An expatriate literature..
If Botswana deserves its nickname "the Switzerland of Africa" for the serenity of its governance, its geographic and demographic situation is also reminiscent of Helvetia. Landlocked and sparsely populated in relation to the Kalahari Desert that makes up much of its territory, the country has a population of just over 2.7 million. Most of them speak Tswana as their preferred idiom, although English is the official language. Bessie Head chose Tswana as her preferred language when she turned to literature, after a difficult life that led her to seek refuge in Botswana. Born in South Africa in 1937, she was the product of the illegitimate love affair between a rich white woman and a black servant. Although apartheid had not yet been formalized, segregation laws were already in force, prohibiting mixed marriages. It is said that her mother will be removed from her environment under false pretences, and that Bessie Head will be born in a psychiatric hospital. As an adult, she became a teacher and began publishing in the famous Drum magazine, but her political involvement with the Pan Africanist Congress prompted her to seek exile in Botswana in 1964, where she applied for citizenship. She was not granted it until fifteen years later, barely ten years before she died prematurely of illness at a time when her work was just beginning to be recognized. Thanks to the remarkable translation work undertaken by the fine Swiss publishing house Zoé, we are now able to discover her most famous novel, Marou, whose heroine is a Marsarwa from Botswana who suffers discrimination at the hands of her tribe.
Norman Rush, born in Oakland in 1933, also drew inspiration for some of his finest pages from his adopted country. A literature buff from an early age, he went from selling antiquarian books to teaching. In 1978, he became head of the Peace Corps - an independent American agency working for peace between peoples - in Botswana, and began to sketch expatriates with a certain bite in a collection of short stories explicitly entitled Les Blancs (The Whites). Completed in 1986 and awarded the Pulitzer Prize, this work is now available in translation from Fayard. In a fabulous gallery of portraits, the reader encounters sociologists disillusioned by their African experience, as well as civil servants and other missionaries who have come to preach the good word, but who are totally out of touch with the reality on the ground.
Norman Rush returned to Botswana for two novels: Accouplement, which won a National Book Award in 1991, and De simples mortels, published in 2003. In the first, an anthropologist confronts reality with her fantasy about an intellectual who has gone off to found a utopian society in the heart of the Kalahari desert; in the second, a CIA agent struggles to reconcile the missions entrusted to him, notably that of monitoring a socialist Tswana, with the jealous passion he feels for his wife.
No secret agent in Alexander McCall Smith's novels, but an atypical and engaging private detective, who is above all a lovely pretext for discovering Botswana from the inside, a country the author knows very well, as he oscillates throughout his life between the continent where he was born in 1948 and his family's native Scotland. Raised in Bulawayo, he went on to teach in Gaborone in the early 1980s, an experience that left a lasting impression, since in 1998 he launched his writing career with the publication of Mma Ramotswe détective, the first volume of a world-famous series that is now available in French in the legendary "Grands détectives" collection published by Editions 10-18. Precious Ramotswe, a forty-something woman separated from a violent ex-partner, has decided to set up Botswana's No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency in the small town of Tlokweng - the first of its kind in the country! Relying more on her intuition and her sense of human relationships than on tangible clues, the young woman went on to achieve one success after another, painting an intimate portrait of Botswana and allowing herself a new, much more romantic love story. Alexander McCall Smith wrote some twenty Botswana adventures before turning to new horizons. Such is the popularity of his saga that it has been translated into over thirty languages, delighting readers the world over.
... and a native literature
Perhaps still a little timid, or not benefiting from the kind of publicity that ignores the country's borders, literature written by Botswanans nevertheless exists, as demonstrated by the writings of Unity Dow. Strongly involved in her country's political life and a militant in the fight for women's rights, her novel Les Cris de l'innocente (The Cries of the Innocent), published by Actes Sud in 2006, features Amantle, a strong-willed investigator who does everything in her power to ensure that the death of little Neo, too easily blamed on the wanderings of a lion, is solved. Although France honored her with the Ordre National de la Légion d'Honneur in July 2010, it is regrettable that this novel - which is unfortunately out of print - is the only one to have been translated, whereas Unity Dow has published five, including 2010's Saturday Is for Funerals, published by Harvard University Press, which received unanimous international critical acclaim and several awards in the USA.
Anyone wanting to hear the new voices of Botswana literature will have no choice but to practice their English, for example by picking up a copy of Goodbye to Power or Love on the Rocks by Andrew Sesinyi, born in 1952, or by delving into the work of university professor Moteane Melam, who has published in South Africa(Living and Partly Living, 1996), the USA(Children of the Twilight Zone, 1999) and Botswana(Baptism of Fire and Others Stories, 2010). Another way of sniffing the zeitgeist in contemporary literature is to take to the Web, and it was on the Internet that Siyanda Mohutsiwa, born in 1993, made her name with a hashtag that went viral. Now a writer and lecturer, she represents a new generation demanding to be heard.
