An expatriate literature..
If Botswana deserves its nickname of "Switzerland of Africa" for the serenity of its governance, its geographical and demographic situation is also reminiscent of Helvetia. Without access to the sea and sparsely populated in relation to the Kalahari desert which makes up a large part of its territory, the country hardly exceeds 2.5 million inhabitants. Most of them speak Tswana as their preferred language, although English is the official language. Bessie Head chose Tswana as her preferred language when she began writing, 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 was not yet official, segregation laws were already in force, prohibiting mixed marriages. It is said that her mother will be removed from her environment under a false pretext, and that Bessie Head will be born in a psychiatric hospital. As an adult, she became a teacher and began to publish in the famous magazine Drum, but her political involvement with the Pan Africanist Congress led her to seek exile in Botswana in 1964, where she applied for citizenship, which she did not receive until fifteen years later, barely ten years before she died prematurely from illness at a time when her work was just beginning to be recognized. Thanks to the remarkable work of translation undertaken by the fine Swiss publishing house Zoé, it is now possible for us to discover her most famous novel, Marou, whose heroine is a Marsarwa from Botswana who suffers from the discrimination suffered by her tribe
It is his adopted country that also inspires Norman Rush, born in Oakland in 1933, to write some of his most beautiful pages. From an early age, he was mad about literature, selling old books and teaching. In 1978, he became head of the Peace Corps - an independent American agency working for peace between peoples - in Botswana, and then he began to sketch expatriates with a certain bite in a collection of short stories very explicitly entitled The Whites. Finished in 1986 and awarded the Pulitzer Prize, this book is offered in translation by Fayard. In a fabulous gallery of portraits, the reader meets sociologists disappointed by their African experience as well as civil servants and other missionaries who have come to preach the good word, totally at odds with the reality on the ground
Norman Rush will do it again and will use Botswana as a setting for two novels: Coupling, acclaimed by the National Book in 1991, and Mere Mortals published in 2003. In the first, an anthropologist confronts reality with her fantasy about an intellectual who has gone to found a utopian society in the heart of the Kalahari desert, while 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
There are no secret agents in Alexander McCall Smith's novels, but an atypical and engaging private detective, who is above all a nice excuse to discover Botswana from the inside, a country that the author knows very well, as he will oscillate throughout his life between the continent where he was born in 1948 and Scotland, where his family comes from. Raised in Bulawayo, he taught in Gaborone in the early 1980s, an experience that had a visible impact on him, since in 1998 he began writing by publishing Mma Ramotswe Detective, the first volume of a world-famous series that is now available in French in the mythical "Grands détectives" collection published by 10-18. Precious Ramotswe, a forty-something woman separated from a violent ex-partner, has decided to create in the small town of Tlokweng the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency in Botswana, the first in the country! Relying more on her intuition and her sense of human relations than on tangible clues, the young woman is going to succeed one after the other, drawing up an intimate fresco of Botswana and also allowing herself a new, much more romantic love story. Alexander McCall Smith wrote about twenty Botswana adventures before turning to new horizons. The reception of his saga is such that it has been translated into more than thirty languages and is enjoyed by readers around the world.
... and a native literature
Perhaps still a little timid, or not enjoying the favors of publicity that would ignore the country's borders, literature written by Botswana citizens does exist, as the writings of Unity Dow prove. Her novel The Cries of the Innocent, published by Actes Sud in 2006, features Amantle, a strong-willed investigator who does everything she can to get to the bottom of the death of little Neo, too easily blamed on the wanderings of a lion. Although France honored her with the National Order of the Legion of Honor in July 2010, it is unfortunate 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 was unanimously acclaimed by international critics and has won several awards in the United States
Anyone who wants 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 in 1996), the United States(Children of the Twilight Zone in 1999), and Botswana(Baptism of Fire and Others Stories, 2010). Another way to get a feel for contemporary literature is to take a trip 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 speaker, she represents a new generation that is demanding to be heard
