Cattle

Around 2 a.m., long, mournful cries started echoing from the far corner of the yard. I was used to the sounds of roosters crowing, donkeys braying, trains passing, and cowbells jangling through the night, but this sound – nasal, plaintive, almost childlike – was a new one.

‘What is that?’ I asked quietly, unsure whether any of the other girls in the room had awoken.

‘Haish! Ngwana wa ga Modiri!’ Lorato exclaimed with frustration, pulling a pillow over her head.

Modiri’s child. Modiri didn’t have a child. But the day before, he had arrived home from the cattle post with a doe-eyed, gangly calf. Its mother had died, and knowing it would not otherwise survive, Modiri had brought it home to rear it himself. As someone who had once liked to threaten the children with a sjambok, he had presented an anomalous figure, lifting the tangled calf gently out of the back of the truck, murmuring reassurance.

It was an especially harsh winter. A drought had been declared earlier that year and the cattle had little to eat, little to drink, and were getting mired in the mud of dried-up waterholes without the strength to pull themselves out. Modiri travelled between home and moraka (the cattle post) daily to help the herdsman, ferrying feed and medicine back and forth, and occasionally bringing home the carcass of a cow he had lost for cooking and curing. It was onerous work. But every evening, without fail, he carefully mixed milk and medicine into a two-litre glass soda bottle, attached a rubber nipple, and fed the calf by hand. It followed him around when he was at home, nosing his hand or the pocket of his jeans – to which Modiri would react with mixed annoyance and indulgence. The rest of the time, the calf wobbled on its awkward legs freely around the yard, the boys keeping an eye on it and ensuring that the gates were closed so it couldn’t wander off. At night Modiri closed it into the makeshift kraal in the corner of the yard. After the household had settled into silent slumber, it would start lowing pitifully.

Modiri was the first-born son of the family and his parents had given him a name popular among first-born boys: Modisaotsile – ‘the herdsman has come’. The name was less a premonition than a prescription. ‘Herdsman’ described Modiri’s position in the family, as if having defined his contribution to it from the outset. And it was a critical, powerful position. As in many other places in Africa, in Botswana cattle are a repository of wealth and are key to relationships within and between families, including ‘of power and debt’ (Durham Reference Durham1995: 117). Cattle remain a fundamental component of bogadi, and siblings were historically ‘cattle linked’ in anticipation of this expense: the cattle a married sister brought into the family would be earmarked to enable the marriage of her linked brother, who would later bear special responsibilities to his sister’s children as their malome or maternal uncle (Kuper Reference Kuper1975). Indeed, cattle have been so important that the practice of parallel cousin marriage – unusual in the region – was cast in terms of keeping a family’s cattle together; Isaac Schapera cites the proverb, ‘Child of my paternal uncle, marry me … so that the cattle should return to our kraal’ (Reference Schapera1940: 42). Cattle are contributed predominantly to family – to celebrate wedding feasts, initiations, and parties of all kinds; to mark funerals; and to make major purchases, such as for building houses. More rarely, they may be contributed to enable development projects; the University of Botswana was built partly from public contributions of cattle.

But cattle do not simply produce and define kinship structurally, by their exchange; they are also emblematic of care, both as objects of care and in the care they require. Bogadi, for example, is provided to recognise a family’s contributions and care in successfully raising a marrying daughter; to transfer her responsibilities of contribution and care to her husband’s family; to contribute towards her brothers’ successful marriages and making-for-themselves (as they herd the cattle in their turn); and to link the two marrying families together so that they can continue to claim help and contributions from one another, especially through the couple’s children. Having a boy who can assist in herding the cattle – which is customarily, though not exclusively, the work of boys and men – eased the work of cattle herding and enabled the acquisition of a larger herd. The child’s contribution enabled the family’s expansion of wealth and kinship ties. And Modiri’s assiduous fulfilment of his name’s promise had just that effect. Calling Modiri’s calf his child was partly playful, but it also recognised the contributions Modiri invested in the cattle, and put them on a par with parenting as a contribution critical to producing and reproducing the family. When his father, Dipuo, was away at the lands, Modiri acted and was treated as the head of the household – and this role partly conveyed, and was partly conveyed by, his responsibility for the cattle.

The cattle Modiri herded were not his alone, nor did they belong exclusively to his father. The old man had perhaps only one cow left; the rest belonged to Modiri and his younger brothers. When they were teenagers, they were each presented with one or two cows in recognition of their contributions to the care of the herd (a fact that embittered their eldest sister, Khumo, since she had also spent much of her time herding as a child but had received no such recompense). Gradually they had increased their stock, individually setting aside money – mostly from wage labour – to buy additional heads of cattle. The brothers’ cattle all shared the same brand, however, and the same pattern of cuts and notches out of their ears; the brand was Dipuo’s and marked both the cattle and the donkeys as belonging to the same family.

I was mystified how the men could tell their cattle apart. The older boys and their uncles could distinguish individual donkeys and cows by their hoofprints in the sand, having spent years responding to their habits and health and tracing them through the bush. But herding separately owned cattle together marked the men’s contributions to the family and enabled contributions to events and projects that either extended the family or connected it with other families, producing a vast range of relationships in their wake. This cycle described both the men’s movement into adulthood and a gradual generational transition, as cattle were contributed to boys who had contributed to their care, as their opportunities to contribute out of wage labour expanded, and as their responsibilities to contribute to others grew.

Much as they shared a brand, the adult brothers also shared the responsibility for the herd – although, just as they owned the cattle individually, their responsibilities to contribute were also individualised. All were expected to go to moraka (the cattle post) at the weekends, if they were home; and each was expected to contribute to the cost of food, medicines, and a full-time herdsman who would mind the herd, in accordance with their relative incomes. These shared responsibilities asserted the adult men’s siblingship. Of course, what they were each able to contribute differed depending on their individual circumstances (and their willingness to contribute); this differentiation indexed their relative influence and power in the family. Modiri’s seniority was achieved by taking the lead role in cattle care – and it obliged him to take that role. Moagi’s absence – he was in the army – meant that his contributions were limited to his holidays at home, when he was expected to be generous with his time and money. By the same token, he was somewhat distanced from the daily needs and concerns of the family, except when he was home. As Kagiso’s success in business grew, and his capacity to contribute financially, so too did the respect he was shown at home, although the constraints that his work driving for a local NGO placed on his time at the cattle post had other effects (as we will see shortly). The fact that Tuelo had fewer cattle and unsteady work meant that his contribution was somewhat irregular and mostly in labour – which gave him a reputation at home for being unreliable. In other words, the brothers’ shared responsibilities served to separate them as much as bind them together.

The ways in which cattle bind brothers to sisters, and enable sisters’ making-for-themselves, also become evident if we think of them in terms of contribution. As well as contributing incidental work in the care of the cattle in girlhood, women have the potential to make perhaps the most substantial contributions of cattle to the family herd through their marriages. While binding spouses and their families in the idiom of care, these cattle also bind sisters to their brothers, whose self-making they enable and who bear an obligation to contribute to the ongoing care of their sisters’ children in turn. The relationship established by this cycle of contribution binds siblings together in perpetuity through their marriages and children, which might otherwise be expected to divide them (cf. Kuper Reference Kuper1975). In other words, through contributions, siblings’ separability becomes a source of their sustained togetherness; and both their difference and mutuality are established through contributions and care (Alber et al. Reference Alber, Coe and Thelen2013a: 12).

The tensions between siblings’ unity and separability, equality and hierarchy, as well as between their ideal contributions and their actual ones, inevitably produce dikgang. In turn, these dikgang play an important role in calibrating sibling relationships. In the dispute with which I opened this part, Modiri had been muttering for some time about his brothers’ unwillingness to help him with the cattle, but he was especially fed up with Kagiso. Kagiso worked full time at a local NGO and was running three businesses on the side, each of which required a continuous investment of his time and money. But they represented work he was doing for himself, from which only he would benefit (like most young men, he had a significant amount of money to save up if he wanted to marry, much less build). He contributed a little here and there at home, but he seldom went out to the cattle post.

