OUR POOR SOCIETY: SADLY DISLOCATED, DISJOINTED, AND DYSFUNCTIONAL

The farther we stray from our culture is the more dislocated, disjointed, and dysfunctional we become as a people.

Mark my words, this is real! The so-called developed countries are busy trying to produce organic foods because they have finally realised that genetically modified foods are not healthy after all!

Yet, the same developed countries are selling these GM foods to us the lesser beings of this world and we heartily embrace them even go farther as to lobby for their production!

Genetic modification as a corrective science is well and good, but like all other great inventions it is not immune from abuse, that is why most African nations have suddenly lost their age-old practices of seed-breeding for example.

The same is true for us here in Botswana. Ever since the days when the government started distributing free seeds to farmers, we began to gradually lose our customary practices, which have sustained generations before us!

When I grew up at my granny’s farmlands in Diteleng, I used to see her harvest seeds from all her farm produce and then preserving them for the next planting season using only ash – and other preservation methods she had learned from her parents. But as time went on, the government in its wisdom, introduced free seed distribution and even decided to fence part of farmers’ fields including planting or paying farmers to plant portions of their farms. All these were politics at play designed to buy votes!

My granny used to tell me, beware, my grandson, these are no longer your farms, no sane man can ever allow another man to come into his field, fence it and plant it, and still call himself the owner of that farm! It is owned by the one who tills it, who weeds it, who fences it!

I didn’t quite understand what she meant until I grew older and a little wiser to understand some of these things. Unfortunately, these programmes bred in our farmers a dependency syndrome, which has stayed with us to this day where we now have to contend with GMOs. Today, our farmers no longer make their own seeds.

They rely on seed companies, most of which sell GM seeds. Little wonder then that our children outgrow their ages the moment they are born to the extent that elders even go into sexual liaisons with minors!

Sometimes it is out of genuine ignorance – the elder would assume just by looking at the child’s body, that they are old enough only to offend the law!

In the days of organic produce that was eaten from the farms, Nature was our compass, our guiding hand. Just as we have the four cardinals – north, south, east and west – or the four seasons, summer, autumn, winter and spring – we also understood that a person’s growth or development has stages. These are early childhood, middle childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, middle adulthood, and late adulthood. It is important not to skip any of these developmental stages.

We should not burden children with adult responsibilities just as grannies should not pretend to be youngsters!

But I am afraid with these GM foods you find that an infant shoots straight to adulthood, and once there, finds itself lost – that is, dislocated, disjointed and dysfunctional. But whose fault is it? Is it the child’s or is it the parents or the system’s? You tell me. As for me, I say we derailed from the right path the day we began despising what essentially constitutes our culture. And by culture I don’t necessarily mean traditional troupes dancing for visiting dignitaries at the airport or at receptions et al, but instead, I mean our ways of life – our ways of doing things. These include our moral and behavioural standards, for example a child would defer to an elder because it learnt that trait from the elder.

Susu ilela suswana gore suswana a go ilele - these maxims, such as ngwana o godisiwa ke motse (it takes a village to grow a child) – were the guiding light or the necessary conditions for national cohesion. This conditioning, or upbringing if you may, was then affirmed through initiation schools, these being rite of passage for the youth to enter adulthood. In contemporary society, I am afraid we have lost these. They have been rendered meaningless by the selfsame people who by all intents and purposes should be their custodians. Instead, we would rather desecrate these ways even if it means falling headlong into an abyss!

It is as if we are in a hurry to get somewhere, but where, nobody knows! Life is Nature and nature is governed by divine rules that cannot be modified by man. The sooner we all learn and accept this, the better for all humanity.

Nature is Provident. She provides for our needs wherever we happen to be born. The food that we need to sustain our bodies is right here in our land, just as the medicinal plants and herbs that we require to heal or sicknesses are here. WE don’t really need to travel abroad to get a Panado to fix a headache, much as we don’t have to travel beyond our border to get food to eat. We can, if we want, grow our food and make our own medicines.

But it all starts with decolonising our minds. The day we do that, Botswana Vaccine Institute will not just produce livestock medicines, but human medicines as well. There is absolutely no reason why BVI cannot produce any form of vaccines. In the days of Contagious Bovine Pleuro-Pneumonia (CBPP) that decimated cattle in the Northwest District, BVI produced vaccines to treat the disease, but for some weird reason, were bought by Namibia whist we elected to cull our cattle!

A proud people that have an identity know how to coexist with their habitat. It is not by chance that this country is endowed with a rich biodiversity, both flora and fauna, it is by the deliberate measures employed by our forebears, such as the practice of Sereto (Totem) – that we managed to preserve it.

Through such practices, Batswana managed to instill environmental protection in everyday life. Instead of disparaging our rich heritage, our customs, beliefs and cultural practices, we must celebrate them and wean the bad from them, but never to abandon them!

For, as Marcus Garvey – the father of Pan Afrikanism once said, ‘A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots!’