Barolong Seboni launches Nitty Gritty book
One of Botswana’s renowned authors, poet and academic, Barolong Seboni, launched his book titled, Nitty Gritty, at the scenic Marabou Rocks Part at Broadhurst in Gaborone.
The venue was breathtaking. In what seems like a bush with rocks and uncompleted structures built with rocks, lies a very beautiful opening with well trimmed green grass. The venue was perfect for a picnic outing where revellers also enjoyed beautiful poems from two local poets, Duchess and Mbali. Each recited two poems and their unique and immense talents stole the audience’s hearts including a baby girl who accompanied her mother to the event as she could not resist but danced next to Mbali when she was dishing out her beautiful poem, ‘I am Africa.’
Putting a cherry on top to make the event even more interesting, revellers complied and brought their coolerboxes, picnic baskets and blankets and camp chairs giving the venue an intimate feeling with soft music playing on the background. The two poetesses blessed the audience with beautiful poems with Mbali spicing hers with some dance moves, hyping up the event. After that, the man of the moment, Seboni joined the audience and shared with them the inspiration behind the story.
He said it started in the 80s when he was still studying abroad (Canada). He said at the time, it was extremely cold. He was bored and thought of a way to keep himself busy. He ended up deciding to write a book but at first he said he was clueless of what to call it. The talented writer and poet explained that there was a bar where he and his friends liked hanging out called Nitty Gritty and so the Nigerian guys used to like buying burgers from it calling them Gritty burger. Due to curiosity, he asked why they called them that and was told the name came about after the bar ‘Nitty Gritty’ and that was when he had a name of his new book.
Nitty Gritty; The Book of Meanings, is a compilation of stories that Seboni wrote from his column with the same name, which appeared in the Botswana Guardian and Mmegi newspapers over a period of 15 years. He explained that he created characters and decided to put them in a place; he chose a shebeen saying it was a place where people had a lot of freedom to say whatever they wanted.
“I created a shebeen queen called Ausi
Maggie and she is an intelligent woman. I had to create other characters from different educational and professional background so that we could explore how different people of different backgrounds behave and communicate. At the time there was no Internet and social media so I would write down whatever comes to my mind. There was fax so I would fax my stories to newspapers and was encouraged to write more,” he said.
To make the event more exciting, there were fun filled activities such as story telling, poetry performances, quizzes where a few revellers walked away with some prizes such as Nitty Gritty T-shirts and an ice cream. Revellers also enjoyed their favourite drinks while passing away the night with music playing.