Kagiso was equally fed up with Modiri. Modiri had found and hired a herdsman without consulting his brothers on the costs involved, and without informing them about who he had chosen. Given Kagiso’s gradually increasing wealth and social status – he was also becoming a preacher of some repute – he felt entitled to be consulted and taken seriously by his brother, as an equal. At the same time, he was keen to avoid bearing any further responsibility to contribute towards the cattle than he already did; he wanted to protect the solvency of his personal projects. Kagiso’s growing sense of independence and success in making-for-himself gave him a certain entitlement to respect and authority – especially given that his elder brother, having not built, nor married, nor had children, may have seemed stalled by comparison. No doubt Kagiso’s staunch apostolic leanings partly informed the value he attached to ‘individual ownership, autonomy, [and] the value of assertiveness’ (Klaits Reference Klaits2011: 208) in this respect. Kagiso’s emphasis on the equality of siblings – his insistence that all of his brothers should be present for the discussion, that everyone should bear the responsibilities of contribution jointly – served this dual purpose of asserting an equality of authority with his brother while escaping the added responsibility to contribute that such authority and his growing wealth entailed.

However, his family’s dismayed and frustrated response made clear that Kagiso’s relative success made him neither equal in authority to his brother nor able to claim the lesser responsibility enjoyed by his other siblings. As Mmapula emphasised at the end of their discussion, Kagiso was not simply Modiri’s younger brother but his child – emphasising Kagiso’s failures to contribute the right things in the right amount and in the right places, and his unwillingness to recognise this responsibility, as well as Modiri’s continuing right to claim his contributions. Kagiso bore a greater responsibility than his siblings to contribute care, in both resources and work, commensurate with his ability to do so. Some adjustments had been made for his changing circumstances; but, if anything, his success underscored the imperative to contribute more, simply to retain his role. The dispute also made clear that contributions within the family were not interchangeable: specifically, for a man, bringing home groceries did not suffice in discharging his responsibilities to contribute at and through the cattle post. But perhaps above all, the family’s concern was with how Kagiso assessed his own responsibilities, and against what ethical standards. Dipuo asked Kagiso what kind of a person he was, not just rhetorically but to underscore that, in mediating the kgang of the cattle, they were jointly reflecting on his assertions as ethical judgements and finding them questionable – thereby calling his moral personhood into question.

While Kagiso’s threat to take his cattle was a stubborn attempt to reject this repositioning – reminiscent, in some ways, of an historical tendency among Batswana to abandon a chief they no longer agreed with (Wylie 1991) – in the end it was far more expense and labour than he would be able to bear alone. Like Lorato and her house, he was unable to mobilise the resources and relationships that such a separation would require. But, more than that, the cattle bound him to his siblings, and especially Modiri, in dense contributory economies with long histories on which he would continue to rely. The weekend after the discussion, he spent two days out at the cattle post, helping with the work of the herd. The climbdown from his threat highlighted the extent to which his selfhood relied on bearing his shifting responsibilities to contribute within the family, as much as his success in accumulating resources and relationships outside it, and on finding a balance between them. Kagiso was achieving success in making-for-himself, but the kind of person he was becoming was far from decided, and depended very much on his contributory relationships with his kin. At the same time, his volte-face demonstrated the extent to which conflict can avert schism, rather than simply producing it, thereby making room for both continuity and change in kinship relations.

As the dispute between Modiri and Kagiso suggests, contributions of care around cattle intersect with and rely on other contributions in their turn. Not just anyone can contribute just anything: certain people are required to contribute certain things based on their relative age and gender. Conflicts arising around these expectations work to fix specific responsibilities on specific people, regardless of changes in their circumstances; and, counterintuitively, they thereby work to avert major schisms, especially between siblings. Below, I explore these themes in the dynamics among women around food.

Figure 5 Winnowing sorghum.

Food

I arrived home well after dark one evening, after a long day running errands in town. As I switched on the light in my room, a few of the children trickled over from the main house and flopped themselves on the bed.

‘Haish! We are hungry!’ Kenosi offered in a theatrical, significant tone. ‘I like apples,’ she added, in case I might have any.

I asked Lesego if anything had been cooked for dinner. At 13, Lesego was responsible for much of the preparation and serving of food at home. When her older cousin TshepoFootnote ¹ was around, they shared the job; very occasionally, one of the women – Kelebogile, myself, Lorato, or Oratile – took over for the evening. Every once in a while even Kagiso or Tuelo would whip something up. I had arrived home hungry, hoping I would find my plate full and covered in the kitchen as usually happened when any of us were away at mealtimes.

‘Aa-ee!’ Lesego responded, in a sassy, sardonic negative. ‘Nna I’m not cooking; I’m studying akere,’ she added. She had notified everyone some weeks previously that her Standard Seven final exams were approaching, and that she would stop cooking so that she could study. It was a reasonable position to take: cooking for between 12 and 20 people was tremendously time-consuming, and Lesego often complained about it. (Learning to type on my laptop, her little sister Kenosi had picked out, ‘Lesego cooks too much.’)

I asked Lesego whether there was any food in the house. She shrugged, and so I headed to the kitchen to check, trailing the children behind me. Food was bought sporadically; more appeared at month end when everyone had been paid, but only the basics were resupplied throughout the month. Usually Kelebogile bore much of the expense on her own. Oratile, her younger sister, would contribute what she could, which was not much, considering that half of her salary went to pay transport to and from work. I often restocked mid-month. Kagiso would intermittently offer a few hundred pula (£30–£40) to help out, or would bring a few small boxes of vegetables from the small shop he ran. His brothers contributed very little: Modiri would replace tea or sugar when they ran low, and occasionally buy some fat cakes or a few loaves of bread; Tuelo ate at home, but I never saw him contribute for food. Moagi lived away, although his son stayed with us; he had bought a vehicle for his mother’s use and occasionally made similar major contributions, but he excused himself from responsibility for the day-to-day running of the household. The upshot was that it was not uncommon to find the cupboards and fridge empty – in which case, dinner was sometimes forgone.

The rest of the children were sprawled out on the cement floor of the sitting room, watching TV, when we piled through to the kitchen. They followed, stretching and asking hopefully whether we were going to cook. I flipped on the light, and much to my surprise found various boxes and plastic bags on the countertop of the kitchen cupboard unit that stood by the stove. There were tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, maize meal, eggs, packets of soup mix, and seasoning – more than enough for a meal.

‘Why has nobody cooked?’ I asked. Kelebogile had been home all afternoon; Lorato had been home at least a couple of hours. The men were all home. The children looked at me.

It was already late, so I fried up a mess of eggs and vegetables for us to share. But the next night, I arrived home to the same situation. The same happened the night after that. Each time, there was food in the house – I supplemented it, just to be sure – and there were people at home who might have cooked, but no dinner was served.

The standoff continued for nearly three weeks. The perishables in the kitchen went off. We all grew hungry, cranky, and suspicious. Whispered recriminations flew thick and fast. Kelebogile was seen stashing half-pints of UHT milk and other food in her room, for the exclusive use of her son Tefo. Oratile arrived home one evening with chicken bologna and miniature yoghurts and asked if she could stash the ‘food for my children’, as she put it, in the small bar fridge in my room rather than in the main fridge in the house. The children made do with tea for breakfast and whatever was being served at school for lunch. When Tefo flaunted some takeaway chicken his mother had brought him one night, he was promptly thumped by Moagi’s boy, Kopano (for which only I reprimanded them, unusually). Most nights we would go until 8 or 9 p.m. having eaten nothing. Eventually Modiri would call one of the children and send them to buy two loaves of bread so that we would have something to eat with tea.

I cooked a few times at the beginning; but because I routinely supplied half of the groceries, I too started questioning why I should do so, and I gradually stopped. Sometimes I would feed just the children, in my room, from whatever I had in my mini-fridge that didn’t need cooking: beans, a tin of chakalaka (a spicy relish), apples, peanut butter. We might wait until there were only two or three of us at home to cook some eggs on the sly; or a few of us would buy something at the shop and go to eat it somewhere the others wouldn’t see us. ‘Re ja jaaka magodu,’ one of the children observed on such a furtive eating mission: we eat like thieves. It was a sober reminder that our behaviour was profoundly antisocial and amounted to stealing the food out of one another’s mouths.

Like contributions around cattle, the way in which family contribute food – and the work of cooking, or planting, tending, and harvesting it – tells us something about the demarcations of different kin roles by gender and generation. The female head of the household is often the most significant food provider, responsible for ploughing the fields, raising chicken and goats for slaughter, or buying the bulk of the food that needs to be bought. Other adult women in the home bear similar responsibilities, but to lesser degrees depending on their ability to contribute. The teenage girls of the family are primarily responsible for the work of cooking and serving. And, of course, these responsibilities are subject to rolling dikgang – especially as opportunities for younger women in education and employment have changed over time (Livingston Reference Livingston, Cole and Durham2007b).

