joale jaaka ena,

and I am now like her,

appendix one

ke re le nna ke na le batsadi ba moya, jaaka ena.

I say that I have spiritual parents, like her.14

Ke re le nna ke tshwane le lesole,

I say that I too should be like a soldier,

ke ngaparela Jesu fela,

grasping onto Jesus alone,

ke seka ka leba gope gape.

I should never again look anywhere else.

Ke rata re binele lesole,

I desire us to dance for the soldier,

re tsene ka natla.

let us enter with energy.

Kgotsane ba ba robetseng ba tsoge,

Let those who sleep rise

ba utlwe ha “go tlhajiwa mekgosi,”

and hear “the loud calls,”

kgotsane ke “letsatsi la dikgakamatso,

that is, the “day of wonders,

tsatsi le le boitshegang.”

the dreadful day.”

Tsatsi la dikgakamatso!

Day of wonders!

Tsatsi le le boitshegang! (140)

Dreadful day! (140)

Fatshe yotlhe le tla tsoga,

All the world will rise,

Ka le utlwa yo o tlang [Dihela 377]

Since it hears him coming [Dihela 377]

appendix one

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Appendix Two

This is a transcription of Lesego’s preaching in Baitshepi in July 1993, discussed in chapter 4 and recorded in file 2 of the online audio annex, at www.ucpress.edu/ 9780520259669. Sung hymns are given in roman type in the Setswana text and in italics in the translation, and double quotation marks indicate spoken words taken from hymns. Line numbers at intervals of twenty are given in parentheses within the Setswana and English texts. Tshwa-tshwa-tshwarelo. (Amen.) Tshwa-tshwa-tshwarelo. (Alleluya!)

Par-par-pardon. (Congregation: Amen.) Par-par-pardon. (Alleluya!)

[O ntsha Lifela tsa Sione 108:]

[She brings out Lifela tsa Sione 108:]

Athe Jesu o n’a mpona

Yet Jesus saw me

Ha ke lela joalo;

When I was weeping in that way;

A mpitsa, a re: Tlo ho nna,

He called me, saying: Come to me,

O fole matswalo.

And your conscience will be cooled.

Joale ke khotso ka metlha

Now I am at peace forever

Mohau wa Modimo;

In the grace of God;

Ke qalile ho iketla

I began to rest

Tsepong ya godimo.

In heaven’s holiness.

Tshwa-tshwa-tshwarelo. (Alleluya!)

Par-par-pardon. (Alleluya!)

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Ke rile ha pina e, ha e opela jaana, go utlwala letswalo laka lena le nkitaya,

I say that when this song, when this song is sung, I feel this my conscience strike me,

go nneela sengwe sebaka hane ke ntse ke ntse joale,

giving me1 that time when I was like that,

ka lela le Morena Modimo a re “Tlo ho nna, o fole matswalo.”

when I wept to the Lord God who said “Come to me, and your conscience will be cooled.”

Tshwa-tshwa-tshwarelo. (Amen!)

Par-par-pardon. (Amen!)

[O ntsha Lifela tsa Sione 99:]

[She brings out Lifela tsa Sione 99:]

Bodibeng jwa matlhomola,

In the deep well of sorrows,

Moo ke neng ke tebile,

In which I was immersed,

Ha ke se ke ea timela,

When I was lost,

Jesu, o n’o nkhopola;

Jesus, you remembered me;

O a tlhaha, o a ntutubolla,

You appear, you open my eyes,

Ka tsota dintle tsa hao, (20)

With your beautiful wonders, (20)

Ke tseba le go nyakalla,

I know to be happy,

Hoba ke bone mohau.

Since I have found grace.

Empa ke santse ke khasa;

But even when I was still crawling;

Che, esita le joale

Ah, even then

Matswalo a sa ntlhokisa

My unhappiness made me need

Tumelo ea sebele.

Faith itself.

Tshwarelo! (Amen.) Tshwarelo! (Amen.)

Pardon! (Amen.) Pardon! (Amen.)

“Bodibeng jwa matlhomola,” jo nkileng ya re ka sengwe sebaka,

“In the deep well of sorrows,” in which at one time

ka thiba go lona,

I was immersed,

go be sefela sena ke se opela jaana,

this hymn that I sing like this,

go be se lebagane le nna,

it is face to face with me,

ka se sengwe sebaka,

that time

se ne sa tiba

which immersed [me]

“bodibeng jwa matlhomola,”

“in the deep well of sorrows,”

hane batsadi baka bone,

when my parents they too,

appendix two

ha ba ne ba le mo matlhomoleng,

when they were in sorrow,

ba ne ba nahana ke diba

they recognized that I was immersed

“bodibeng jwa matlhomola.”

“in the deep well of sorrows.”

Tshwarelo! (Alleluya!)

Pardon! (Alleluya!)

[O ntsha Lifela tsa Sione 99:]

[She brings out Lifela tsa Sione 99:]

Bodibeng jwa matlhomola . . . (40)

In the deep well of sorrows . . . (40)

. . . fa ke ntse ke opela sefela sena,

. . . when I am singing this hymn,

o ultwa lenyoloi le tla le nna,

you hear the angel coming to me,

o a itse ke gopola lenyoloi lena la [Baitshepi],

you know I think of the angel of [Baitshepi],

lenyoloi le le thata,

the powerful angel,

lenyoloi le le thata le kgona go gogela motho kwa go Modimong.

the powerful angel that can pull a person to God.

Lenyoloi le erileng ka sengwe sebaka

The angel that at one time

fela ha nka- pha- ka hapoga ditiro tsa Modimo.

when I- tur- turned away from the works of God.

Tshwa-tshwa-tshwarelo! (Alleluya!)

Par-par-pardon! (Alleluya! Amen!)

Lenyoloi le a ntsenya, le a ntsenya mo tseleng ya Modimo. Tshwatshwa-tshwarelo! (Alleluya!)

The angel causes me to enter, causes me to enter in the road of God. Par-par-pardon! (Alleluya!)

Tshwa-tshwa-tshwarelo! (Alleluya! Amen!)

Par-par-pardon! (Alleluya! Amen!)

[O ntsha sefela:]

[She brings out the hymn:]

Matlhomoleng a ka, Jesu o na le nna!

In my sorrows, Jesus is with me!

Ditsietsi, meleko, Jesu o na le nna!

In temptations, trials, Jesus is with me!

[Se a tswelela, maloko a bina.]

[Repeated over and over, as members dance.]

. . . ke le “matlhomoleng a ka,

. . . “in my sorrows,

aa, Jesu o na le nna,”

ah, Jesus is with me,”

Hane ka sengwe sebaka,

in that time, appendix two

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300

hane ne ka timela

when I wandered,

hane ne ka timela tseleng yagagwe.

when I wandered away from his road.

Tshwarelo! (Amen!)

Pardon! (Amen!)

[O ntsha sefela:]

[She brings out the hymn:]

Tumelo ya ka,

My faith,

Ga nka ke ka e latlha, (60)

I won’t throw it away, (60)

Tumelo ya ka.

My faith.

[Se a tswelela, maloko a bina.]

[Repeated over and over, as members dance.]

. . . ka kagiso mo pelong ya me.

. . . with peace in my heart.

“Ga nkitla ke e latlha,

“I won’t throw it away,

ruri ga nkitla ka e latlha,

really I won’t throw it away,

ruri ga nkitla ka e latlha,”

really I won’t throw it away,”

tumelo e Modimo o kile wa mpha yone,

the faith that God once gave me,

le yone ke ile ka e tsaya ka e latlha,

which I took and then threw away,

jaaka loungo le le sa ungweng sentle.

like a fruit [tree] that bears bad fruit.

Tshwa-tshwa-tshwarelo! (Amen!)

Par-par-pardon! (Amen!)

Tshwa-tshwa-tshwarelo! (Amen!)

Par-par-pardon! (Amen!)

Nka re, le nthapediseng thata,

I say, please pray hard for me,

go bua le Morena Modimo,

to speak to the Lord God,

o ile a mpha tumelo,

he gave me faith,

ke seka ka e latlha,

I should not throw it away,

tshware- tshwarelo! (Alleluya!)

par-pardon! (Alleluya!)

Le tumelo nna ke e tshware,

And faith, I should hold onto it,

go fitlhelela ke swa,

until I die,

go tsweng lefa ke tshela. (Amen!)

throughout my life. (Amen!)

Tshwa-tshwa-tshwarelo! (Amen!)

Par-par-pardon! (Amen!)

Fa re ultwa sentle lentswe lena, bana ba Modimo, (80)

When we listen well to that voice, children of God, (80)

la re ekile ya re monna mongwe Jona monna wa Modimo,

it says that there was once a man, Jonah a man of God,

appendix two

hela ka sengwe sebaka ha a ne a romilwe Ninife, tshware- tshwarelo, (Alleluya!)

at one time he was sent to Nineveh, par-pardon, (Alleluya!)

ya re fa monna Jona a tswelela a tsamaya bana ba Modimo

while the man Jonah was traveling, children of God,

o ne a ya kwa dikepe di emang gone, tshware- tshwarelo (Alleluya!)

he went to where the ships were sitting, par-pardon (Alleluya!)

ha a tla tsaya sekepe se tsamaya go sele, tshwa-tshwa-tshwarelo, (Alleluya!)

then he took a ship going elsewhere, par-par-pardon, (Alleluya!)

erile a ntse a tsamaya mo tseleng bana ba Modimo

when he was on his way, children of God

ha sekepe seo ga tsoga phefo— tshwa- tshwarelo! (Alleluya!)

when that ship a wind rose— par-pardon! (Alleluya!)

[Ba bangwe ba ntsha sefela:]

[Others bring out the hymn:]

Uyele somandla!

You are holy!

[Se a tswelela, maloko a bina.]

[Repeated over and over, as members dance.]

. . . ha ke leka go gopola ka sengwe sebaka,

. . . when I try to think of that time,

ke gopola pina e re ka sengwe sebaka,

I think of the song when at that time,

e ke neng ka phomola ka yone, tshware-tshwarelo, (Amen.)

[the song] in which I found rest, par-pardon, (Amen.)

ye ke neng ke phomola ka yone, tshware-tshwarelo, (Amen.)

when I found rest through it, par-pardon, (Amen.)

hane ka sengwe sebaka tshwarelo bana ba Modimo, (Amen.)

when at that time, pardon children of God, (Amen.)

hane ke phologa ka yona bana ba Modimo,

when I was healed by it, children of God,

ke ile ka phologa ka sefela seo, tshware-tshwarelo.

I was healed by that hymn, par-pardon.

Gakere ha re utlwa sentle, lentswe lona la Modimo,

So when we listen well to that voice of God,

lentswe lona le a re Jona monna wa Modimo,

that voice says that Jonah man of God,

fa a ne a sena go tsaya tsela e sele, bana ba Modimo,

after he took the other road, children of God, appendix two

301

302

mme lentswe le—tshwarelo bana ba Modimo! (Amen!)

then this voice—pardon children of God! (Amen!)

