Abstract
The materialization of memory is one way in which the past becomes a powerful agent for negotiating the present. Today in Botswana, archaeological sites have become sites of memory where ancestors have been invoked for healing in response to the rapid spread of HIV/AIDS. This paper concentrates on one site, Khubu la Dintša, where a local community practiced an ancestral healing ceremony, phekolo, as a way to restore spiritual balance. Told through a set of narratives that integrate ethnographic interviews with one of the former church elders, Russia, the article chronicles the trajectory of the church, the perceived power and active role of the ancestors in this ceremony, and the complex web of morality and practicality in which alternative narratives emerge during a time of social disruption and later fall apart. This paper complements the others in this issue by focusing on how memory, place, time, and material culture are recursively engaged: a process that includes formal and accepted to marginal and even ephemeral viewpoints and holds lessons for how we as archaeologists approach and curate the past.
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Notes
Lions have strong religious and symbolic importance as they play part of a creation myth in some Batswana groups. Molato likened these small rock depressions to the Matsieng Footprints, a set of 113 human footprints and feline paw prints carved into sandstone plates (Walker 1997). These paw prints, originally made by the Basarwa (San) people, were later reinterpreted by Sotho-Tswana people as a creation site. At Matsieng Footprints, Tswana tradition describes, the first Tswana (Matsieng) emerged from the earth and his footprints and those of the animals that accompanied him imprinted there, as the stones were still new and soft in the world’s beginning (Taçon and Ouzman 2004:63).
As ancestral places, there is a certain understanding about how one respects these places, to a degree that even pointing directly at the site is taboo pointing directly at the site (or to face the associated consequences such as illness, crop failure, getting lost, even the pointing finger falling off, as encapsulated by the place-names) (Denbow in conversation 2010).
This ash was a specific choice by the community to harness the power of the ancestors for healing, as white is a color associated with health, power, and life in local cosmology (Mensele 2011:58).
Although church elders were invited to the meeting as well, they did not attend, citing a series of excuses for their absence (Mosothwane in conversation 2016).
The color black in phekolo ceremonies is associated with the chasing away of and protection from evil forces (Mensele 2011:78–9).
White, as mentioned earlier, is used during phekolo when one asks for blessings from the ancestors, which was why the ditch was dug into the kraal years earlier. In phekolo, white clay or soil, with the color’s symbolic importance, is especially important as a material for healing (Mensele 2011:79). During the 2002 ceremony, Molato had about five female assistants who also wore white dresses (Denbow in conversation 2016).
The skin serves as a carpet made of leather or phate in Setswana.
Russia would not share with me the specific songs and lyrics used.
This train of thought, as explained to me by Mothusi and Mokgosi, my accompanying archaeologists, is part of a long ongoing conspiracy theory that HIV/AIDS was a laboratory-made by white people, outsiders or otherwise, to suppress black Africans, one of a number of narratives that are used as explanation for the pandemic (for further analysis of these tropes, see Fassin and Schneider 2003; Liddell et al. 2005:692–693; Petros et al. 2006: 70–74; van Dyk 2001)
Like with the previous attempts to fence off the site and to stop archaeologists from working there, the site might still be “protected” in another way.
At the more extreme end, it was seen as being similar to boswagadi, one of the gravest of traditional afflictions that occurs when someone has sexual intercourse with the spouse of a dead person before a purification ritual takes place. This was well documented particularly among elderly people, who related the symptoms of boswagadi (weight loss, coughing, darkening of the skin, failure to control the bowels) with HIV/AIDS (Amanze 2002; Kgathi et al. 2000; Thapelo et al. 1999).
Witchcraft by the biomedical community or from foreigners has also served as an explanation of other natural disasters in Botswana. With the repatriation in 2001 of “El Negro,” a stuffed specimen of a Motswana man who had been displayed in a Spanish museum for over 150 years, rumors circulated regarding witchcraft and its impact on weather (Gewald 2001). A sudden absence of rain in January, the wet season, after a particularly wet set of months, became linked to the arrival and reburial of the skull (only the skull was buried as the soft tissue was inexplicably removed in the transition of the specimen to Botswana; the accompanying grave goods also stolen) in Tsholofelo Park in Gaborone, the capital of Botswana (Gewald 2001:557–558). These rumors developed into an assertion that the ancestors were angry, either because the remains did not come from Botswana, that they were of a “Bushman” (as opposed to a Motswana of Bantu ancestry) that therefore angered one of the Tswana ancestors, Chief Tshekedi Khama, and/or the bones served as a drug to prevent the rains from coming, in a broader conspiracy where the elite schemed to keep the populace poor and dependent (Gewald 2001:558). As in Mmashoro before the meeting took place, these rumors circulated in part because of confusion: a lack of common knowledge where the bones came from and why they were to be interred in Gaborone and a belief that ancestral spirits can influence the land of the living.
This date, as described earlier in the article and published in Klehm (2013), is incorrect and should be the thirteenth–fifteenth century AD.
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Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank Russia for the interviews; Mothusi Maeletsa, Mokgosi Modimoosi, Boineelo Ratie, Lefatshe, and Morongwa Mosothwane for their translation, assistance, and advice during and after the interview, and to the four anonymous reviewers that made this a much stronger manuscript. Thanks as well to Edward Henry and David Mixter for organizing and inviting me to their AAA session on social memory and the subsequent volume, as well as their comments on an earlier draft. Lastly, the ability to interview the people around Mmashoro, conduct archaeological survey in the region, and engage in reflexive practice is due to the model that James Denbow has created. Many, many thanks.
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The original research at Khubu la Dintša in 2011 was conducted under a Doctoral Dissertation Improvement grant from the National Science Foundation (2011, BCS-1115148), with a Republic of Botswana Ministry of Environment, Wildlife, and Tourism Permit (EWT8/36/4XV(54)). The 2014 interview with Russia was conducted in conjunction with survey and excavations in the Bosutswe region, supported by an East Tennessee State University RDC Major Research Grant (2014; PI Eileen Ernenwein), with Botswana research permit EWT8/36/4XXV(62).
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Klehm, C.E. Finding Russia in Botswana: AIDS, Archaeology, and the Power of the Ancestors. J Archaeol Method Theory 24, 28–49 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-017-9318-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-017-9318-2