Much as the brothers shared the responsibility to contribute to the care of the herd, the sisters shared the responsibility to contribute to the provision of food. And, likewise, their contributions were individualised according to their roles in the family, affecting those roles in turn. Kelebogile, being the eldest sister at home (and taking Mmapula’s role when she was away at the lands), was primarily responsible for ensuring that there was food available and that someone would cook it; to the extent that she was successful in this role, she was respected as the female head of the household. When she disavowed this role – as she did during the time of the food feud – she was subject to suspicion and moral disapprobation, which motivated her to withdraw from contributing even further, in a sort of reversal of the contribution cycle we have seen. Oratile, being younger, was responsible in part for providing the food, but in greater part for ensuring that it was cooked – a responsibility borne on her behalf by her eldest daughter. Because of her absence for work, and the pittance she earned, Oratile was generally considered well meaning but still young in this regard. Lesego, however, was considered responsible and hard-working, having stepped capably into the role left her by her mother.

As with the men and their cattle, generational transition among the women was also marked by their respective contributions of care around food. More than once, I was called by Mmapula in the presence of one of the younger women and asked whether she should cook if Lorato, or Boipelo, or Tshepo were there. It was a rhetorical question – designed to remind the girls that their contribution was to cook, me that mine was to provide the food, and all of us that the old woman had a claim on our contributions. Much as generational transition was marked among the men in the handover of cattle to boys who had contributed to their care, motivating further contributions and acquisitions, generational transition is marked among women by the gradual acquisition of care responsibilities: daughters take from their mothers first the responsibility to cook, then the responsibility to provide, then the responsibility to oversee both cooking and provision. Like the men, contributions among the female siblings served both to unite them through their shared responsibilities and to separate them as they met those responsibilities individually.

Contributions around food and feeding differ most from contributions around cattle in the ways that food differentiates between brothers and sisters, rather than binding them together. Men frequently feed themselves; the pot at the cattle post is both filled and cooked by them, and they will often buy themselves basic supplies even at home. Modiri was accustomed to buying his own sugar, tea, and bread, and Dipuo regularly bought himself food for the lands; both of them pointed out these facts in the course of the cattle debate. They may share these supplies in times of shortage, as Modiri did, but such gestures are understood more as a sharing of their own things than a sustained contribution they are expected to make. Indeed, casting such provisioning as a contribution is inappropriate – as Modiri insisted in Kagiso’s case. This differentiation arises because food and feeding are responsibilities primarily borne by the women not simply as women, but as parents of children. When Oratile set out to chastise Tuelo one day for eating vast quantities of food without ever contributing, he replied simply, ‘I don’t care, I don’t have children, do I?’ While his contributions to the household economy were lacking in other respects, Tuelo did not acknowledge an obligation to contribute food – regardless of how much he was eating – because he didn’t have children; indeed, he felt entitled to consideration as a child himself. Food does not figure critically in men’s making-for-themselves the way it does for women; and it figures critically for women primarily because it performs and enables motherhood, the strengthening of their relationships with their children, and future claims on care (Livingston Reference Livingston, Cole and Durham2007b). Contributions, then, bind and individualise siblings, but also establish the priority of parent–child relationships over – and within – siblingship.

As the food feud dragged on, Oratile, Kelebogile, Lorato, and I made the two-hour trip out to visit Mmapula at the family’s second lands. We chatted freely enough on the journey, although the tension of the past weeks stayed with us. Mmapula was visibly pleased to see us, having had little company for so long. Eagerly, she suggested we help her with some work in the fields, but no one jumped at the prospect and so she gave up. After some chat about the children and others at home, I was surprised when the old woman turned and settled in her chair and said she had heard Oratile and Kelebogile were not getting along (ga ba utlwane – lit. were not hearing one another). I hadn’t expected an intervention. The sisters straightened and readied themselves, however, as if they had come expressly for this purpose.

Each sister set out to give a measured account of what had been happening at home, but emotions quickly ran high. Oratile complained that her elder sister was treating Lesego and Kenosi harshly, describing the nasty comments Kelebogile was prone to making about their laziness or uselessness, or their mother’s failure to look after them properly. Kelebogile complained of Oratile’s scant contributions to the household, although she was working, and then turned on their mother as well. ‘It started with you in 2009. If she can’t contribute she tells you. But it’s me looking after the household. Why can’t she tell me?’ Kelebogile spoke rapidly and with great annoyance, gesturing first at her mother and then at her sister, who was on the verge of tears.

The mutual recrimination continued for some time. Mmapula mused on both of her girls’ behaviour, stretching back to childhood, with varying degrees of apparent relevance for the disagreement at hand. ‘Kelebogile, you like things [o rata dilo] too much. These are things of Satan,’ she added, referencing their shared faith. ‘Oratile, you are too sensitive and cry too quickly; you need to stick up for yourself.’ Quite suddenly, she leaned towards me and asked me what I thought should be done. I was at a loss.

‘I don’t know,’ I responded with perplexity. ‘Maybe we should figure out how much money we spend on food every month, and then everybody could contribute equally?’ It was a naïve suggestion, but I knew the brothers were making decent money and were in the best position to help out.

Oratile crossed her arms and looked away wistfully. ‘We can’t ask Modiri, he looks after the cattle,’ Kelebogile asserted. It was hard to argue the point: he spent a small fortune on the cattle, and this was already the subject of running dispute. ‘What about the others?’ I rejoined. They helped out occasionally with the cattle, but it was hardly an expense for them; and either they or their children ate at home. An expression of resignation passed across all three women’s faces. There was an extended silence.

Mmapula sighed. ‘Kelebogile,’ she began, ‘Oratile is your younger sister, her children are your children.’ Kelebogile crossed her arms and looked sullen. Oratile’s children recognised her as nkuku – the same title they used for their grandmother. Both Kelebogile and Mmapula bore the responsibility of caring for the girls when Oratile was staying elsewhere for work, although Lesego – the eldest – did a lot of the actual work of looking after her little sister.

‘You see what I’m saying. You’re not children, you look after children,’ the old woman said. ‘I don’t like too much discussion [puo],’ she added, sitting up and putting her hands on her knees to end the conversation.

In the end, nothing changed. Kelebogile talked to me once or twice about trying to budget for our grocery expenses and asking her mother to speak to the men in the household about it, but it never happened. Perhaps we both suspected that either the old woman would refuse to make the request or that the men would refuse or be unable to respect it, which would only cause greater bitterness (Durham Reference Durham1995: 123). It was only after Lesego had finished her exams and had begun cooking again that our dinners resumed.

The fluidity and multiplicity of generational roles emerged in the food feud among the women much as they had in the wrangling over cattle among the men. The egalitarian ethic of contribution is even more apparent in the conflation of mothers and daughters; Kelebogile reproached Oratile’s children for their mother’s failures, and took Lesego’s refusal to cook as a reflection of Oratile’s own refusal to contribute (see Livingston Reference Livingston, Cole and Durham2007b for similar intergenerational patterns of blame). And, much as Kagiso had, Kelebogile used this egalitarian ethic to try to limit the already onerous responsibilities placed on her. But, in the end, as their mother’s intervention made clear, Kelebogile’s seniority made her the girls’ parent and also Oratile’s parent, and so her responsibilities to contribute were greater. (Unlike Modiri, Kelebogile’s claim over her sister’s contributions was not reinforced by this hierarchisation, but I suggest that this difference arose only because Oratile had comparatively little to contribute.) As the silent dismissal of my naïve suggestion indicated, although siblings might be equals, an insistent egalitarianism can undermine claims on their contributions, and so the hierarchical differences in their responsibilities, usually framed in parent–child terms, is reasserted.

Finally, the food feud made the sharpness of gender distinctions in responsibilities to contribute especially clear. No matter how much the women were struggling to generate contributions sufficient to feed the family, men were not called upon. And no matter how expensive the cattle proved to be, the women were not asked to contribute to their ongoing care. Curiously, however, the men were carefully excluded from dikgang over food among the women, although the women were necessary players – if primarily as witnesses – in the dikgang over the cattle. Framed differently, women contribute to the negotiation of dikgang among men about cattle, whereas men do not contribute to the negotiation of dikgang among women about food. Remembering that women are major potential contributors of cattle through their marriages, whereas men’s contributions to the family’s food and feeding carry no particular weight, this dynamic becomes clearer. The gendered ways in which siblings are engaged in dikgang mirror the contributions they make and that are expected of them. Dikgang, in other words, are microcosms of the contributory process, and they allow that process to be adapted to individuals’ changing circumstances while reasserting a continuity in their complex relationships to one another.