Erile fa ba le fa gare, fa gare ga noka, tshwarelo bana ba Modimo, (Amen.) (100)

When they were in the middle, in the middle of the river, pardon children of God, (Amen.) (100)

sekepe sa tlhaga phefo ya phuntlhega -phuntlhega [?] sekepe sa nwela (Amen!) tshware-tshwarelo bana ba Modimo

the ship encountered a wind with a rush [?], the ship was drowned (Amen!), par-pardon children of God

erile sa tswa gape, tshware-tshwarelo bana ba Modimo,

when it came out again, par-pardon children of God,

Jona ke fa a ntsha lentswe, batho ba Modimo,

it was then that Jonah brought out his voice, people of God,

a raya batho ba ba neng ba palama sekepe, a ba raya a re,

telling the people who had boarded the ship, telling them

a re ntatlheleng mo teng ga noka, tshwa-tshwarelo,

throw me into the river, par-pardon,

jalo batho ba ba ne ba tsaya ditaolo tsa ga Jona, tshware- tshwarelo bana ba Modimo,

so the people drew lots for Jonah, par-pardon children of God,

ba mo tsaya ba mo latlhela kwa tlase, ba mo latlhela mo teng ga noka,

they took him and threw him down, they threw him into the river,

e be a re a ntse a le mo teng gaga -ga noka, tshware-tshwarelo bana ba Modimo,

and when he was in the river, par-pardon children of God,

ke fa a kopana le leruarua, tshware-tshwarelo,

that was when he met the whale, par-pardon,

ke fa leruarua lena le ile la mo kometsa, tshware- tshwarelo,

that was when that whale swallowed him, par-pardon,

ke fa monna yole Jona a nna malatsi a mararo le masigo a mararo, tshware- tshwarelo bana ba Modimo

that was when that man Jonah spent three days and three nights, par-pardon children of God,

a le mo mpeng ya leruarua, tshware-tshwarelo,

in the stomach of the whale, par-pardon,

erile monna . . . tsatsi la bofelo a rapela, tshware- tshwarelo,

when the man . . . on the last day he prayed, par-pardon,

appendix two

a re rraetsho yo o ko legodimong, tshware-tshwarelo,

he said our father who is in heaven, par-pardon,

leina lagago a le itshepisiwe, tshware-tshwarelo

hallowed be your name, par-pardon

[Ba bangwe ba ntsha Lifela tsa Sione 89:]

[Others bring out Lifela tsa Sione 89:]

Se teng sediba sa madi,

Here is the well of blood,

Aletareng ea tefelo,

Aletareng ea tefelo,2

Diba see e leng setlhare;

This well is medicine;

Mmatla sona ke bophelo.

Its power is life.

Baetsadibe ba batso (120)

Black sinners (120)

Ba se kenang ka tumelo,

Who enter it with faith,

Ba tloga teng ka bosweu,

They leave it in whiteness,

[Ka thabo le ka tshwarelo.]

[With joy and forgiveness.]

Le utlwe sentle bana ba Modimo,

Listen well children of God,

hane a leruarua le sena la mo kometsa,

after the whale had swallowed him,

hane leruarua le ne le ile la mo tsaya la latlhela kwa kwantle ga noka, tshware-tshwarelo, tshware- tshwarelo,

the whale took him and threw him up out of the river, par-pardon, par-pardon,

fela ke tla fela ke tla ikhutla ke boetse morago,

I will finish, I will cut myself off and go back [among the congregation],

gone ha ke hitlha, ka hitlha Egepeto

there I’ll reach Egypt,3

go katoga ga leba yo o sebete.

and move back to watch whomever is courageous [implicit meaning: if I continue, no one will be able to equal my skill in preaching].

[Ba bangwe ba ntsha sefela:]

[Others bring out the hymn:]

Noyana, noyana!

Noyana, noyana!

[Se khutliwa ka pele.]

[It is cut off very quickly.]

Fela ke kopa gore hane ke boela morago gona,

I just ask as I go back there,

ke kopa sefela se nkileng ya re ka seno sebaka,

I ask for the hymn that at that time,

appendix two

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304

hane fa ke neng ya re ka phologa, ba ne ba phologa ka sone.

when I was healed, they were healed by it.

[O ntsha sefela:]

[She brings out the hymn:]

Angelina, uyele somandla!

You are holy, God!

appendix two

notes

i n t ro d u c t i o n 1. Rebaone Odirile, “Life without Parents,” Midweek Sun, July 22, 1998. Typographical errors have been corrected. 2. Estimates of HIV prevalence in Botswana are more reliable than mortality statistics. Estimates of infection rates are based on seroprevalence surveys of pregnant women in health clinics. Because there is no national death registration system, however, cause-specific mortality rates are calculated through demographic projections extrapolated from the seroprevalence data. The source of the statistics cited here is www.unaids.org, accessed January 2001. 3. I use conventional anthropological shorthand for kinship relations; see Note on Pronunciation and Orthography. In this instance, MMyZS is mother’s mother’s younger sister’s son. 4. I am also indebted to Richard Werbner and Bennetta Jules-Rosette for suggesting the term as co-chairs of a panel on “Moral Passion and Desire in Postcolonial Africa” at the 101st meeting of the American Anthropological Association, New Orleans, Louisiana, November 2002. 5. Church leaders chose the pseudonym “Baitshepi” (Saints) for me. 6. This is a pseudonymous teknonym meaning “mother of Maipelo.” RraMaipelo means “father of Maipelo.” I refer to adults by teknonyms if most people familiar with them do so as well. Usually, people begin to call a woman “mother of so-and-so” in routine fashion some years after she first gives birth, as they become used to thinking of her as a mother. Men are rarely called “father 305

of so-and-so” before they are married or build a house for themselves and their children. 7. Unless otherwise noted, all Bible passages are my translations from the second edition of the Setswana Bible used by informants, Baebele e e Boitshepo (Roggebaai, Western Cape, SA: Bible Society of South Africa, 1992). During my first period of fieldwork in 1993, most used the 1908 edition translated by A. J. Wookey, which employs a now-obsolete orthography. By the late 1990s, the subsequent edition with revised orthography was in wide circulation (see Dube 1999; Sandilands 1989). In keeping with usage in both Setswana Bibles, I do not capitalize pronouns referring to the divinity. The highly inflected grammar of the language would make such capitalization awkward. 8. Kagiso, meaning “peace,” is the name given me by Sheila Mmusi, one of my Setswana teachers. 9. Such accusations often involved talk about improper sexual activity. The relatives of a man injured in a mining accident attributed his failure to recover to the “hot blood” which his wife had transmitted to him in sex after she had aborted a baby conceived with another lover. The brother of a woman who had suffered a stroke blamed her daughters for causing her stress and worry by their promiscuous behavior. The relatives of a woman who abandoned her child suffering from mopakwane accused the woman’s mother-in-law of failing to instruct her son to respect restrictions on postpartum sexual intercourse (Livingston 2005:40–63). 10. At a funeral, as I show in later chapters, MmaMaipelo would be very reluctant to make such a remark attributing sickness and death to divine retribution. 11. There are other Setswana terms for sin, sebe and boleo, both meaning an evil thing, but I have not heard these used as commonly as molato, or debt. Joel Robbins (2004:282) shows how Urapmin Christians in highland Papua New Guinea also refer to sins as debts, but as debts to God rather than to other people. In their confessions, Urapmin make clear that they are “giving” their sins to God, ridding their bodies of their weight, so that the sins are no longer legitimate subjects for discussion (2004:279, 282). 12. Mass labor migration to South Africa, which gave rise to novel understandings of autonomy and work time, brought about the decline of such rainmaking rituals and of the broader indigenous public health system focused on regulating physio-social maturation through age grades (Livingston 2005: chs. 2–3; see P. Werbner 2009 on the persistence of girls’ maturation rituals in northeastern Botswana). 13. On the perceived unknowability of sources of illness in other African contexts, see Last 1992; West 2005; Whyte 1997. 14. Reminiscent here of Jean and John Comaroff’s discussion of hegemonic and ideological aspects of consciousness (1991:19–32), Keane’s argument (2007:14, 289) that moral problems stem from the ways in which signifying practices 306

notes to pages 8–25

are and are not objectified, rather than from the ways in which those practices structure relationships, likely owes much to Sumbanese performance styles (see Keane 1997b). “Long-standing assumptions embedded in the pragmatics of performance in Sumba require public recognition of the self in formalized interactions, as elaborated in everything from marriage negotiations to any dealings with ancestral spirits” (Keane 2002:82). By contrast, when Baitshepi leaders say that they “refuse to have faith” in divination, they call attention to what they perceive as the problematic sociality arising from this practice—not primarily to diviners’ and their clients’ misrecognition of its lack of efficacy. Hence I frame the moral problems arising from such practices in terms of tumelo—how one’s sentiments become aligned with those of particular persons—rather than in terms of recognition or consciousness. 15. “Zola Seven,” South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) 1, December 21, 2006. 16. Given her opposition to divination, MmaMaipelo would have been surprised to find that I have classed her together with Mr. Zondi. Yet notwithstanding the differences in these healers’ approaches, I see them as engaged in comparable forms of moral passion in that each was seen to possess an expertise in imagining the nature of other people’s sentiments and in fostering love according to particular (and highly divergent) methods. See Kiernan 1992; Schoffeleers 1989; and chapter 3 below. 17. By contrast, J. P. Kiernan (1997) describes how Zulu Zionists in South Africa see themselves beset by occult attacks from other township residents whose egalitarian ethos leads them to be jealous of Zionists’ self-discipline and relative prosperity. These Zionists seem to have foreclosed possibilities of ongoing participation with people of different tumelo—that is, with township residents who orient their sentiments toward beer drinking rather than toward asceticism. For this reason, the rituals of these Zionists stress the threats posed by occult adversaries rather than the need to forgive one’s debtors. 18. People do commonly express anxieties about the potentially malign tendencies of ancestors and sometimes speak of a resentful ancestor as an “evil spirit” (mowa wa bosula). Such concerns show that the importance of dying in faith derives less from anxieties about individual salvation than from the need to sustain love between the living and their deceased relatives. 19. Pentecostalist churches based in other African countries appear to constitute an important exception in this regard. These churches, such as Bible Live Church International and Christ Citadel International Church, appeal in large part to migrants from elsewhere in Africa, as well as to middle-class Batswana (van Dijk 2006). Pastors of these Pentecostalist churches attempt to set their congregations apart from other religious communities in many ways, in particular by preaching against what they consider the “promiscuous” sexual practices of most Batswana. Members of churches of the spirit, for the most part relatively notes to pages 25–30

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poor, commonly accuse these Pentecostalists of praying only for money. Baitshepi members have told me that they have never seen members of these Pentecostalist churches at any funerals they have attended. It is likely that antagonisms between these Pentecostalist churches and churches of the spirit have contributed to a reluctance on the part of Pentecostalist pastors in particular and African expatriates in general to participate in funerals in Botswana. Given that funeral participation is locally understood as central to practices of civility (see chapter 6), this dynamic is likely to have contributed to patterns of xenophobia in Botswana directed against migrants from elsewhere in Africa (see Nyamnjoh 2006; also Taylor 2004).

