As a chronicler of the royal village of Serowe, and of Botswana as a whole, Gothataone Moeng has assumed Bessie Head’s mantle. Forty years after Head’s death (in 1986, aged 48), the country’s central tension remains the same: the clash of the modern and traditional, of city and village.
Botalaote Hill emerges from that tension. It centres on the sexual awakening of 15-year-old Boikanyo, burdened with the responsibility of caring for a dying aunt who had a string of boyfriends in the diamond mining town of Orapa and returned to Serowe stricken, it seems, with AIDS. Years later, living in Gaborone, Boikanyo’s friends are fascinated by, but not all of them believe, her recollections of the village. ‘That sceptic seemed to assume that the hill—which I now knew to be just a hillock—the school, the cemetery were symbolic of something that I had overcome, something I had escaped.’
First published in Oxford American in 2017, online here. Appears as ‘Botalaote’ in the collection Call and Response, Oneworld, 2023
A Personal Anthology 