Responsibilities to contribute care – and the conflicts they produce – define roles and relationships within family, both across and between generations, and also define generations themselves. On the one hand, siblings are ideally bound together as a cooperative group that shares those responsibilities, each contributing in accordance with their role and their capacity to do so, and relying on the contributions of others in kind. On the other hand, they are sharply separated and ranked by birth order, generally in the idiom of parent–child relationships. Greater responsibilities of care are borne by older siblings for their younger siblings and those siblings’ children; their success or failure in meeting those expectations of care confers or withholds the moral seniority of parenthood in turn. In this sense, siblings’ generational positions become multiple; they are potentially of the same and of different generations as one another, as their parents’ generation, or as the generation of their siblings’ children, depending on the order of their birth and the responsibilities in question. This multiplicity echoes and grounds many others, emphasising the ways in which persons are inevitably children as well as parents, in which one person may have three mothers, or children in other families, depending on the contributions they have made. At the same time, in all this multiplicity, it becomes clear that the critical relationship in terms of which kinship and care are understood is that of parent to child, and that siblingship is encompassed by parenthood.

The proverbs with which this chapter began neatly summarise these conclusions. Siblings share responsibilities to acquire and contribute; they hold and consume things jointly; they feast or suffer together. But the precept that they should share even the head of a fly does not guarantee their unity, much less their equivalency (pace Radcliffe-Brown Reference Radcliffe-Brown, Forde and Radcliffe-Brown1950; Reference Radcliffe-Brown1971). The expectations attendant on this dictum are frequently disappointed, as each sibling, brother and sister alike, bears them differently and must meet them individually – while balancing them with attempts to establish a self, life, household, and family of his or her own. Ideally, siblings are equal, united and together; but, at the same time, they, like their things, are ranked and separable (Alber et al. Reference Alber, Coe and Thelen2013a: 3). And yet, in making-for-themselves, and in the dikgang that ensue, important possibilities emerge for each sibling to access independence through one another – binding them together even as they individuate themselves. The second proverb nods to this paradox, taking as given that siblings are frequently in conflict, and implicitly condoning it as a necessary dimension of binding ‘children of one womb’ together as kin and as persons.

While demonstrating the ways in which things produce kin, the examples discussed above also demonstrate a concomitant dynamic. Things are held together, but owned separately; they are consumed together, but contributed separately. And, as a result, the work of care they require is cast simultaneously as a shared undertaking (‘we were working as one’) and an individual responsibility (‘if you own something that needs care, you must take responsibility’). This tension can be traced to a deep tension in the things of care and the care of things: they are bound up in wider economies of contribution that are critical to self-making, as well as to kin relationships. With the women stashing food for their children, and the men purchasing and expending cattle independently, it becomes clear that contributions of the very things and work that produce family are also called upon in making-for-oneself – a question to which I turn next.

I Am a Man: Tuelo’s Outburst

I awoke suddenly, to the sound of Lesego screaming.

At first I imagined that she was laughing while getting ready for school. But then I recognised a note of panic, and then that she was calling for her malome, and finally that it was still pitch dark. I was out into the lelwapa even before I was entirely awake, and somehow everyone else was also there already, in shorts and nightshirts and hastily grabbed blankets. It was four in the morning.

The first thing that came into focus was Tuelo striding across the lelwapa away from the house, dressed in his bright blue overalls and scowling furiously. The next was the loose brick he had picked up and hurled back at the house with ruthless accuracy, smashing the sitting room window.

From the doorway, Modiri, the eldest, was yelling insults. Oratile was holding him there and trying to calm him down. Tuelo strode back and forth at the edge of the lelwapa, yelling ‘Ga ke tshabe ope!!’ – I am not afraid of anyone (also, as I was told later, ‘I respect no one’ – a statement of profound contempt). Kelebogile said something under her breath that struck a note of concern about the cars, near which Tuelo was prowling as if looking for more missiles.

Tuelo moved threateningly back towards the house, and suddenly Kagiso came out to intercept him. Kagiso was thin and reedy in his boxer shorts, but somehow more imposing than usual. He caught Tuelo by his collar with a straight, firm arm and started slapping him on the side of his head. ‘Who do you think you are?!’ he yelled repeatedly, clobbering Tuelo each time. ‘Do you know who I am?!’ I had never seen so much as a violent gesture from Kagiso before – the cheery, implacable evangelist of the family. In the grip of his older brother, Tuelo had begun to cower, pulling his arms up near his head and trying to duck the blows. ‘It’s him!! He was beating me! Look what he did to my head!’ he began to bleat, blaming Modiri for having provoked the incident.

Kagiso wrangled Tuelo back into the house, the latter shouting about a long string of injustices he had suffered at the hands of his older brothers: being denied access to their cars, being made to work without pay, having his cattle taken from him unfairly. He vowed to set up his own cattle post and build his own house – insisting, ‘Nna ke monna!!’ (I am a man) – as Kagiso wrestled him into his bed. When the complaints began to repeat themselves, Kagiso instructed him simply, ‘Robala! Robala, monna’ (Sleep! Sleep, man). Tuelo refused, but Kagiso held him in place until his diatribe gradually began to fade, and he dozed off.

Meanwhile, most of the women from the yard across the road had arrived in the lelwapa, their blankets secured round their chests. They began telling us about Tuelo’s comings and goings: they had seen him leave with the vehicle late the night before, drunk, insulting them as he went. When he finally returned, Modiri had asked where he had been. Tuelo had refused to tell him and insulted him for asking. We all shook our heads at the familiar patterns of Tuelo’s drunkenness and violence, although much of the remonstrating focused on his stupidity: why had he stayed out so late with the truck, knowing that Modiri would have to use it to go to the cattle post early in the morning? Why not bring it back earlier? There had been a clear way to avoid the incident, but Tuelo – because he is stubborn and ‘doesn’t listen’ (ga o utlwe), they suggested – had provoked it.

It was neither the first nor the last time that Tuelo created such a scene, although it was one of the worst. Generally, the incidents revolved around a borrowed car, alcohol, and month’s end – when everyone had been paid, and young men in particular were spending the proceeds of their labour at lightning speed. Month end was a rare opportunity for young men in particular to extend their influence in their friendships and relationships, and they took to it with gusto: buying phone units or gifts for prospective girlfriends, treating friends to drinks or helping them with loans, as well as buying clothes, shoes, watches, or other highly visible items for themselves – seeking and ‘achiev[ing] esteem through immediate and conspicuous consumption’ (Gulbrandsen Reference Gulbrandsen1986: 15; see also Durham Reference Durham, Cole and Durham2007; Suggs Reference Suggs2001), and enabling the conspicuous consumption of others. As our builder and neighbour Rra Ditau explained, ‘Tuelo only cares about friends and women right now.’ Often, the incidents he provoked involved the theft of any cash in the house. The very next morning – once his older brothers were gone, and as the rest of us prepared to attend a big community event – Tuelo aggressively threatened his mother until she handed over money he had asked her to hold for him, and then he took some of hers as well.

A couple of mornings later, in the bright early morning light, Mmapula rapped on the bedroom door and announced, ‘Re tsena mo kgang ya Tuelo’ – we’re getting into Tuelo’s issue. Modiri was away at the cattle post and Kelebogile refused to come, but the rest of us congregated in the living room, perched awkwardly on the furniture and trying to avoid the seat on which shards of broken glass and a brick still lay. Tuelo was seated across from his father, scowling. The tale of the explosive night was first summarised by Dipuo, then retold at his invitation by Mmapula and Kagiso (the rest of us declined, although we were also invited to give our accounts). Several times Tuelo tried to interject, revisiting his complaints from that night, only to be silenced by his father.

Satisfied with our collective narrative of the event, Dipuo launched into his judgement. He dwelt mostly on the inappropriateness of insulting one’s eldest brother, tantamount to insulting the old man himself. Mid-speech, Tuelo, furious, stood up and stormed out. No one stopped him. The old man wondered aloud, primarily to his wife, what they could do with someone so stubborn, who had no respect. After a pause, he concluded, ‘Re tla bitsa bo malome’ – we’ll call the uncles.Footnote ¹ No mention was made of the broken window, the car, the alcohol, the cattle, or any of the other things the original dispute had seemed to be about. We disbanded.

‘The uncles’ were notified, but they never came. Their having been called hung like an ominous cloud over Tuelo for a while, but, as the weeks passed and the meeting did not happen, the threat dissipated. He calmed, was more conscientiously helpful at home, and began working for Kagiso in his shop.