chapter one Some of the material in this chapter was presented in earlier form in F. Klaits, “Making a Good Death: AIDS and Social Belonging in an Independent Church in Gaborone,” Botswana Notes and Records (published by the Botswana Society) 30 (1998): 101–19; and in D. Durham and F. Klaits, “Funerals and the Public Space of Sentiment in Botswana,” Journal of Southern African Studies (published by Taylor & Francis) 28, 4 (2002): 773–91. 1. No national statistics were kept on voluntary HIV testing in Botswana during the 1990s. The National Health Laboratory at Princess Marina Hospital in Gaborone, which handled most blood testing for the country, screened about 7,000 samples per year for HIV during the late 1990s, according to the head of the facility, Ms. Sarah Gaolekwe, whom I interviewed in 2000. However, this number included about 800 samples taken from pregnant women each year for sentinel surveillance purposes, a large number of blood donations, and multiple samples taken from those who wanted confirmations of a positive HIV test. By contrast, the number of people receiving diagnoses at clinics for other STDs during 1997 was 196,201, of whom 79,025 were male and 117,176 female (Botswana Government 1999:32). Clearly, people were not discouraged from seeking medical attention by having symptoms of sexually transmitted disease, yet most were reluctant to be tested for the fatal HIV. 2. For example, settlement patterns among Kalanga in the northeast of the country are more dispersed, with localities surrounding landmarks serving as units of use (R. Werbner 1975), and there are permanent settlements at many fields in the southeast (Silitshena 1982). 3. On the range of economic conditions within “female-headed households” in Botswana, see Peters (1983) and Gulbrandsen (1994). These authors call attention to the analytical bluntness of this category in light of the diversity of connections between women householders and their children and siblings. 4. Source: www.unaids.org, accessed January 2001. 308

notes to pages 38–45

5. Source: Dan Moabi, “Make HIV Testing Truly Routine,” Mmegi, June 17, 2004. Electronic document: www.mmegi.bw/2004/June/Thursday17/1013404 23378.html, accessed June 2004. 6. Source: Newsletter of MASA, the Botswana National Antiretroviral Therapy Programme, vol. 15 (June 2005). 7. Source: Botswana Daily News, March 7, 2006. Electronic document: www .gov.bw/cgi-bin/news.cgi?d = 20060307. 8. Young adult men told me that they are able to “stretch out” ( go itshidila ) their bodies through manual labor—middle-class men do the same by working out at the gym—in order to maintain this sort of bodily strength, unlike (so they say) women who spend more time “staying put” (go nna fatshe ). 9. The Setswana term for church, kereke, derives from the Afrikaans kerk. 10. Analytical distinctions between “churches of the law,” “churches of the spirit,” and “Pentecostalist” churches have a tendency to obscure the nature of the dialogues and confrontations between them. Thus, Allan Anderson (1992) presents the alternative rubric “African Pentecostalism” in order to emphasize the importance placed on the power and manifestations of the Holy Spirit in churches as diverse as the ZCC and the Assemblies of God. 11. Most of these women belonged to churches of the spirit, while a few were members of Pentecostalist churches. Children as young as five years old may go to churches in the absence of their parents, having been attracted by the singing, and may eventually bring their mothers into church as well. However, I did not include children in this calculation since in many cases it is unclear whether they consider themselves formal members of a church. Also excluded from the ratio are people living in church compounds, almost all of whom attend the church located in the yard. 12. Likewise, Ruth Prince writes (2007:95–96) that for Luo in Kenya, the “verb yie, ‘to accept,’ which is translated in the Christian context as ‘to believe,’ . . . is closer in meaning to the original English meaning of belief as having faith in, or being committed to, something.” 13. Batswana distinguish sharply between witchcraft, which is intentional harm, and dikgaba, unintentional harm caused by the hurt feelings of an elder or ancestor. In this instance, the widow did tell me that her husband had been bewitched by his mother, but the church elder interpreted what I told her as an account of dikgaba. 14. Harry West (2007) describes how Muedans in northern Mozambique engage in practices of countersorcery as well as sorcery, continually “overturning” (kupilikula) one another’s efforts to envision and remake reality. Beneficent authorities in Mueda engage in “constructive sorcery” by announcing that they have perceived and thus undone the invisible deadly realities that sorcerers have created (2007:57). In saying that she did not have tumelo in dikgaba, MmaMaipelo was not in my view making a comparable claim about her perception of realities; nor, it notes to pages 46–60

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seems to me, were Adam Ashforth’s friends in Soweto who told him that they only “partly” believed in witchcraft (2000:73, 76). In these contexts, refusing to have tumelo appears to be a means of counteracting witchcraft and dikgaba, not by discerning and overturning their realities, but rather by orienting one’s own and others’ sentiments in relation to possibilities that witchcraft and dikgaba have had effects upon a person’s life. 15. This important shift seems to have occurred in most areas during the early twentieth century. Tlokweng, a village located in the small region between Gaborone and the South African border, is one of the few places where there is no cemetery. Continued insistence on the part of Batlokwa that the dead be buried within their compounds reflects a long history of tribal claims to scarce land. 16. I never heard any Baitshepi members discuss passages in which Job takes God to task for punishing him unjustly. 17. This hymnbook was first published in 1854 by French Protestant missionaries in Lesotho (Coplan 1994:74). At some point, no doubt because of its title, the Zion Christian Church adopted it as their own, and it is now often identified as the hymnbook of churches of the spirit, in the same way that churches of the law possess their own hymnbooks. 18. Funeral programs specify who will speak in what capacity during the morning service, for instance, as a “parent,” “mother’s brother,” or “nurse” to the deceased. In order to compose a program, there must be consultations with a range of interested parties so that no one feels neglected. Such consultations, carried out within a few days following a death, are highly confidential; I was never allowed to take part in one. 19. Borneman’s presumption that care is a matter of “voluntary affiliation” reflects the importance of “families of choice” among same-sex partners in the United States and elsewhere who are compelled to recognize how kinship relations must be maintained through sustained effort and attention (Weston 1991, 1995). However, the voluntarism of Borneman’s formulation runs against abundant comparative evidence that relationships of care frequently do not involve equivalent degrees of volition or power on the part of “carers” and the “cared for.” This point has been made forcefully, for example, in literature on child fosterage and pawning in Africa (Bledsoe 1990a; Falola and Lovejoy, eds., 1994). 20. See Richard Werbner’s discussion (2004a: ch. 7) of the current political involvement of Kalanga elites with elders and ancestral shrines in northeastern Botswana. On Reformation-era shifts in relationships between the living and the dead in England, likely a distant source of Schapera’s presumption that Christian belief precludes contact with ancestors, see Greenblatt 2001.

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notes to pages 70–80

c h a p t e r t wo 1. Suzanne Brenner’s study (1998) of how women batik makers in Java incorporate wealth derived from the marketplace into a “domestic sphere” of familial and ancestral ownership presents a comparable case of how women and men value one another’s sentiments and productive capacities in terms provided by domestic moralities. Unlike in the Javanese context, where there are strongly felt imperatives to exclude ancestral wealth from circulation, in southeastern Botswana, junior men’s access to cash and consumer goods derived from labor migration transformed intergenerational wealth flows beginning in the 1930s, so that the capacity to earn money came to be seen as a principal source of physical and moral strength (see Livingston 2005: ch. 3). Yet because housing activities give rise to sentiments of love, care, scorn, and jealousy, Batswana have often conceived of the consequences of disparities in one another’s earning power in terms of what they have felt and done within domestic spaces so as to enhance or diminish one another’s well-being. 2. Durham (2007:106–7) shows that government measures to reintroduce public school fees met with much popular approval when they were proposed in 1999, on the grounds that parents need to show that they are “developed persons” by providing money for their children’s education. Introduced in 2006, these school fees are very substantial: P300 per student per year in junior secondary school, and P450 for senior secondary school (Botswana Press Agency, “Pay Now or Else!” Botswana Daily News, October 23, 2006; electronic source: www .gov.bw/cgi-bin/news.cgi?d=20061023, accessed March 29, 2009). Students in some secondary schools were warned that they would not receive their examination results or be promoted to the next form if their parents defaulted on school fees (“No School Fees, No Results,” Botswana Gazette, October 20–26, 2006). 3. Early in Otladisang’s narrative (1993:16; my translation), Leidi tries to persuade another girl, named Poifo, to run away to the city with her: “All right, if you’re afraid because we’re girls, let’s change into men. We will leave our girlhood here by the side of the stream and change into men, and then we will begin to behave like men.” Poifo laughed, even though she didn’t think it was funny. . . . She asked, “What do you mean?” “For that of a man is by the side of the road!” “What is?” “His grave!”

4. “In the Heart of the Hood—Part 4,” Mmegi, June 18, 2004. Electronic document: www.mmegi.bw/2004/June/Friday18/3755830371622.html, accessed February 16, 2009. 5. In the villages, the lelapa is often identified as a walled courtyard lying in front of the house. In Gaborone generally, such walled courtyards are relatively notes to pages 84–93

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rare given building regulations, and the entire plot (setsha) upon which houses are situated is often referred to as the lelapa. Since Old Naledi residents have been allowed to retain the informal structures built prior to the upgrading projects of the 1970s and 1980s, front courtyards are more common than elsewhere in the city. Whether or not a courtyard is actually present, the term lelapa refers above all to the space in front of the house where visitors are received. 6. Electronic source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaborone, accessed April 4, 2009. 7. Public Works Department, Bechuanaland Protectorate, “Low Cost Housing—Bechuanaland Protectorate. Paper No. 2.” MS in Botswana National Archives, S.589/9.2, May 4, 1962, pp. 1, 3. 8. Secretary, Townships, Works, and Communications Division, Bechuanaland Protectorate, “Low Cost Housing at Gaberones.” Ms. in Botswana National Archives, S. 592/11.8, May 20, 1963, p. 3. 9. In the course of upgrading, there occurred what to my knowledge was the only instance in which government officials regulating housing in Old Naledi concerned themselves explicitly with residents’ marital arrangements. A former employee of the Gaborone City Council told me of her efforts to ensure that women were not defrauded of their plots by “boyfriends” who claimed to be their husbands and thus entitled to register houses in their own names under community of property laws discriminatory against married women (Molokomme 1987). “Then, once he had the plot in his name, he could throw out the woman and her children if he wanted to. So what we did was to make sure that the women were really married. We interviewed them closely and even interviewed their neighbors to see how long they had lived together. You have no idea what men can do.” As far as I have been able to gather, this was not a matter of explicit policy, but rather a decision reached informally by a group of women housing officials. The fact that this upgrading effort entailed not the enforcement of a nuclear family ideal but an attempt to give property rights to unmarried mothers should caution against too ready an equation between ideologies of modernity and those of domesticity (cf. Comaroff and Comaroff 1992: ch. 10). 10. “In the Heart of the Hood—Part 1,” Mmegi, June 15, 2004. Electronic document: www.mmegi.bw/2004/June/Tuesday15/1009491627870.html, accessed February 16, 2009. 11. Mpho Koboyatshwene, a Gaborone city councilor, interview, May 1, 2000. 12. Prof Malema, “New Face for Old Naledi,” Mmegi, April 28–May 4, 2000, p. 1. 13. It was within these rooms accessible only from the outside, designed as servants’ quarters (rooms D and G in figure 1), that most young women who were “spiritual children” stayed without paying rent. In 2000, room G was unoccupied for the first time in my experience, due I imagine to Maipelo’s in312

notes to pages 94–105

creased influence on living arrangements in his mother’s yard after his father’s death two years previously. 14. A common warning is that “a child who does not hear the law of his parents will hear that of the vultures” (ngwana yo o sa utlweng molao wa batsadi o tlaa utlwa wa manong), the vultures being the strict taskmasters of now-obsolete initiation ceremonies, who severely punished the disobedient. 15. Mennonites did not engage in active proselytizing in Botswana. Beginning in 1977, they organized Bible classes attended by pastors from independent churches. It was local church leaders themselves who invited the Mennonites to do so, given the government’s long-standing suspicion of unauthorized church practices. By obtaining certification from formal classes, pastors may register themselves and their churches at the Ministry of Labour and Home Affairs, and they compete for positions of privilege within church hierarchies. A number of Baitshepi pastors have received certification from Mennonite-sponsored courses and other religious schools. 16. Nicholas Townsend’s category of having “established one’s own household” appears to include men who live with children or spouses but not with parents or by themselves. This classification is problematic for Old Naledi, where renters may have “established a household” by these criteria but would not usually regard themselves as having done so, given that they have not yet “built for themselves” either in the city or in a village.

