Morafe: Person, Family and Nation in Colonial Bechuanaland, 1880s-1950s

Morafe is a luminous exploration of two generations of the Molema family. Beginning in the 1880s and ending in the 1950s in Mafikeng, the capital town of the North West province, this is a landmark publication of South African history and biography. The Molemas were 'border people', who then straddled what would become present-day South Africa and Botswana. We begin the story in the 1880s with a frontier setting of 'black', 'white', 'metis' and many others streaming into the new British territories of British Bechuanaland (present-day North West and Northern Cape provinces) and the Bechuanaland Protectorate (present-day Botswana), and where the political boundary between these two territories is negligible. The setting is one where skin colouring did not yet connect with a particular social or political status, nor did it yet really affect economic opportunity. Morafe ends in the 1950s, where the political boundary matters profoundly, dividing two very different colonial dispensations of colonial racial ordering and classification, and two separate traditions of nationalist politics. Khumisho Moguerane recounts how this was not necessarily how people, including members of the South African National Congress in the early twentieth century had conceived of their futures. The setting of empire and colonialism in the late nineteenth and into the early decades of the twentieth century still allowed for possibilities of statehood and nationalist traditions outside of, overlapping and competing with, those that eventually led to two neighbouring, democratic independent nation-states from the 1940s. The book argues that as a chiefly, Christianised and educated family the Molemas - Silas Molema, (b. 1850) and his two sons, Sebopioa and Modiri, and his daughter, Harriet - played a central role in the events and consequences that forged these two countries by the mid-twentieth century. The fifth protagonist in the book is the prodigious and renowned writer, newspaper editor and politician Solomon Plaatje, who was, in many ways, a member of the family. The family history emerges through the interwoven routines of everyday life - marriage, landholding, education, work, devoutness and political offices - intimate routines that show the moral hierarchies of gender and generation amongst a frontier society coming to an awareness of itself as 'Bechuana'. A first for South Africa, a profound and original story, Morafe reveals that the 'nation' is less 'out there' in public institutions and political struggles, but 'in here', in the everyday drama of personal and ordinary lives. Moreover, Morafe provides the first analysis in South Africa that puts the focus on moral lives as foundation to an understanding of nationalist politics in South Africa and Botswana. The Seed is Mine by Charles van Onselen, Thabo Mbeki: A Dream Deferred by Mark Gevisser, The Scramble for Africa by Thomas Pakenham, The Land is Ours by Tembeka Ngcukaitobi are some of the books in the tradition of significant histories and biographies of South Africa. See more