Tuelo, I suggest, ran foul of his family by trying to assert himself as a man through his brothers’ things. Kagiso’s repeated question to Tuelo – who he thought he was, drawn into comparison with who Kagiso was – made this painfully clear: Tuelo was not a man, he was a younger brother, and in this sense a child. He relied on his older brothers to borrow vehicles, for piece jobs to earn some cash, and even for their hand-me-down clothes. The things Tuelo relied on to assert his independence were often not his; the contributions he made to friends and girlfriends were the repurposed contributions of others. His limited access to these things made it difficult for him to extend them to others, and thereby form relationships through them. At the same time, he frequently failed to undertake the work of care these things (or other things for which he bore responsibility) required. He had a passable basic knowledge of mechanics, but he couldn’t pay for or fix the more complex problems that arose constantly with the vehicles; he refused to undertake yard work without payment; and he had even managed to lose much of the family herd – eventually recovering most, but not all, of the cattle. These failures further disrupted his claim on his brothers’ things – and, indeed, on any things of his own. They also meant that Tuelo’s ability to contribute was limited and highly suspect, subject to widespread doubt – as the neighbours’ input above demonstrated – frustrating his ability to build relationships and assert personhood in turn. If, as Deborah Durham notes, ‘the “power” of being a young person lies in one’s ability to contribute to relations of caring for others within the family and, through activities associated specifically with youth, to extend those relations with other groups beyond the family, including lovers and future spouses’ (Durham Reference Durham, Cole and Durham2007: 103), Tuelo’s failure to contribute to caring relations at home foreclosed his ability to extend those relations elsewhere, and to self-make through them.

Tuelo’s example demonstrates the extent to which the acquisition of things is necessary, but not sufficient for self-making – especially when those things are simply taken or borrowed from others. Neither a gift nor a contribution can meaningfully be made from a theft or a loan. Indeed, part of what makes a contribution of cash or clothes meaningful, or valuable, is that it comes from a limited resource that should or could have been contributed elsewhere. In this sense, making-for-oneself is not simply centrifugal, constantly pulling away from kinship; rather, it relies on the context and counterpoint of kinship for its validation and significance.

That volatile morning, Tuelo lashed out against the constraints that his own lack of things placed on his ability to make-for-himself. In some ways, he was trying to make a break (and he succeeded, with the window at least, which went unmended for months). But drawing his family into conflict also had the opposite effect: it reasserted both their responsibility for him and his dependence on them, especially as it concerned his older brothers. It was partly through engaging this responsibility, I suggest, that he was able to acquire paid work from Kagiso and was not asked to fix the window or make good on the money he had stolen. The fact that the incident was never entirely resolved also effectively acknowledged and left room for Tuelo’s claims to independence. More than simply allowing kinship to reassert itself, then, dikgang also allow family to respond to and enable the changing circumstances, growth, and gradual independence of its members.

Women’s Things: Motshelo

‘Owai!’ Khumo exclaimed with annoyance, hurrying past me to check the meat on the grill. ‘They haven’t brought food, they haven’t brought money,’ she added, shaking her head.

It was a Sunday afternoon, the day of Khumo’s grocery party. Her motshelo group – a small-scale savings concern in which she participated with five other women, including her younger sister Kelebogile – met for such events monthly, its members taking turns to host.Footnote ² They usually met on Sunday afternoons, at the beginning of the month. By then everyone had been paid, but other standing debts had not yet finished off the money; clashes with Saturday weddings and funerals were avoided; and, by the afternoon, all the housework and laundry had been finished and the women were free to visit one another’s yards.

I was familiar with metshelo organised for household goods, building supplies, and even savings-and-loan schemes from my previous time in the village, but grocery parties introduced a twist that was new to me. They had clearly become a popular fixture; the women at home seemed to be attending someone’s grocery party every other week. Every month, one member of the motshelo would send out invitations to the others, and to friends and neighbours associated with other metshelo as well. For core members of the motshelo, the invitation would specify an item or items of food of a previously agreed value – in Khumo’s case, P125 (roughly £10), which was enough for a sizeable sack of rice, maize meal, or flour, or a few bottles of cooking oil. Thus, every month each member would spend P125 to supply someone else with food, but then one month she would receive food worth P725 (£50) in return. Additional invitees would be assigned a smaller item of food to bring, or a comparable amount of money, as a ‘gate pass’. One might then be expected to be invited to their future grocery parties, and to contribute something of comparable value.

Other metshelo I knew involved regular meetings among members to gather and tally contributions, but grocery parties were fully fledged events. People who attended grocery parties expected to be fed – and fed well. We had spent much of the previous day sourcing meat, vegetables, drink, and sweets to serve the motshelo members and anticipated guests. Khumo had had to bear a significant cost up front for these foodstuffs – borrowing from the rest of us at home to cover the expenditure.

‘What if the amount of food Khumo gets is less than how much she spent?’ I asked Lorato, who was helping me run errands on Khumo’s behalf. With six children and a grandchild at home, Khumo struggled to make ends meet at the best of times.

‘Gareitse,’ Lorato answered, non-committally: we don’t know. ‘We prefer to save our money in people,’ she added (an idiom Jane Guyer (Reference Guyer1993) might have recognised from Equatorial Africa).

As we helped Khumo finish grilling the meat and preparing the meal, the motshelo members chatted behind the house in the spreading shade of an enormous acacia. A long table stood at the head of the impromptu ceremony, covered in a white tablecloth. A blue tarpaulin was laid on the ground in front of the table, folded neatly, the contributed foodstuffs arrayed upon it. It was a substantial amount of food: ten-kilogram bags of maize meal, macaroni, and flour were stacked, each in their own piles, with smaller bags of sugar and jugs of oil and condiments lined up beside them. At right angles to the table, the motshelo members sat ranged in two lines on chairs acquired through another motshelo in which Kelebogile participated. Kelebogile had carefully registered everything in a ruled exercise book, alongside the names of the contributors, and had just finished reciting every contribution to the ululations and applause of the gathered members.

Neighbours and other invited guests who were not members of the motshelo trickled into the yard over the rest of the afternoon, helping themselves to meat and salads, many without having brought anything to contribute. Standing by the grill, we made rough calculations and figured that Khumo was probably running at a loss. At this, her daughter Boipelo – with her own infant child on her hip – became thoroughly annoyed. ‘What’s the point of motshelo if it costs you more money than you get? Why not just use your own money to buy your own food?’ She tsked to herself, hoicking the baby up to redistribute her weight.

Not all motshelo groups ran such events. Indeed, once everyone in Khumo’s motshelo group had hosted their own grocery party, the decision was made to simplify things. After I joined the motshelo, we would simply meet in the yard of that month’s host for a drink and some simple snacks, to ensure that all payments had been made, collected, tabulated, and appreciated. Where there had been covered tables, ceremony, and ululations, now there were chairs pulled into a circle in the lelwapa and informal chat (mostly about the motshelo itself). Kelebogile even hosted the group in her pink polka-dot pyjamas, a hat thrown absent-mindedly over her uncoiffed hair.

Not all metshelo focused on food, either. Kelebogile and Mmapula belonged to a motshelo in which each member bought four chairs for the main recipient each month. Metshelo were organised for dishes, cookware, furniture, and even building supplies. Occasionally recipients simply pooled money; in the motshelo I joined, we each contributed P150 (£12) to the main recipient each month. Often they were set up on a savings-and-loan basis: each member would contribute a certain amount up front, from which pool loans would be offered either to other motshelo members or to friends, neighbours, and family, usually at steep interest rates of 10–30 per cent (see James Reference James2012 for South African corollaries to this practice). The interest would then be divided equally. Savings-and-loan metshelo were often kept close: Kelebogile, Oratile, Lorato, and Khumo ran one for a while, as did another friend of mine in concert with her siblings.

Above all, in Dithaba, metshelo were women’s initiatives. While men might, in principle, have a motshelo of their own, these were rare. But every woman in the yard with access to even small amounts of money belonged to at least one motshelo, and often several; at one point, Kelebogile belonged to no fewer than eight. Most metshelo comprised a cross-section of women linked through family, neighbourhood, work, or friendship; they were often intergenerational, although many explicitly preferred to join with bagolo (elders) rather than banyana (girls). Many also nominally included members’ children, whose contributions were supplied by their mothers. And they were as common in the city as in the village: social workers I knew ran them together, and the young professional women running one major NGO in town had tables recording who was due to pay what to whom tacked to the walls behind their desks (this is a long-standing practice in South Africa’s urban centres as well; see Kuper and Kaplan Reference Kuper and Kaplan1944; Verhoef Reference Verhoef2001).