c h a p t e r t h re e Some of the material in this chapter and chapter six was presented in earlier form in F. Klaits, “The Widow in Blue: Blood and the Morality of Remembering during Botswana’s Time of AIDS.” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute (published by Edinburgh University Press) 75, 1 (2005): 46–62. Online access to the journal Africa is to be found at www.eupjournals.com/journal/afr. 1. See Ruth Prince’s discussion (2007) of a comparable set of debates among Luo in Kenya revolving around widow inheritance in the time of AIDS. 2. Many studies have shown how religious movements in Africa address the lived predicaments of their adherents through rituals that transform the spatial location and movements of people’s bodies. Fernandez (1982), for example, documents how adherents of Bwiti chapels in Gabon dance “down the path of birth and death,” toward an ecstatic transcendence of bodily impurities. In the KwaZulu-Natal–based Church of the Nazarites (Muller 1999), as among Apostles of Johane Masowe (Dillon-Malone 1978), the identification of young women’s virgin bodies as components of the physical “house” of God, the temple, reflects efforts to constrain their sexual involvement. Jean Comaroff (1985) argues that Zionist ritual reconstructs the spatial organization of daily life, drawing notes to pages 107–127

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participants away from the alienating South African political economy and reintegrating them into the collectivity of Zion, centered around the prophet’s homestead. Richard Werbner (1989: ch. 8) outlines how ritual spaces in three large-scale churches of the spirit, all founded in Zimbabwe, constitute different approaches to the problems of being a stranger in, or of being estranged from, the land. 3. Deborah Posel (2005) argues persuasively that former South African President Thabo Mbeki’s opposition to biomedical discourses about HIV reflects his concern with asserting the vitality of the (South) African nation; male sexual vitality is an image for national vitality. I suggest that a presumption that sex ought to give rise to love might also underpin these conceptual linkages between sexual health and the health of the nation. The narrative Schapera records was likewise written at a time of heightened anxiety about pathological sexuality and the tenuousness of love, when men’s labor migration to South Africa contributed to worries about the contamination of blood by women’s inappropriate sexual activity (see Livingston 2005: ch. 4). 4. Schapera describes how during the 1930s Bakgatla men aimed to have frequent sex with their pregnant wives so that their semen would “continue to strengthen and build up the child in the womb” (1941:231). After having sex for the first time with a new mother, her spouse would smear his semen on the back of their newborn child in order to “strengthen its spine” (1941:236). Livingston (2005:173–75) shows that the decline in observance of restrictions on postpartum sexuality as large numbers of men left on labor contracts to South Africa was often seen as a source of children’s debilities during the post–World War II period. 5. People are apt to “loom over” one another if their bodies are “hot” or have been strengthened with medicines (dipheko). For instance, a child who has been treated by a prophet or a diviner against sorcery (see Amanze 1998:168) may be said to “loom over” untreated children, whom it can make ill, as well as pregnant women, in whom it can cause miscarriages. 6. Schapera points out (1941:199) that a man must not have sex with a woman who is pregnant, other than his own spouse, because “hot blood” from the baby’s father is within the pregnant woman and will make him sick when it enters his body during intercourse. Men continue nowadays to refrain from sex with pregnant women apart from their spouses for this reason. My wife Laura found that men stopped harassing her on the street once she became visibly pregnant. “Oh, I see that you already have a husband,” one man told her, looking at her maternity dress. 7. Adults take measures to strengthen their own sinews and joints as well. I was told, for instance, a person may avoid the flu by taking long walks to “exercise and strengthen” the joints, so that the sickness may not “enter into them.”

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Likewise, it is common for adults to tie threads on their wrists to block the movement of heat or witchcraft substances into their bodies upon shaking hands. 8. Orata, a Baitshepi member (see chapter 2 above), had a baby who died at age 2 in 2000. While holding the child, who was emaciated and crying pitifully, Orata and her mother told me that the sickness was due to dikgaba, which is usually construed as an illness of ancestral wrath. They explained that Orata’s father had been refusing to provide food or blankets, and that they had scolded him about this. They told me that the father was feeling shame as a result, and that the shame had afflicted the baby with dikgaba. They had been to a diviner who had told them that this was the case. They had confronted him with this diagnosis, but the father had said, “No, it’s not me.” 9. Blood tests are routinely ordered by courts to determine paternity in pregnancy compensation cases. See Athaliah Molokomme’s study (1991) of the maintenance provided by the courts for children conceived outside of marital unions. 10. The orientation of the church building itself in relation to the east appears to be arbitrary, dictated mainly by constraints of construction. In Baitshepi, the wall facing east is to the bishops’ left, while in other Apostolic churches, this wall may be the one across from them. 11. I have left this phrase untranslated from the Sesotho because no Baitshepi church member was able to tell me its meaning in Setswana. 12. As in the following passage from the short story “Matshelo” (Lives) by Bolelang Pheko (1991:1; my translation): “The poor woman made porridge with sweet reeds in the morning. Its odor called [boupa jwa yone jwa bitsa] Ntšhene as he passed down the path, giving him the impression that the woman was preparing mash for beer.” 13. In sessions of divination “by the spirit” that I have witnessed, prophetdiviners “examine” ( go tlhatlhoba ) patients by telling them where they have pain and the nature of their sickness, and then asking the question “Is it not so?” As in divination by lots, divination by the spirit relies on a certain form of poetic description, albeit far less esoteric, in order to convey to the sufferer the nature of his or her affliction (see R. Werbner 2009).

chapter four 1. The Setswana text of John 1:1 reads: “E rile mo tshimologong Lefoko a bo a ntse a le yo, mme Lefoko a bo a ntse a na le Modimo, mme Lefoko ya bo e le ene Modimo.” The gender-neutral personal subject concord a and absolute pronoun ene are used here to complement the subject Lefoko (Word), rather than the impersonal le and lone, as would ordinarily be done in referring to the word as an “it.” In addition, the phrase a bo a ntse connotes continuous presence

notes to pages 136–163

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rather than sudden appearance. Thus, in direct translation: “In the beginning the Word [he/she] was continually present, and the Word [he/she] was continually with God, and the Word [he/she] was continually himself/herself God.” MmaMaipelo was at the time using the 1908 edition of A. J. Wookey’s translation of the Bible, which renders the text as above, but in a now-obsolete orthography. 2. The Albury revivalist movement, organized principally by Edward Irving, Henry Drummond, and John Cardale in Scotland during the early 1830s, valued healing and prophetic utterances showing that God was pouring the Holy Spirit upon new apostles for the first time since the Pentecost (see Davenport 1970; Flegg 1992). The church resulting from this revival, known as the Catholic Apostolic Church, gave rise to numerous schismatic movements before becoming defunct in Britain during the early years of the twentieth century. Congregations in Hamburg, Germany, founded the New Apostolic Church (NAC) in 1863, which now claims over eleven million members worldwide; see the official NAC International website www.nak.org/en/about-the-nac/history-of-our-church (accessed February 19, 2009). In 1889, the NAC sent a missionary named Carl Georg Klibbe to South Africa, whose followers adopted the name Old Apostolic Church of Africa in 1926 as a result of differences over changes made to official doctrines (Amanze 1994:218). Under apartheid, the Old Apostolic Church was segregated along racial lines. An African section of the church broke away in 1968 under the leadership of Apostle J. Ndlovu and was renamed the Twelve Apostles Church of Africa (Amanze 1994:297). The New Apostolic Church International, based in Germany, affirms three sacraments, Holy Baptism, Holy Communion, and Holy Sealing, all of which have been retained by the Old Apostolic Church and the Twelve Apostles Church of Africa (Amanze 1994:219, 296; statement of NAC creed at www.nak .org/en/faith-and-church/creed [accessed February 19, 2009]). The founders of the NAC declared “that the sermon alone was the word of God” (Apostles’ College of the New Apostolic Church 1991:188; emphasis in original). Twelve Apostles ritual has also retained emphasis on the sermon. However, I have not been able to identify any parallels within the literature produced by the NAC to the doctrines of either of the offshoot churches currently operating in Botswana (Old Apostolic, Twelve Apostles) to the effect that the Bible must be interpreted in a spiritual (i.e., metaphorical) rather than a literal sense, that God does not dwell in the sky but rather in persons, and that the soul is reincarnated in the bodies of believers (Amanze 1994:218–19, 297–98). I surmise that these doctrines have been innovations on the part of the African leadership. 3. I have borrowed this characterization of Urapmin linguistic ethos from Webb Keane’s comments as discussant for Joel Robbins’s conference paper “On Not Knowing Other Minds: Confession, Intention, and Linguistic Exchange in 316

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a Papua New Guinea Community,” presented in the panel “Confession, Intentionality, and the Opacity of Other Minds: Linguistic Anthropology and the Challenge of Pacific Language Ideologies” at the 105th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, San Jose, California, November 17, 2006. 4. Baitshepi Elders told me that they were uncertain of the origin of this hymn, but speculated that local Catholics might have composed it, since Catholic choirs commonly sing it at interchurch gatherings. 5. The “live and direct” semiotics of the Friday Masowe Apostolics in Zimbabwe (Engelke 2007) appear to reflect an ethos of receptivity as distinct from intersubjectivity. Friday Masowe Apostles draw strict distinctions between words spoken by mediums “live and direct” from the angels of biblical personages, on the one hand, and words written in the Bible, which they perceive as static and even deadening, on the other. Thus, discerning which agents properly generate words of God is a matter of great concern to these apostolics. In addition, Friday Masowe apostolics seem to value the immediacy and ephemerality of spoken and sung words rather than their dialogic nature. Matthew Engelke comments (222): “ ‘Live and direct language’ is language in sound, a presentation of the divine that eclipses a material form but which is nevertheless a materialization. . . . The voice, like smoke, does a particularly good job of destabilizing the distinction between what is there and what is not there. For the apostolics, there is a metaphysics of sound, in which the voice is a presence that relies on its always impending absence.” By Engelke’s account, “live and direct” discourse valorizes congregants’ receptivity to the immaterial presence of God, rather than their sense of God’s power to reshape their sentiments toward others. 6. A third elder preached that the reason so many people were dying nowadays was that an evil spirit was abroad in the land, causing people to fall ill. MmaMaipelo later told me that she had not understood that particular preaching very well, since by such reasoning you might find fault with a sick person for failing to suppress the evil spirit. 7. The Twelve Apostles pastor was here countering the popular identification of God (Modimo) as a source of life-giving rain. 8. At one point I brought a copy of Plato’s dialogue Meno to the men’s gathering, explaining that Plato had lived before Jesus and had not known the Bible, yet had shown that because concepts cannot be taught, the spirit must learn them in an existence before birth. I received the surprising reply, “Maybe this Plato knew something that the people who wrote the Bible did not know,” and was asked what Plato says about how the spirit reenters the flesh. Not recollecting Plato’s views on this subject, I told them that he did not claim to know. “Listen, what you have said shows that Plato was a man of God. Plato knew how the spirit reenters the flesh. He wanted to leave it for us to think about.” notes to pages 168–188

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9. For instance, one of the Baitshepi pastors, Oketsang, told me that he had joined the church after having purchased a hallucinogenic drink from a Setswana doctor who told him that it was medicine that would enable him to find a job. After drinking it, he lay sick for a long period in a house he was renting in a yard near the church. At this point, MmaMaipelo, who knew his parents in Molepolole, sent a child who called him to see her. The child said, “Rre Oketsang, MmaMaipelo is calling you to her house.” As I suggested in chapter 2, children often bear their parents’ voices, calling people by name to them on their behalf. After praying with MmaMaipelo and drinking water she had blessed, Oketsang was healed of his illness, and subsequently became a pastor. 10. I have rearranged the order of the sentences in the original text for the sake of clarity. 11. During the post–World War II period, botsenwa (madness) was increasingly seen to index afflictions of the blood brought on by experiences in the military, or by transgressions of spatial boundaries protected by Setswana doctors’ medicines (Livingston 2005:176–79). In MmaMaipelo’s case, it is likely that speech about botsenwa would have intersected with witchcraft suspicions, since one reason people may be said to go mad is that the medicines they have tried to use to kill someone else have backfired on themselves. In any case, calling MmaMaipelo a setsenwa amounted to a denial of her ability to care for anyone in her yard. 12. By contrast, Erica Bornstein (2003:163) relates how a Pentecostalist pastor exhorted Zimbabwean parishioners to participate in income-generating projects by preaching, “When poverty comes in through the door, love flies out the window.” 13. The Setswana rendering of the key biblical passage in this regard, John 3:1–8, is go tsalwa seša, “to be born anew,” rather than go tsalwa gape, “to be born again.”

c h a p t e r f i ve Some of the material in this chapter appeared previously in F. Klaits, “Care for the Dying, Care by the Dying: ‘Giving Up’ in a Church of the Spirit in Botswana.” Curare: Zeitschrift für Medizinethnologie / Journal of Medical Anthropology (published by VWB—Verlag für Wissenschaft und Bildung) 38, 1 (2008): 37–49. 1. For example, women who suffer paralyzing strokes may be shunned by their own mothers, who refer to them as “aged” (batsofe) as opposed to “sick” (balwetsi). Given that it is the responsibility of mothers to care for their “sick” children but the duty of daughters to care for their “aged” parents, an elderly woman who calls her child “aged” may be claiming an entitlement to care and assistance for herself 318

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(Livingston 2003b:219–21). Many elderly people complain that the national pension program instituted in 1997 has diminished the amount of cash their children are willing to provide them from their earnings (2003b:217). 2. Arguing that residents of the South African Lowveld avoid and stigmatize AIDS sufferers as “living corpses,” Isak Niehaus (2007:856) quotes a man who explains: “I can tolerate a corpse, but not a person who is dying. When I look at such a person his agony will be transferred to me and I will feel his pain. I will be traumatised. I will also think about those who have to care for me when I’m in such a situation.” Here too the well-being of visitors (and their anticipation of their own future caregivers’ fears) is at stake in the comportment of the sick toward them. Sensitivity to the impact of sick people’s appearance upon their visitors, construed here as poisoning, frames this man’s desire to avoid contact with the dying. 3. This man attributed the scorn expressed toward his father to an intraward rivalry between the father and various agnatic relatives, who influenced his mother’s conduct. 4. When our son Adam was born, one of the church leaders, who knew that I had been in the delivery room, said to me, “So now you see how close life and death are to one another.” Although maternal mortality has dropped dramatically in recent years in Botswana due to the expansion of health-care facilities, women fear the pain of giving birth. One woman speculated that Europeans have fewer children than Batswana because European men watch their wives in delivery. Men who see how much pain is involved in birth, she said, must be reluctant to beget more children. 5. To a greater extent than do other expressions for visiting, such as go etela or go itisa, the verb go tlhola connotes movement to a place where one is received. One visits (go tlhola ) a woman upon being received in her compound on a formal visit, coming to see her in a sickbed, going to her house while she is lying in mourning, and viewing her corpse in a mortuary. 6. Such campaigns are not always successful in avoiding implications of stigma. One billboard encourages sexual partners to learn one another’s HIV status by reminding passersby of the proverb, “A person cannot be known as a piece of land” (Motho ga a itsiwe e se naga). MmaMaipelo once explained to me that this saying implies distrust of someone else: it might be related by someone who suspected an acquaintance of double-dealing or worse. 7. Source: Newsletter of MASA, the Botswana National Antiretroviral Therapy Programme, vol. 15 ( June 2005 ). 8. Masa Patient Enrolment Update, National ARV Project Team, Ministry of Health, Botswana, February 2006. The confidence interval (width unspecified) for this estimate is 0.799–0.854. Electronic document: www.achap .org/downloads/ARV%20Update%20Feb%202006.pdf, accessed September 2006. notes to pages 220–238

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9. Steen et al. (2007:486) report: “A conservative estimate is that at least 14% to 15% of the [national] population was tested through RHT [routine HIV testing] in the public and private health sectors or at the VCTs [voluntary counseling and testing centers] in 2005.” 10. Lesego died in September 2005 at age 24 after having suffered amenorrhea and weight gain for three years, since the birth of her second child. Her experiences with the public medical system were a catalog of horrors stemming from the institutional focus on AIDS and comparative neglect of other chronic conditions. After doctors told her that there was nothing wrong with her and wrote “hypochondriac” in her patient records, she was eventually diagnosed with tuberculosis on the basis of a single x-ray and placed on directly observed treatment short-course (DOTS) therapy, for which she had to report to the clinic every day for six weeks and, under observation, swallow pills that, she said, made her skin break out and caused her pain when she moved about. She suggested to me that her relatives were unwilling to pay for her to go to Gaborone Private Hospital, but was also worried that doctors there would tell her that she had cancer and perform a hysterectomy. “I’ll never have another child,” she told me in utter sadness. In retrospect, I suspect that she suffered from diabetes, and I wish that I had said something. Lesego’s last words to me as she saw me to the kombi stop were, “Ke a go rata, o a itse”—“I love you, you know.” 11. In 2005, the interchurch AIDS counseling organization described in chapter 1 was sponsoring support groups and home visits by outreach workers throughout southeastern Botswana for people infected by HIV. One of the organizers told me that, out of approximately one thousand clients attending support group meetings in the Gaborone area, none had died over the previous year. It is very important, she pointed out, to stress to clients the importance of adhering to their prescribed regimens, of eating well and avoiding alcohol, and of giving them an opportunity to speak with others about problems in their families. Clearly, the success experienced by this counseling service has hinged on its ability to provide an atmosphere of what the organizer called “encouragement.” She added, however, that notwithstanding the presence of a few male counselors, the vast majority of participants in these support groups are women and relatively poor. The men who do participate tend to have been referred to the organization by women relatives. Occasionally, counselors are able to arrange to visit married couples at their homes rather than confronting them with the potential embarrassment of being seen at an AIDS counseling facility in each other’s company.

chapter six 1. The deaths of infants and small children are exceptional in this regard. Infants are usually buried within a few days of death, since only a relatively 320

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small number of people in their extended families are expected to attend their funerals. 2. In the cities, graves are dug by machine and must be purchased for about P10. In the villages, however, men organize work parties to dig a grave during the night of a funeral. Digging and filling in graves are important acts of care. Sandy Grant (1987) points out that men who do not contribute to this work will be shunned when there are funerals in their own yards. 3. High Court of Botswana, Misca no. 299/98. 4. Often, a mother’s brother, or a mother’s brother’s son. 5. Such treatments commonly involve making incisions at each of a person’s “joints” and inserting herbal medicines that prevent the bones from aching ( go thunya marapo). 6. In order to preserve anonymity, I have not recorded the relevant case number.

c o n c lu s i o n Epigraph from Selinah Omphile, “Moments of a Funeral,” Botswana Police Magazine 5. 2 (1998): 2. 1. The pastoral therapist Christina Landman (2003:204) advocates caregiving efforts on behalf of HIV-positive victims of rape and marital infidelity in South Africa that “empower women to take ownership over their bodies and the safety thereof, and to voice themselves as moral agents.” I do not wish to argue against efforts to foster critical consciousness, but must note that the approach risks contributing to recrimination and stigma insofar as it posits distinctions between the saved (those who speak and act in ways that maintain the health of their own and others’ bodies) and the unsaved or not-yet-saved (those who refuse or are unable to do so). For instance, Landman writes of a divorced client who had been infected with HIV by her husband during her marriage. While this woman had “refrained from making his and her HIV-status known because she was afraid that people would say that she was trying to ruin her husband’s new relationships,” Landman appears to have successfully advised her to do so in order “to protect other women against him. [The client] simultaneously used the opportunity to voice herself as a moral person who cared for women who might become victims of her ex-husband’s immoral behaviour. By reporting him, she revealed herself as a moral agent, who incidentally was also HIV-positive” (2003:205). This approach focuses on transforming victims into agents by encouraging them to put their pain into certain kinds of words, an aim construed as an end in itself (see also Cimperman 2005:35). It is not clear to me, however, that moral one-upmanship of this sort helps to advance the purpose of notes to pages 256–284

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diminishing the stigma of HIV infection. As Talal Asad observes (1996:272), “The doctrine of action has become essential to our recognition of other people’s humanity.” 2. Whyte et al. (2006) point out that some Ugandans infected with HIV have committed suicide rather than burden their families with the recurrent expenses of purchasing ARV medications on their behalf. Such findings make clear that it is important to provide necessary medications free of charge to those who can least afford them, not only so as to prolong the lives of individuals but to enhance patients’ capacities to care for others. 3. Maipelo was reading from A. J. Wookey’s 1908 Bible translation, which employs a now-obsolete orthography. I have translated this passage from the 1908 edition but have made use of current standard orthography for Setswana phrases. The rendering of this passage in the 1992 edition of the Setswana Bible is almost identical to the 1908 version. 4. According to the 2005 sentinel surveillance study, the HIV prevalence rate among pregnant women in Botswana was 33.4 percent (cited in Steen et al. 2007:484).

a p pe n d i x o n e 1. This hymn was Rosina’s personal song, which she usually sang before starting to preach in Baitshepi services. She told me that the water to which the song refers is the well that God showed to Hagar (Gen. 21:19: “Then God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water”). 2. Church members commonly reiterate “pardon” (tshwarelo) as a signal that others should allow them an opportunity to speak, and also to excuse themselves when stumbling over words. 3. On this passage, Rosina commented, “Tebogo had suffered from illness ever since she was a small child, and she saw that it was her duty to go to church for the water that heals each and every person. She was in fact healed when she came to Gaborone and entered the Baitshepi Church. As it says in 2 Corinthians 5, ‘If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away.’ ” 4. “A soldier is someone who fends off bad words or intentions, so that she does no evil. Tebogo has defeated the devil, and now her war is over.” 5. “These are the words that I spoke for her, in place of those she actually spoke. I took the position she had had in life. If she had been there, these are the words she would have wanted to say.” 6. “The uniform of a soldier is the church uniform.” 7. “Living in the promise is like going to Babylon with God, as in Jeremiah 40:4.”

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8. “This song was the way Tebogo used to praise God [mopaki wagagwe]. Its message is like that of Matthew 5:5 [Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth]: everyone can come to Jesus for healing.” 9. As it says in Job 17:1, ‘My spirit is broken, my days are extinct, the grave is ready for me.’ ” 10. “Being prepared means living a new life.” Rosina told me that she did not mean that Tebogo had been preparing for death. 11. “Being in the wind means being in the spirit. As Jesus says in John 3, ‘The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.’ ” 12. Rosina explained the term terone as referring to glory, kingdom, or small children about age five, referring to Mark 10:14, in which Jesus says that the kingdom of God belongs to little children. 13. “By angels I mean the spirit that works [mowa o o berekang].” Singing one’s personal hymn in church brings angels (manyeloi ) that give one the strength to preach in the spirit. 14. “By spiritual parents I mean Mme Bishopo and Rre Bishopo [i.e., MmaMaipelo and RraMaipelo].”

a p pe n d i x t wo 1. I.e., reminding me. 2. I leave this phrase untranslated in the transcription because no Baitshepi member to whom I spoke knew its meaning in Setswana. 3. I.e., the place from which members are called to preach.