The things women bought with motshelo money or organised metshelo to acquire were seldom small-scale personal items like clothes, shoes, or toiletries: they were usually major purchases for the household. Attempting to illustrate the value of metshelo to me, Kelebogile noted that she had acquired the sitting room furniture, her wardrobe, 16 matching chairs, a set of good dishes, large pieces of enamel cookware, and various other items useful at home and for hosting parties. Metshelo, she explained, ‘help to buy the things that we need at home’. But motshelo proceeds were also strategic, and answered to the participating women’s sense of what was most needed. Metshelo grant women considerable autonomy – and also begin to establish their capacity to provision and manage a household, an important dimension of making-for-themselves (Suggs Reference Suggs2001; see also James Reference James2015).

Metshelo, in this sense, echo the contributory economies seen in the Legae household in Chapter 4. While in principle they looked like more straightforwardly reciprocal arrangements, carefully tabulated to ensure equivalence, the exchange never quite added up – nor was it expected to do so. Khumo’s additional expenditure on feeding the motshelo group was not tabulated, but taken as the responsibility of a host. Indeed, when motshelo members failed to make their contributions, they faced no reprimand, nor were they chased for any debt. Metshelo were less about exchange or reciprocity than about contribution, circulation, and redistribution (Alverson Reference Alverson1978: 59). And those contributions could, and usually would, be contributed onwards, in cycles that could make both families and selves. They were frequently intergenerational, and they could strategically conflate parents and children. They enabled both an ‘egalitarian mutuality’ among contributors, shielded from capitalist imperatives, and opportunities for social mobility, provided by financialisation, which preserved distinctions, ‘inequalities and dependencies’ (James Reference James2015: 1051) – not unlike the dynamics we saw among siblings in the accounts above.

But while savings groups have often been described as creating new and lasting ties of mutual support, particularly in an era of neoliberal capitalism (see, e.g., Carsten Reference Carsten, Bloch and Parry1989 for Malaysia; James Reference James2015; Krige Reference Krige, Hart and Sharp2015), in Botswana these ties were often highly attenuated and relied heavily on pre-existing relationships with neighbours, colleagues, or kin. They were also explicitly not kin-like ties – not even, uncannily, when they were conducted among family. The metshelo I knew of were often strikingly short-term, fluid, and transient. Most groups I knew lasted through one cycle of contributions – which might last for anywhere between a few months and a year, or perhaps two – and were then disbanded or reorganised. Motshelo contributions were seldom used or looked after by members collectively; the proceeds, like the contributions themselves, were explicitly attributed to and earmarked for separate members, and were consumed separately. Contributions therefore bound motshelo participants together in only limited ways. Motshelo contributions are not, after all, contributions of care; they are contributions of things, explicitly disentangled from the work and sentiment of care. And this disentanglement is one reason why they can be contributed onwards in turn, in gestures of kin-making and self-making.

Tellingly, metshelo in Dithaba – though prone to conflict – struggled to deal with dikgang. Kelebogile told me numerous stories of cheating treasurers and defaulting members, and the risk of potential loss is ever present in savings groups, especially in contexts of tenuous employment (James Reference James2015). In Kelebogile’s examples, offenders were either privately approached or quietly excluded, or the motshelo itself was left to lapse. In worst-case scenarios, the kgotla might be involved, but that eventuality was vanishingly rare. Just as the negotiation of dikgang is productive of kin relationships, I suggest that the near total absence of collective reflection, discussion, and negotiation of dikgang in metshelo indexes limits on the relationships it can produce. Notably, the riskiest of motshelo projects – making loans – is frequently undertaken only by siblings, who have recourse beyond the motshelo to other means of engaging dikgang.

Rather than establishing community among women or alternatives to kinship, metshelo contributions have another, equally critical, effect: they render accumulation for oneself moral, and they secure that accumulation from the expectations of one’s natal family, in part by enabling additional, highly visible and strategic contributions to be made. If Kelebogile were contributing to eight metshelo every month, the resources promised to those groups were as good as spent and could not be claimed elsewhere. I could not understand how Kelebogile managed to sustain eight metshelo until I saw that they acted like a sort of investment that sheltered her available resources from the expectations of her family. Metshelo helped Kelebogile ‘enclave’ her resources, insulating them from the demands of kin and making them ‘unavailable at the moment [but] never completely unavailable’ (Durham Reference Durham1995: 112; cf. Appadurai Reference Appadurai1986: 22ff. on enclaving; cf. James Reference James2015 for a comparable story among South African savings clubs). I do not mean to say that Kelebogile wasn’t contributing to the family out of the proceeds of her metshelo; she was. But so long as she was involved in these groups, there were no expectations that she should contribute more at home – unlike the expectations levelled at Kagiso. This sheltering, I suggest, is made possible because those resources could be interpreted as facilitating further, significant contributions to the household, thereby ameliorating any suspicions about Kelebogile’s ability or willingness to continue to contribute. Even if some of the things one acquired through metshelo were individually owned or intended for personal use – like Kelebogile’s wardrobe or bedroom set – they were among other things available for household use, and could be cast as household contributions. And, in this sense, their accumulation was easily hidden and rendered irreproachable.

At the same time, Khumo’s frustration demonstrates the difficulties of striking the right balance among contributions. One must be seen to contribute enough at home, but it is equally important not to contribute too much elsewhere; in both cases, it is critical to keep one’s contributions in proportion to one’s capacity and to the contributions being made by others. A similar imperative was at work in the dispute between Kagiso and Modiri. But in the context of metshelo – where grudges and outright conflict are avoided, and where recourse is limited – it is one’s own projects of making-for-oneself that suffer should that balance be upset. Over-contributing to motshelo attracts no moral approbation, but it risks the suspicion that one’s ability and willingness to contribute at home will be compromised. The balance between what is contributed and what is kept – between saving in others and contributing to others, which metshelo enables – requires substantial practice and fine-tuning.

As we saw in Chapter 2, being able to establish a family and household, a lelwapa, of one’s own is a critical means of making-for-oneself. But the things through which Batswana establish personhood, and families of their own, are subject to pre-existing claims from their natal households – which also figure powerfully in acquiring those things in the first place. Stocking things for oneself runs the risk of doing so at the expense of one’s natal family, putting them at risk of insolvency and putting oneself at risk of moral turpitude. At the same time, contributing everything to one’s natal family puts one’s own self-making at risk, in part by sharply constraining one’s ability to create relationships and a lelwapa of one’s own. Much as the building of Lorato’s house required her to find a balance between being away and being at home – a balance she was ultimately unable to strike – the acquisition and management of things such as food, cattle, cash, or cars require constant balancing work between having and contributing, and further balancing work in terms of what is contributed to whom. And the difficulties of that balancing work produce dikgang that families are constantly called upon to address, in ways that assert the family’s stability while making room for its children to build independence.

Whether in friendships and relationships, metshelo or paid work, associations that stand beyond and between families have important implications for the acquisition of critical things and for the exercise of specific forms of work and sentiment, and therefore for the negotiation of both selfhood and kinship. Informal extrafamilial associations, which range from choirs and drama groups to burial societies, are a long-standing feature of Tswana communities. But they have proliferated and become formalised in new ways in response to AIDS: home-based care projects, support groups for people living with HIV, orphan care projects, and village- and district-level AIDS coordination committees have become a part of everyday village life. Framing the pandemic primarily as a ‘crisis of care’, the major concern of many of these organisations has been with the provision of some of the very things, work, and sentiment discussed above – either to replace, or to supplement, contributions lost by those who have died. I turn next to a consideration of the sorts of contributions and care that NGOs and government agencies intervening in response to AIDS provide. I suggest that such ‘supplemental care’ programmes closely map the contribution economies of the household and of self-making described above. But in supplemental care, not only are care things disentangled from care work, they are disarticulated from their contributors. The effects of these dissociations disrupt kinship practice without enabling making-for-oneself, thereby provoking crises in some ways worse than those they aim to address.

Pono came struggling up the dusty road towards me, pushing a wobbling wheelbarrow piled high with sacks of maize meal, sugar, vegetables, and odd toiletries tucked in around the edges. I hollered to catch her attention, and she looked up, throwing me a cheeky grin. Shortly, she pulled up in front of me to rest. ‘I’m from the shop,’ she said breathlessly, omitting the other obvious detail: she had been sent to take her food basket.