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index

Anglican Church, 51 antiretroviral drugs (ARVs), 37–38, 45, 46, 49, 80, 214, 238, 239, 284, 322n2 Apostolic churches, 9, 10, 32, 60, 127, 162, 315n9; cleansing rituals in, 140; divination by prophets in, 153, 157, 183; drinking discouraged by, 155; Easter observances of, 222; hymn singing in, 167–68, 171, 172; laying on of hands in, 141–42; monetary donations to, 160–61; nurturance in, 126; services of, 148, 150–52 Asad, Talal, 322n1 Ashforth, Adam, 23–24, 26, 59, 144–45, 310n14 asking, spirit of, 198–202 Assemblies of God, 19, 309n10 “Athe Jesu o n’a mpona” (Yet Jesus Saw Me; hymn), 173–74 Azande people, 57

ABC (“Abstain, Be Faithful, Condomise”) program, 37, 48, 91, 238 Accelerated Land Servicing Programme (ALSP), 96–97 African Americans, 166–68 Ahmed, Sara, 282–84 AIDS, 10–17, 30–31, 37–40, 100, 128, 207, 214–15, 270, 283, 288, 313n1, 320n11. See also HIV; in babies, 136; care for people with, 11, 13, 35, 57, 62–70, 83, 218; deaths from, 2, 13–14, 50, 62, 69–70, 219–21, 236, 271, 279; financial impacts of, 98; funerals and, 268; illness of bereavement associated with, 133; informing youth about, 60–62, 232; institutional focus on, 320n10; politics of, 280–81; “promiscuity” and, 46–48, 124, 135–37, 179, 238–39, 271, 284; stigmatization of, 7, 33, 38, 46, 319n2; treatment of, 236–38, 241, 280 (see also antiretroviral drugs) Akan people, 250 Albury apostolic movement, 164, 316n2 Alverson, Hoyt, 89 Amanze, James N., 27, 52, 186, 194, 197–98 ancestry, reconfiguration of, 188–202 Anderson, Allan, 195, 208, 309n10

badimo (ancestors), 160, 194 bagolo (elders), 53 Baitshepi, 7–8, 11, 20–21, 27, 30, 33, 40, 51–62, 81, 82, 132, 137, 162, 186, 193, 194, 202, 240, 297, 310n16, 313n15; and AIDS epidemic, 37, 60–62, 215, 220–21, 238–39;

343

Baitshepi (continued) ancestors reconfigured as angels at, 195–97, 211; annual conference of, 213–14; baptism in, 141–43; beer drinking renounced by members of, 28–29, 125, 153–56; beliefs about illness at, 123–24; bereavement practices at, 263–66, 282; body as house for voice in, 179–81; branches of, 55, 103; caregiving at, 63–64, 67–70, 90, 120, 161, 218, 220, 224–26, 228–30; conversion experiences of members of, 19, 190; conviction of interdependence in, 14; divination and witchcraft rejected by, 52, 58–59, 125, 157–60, 307n14; education of children of, 207; evangelism of, 181–85; founding of, 53, 83; funerals at, 70–78, 217, 251, 256, 260–61, 266–67, 269–76, 282; healing power of water in, 143, 144; hierarchy of, 53–54; hymn singing at, 168–69, 171–77; intersubjectivity at, 169–70, 189; love in as core of mission of, 8–10, 12; marriages of members of, 112–13, 116, 130–32; nurturance at, 34; plan of compound containing, 104; praying at, 188–89; preparation for death in practice of, 230–37; services at, 54, 64, 148–53, 161, 168, 187, 191; sexual attitudes of, 127–30; spiritual kinship in, 56–57, 90, 199–20, 225; time and money requirements of, 110–12 Bakalanga people, 175 Bakgalagadi people, 128 Bakgatla people, 314n4 bana ba semoya. See children: spiritual baoki (nurses), 35 baperofeti (prophets), 23 baptism, 132, 140–43, 163 Baptists, fundamental, 9, 19, 20, 215–18 barapedi (pray-ers), 188, 210 baratiwa (loved ones), 213 baruti (pastors), 53 bathing, 138–43 Batlokwa people, 160 Bechuanaland Protectorate, 22, 42, 52 beer, 34, 54, 60–61, 75, 83, 92, 100, 124–26, 146, 162, 165, 199, 249, 286, 307; church prohibitions on, 28–29, 53; money spent 344

index

on, 92, 100, 128; nurturance and, 146, 153–56; as offering to ancestors, 195; as source of income, 29, 43, 93, 96, 99, 100, 105, 106, 114, 117, 163, 210 Beidelman, T. O., 6 Betty ( pseudonym), 120–21, 287 Bible, 54, 60, 72, 133, 148, 164, 168, 180–86, 192, 194, 196, 214, 228, 306n7, 313n15, 316n2, 317n5, n8, 322n3; Acts, 142; Corinthians, 129, 231, 322n3; Deuteronomy, 65; Exodus, 150, 205; Genesis, 184, 187, 322n1; Isaiah, 111, 205; Jeremiah, 86–87, 150, 205, 322n7; Job, 65, 205, 287–88, 310n16, 323n9; John, 8–9, 91, 163, 164, 184, 185, 205, 315n1, 318n13, 323n11; Jonah, 172, 174, 184, 205; Luke, 20, 180, 182, 232; Mark, 323n12; Matthew, 142, 184, 323n8; Samuel, 64; Zechariah, 150 Bible Live Church International, 307n19 Biehl, João, 11, 13, 15 Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, 45 blood, dirtying and cleansing, 133–38 boaka. See promiscuity boammaruri (truth), 51 bogadi (bridewealth), 42, 274 boitekanelo (self-sufficiency), 22, 48 bojalwa (sorghum beer), 154 boleo (sin), 186 boloi. See witchcraft, 5 bonatla (energy), 110 bopelotelele (patience), 3, 61, 174 bopelotshweu (white-heartedness), 5, 151 Born Again Pentecostalists, 211 Borneman, John, 80, 310n19 Bornstein, Erica, 318n12 boswagadi (sexually transmitted disease), 133, 259, 270–72 botho (humaneness), 186 Botlhale (pseudonym), 108–10, 116, 120, 202–3, 219, 220, 224, 226 botsenwa (madness), 318n11 Botswana Breweries, 154 Botswana Christian Council, 52 Botswana Democratic Party, 40 Brazil, 15 Brenner, Suzanne, 311n1 Brown, J. Tom, 265 burial societies, 252–55

Calvinists, 21, 24, 166, 167 Campbell, Catherine, 14, 49 Campbell, Reverend, 215–17 Canadian International Development Agency, 95 Cannell, Fenella, 161, 162 Cardale, John, 316n2 Carsten, Janet, 78–80 Catarina (pseudonym), 15 Catholic Apostolic Church, 316n2 Central District, 70 children, 87; AIDS and HIV in, 50, 80, 136, 238–43, 288; of Baitshepi members, 55–56; bereavement rituals for, 262–63; burial of, 70; in church services, 147, 151, 152; deaths of, 2, 5, 135–36, 146; domestic responsibilities of, 106–7, 109, 119; education of, 40, 82, 111, 207; at funerals, 251, 257–60, 268; housing of, 102–5; illnesses of, 5, 17, 47–48, 227; marriages and, 112, 114–17, 128, 131; murders of, 77; names of, 189, 190, 192–93; orphaned (see orphans); social programs for, 68, 239; “spiritual,” 8, 83, 104, 106, 120, 164, 182–83, 185, 198–202, 211; of unmarried parents, 43–46 Christ Citadel International Church, 307n19 Christianity, 19, 21, 27–29, 31, 39, 61, 168, 178, 208, 306n11, 309n12. See also Apostolic churches; ancestral veneration versus, 194, 310n20; Born Again, 211; during colonial era, 51–52; conceptual shifts in terminology of, 57–58; conversion to, 35, 209–10; differentiation of witchcraft and, 58–59; differing styles of discourse of, 166; moral renewal in, 22; officially sponsored, 80; varieties of, 161, 162, 284–85; witchcraft and, 26, 146 churches of the law, 51–52 churches of the spirit, 8, 12, 52, 262, 307–10, 314n2; cleansing rituals in, 132, 137; construal of God’s word as intersubjective in, 168, 169; mourning dresses in, 260; prophets in, 23, 58, 60, 183; “shouting” of preaching in, 186. See also specific churches civility. See maitseo

cleansing rituals, 132–43, 264–65 Comaroff, Jean, 22, 133–34, 143, 160–61, 194, 306n14, 313n2 Comaroff, John, 306n14 commitment, sexual, 127–32 condom use, 13, 45, 61, 135, 194, 241; campaigns promoting, 37, 48, 19, 131, 238 Cultural Politics of Emotion, The (Ahmed), 282 Dahl, Bianca, 11 Das, Veena, 79, 281–82 De Beers Diamond Companies, 49 Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana (Livingston), 15 Debswana, 49 DeVault, Marjorie, 88–89 dibe (sins), 204 dibeela (toxic pollutants), 43 Dieke (pseudonym), 115 dikereke tsa molao (churches of the law), 51–52 dikereke tsa semoya. See churches of the spirit dikgaba (illnesses due to elder or ancestral displeasure), 5, 140, 159, 194–96, 198, 220, 234, 264, 270–71, 309n13, n14, 315n8 dikgogakgogano (arguments), 275 dikgosi (kings), 17, 41–42, 51, 52, 194 Dilger, Hansjörg, 80 Dineo (pseudonym), 65, 113, 120, 137, 193, 205, 213, 221, 224, 228, 237, 240 dingaka (doctors/diviners), 17, 23 dingalo (resentment), 100 dintho (wounds), 233 dinyatsi (lovers), 43 dipelo (hearts), 152 dipheko (charms, medicines), 263, 314n5 directly observed treatment short-course (DOTS) therapy, 320n10 ditakana (houses), 94 dithapo (colored strings), 136 dithuto (teachings), 186 ditlhare (herbal medicines), 139, 160 ditokololo ( joints), 136 ditsala (friends), 199 ditshegofatso (blessings), 8 index