I had known Pono since she was six years old, when I met her at the orphan care centre. We had been neighbours, and she and her little sister had visited my yard frequently. She was also a distant relation of Mmapula, their families both hailing from Maropeng. In her early teens, slight, bright, and precocious, she had a mischievous sense of humour and was wise beyond her years. I turned to accompany her home.

‘Where’s the old woman?’ I asked, partly to hear how Pono’s grandmother was doing, and partly hoping to avoid meeting her. Since before Pono’s mother’s death, her mother’s mother had been somewhat infamous in the neighbourhood; in my company, she was prone to diatribes and discomfiting requests for money (see Durham Reference Durham1995).

‘She’s at the shebeen, akere,’ Pono answered, without missing a beat. Her grandmother was frequently drunk and often left the children locked out of the run-down brick house in which they lived while she was off drinking. Pono’s grandmother did not work, and only infrequently ploughed; the household subsisted primarily on intermittent contributions from Pono’s older sister, occasional gifts of food and clothes that came via the NGO, and the food basket Pono and her little sister received monthly from the government as registered orphans. Pono and her younger sister were often left to cook for themselves, wash their school uniforms, and otherwise look after the house and yard, even when I first knew them – which meant that many of the chores either didn’t get done or were done haphazardly. At the NGO, we had been tasked occasionally with marching the girls in for a shower, or ensuring that they washed their uniforms at the centre; like the other children, they ate lunch and an early supper there. I had even been asked to administer and monitor a prescription for Pono, since her grandmother was apt to forget. Pono was headstrong, quick to talk back, and acutely aware that she was the primary conduit for many of her family’s resources.

‘My older sister has moved,’ Pono noted as we rolled into her grandmother’s unfenced, rocky yard, thankfully empty. She fetched me a ramshackle chair. ‘She’s saying she wants to take me and my other sister to stay with her.’ The older sister, Mpho, was only in Maropeng – the next village over, and the administrative centre of the district – but it was still some distance away. By then, Mpho had two children of her own, and neither she nor her boyfriend had regular employment. They were staying with Mpho’s father’s father, who was losing his sight. I asked Pono what she thought of the idea. ‘Gakeitse,’ she said – I don’t know. She shrugged. ‘This old woman is saying my sister only wants the food basket. And she’s asking, what is she going to eat if we go?’

Tumelo, the village social worker, seemed to share the old woman’s scepticism. Pono described joint visits to Tumelo’s office with her older sister and grandmother, and their fruitless attempts to negotiate a transfer of the girls’ registration and food basket from Dithaba to Maropeng. Mpho would produce a litany of examples demonstrating her grandmother’s neglectful behaviour; her grandmother would answer with a litany of examples demonstrating Mpho’s greed and filial irresponsibility. From what I knew, both were probably accurate. Tumelo had asked Pono and her sister what they would prefer, but they had remained silent. ‘What could I say?’ she asked me, rhetorically; we both knew one situation could be as bad as the other, and that taking sides could provoke uncertain consequences.

I heard a few weeks later that Mpho had eventually just taken Pono and her sister to stay with her, hoping that the transfer of the food basket would be hastened when the social workers realised the change in residence was already a fait accompli. It was a misjudgement. The social workers refused, taking the incident as proof that Mpho was only after the girls’ food basket and therefore did not have their best interests at heart. The girls remained registered in Dithaba at the same shop; but, in their absence, their grandmother could not fetch the monthly ration from the other side of the village, and so it went uncollected. It marked a major falling-out between Mpho and their grandmother, after which they refused to speak to one another, although the girls were allowed to visit the old woman from time to time.

The Department of Social Services introduced the food basket as its central response to the ‘orphan crisis’ in 1999, under the Short Term Plan of Action on the Care of Orphans (RoB 1999). Much to the chagrin of social work practitioners and policymakers alike, the plan was still the primary policy guide for the orphan care programme during my fieldwork in 2012. The food basket had been a source of endless consternation in the interim. The plan explicitly framed it as a contribution to the entire family, to assist them in managing the additional burden of caring for an orphaned child in the absence of contributions that child’s parent would have made. As such, it provided an ample amount of food – much more than a single person could eat in a month, and certainly more than many of the adults in the Legae household managed to contribute. Nutritionists had been involved in identifying a healthy range of foodstuffs. And yet the stories of the ways in which it had gone wrong were legion: grandmothers were rumoured to resell the staples in their tuckshops; greedy aunts were said to feed their own biological children while letting the orphaned children of their late siblings go without; or orphaned children were reported to have commandeered the baskets and refused to share them with anyone else in the household, cooking for themselves and insulting their grandparents into the bargain. Indeed, tales of food basket abuse by neglectful, selfish relatives or poorly socialised orphans were a sort of shorthand for the irreparable collapse of the Tswana family.

Perhaps partly because of these narratives, almost all of the NGOs I knew provided feeding programmes of some kind. In many cases, that was all they provided. Whether a lack of food was ever a serious issue for the orphans served by these projects was never fully established. Given that the children were fed at school as well as through the government’s problematic food baskets, it seemed unlikely. As a Motswana colleague who worked for the American Embassy observed wryly one day: ‘Botswana must have the fattest orphans in the world’ (see similar commentary in Dahl Reference Dahl2014).

Food was not the only thing with which government and NGOs responding to the AIDS epidemic in Botswana provided their clients – although it was by far the most common. Clothes – donated outfits from NGOs or school uniforms from social workers – were also provided, as was cash support for school fees and transport. Household necessities such as blankets and mattresses were also favoured. But what was most striking was that all of these items were the very sorts of things that figured so strongly in the contribution economies of kin-making and making-for-oneself explored above. Their relative priority in families was largely mirrored in these programmes.

To the extent that AIDS has been framed as a crisis of care – with more people (the ill, dying, and orphaned) needing care, and fewer people to provide it – this parallel is deeply appropriate. To an extent, food is care, as are clothes and household goods; and both government and NGOs were attempting to make contributions where they believed those of parents had been lost. This gesture presented a ‘way in’ to the family, creating a pseudo-kin role for these agencies by dint of their contribution. The common habit of referring to orphaned children as bana ba bommaboipelego, children of the social workers, or bana ba diNGO, children of the NGOs – much like calling the calf Modiri’s child – seemed to recognise the contribution made in terms of the parent–child relationship central to Tswana kinship.

But the ironic undertone of these expressions was equally telling. Although they may provide food for the family, social workers don’t undertake the cooking or any of the other work of care that raising children or being family requires; nor do they undertake the work of producing the food itself. The same limitation generally applies to NGO donations to the home. The child recipients, in turn, are either unable to do the work that these things require, or they must do it for others who have not necessarily contributed towards it. Even if they are animated by the appropriate sentiment, then, food baskets and NGO donations are awkwardly estranged from the work that might make them expressions of care. And, as we have seen, this disarticulation of things, work, and sentiment not only disrupts care and its relationship-building potential, but also creates the risk of scorn and jealousy in its place. The teknonymic phrases noted above are often deployed when children are conducting themselves inappropriately at home; they serve to signify the children’s growing distance from the family rather than the social worker’s or NGO’s inclusion. These contributions, in other words, only partially live up to their billing as supplemental care, and they do not serve to regenerate kin relationships in the way care ordinarily would. Instead, these contributions behave like poisonous gifts that cannot be reciprocated, and therefore threaten relationships (Durham Reference Durham1995; Parry Reference Nyati-Ramahobo1989). They are not generative – neither of future, additional contributions, nor of kin relationships as such.

This partiality does not entirely foreclose the possibility of care, however, as it leaves the source of the contribution open to reinterpretation. Government policy positions the food basket as a sort of replacement for a dead parent’s contributions, for the use of the whole family (RoB 1999). But in the absence both of the dead parent and of the contributing institution, the contribution is delinked from a contributor. And it is open to claims – as a contribution – by those who cannot otherwise contribute to the extent expected of them. In this sense, it offers family members a potential means of asserting a new role for themselves in their families, and a new means of making-for-themselves as well. Thus, Pono, her elder sister, and her grandmother all asserted some claim on the girls’ food basket – not simply for their own use, but as an object that their other care work validated as a contribution to the family and therefore as an expression of care. But, as we saw in Tuelo’s case in Chapter 5, contributions made of others’ things seldom have the desired effect. The extent to which the food basket is delinked from work and from its original contributor makes contributory claims on it highly volatile and open to contestation. As we saw with Pono’s older sister above, ethical assessments about what such a claim means or demonstrates about the would-be contributor and her relationships may arrive at quite different conclusions. And this indeterminacy is particularly marked when the potential arbiters of such claims – social workers or NGO figures – explicitly exclude themselves from the relationships of the gae and apply rather different ethical measures of their own.

Perhaps more importantly, these claims to self-making by appropriating contributions are made at the expense of someone else’s claims, or in direct competition with them. Children’s claims to food baskets become a sort of precocious claim to personhood and to a more significant role in the family (even a political claim, as suggested by Dahl Reference Dahl2009a) – a claim that speeds them up or knocks them out of time, much as Lorato’s building project did in Chapter 2. Because these newly acquired resources cannot easily be contributed or gifted elsewhere, they do not serve to build the extrafamilial relationships that might constitute self-making. In the worst-case scenario, like the soil-eating children of the Amazon (Gow Reference Gow1989), Tswana orphans are enabled to provide for and look after themselves – truncating the relationships that constitute and sustain not only family but also personhood. In this sense, food baskets and donations successfully enter into the contribution economies of kin, but they also serve to disrupt those economies, frustrating attempts at making-for-oneself within the context of kinship. Much like the Basic Income Grants and other forms of direct cash transfer support James Ferguson describes in South Africa, food baskets meet material needs but ‘offer far less by way of dealing with … social and moral needs’, are unable to convey ‘meaningful personhood or social belonging’, and prove ‘dangerously empty’ (Ferguson Reference Ferguson2013: 235).

Of course, there were limited but important ways in which NGO and social work actors did undertake the work of care associated with the things they provided, in ways animated by the appropriate sentiment as well. As we saw in Pono’s case, staff or volunteers at the NGO cooked the food they provided, washed the uniforms supplied by social workers, and helped administer the medicines they sourced. This approach echoed and preserved a distinctly Tswana understanding and expression of care. However, this expression of care was non-contributory as concerned the family. Care was provided within the confines of the NGO, exclusively to the registered client, disentangled from the gae. Between them, NGO staff, child clients, volunteers, and others might be thought to be collectively involved in a contribution economy that generated care; however, since these ‘contributions’ were either professionalised (the cooks are paid to cook) or gift-oriented in a way that was impossible to reciprocate (as with gifts from anonymous foreign donors to small children, intended as ‘pure gifts’ (Parry Reference Nyati-Ramahobo1989); see also Durham Reference Durham1995: 111), they unsettled the logic of contribution.

In this sense, NGOs seemed to be establishing themselves as fully fledged alternatives to family, in part by establishing an alternative economy of care. Removing their clients from the contribution economy of their families encouraged children’s refusal to contribute at home. As we saw with Lesego’s refusal to cook, the withdrawal of a child’s contribution at home is potentially enough to set off a domino effect among the contributions of the whole family. During my time working at the orphan care centre, we fielded streams of complaints from grandmothers whose orphaned charges arrived home, claimed to be full after having eaten at the NGO, and refused to cook, to clean dishes, or to eat the food that had been set aside for them. Because they spent all the time they weren’t in school at the NGO, they weren’t doing any other work at home either. Accusations that the NGO was breaking apart families were generally framed in these terms. In other words, the very ‘crisis of care’ and family collapse discourse that motivates NGO support provokes crises of its own.

This book takes as its central argument the idea that conflict and crisis are productive of kinship, not simply destructive. But rather than providing for the recalibration of relatedness, the conflicts that developed around NGO and government contributions were often intransigent. Families were not in a position to call NGOs or social workers together in the way they could with their own wayward broods. NGOs or social workers might call families together, but as they positioned themselves outside the family’s economy of care, they were ill-placed to resolve emergent tensions within it. And, of course, because families do not contribute to NGOs or government – they are institutions that rely on other economies for their solvency – families that called them or complained to them enjoyed little leverage. The basic preconditions under which dikgang could be engaged and negotiated, reflected on and evaluated, went unmet.

By the same token, resources are resources – seldom would anyone risk losing them by complaining about their surfeit. Food baskets and other donations held out both the possibility of transformation into a contribution through someone’s appropriate care work, and the possibility of making-for-oneself, difficult to realise as it may be. The recalcitrant children themselves could be – and often were – called and upbraided; but to the extent that they understood themselves as sources of major contributions to the family, their usual position in these interventions was upended, and their dependence on family for their own independence was undermined. In the NGOs they attended, and for the social workers who served them, these children were also the critical objects of the ‘contributions’ and gifts those institutions attracted, which put them in a comparably powerful position. In both cases, confrontations presented the risk of permanent schism, and, as such, they were frequently avoided.

Some time after I had returned from fieldwork, I was chatting with Lorato on the phone and asked whether the family had been out to the lands recently. ‘Haish! Ke kgang,’ she replied – that’s a problem.

Years previously, her grandfather Dipuo had been insistent about buying the family’s second lands, in a village a significant distance away. The land in the area was known for its fertility, and he was convinced that it would be a good investment. He had even contributed a cow from the herd to assist with the purchase. Suddenly, Lorato explained, he was demanding his cow back.

Mmapula had taken most of the responsibility for ploughing at these lands, but she was suddenly made solely responsible for the lands in question by this gesture. Of course, she had no cow to give her husband. The cow had become land, and while the land produced ample food, it was all either eaten by the family or sold to cover the running costs of both the farm and the household. And, of course, women did not typically invest in cattle, as Dipuo knew well. A cow would have to come from among their sons’ heads of cattle, if anywhere, which was a request Mmapula could hardly make. The demand was deliberately awkward – and seemed to portend something worse.

‘My grandmother has realised he’s been slowly separating his things for a long time now,’ Lorato said.

‘Like what?’ I asked. ‘Why would he do that?’

‘Gareitse!’ she said, in a tone of suspicious resignation – we don’t know. ‘First he says Dithaba is his lands, the others are hers. Then he gave away the donkeys. He’s been taking all of his clothes to the lands bit by bit. His money, food, now the cow …’ She trailed off.

Dipuo’s separation, hoarding, and demands for ‘his’ things – like Kagiso’s threat to take his cows – illustrate the fundamental uncertainty and potential reversibility of contributions and of the care they instantiate and produce. The contribution of the cow to acquiring lands for Mmapula to plough was a gesture of care – but when Dipuo demanded it back, with potentially profound effects on the further contributions it had enabled (the cow for land, the land for food, and so on), it called into question his care, and the relationships he had built through it to Mmapula and the rest of his family. And it was not only the futures of these relationships that were suddenly destabilised, but also the meanings of the full range of his contributions in the past. Previously shared understandings of what Dipuo had provided for his family, what it meant, what they had done for him, and with what effects were thrown up into the air.

Contributions, then, are critical to binding together kin, reflecting and shaping responsibilities by age, gender, and generation over time; but they are also means by which kinship can be confounded, rejected, and undermined. This instability and reversibility renders contributions, and tlhokomelo in turn, prone to dikgang, which – though never fully resolved – allow for the active negotiation, renewal, and recalibration of family relationships and their ethical underpinnings.

As we have seen, contributions are equally essential means of making-for-oneself. Contributions to friends, neighbours, and partners are required to build relationships with them and to establish or assert oneself as a person, as well as to build one’s own lelwapa. And the things, work, and sentiment one is expected to contribute are similar to those expected by one’s family. This conundrum affects women and men alike, if in different forms, over the entire life course (as Dipuo’s example suggests). The tension between these divergent demands frequently produces dikgang – which defer outright fission in the natal family by reasserting its claims and relationships, while making room for the accumulations and redirections required by the project of self-making. According to this model, personhood is meaningful only if it is built within the context of kinship, in spite of appearing opposed to it. It marks a form of self-determination derived not from demonstrating independence but from demonstrating and carefully managing interdependence. In contrast, NGO and government contributions of comparable things, work, and sentiment – though cast as a form of care – behave more like gifts that cannot be reciprocated, shared, or given in turn; as such, they disrupt both the contributory economics of the family and those of making-for-oneself.

Of course, the tension between the imperatives of self-making, its reliance on one’s natal kin, and the role of dikgang in negotiating that tension is not confined to questions of contribution and care. Similar tensions arise in attempting to secure intimate relationships – predominantly through the careful management of the ways they are seen, spoken, and known, or recognised. The often fraught negotiations of the dikgang that emerge around pregnancies and marriages perhaps best illustrate this process of managing recognition, and in Part III I turn to a consideration of the reproduction of kinship through conflict.

Figure 6 ‘I Care, Do You?’ Government public health messaging by the highway.

INTERLUDE: An Incident