345

ditshika (sinews or veins), 136 divination, 10, 27–28, 65, 121, 124, 314n13; Baitshepi’s opposition to, 52, 59, 69, 152–53, 160, 236, 307n14; Bible as means of, 183; monetary transactions in, 156–60; “speaking truth” as aim of, 25 “Do Not Bypass Me, Beloved One” (hymn), 69 Drummond, Henry, 316n2 Dube, Musa, 194 Durham, Deborah, 3, 138, 139, 162, 199–200, 311n2 Dutch Reformed Church, 51, 53 Easter, 54, 222 Egypt, 169 Eldridge, Deacon, 166 Engelke, Matthew, 209, 317n5 England. See Great Britain Enlightenment, 57 European Union, 40 evangelism: Baitshepi, 181–85; Twelve Apostles, 185–88 Evans-Pritchard, Edward, 57 Ewe Pentecostalists, 19, 209 faith. See tumelo “Faith in You Is a Shield, It Will Defend Me from Death” (hymn), 229 Family of God Church (Molepolole), 2 Farmer, Paul, 12 Fassin, Didier, 281 Feddema, Hans, 155–56 Fernandez, James, 126, 313n2 Fortes, Meyer, 79 Friday Masowe Apostolics, 317n5 fundamentalists, Baptist, 9, 19, 20, 215–18 funerals, 2, 14, 15, 35, 38–39, 64, 87–88, 247–63, 266–84, 306n10; all-night vigils at, 30, 54, 110; church leaders presiding at, 8, 53; expense of, 93; grave digging and, 321n2; hymns at, 246, 276, 285; of infants, 320n1; Pentecostalist, 308n19; preaching at, 30, 33, 72–74, 168, 247, 249, 266, 267, 279; programs for, 310n18; RraMaipelo’s, 235–36, 266; sentiment and kinship at, 70–81; Tebogo’s, 70–78, 168, 225, 226, 228, 233, 266, 289–95; time devoted to, 110 346

index

Gabon, 313n2 Gaborone Private Hospital, 320n10 Gadifele (pseudonym), 273–76 Gaolekwe, Sarah, 307n19 Gaylord (pseudonym), 209 gender inequality, 90, 112–13, 119 Germany, 80, 316n2 Ghana, 19, 209, 250 “giving up,” 35, 39, 57, 66, 78, 247–49, 257, 258, 268, 273, 277–78, 282 Gladys (pseudonym), 199, 201, 229–34 God, 3, 9, 20, 24, 25, 61, 72–74, 76, 111, 112, 123, 146, 160, 176–92, 194, 196–98, 202–8, 210–11, 216–18, 233, 235, 242, 246, 262, 272, 275, 280, 286–88, 306n11, 310n16, 313n2, 316n1, 317n7, n8, 323n8; angels of, 150; believing in, 9, 27, 35, 73–74, 177, 202, 206; calling by, 69; children of, 86, 91, 120, 150; doing work of, 147; faith (tumelo) in, 6, 18–19, 21, 27, 39, 57, 58, 68, 75, 78, 90, 202, 215, 220, 227, 285; praying to, 64, 179, 203, 228, 273; speaking to, 172, 173, 208; voice of, 148; will of, 137, 158–59, 217; word of, 7, 8, 18, 28, 31, 34, 35, 53, 65, 67, 91, 106, 120, 155, 163–70, 174, 180–85, 187, 188, 200, 204, 206, 212, 283, 316n2, 317n5 gonorrhea, 37 Good, Byron, 57 Grant, Sandy, 252, 321n2 Great Britain, 15; indirect rule policy of, 42; missionaries from, 22, 51, 137; Reformation-era, 310n20 Greece, 277–78 Griffiths, Anne, 43, 113 Gulbrandsen, Ørnulf, 40, 42, 113, 308n3 Habermas, Jürgen, 267 Harding, Susan, 9, 19, 215 Heald, Suzette, 47, 270 heart. See pelo; dipelo Helle-Valle, Jo, 46, 128 Herero people, 3 High Court of Botswana, 257 Hinson, Glenn, 166, 167 HIV, 33, 44–47, 80, 100, 123, 314n3, 319n6, 320n11, 321n1. See also AIDS; prevalence

of, 2, 46, 288, 305n2, 322n4; prevention of, 11, 13, 14, 22, 37, 48–49, 91, 178, 280, 284; public health campaigns on, 48, 135; testing for, 35, 38, 46, 49, 203, 237–43, 308n1, 320n9; transmission through breast milk of, 50 Holy Sabbath Apostolic Church, 103, 106, 112, 141, 142, 223 housework, love in, 106–8 housing, 89–106, 118–20, 311n1; caregiving and, 81, 83, 129, 221–26, 244; government policies on, 11, 22, 86, 95–100, 284, 312–19; love and, 100–106; marriage and, 113, 116,; morality and, 31–36, 84, 112–13, 219, 285; of spirit, 32, 162, 233; shortage of, 42; social programs for, 52 hymns, 4, 6, 53, 71–75, 147, 151–52, 187, 211, 214, 229, 235, 287, 310n17, 317n4; for dying, 218, 229, 233; funeral, 246, 276, 285; personal, 34, 69, 190, 322n1, 323n13; popular, 163–70; remembering and, 158, 170–79 Indonesia, 166 inequality, 11–13, 18, 40, 89–90, 112–13, 119, 244, 281, 283; domestication of, 32, 84, 94, 103, 120, 218, 219 intersubjectivity, 34, 165, 168–70, 189, 205, 283, 385, 317n5; in Baitshepi Church, 202, 210; civility and, 266 “In the Deep Well of Sorrows” (hymn), 174 Irving, Edward, 316n2 itlhaloganyo (self-understanding), 187 “I Won’t Throw It Away, My Faith” (hymn), 71 Jules-Rosette, Bennetta, 210 kagisano (harmony), 51 kagiso (peace), 21 Kalahari Desert, 41, 273 Kalanga people, 308n2, 310n20 Kamogelo (pseudonym), 115–16 Keane, Webb, 19, 21, 24, 25, 30, 165, 166, 209, 306n14, 316n3 Kelebogile (pseudonym), 177 Keletso (pseudonym), 2, 3, 31, 286

“Ke na le modisa” (I Have a Shepherd; hymn), 177 Kenya, 13–14, 309n12, 313n1 Kerileng (pseudonym), 111, 120 Kesetse (pseudonym), 109 “Ke sikiloe ke Jesu” (I Am Carried by Jesus; hymn), 177 kgaba (herbs), 140 Kgatleng District, 55, 196 kgomotso (consolation), 35 Kgomotso (pseudonym), 198 khujwana (disease of infants), 122–24, 134, 139, 146 khutsana. See orphans Kidder, Tracy, 12 Kiernan, J. P., 140, 149, 307n17 Kim, Jim Yong, 12 Klibbe, Carl Georg, 316n2 Koketso burial society, 252 Koodirile, Hillary, 173 kutlwisano (mutual understanding), 25 KwaZulu-Natal, 313n2 Kweneng district, 40 labor migration, 17, 42–44, 87, 306n12, 314n3 Labour and Home Affairs, Botswana Ministry of, 313n15 Lagerwerf, Leny, 18, 19 Landau, Paul, 137 Landman, Christina, 321n1 Larsson, Anita, 96, 102 Latour, Bruno, 21 Leavitt, John, 125 lefoko (word), 163, 315 lefufa (jealousy), 5, 38 legae (home), 38, 114, 233, 256 lentswe (voice), 163 Leonard, Lori, 79 leprosy, 207 lerato (love), 3, 61 Leseding burial society, 252 Lesego (pseudonym), 58, 135, 137, 172–79, 211, 225, 228, 238, 297–304, 320n10 lesiela. See orphans Lesotho, 19, 101, 310n17 leswe (dirt), 132, 141, 251 letholwane (zombie), 257 index

347

Lifela tsa Sione (Songs of Zion), 73, 152, 187, 229, 285 Livingston, Julie, 15, 16, 22, 48, 85, 134, 158, 314n4 Local Government, Lands, and Housing, Ministry of, 98 London Missionary Society, 22, 51 Lord’s Prayer, 20, 174, 208 losika la semoya (spiritual family), 74–75, 237 Luo people, 13, 309n12, 313n1 Lutheran Church, 51 maatla (strength), 174 madi a matona (high blood), 218 madi a mogote (hot blood), 122–24 Madumo (pseudonym), 26, 144–45 Maggie (pseudonym), 273–76 Maipelo (pseudonym), 82, 84, 158–59, 196, 206–8, 235, 287–88, 312n13, 322n3; birth of, 105; childhood of, 82–83; on diviners, 160; and father’s death, 247; on HIV testing, 242–43; relatives of, 286; and “spiritual children,” 120, 202; unmarried spouse of, 109, 131, 179 maitseo (civility), 77, 132, 141, 186; at funerals, 266–68 Malawi, Born Again movement in, 211 malwetsi a dikobo (sexually transmitted diseases), 37, 75 MaMfete (pseudonym), 24 Mandu (pseudonym), 225–27, 244 manyeloi (angels), 189 Maranke Apostolics, 210 Married Life in an African Tribe (Schapera), 80 Masego, 269–73 masiela. See orphans Masowe, Johane, Apostles of, 313n2 Masowe weChishanu Apostolic church, 209 Matlala (pseudonym), 273–76 matshediso (enlivenings), 252 Mavis (pseudonym), 109, 120 Mbeki, Thabo, 314n3 Médècins sans frontières, 13 megare (infectious dirt), 123–24, 135, 160, 257 melato (debts), 20, 208 348

index

Mennonite Ministries, 11, 49, 60, 110–11, 191, 206, 313n15 Meno (Plato), 317n8 Merck Company Foundation, 45 Merriweather, A. M., 122 Methodist Church, 11, 51 metsi a a phekotsweng (herbal medicines), 76 Meyer, Birgit, 209 MmaDineo (pseudonym), 103, 105, 109, 119, 138, 151, 204, 234, 286–87 MmaMaipelo (pseudonym), 7–11, 36, 127, 147, 161, 240, 269, 283, 309n14, 318n11, 319n6; ancestors of, 191–96; approach to AIDS of, 11, 14–15, 30, 35, 39, 57, 60, 61, 203, 214–15, 219, 232, 306n10; asking avoided by, 200–201; on bathing, 138–39, 142–43; and beer brewing and drinking, 28–29; on belief in God, 202–3, 206–8; Bible passages explained by, 8–9, 20, 133, 168, 183–85, 316n1; birth of, 103; Botlhale and, 108–10, 224; calling of, 35, 53, 155, 163–64, 174, 179, 196–97, 203–7, 210–11; care for husband’s relatives by, 229–30; childhood of, 103, 205; concepts of blood of, 133, 137; death of, 119, 285–87; on flesh and spirit, 181–82, 186–87, 199, 233; and funerals, 272–76, 280; giving love as focus of, 9, 26, 36, 51, 79, 106; on healing power of water, 143, 145; housing activities of, 34, 82, 103–6, 108–13, 176; and husband’s death, 177, 221, 226, 228–29, 234–36, 244, 250–51, 260–62, 266, 277; and husband’s illness, 172, 226–28; husband’s relationship with, 100–101, 129; marriages encouraged by, 112–13; Mennonite missionaries and, 110–11, 191; on naming, 191–95; orphans and, 116–18; preaching of, 8, 35, 64, 68, 106, 151, 207, 213–14, 216–18, 221–22, 279; private prayer sessions in home of, 230–31, 318n9; relatives of, 10, 103, 120, 196–97, 252, 260–61; and “remembering,” 39, 57, 63, 67, 69, 78–79, 84; on resurrection, 161, 231–32; role in Baitshepi Church of, 53–56, 156; at services, 148; shebeen of, 105; son’s relationship with, 82–83, 207;

“spiritual children” of, 8, 74, 189, 201–2; and Tebogo’s illness and death, 63–70, 77–78, 90–91, 225; theological education for women encouraged by, 71; on voice as spirit, 180–85; witchcraft and divination opposed by, 59–60, 143–44, 159, 307n16 MmaOfile (pseudonym), 105, 108, 109–10, 120 MmaPoloko (pseudonym), 270–73 MmaSeobo (pseudonym), 54, 168–69, 174, 203, 235, 263, 285; Dineo’s child named for, 193; and MmaMaipelo’s death, 285; MmaMaipelo’s mourning dress sewn by, 260; relatives of, 105, 233; during RraMaipelo’s illness, 227–28; Tebogo cared for in compound of, 62–64, 69, 70; at Tebogo’s funeral, 76 Mmusi, Sheila, 306n8 Modiehi (pseudonym), 24 Modimo (God), 3, 137, 158, 317n7 Modise (pseudonym), 178 Moffat, Robert, 194 mogaga (herb), 259, 260 mogote (heat), 132, 272 mohau (benediction, 152 Mokgale (pseudonym), 138–39, 286–87 Mokwena, Peter, 158 moleofi (sinner), 21 molora (soap), 141 molwetsi (sick person), 35, 219, 222 “Moments of a Funeral” (Omphile), 279 monate (sweetness), 130 monepenepe (herbal medicine), 136–37 monna (husband), 43, 115 mooki (nurse), 76, 222 mopakwane (debilitating disease), 17–18, 47–48 moral passion, 1–36, 78, 80, 84, 90, 210, 307n16 Moremi people, 170 moriti (shadow), 170 Mormons, 161 morongwa (messenger), 196 mosadi (wife), 43 mosola (value), 51 Mothusi (pseudonym), 201 motlhokomedi (caregiver), 222

motsadi wa kereke (parent of the church), 56 mowa (mind), 156–57 mowa o o maswe (evil spirit), 180 moya (spirit), 163 Mozambique, 309n14 Muedan people, 309n14 Muslims, 169 muthi (medicine), 24 nama (flesh), 163 Nazarites, Church of the, 172, 313n2 Ndlovu, J., 316n2 Neo (pseudonym), 176–78 Neo-Pentecostalist churches, 80 New Apostolic Church (NAC), 316n2 Ngwaketse region, 42 Ngwenya, Barbara, 254 non-governmental organizations (NGOs), 49 ntlo ya khutsafalo (house of sorrow), 251, 258 nursing, 221–26 Nyamnjoh, Francis, 89–90, 106 Oedipus and Job in West African Religion (Fortes), 79 Oketsang (pseudonym), 318n9 Old Apostolic Church of Africa, 316n2 Omphile, Selinah, 279, 281 Onalenna (pseudonym), 67–68, 78 Oosthuizen, G. C., 140 Orata (pseudonym), 116–18, 239–41, 315n8 orphans, 2, 31, 108, 116–18, 239–41, 245; centers for care of, 11; expressions of pity for, 225 orusuvero (love), 3 Oteng (pseudonym), 109, 131–32, 179 Otladisang, O. B., 87, 146–48, 311n3 pabalelo (shelter), 8, 189 Papua New Guinea, 167, 306n11 Paul, Apostle, 20 Pelaelo, Bontogetse, 173 pelo (heart), 5, 173 pelotshetla (yellow-hearted), 5 Pentecostalists, 19, 52–53, 60, 80, 195, 209, 307n19, 309n10, n11, 316n2, 381n12; Born Again, 211 Perry, Lena Mae, 167 index

349

Peters, Pauline, 101, 308n3 Pheko, Bolelang, 315n12 Plato, 317n8 Poifo (pseudonym), 122–24, 134, 139, 160 Poloko (pseudonym), 269–73 Posel, Deborah, 314n3 prayers, 6, 8, 165–68, 170, 179, 181, 182, 188, 191, 280, 287–88; to ancestors, 140, 194, 195, 198; communal, 22; divination versus, 28; during services, 148, 151–52, 250; funeral, 74, 252, 269, 270; personal, 174; power of, 143, 162; for recovery, 3, 63, 66, 226, 229, 231; tumelo in, 125, 133, 285. See also Lord’s Prayer preaching, 9, 18, 37, 28, 67, 86, 103, 142, 148, 170, 180, 236, 297, 318n12; AIDS and, 60, 64; ancestors named in, 191, 196; in Baitshepi Sunday services, 151–53, 161, 187, 231, 232; cleansing through, 184; at funerals, 30, 33, 72–74, 168, 247, 249, 266, 267, 279; housing activities and, 100; hymns incorporated into, 171–75; by MmaMaipelo, 8, 35, 64, 68, 106, 151, 207, 213–14, 216–18, 221–22, 279; against “transgressive” sexual behavior, 128, 129, 307n19; in Twelve Apostles, 186, 187 Prince, Ruth, 309n12, 313n1 Princess Marina Hospital (Gaborone), 65, 159, 223–24, 226–28; National Health Laboratory at, 308n1 promiscuity, 39, 46–51, 62, 64, 79, 128–29, 154, 217, 306n9, 307n19; AIDS and, 46–48, 124, 135–37, 179, 238–39, 271, 284; parental warnings against, 87; shame about, 131; stigmatization of, 68; truth-claims about, 282 Protestants, 166; evangelical, 19, 167; missionaries, 21, 24–25, 310n17; purification agenda of, 209 Redfield, Peter, 13 Reformation, 310n20 remembering, 39, 57, 63, 67, 69, 78, 84, 158, 209, 237; song and, 170–72 Rhodes, Cecil, 91 Riley, Denise, 165 Robbins, Joel, 27, 209, 306n11, 316n3 350

index

Roman Catholic Church, 51, 52, 166, 263, 317n4 rondavels (traditional round huts), 85 Rosaldo, Renato, 247–48, 277 Rosina (pseudonym), 72–74, 168, 233–34, 289–95, 322n1, n3, 323n10, n12 RraMaipelo (pseudonym), 129, 148, 204, 217, 305n6; ancestors of, 191, 195; death of, 131, 213, 221, 226–29, 234, 244, 250–51, 260, 277; drinking by, 83, 100; funeral of, 235–36, 266; illness of, 227–28; mourning for, 260–62; relatives of, 116, 201, 225, 228–31, 250, 251, 260–62; son’s relationship with, 82–83; in South African mines, 105, 227; as “spiritual parent,” 56, 74, 323n14 RraMpho (pseudonym), 103, 105, 286 Rusche, Laura, 7, 9, 122, 124, 134, 171, 314n6 San people, 42 Schapera, Isaac, 80, 122, 127–30, 140, 310n20, 314n3, n4, n6 Scotland, apostolic movement in, 164, 316n2 sefifi (darkness), 247, 251, 255 Segaetsho (pseudonym), 191 Segotso burial society, 252 sejeso (witchcraft substances), 124, 141 Self-Help Housing Agency (SHHA), 95–99, 105 sepoko (ghost), 180, 197 Seremetakis, C. Nadia, 277 seriti (shadowiness), 170, 205 Sesotho, 73 “Se teng sediba sa madi” (Here Is the Well of Blood; hymn), 174 Setiloane, Gabriel, 19 Setswana language and culture, 3, 4, 7, 21–23, 31, 89, 129, 140, 163, 193, 286; in Baitshepi Church, 54; Bible in, 194, 306n6, 315n1, 318n13, 322n3; children in, 106–7; concepts of dwelling in, 102; marriage in, 115–16; medicine, 63, 64, 59–60, 69, 75–78, 125, 263–64, 158–61, 175, 196, 207, 222, 260, 263–65, 272; names in, 192–93; novels in, 103; in primary schools, 40, 82; proverbs in, 34, 165; in Twelve Apostles Church, 187, 188, 198

sewacho (emetic), 140–41, 143 sexuality: commitment and, 127–32; transgressive, 17, 45, 47 (see also promiscuity) Shade Seekers and the Mixer (film), 170 Shona Zionists, 195 Smith, Wilfred Cantwell, 57 Solway, Jacqueline, 40 Sontag, Susan, 281 Sophie (pseudonym), 239–43, 245 South Africa, 19, 52, 92, 114, 117, 140, 172, 175, 177, 186, 208, 307n17, 310n15, 316n2; churches of the spirit in, 52 (see also Twelve Apostles Church of Africa); HIV and AIDS in, 13, 14, 281, 314n3, 319n2, 321n1; labor migration to, 17, 42, 105, 227, 306n12, 314n3, n4; Zionists in, 22, 173, 314n2; witchcraft in, 23–24, 144, 310n14 South African Broadcasting Corporation, 25 speaking truth, 25–26, 283–84 spiritual ancestors, 191–98 Spiritual Healing Church, 52 STDs, 308n1. See also AIDS Suggs, David, 154–55 Sundkler, Bengt, 208, 209 syphilis, 37 Tallensi people, 79 Tanzania, 13, 80 Tebogo (pseudonym), 62–63, 182, 213, 217, 221, 322n3, n4, 323n8, n10; caregiving during illness of, 63–70, 90, 223, 237; funeral of, 70–78, 168, 225, 226, 228, 266, 289–95 Thabo, 23–24 Thandi (pseudonym), 263–65 thibamo (debilitating disease), 47–48, 65 thibano (sexually transmitted disease), 134 Thuso burial society, 252 thuto (study), 181 tlhaloganyo (understanding), 173 tlhoafalo (earnestness), 151 tlhokomelo (care), 4 Townsend, Nicholas, 102, 114, 115, 313n16 transgressive sexuality, 17, 45, 47. See also promiscuity Tshepo (pseudonym), 116, 117 tshiriletso (protection), 23

tshotlego (suffering), 4–5 Tshukudu, One, 1–3, 8, 17, 31 Tswana ethnic groups, 262 Tswapong region, 170 tuberculosis (TB), 47, 134, 207, 227, 320n10 tumelo (faith), 23–25, 124, 153, 161, 215, 286, 307n14; beer drinking and, 28, 34, 307n17; funerals and, 256, 264, 266; in God, 6, 27, 31, 75, 202, 206, 227, 232; in herbal medicines, 34, 125; illnesses and, 57, 78, 81, 159, 218, 309n14; lack of, 200; necessary for healing, 174; voice and, 180; witchcraft and, 23–24, 145, 146 “Tumelo ya ka” (My Faith; hymn), 174 Twelve Apostles Church of Africa, 164–65, 184, 263, 267, 316n2, 317n7; ancestors in, 189, 190, 197, 211; burial society of, 253–54; evangelism of, 185–88; intersubjectivity in, 169–70; moral self-reflection through song in, 172, 180 Uganda, 49, 239, 266, 322n2 UNAIDS, 2 United Congregational Church of Southern Africa (UCCSA), 51, 230, 260 United States: caring as gendered work in, 88–89; fundamentalists in, 19, 20, 215–18; home building in, 87; same-sex partners in, 301n19 Urapmin people, 167, 168, 306n11, 316n3 “Uyele somandla” (You Are Holy; hymn), 174 van der Geest, Sjaak, 250 van Dijk, Rijk, 211 van Norstrand, John, 95 Violet (pseudonym), 55, 83, 108, 200, 214, 240, 242–44 Vita (Brazilian asylum), 15 voice, 179–81; evangelism and, 181–88 “We Are Visitors in This World, We Have Our Home in Heaven” (hymn), 233 Werbner, Richard, 30, 156–57, 170, 310n20, 314n2 West, Harry, 309n14 Whyte, Susan Reynolds, 244, 266, 322n2 index

351

witchcraft, 18, 23–24, 26, 30, 57–60, 72, 79, 190, 209, 255, 310n14, 315n7; accusations of, 121, 20, 223, 228, 236, 285, 318n11; AIDS deaths and, 39; biomedicine versus, 14; Christian methods of counteracting, 29; faith in, 143–46; harmful substances introduced using, 124, 132, 140, 141, 158, 175; jealousy and, 5, 114, 200, 265; refusal to believe in, 135; truth-claims about, 282; unintentional harm distinguished from, 309n13; vulnerability to, 195 Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande (Evans-Pritchard), 57 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 281 Wookey, Alfred J., 194, 306n7, 316n1, 322n3

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index

Ya Le Nna Babelona (Go with Me to Babylon; Otaldisang), 87, 146 Yamba, C. Bawa, 14 “You Are Holy, God” (hymn), 176 Zambia, 14 Zimbabwe, 90, 139, 176, 209, 314n2, 317n5, 318n12 Zion Christian Church (ZCC), 22, 26, 52, 121, 309n10, 310n17, 313n2 Zola (pseudonym), 25 Zondi, Mr. (pseudonym), 26, 144–45, 307n16 Zulus, 176, 208; Zionists, 140, 149, 160, 307n17

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