Botswana’s Ecumenical Funerals in the Making

Abstract

This study of grassroots ecumenism in Botswana focuses on the funerals in which much interdenominational co-operation and religious rapprochement prevails, even against troubling dissent. Because this accomplishment is relatively exceptional not only in southern Africa but in the continent as a whole, its special history, in a post-colonial shift towards religious tolerance, is examined along with its more enduring socio-cultural basis. The account documents the emergence of a whole shared repertoire of ideas and practices, and a distinctive social space outside any church, for activating grassroots ecumenism in its boundary-crossing, its inclusive relatedness and its opening of belonging in the presence of difference. A simple logic, tied to common-sense assumptions about gender roles, is shown to inform certain parts of this shared repertoire. The analysis of cases from funerals in Tswapong villages in the Central district and in the city discloses how ecumenical and anti-ecumenical tensions are managed, especially by local ministers, while caring mourners try to console the bereaved and maintain amity for the sake of promised salvation for the dead. Given the importance, in the funerals as in public life, of civic ideals, decorum and formality, this analysis also clarifies how public officials conclude, and even regulate, funerals by bringing together their appeals, ecumenical ones to God and civic ones for the upholding of citizenship, of moral interdependence and responsibility in village life. More generally, the argument is that grassroots ecumenism is a boundary-crossing phenomenon of broad interest for comparative analysis of the cultural and social creation of a popular religious movement that looms large in everyday lives and which contributes to the welcome shape of citizenship.

Keywords:

• religious tolerance
• citizenship
• moral interdependence
• post-colonial turn
• sociability

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the British Academy for a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant, which funded my ecumenical research in 2014. I am grateful also to Fred Klaits and Pnina Werbner for their careful and very helpful criticism of an earlier draft of this article.

Notes

¹ Although my main focus here is on my recent research, intermittently between 2000 and 2017, in the Central district and in Gaborone, I also draw on my earlier research, intermittently since 1964, in the North-East district and, since 1971, in the Central district

² An important turn to redress this neglect is the recent edited collection, M. Jindra and J. Noret (eds), Funerals in Africa: Explorations of a Social Phenomenon (New York and Oxford, Berghahn, 2011). The chapter on funerals in Burkina Faso provides an exemplary account of when, how and why funerals afford occasions for contesting or realising ideals of religious rapprochement: K. Langewiesche, ‘Funerals and Religious Pluralism in Burkina Faso’, in Jindra and Noret (eds), Funerals in Africa, pp. 130–53.

³ For an exemplary account of an ecumenical funeral, including Pentecostal ministers and pastors along with others, in South Africa’s lowveld, see I. Niehaus, Witchcraft and a Life in the New South Africa (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press for the International African Institute, 2012), pp. 187–201.

⁴ The word for wake conveys a ‘watch’, with the sense of guarding.

⁵ I was told by bereaved kin of their fear of being in danger of a curse, kutsa, if one is seen to fail to meet work obligations at the funeral.

⁶ The burial day in the funeral of the archbishop of a church in the railway town of Palapye is shown in R. Werbner, Burying Hallelujah (London, Royal Anthropological Institute, Ethnographic Video Online, Alexander St Press, 2014).

⁷ Appendices 1 and 2 give the funeral programmes of a middle-aged man and an elderly woman, respectively.

⁸ Elders say that, in their youth, children did not attend funerals, as they do today, but were told that the dead had been taken away by the hyenas (the hyenas being the young men who dig the grave, of course).

⁹ On initial phase grassroots ecumenism, see B. Jules-Rosette, ‘Grass-Roots Ecumenism’, African Social Research 23 (1977), and the Introduction, elsewhere in this special issue.

¹⁰ O. Kealotswe, ‘The Role of Mulindelo/Moletelo as an Important Aspect of Ecumenism in the African Independent Churches (AICs) in Botswana’, paper presented to the conference ‘Ecumenical Predicaments and Religious Pluralism in Southern Africa’, University of Botswana, Gaborone, 2015.

¹¹ J. Amanze, Ecumenism in Botswana (Gaborone, Pula Press, 2006), pp. 38–9; R. Werbner, Holy Hustlers, Schism and Prophecy (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2011), p. 9.

¹² For a brief report, see BG reporter, ‘Parliament Passes “Fire Churches” Bill’, Botswana Guardian, Gaborone, 27 March 2015, p. 1.

¹³ J. Fernandez, Bwiti: An Ethnography of the Religious Imagination in Africa (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1982), p. 468. For a related analysis of ‘housing activities’ in Botswana, see F. Klaits, Death in a Church of Life: Moral Passion During Botswana’s Time of AIDS (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2010), pp. 89–106.

¹⁴ Not everyone gets to have a wedding or a feast – it is something of a distinction – but normally everyone, at death, is given a funeral.

¹⁵ For a filmed representation of the architectonics of the lwapa, see R. Werbner, Caught-in-Between (London, Royal Anthropological Institute, Ethnographic Video Online, Alexander St Press, 2016).

¹⁶ On the importance of such conviviality for unity in the presence of difference, see F. Nyamnjoh, ‘A Child is One Person’s Only in the Womb’, in R. Werbner (ed.), Postcolonial Subjectivities in Africa (London, Zed Books, 2002), pp. 112–13.

¹⁷ D. Durham and F. Klaits, ‘Funerals and the Public Space of Sentiment in Botswana’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 28, 4 (2002), p. 777.

¹⁸ Ibid., p. 787.

¹⁹ Klaits, Death in a Church of Life.

²⁰ Ibid., p. 30.

²¹ For filmed examples, see R. Werbner, Shade Seekers and the Mixer (London, Royal Anthropological Institute, Ethnographic Video Online, Alexander St Press, 2007); Werbner, Burying Hallelujah.

²² Customarily, the opposite, facing the rising sun, is normal for the living.

²³ On the mortuary industry in South Africa (which has been exemplary for Botswana), see R. Lee, ‘Entrepreneurism in South Africa’s Emergent Funeral Industry’, in U. Rosenthaler and D. Schulz (eds), Cultural Entrepreneurship in Africa (London, Routledge, 2006), pp. 121–35; ‘Death “On the Move”: Entrepreneurism and the Rural–Urban Nexus in South Africa’, Africa, 81, 2 (2011), pp. 226–47.

²⁴ For the contrast to the souvenir display for the deceased in Swazi funerals, see C. Golomski, ‘Urban Cemeteries in Swaziland: Materialising Dignity’, Anthropology Southern Africa, 38, 3–4 (2015), pp. 360–71. In the past in Botswana, some burials were in the goat pens.

²⁵ On the dead, partible persons and dividuality, see Werbner, Holy Hustlers, pp. 12–14.

²⁶ For a sensitive discussion of a church’s encouragement to its members, for ‘giving up’ and being resigned to death, see Klaits, Death in a Church of Life, pp. 147–8.

²⁷ The Ministers Fraternal have a wide membership, belong to no ecumenical council and include ministers from different denominations in a locality; they consider a wide range of issues, including matters of social welfare and social justice as well as spiritual concerns. ‘The Fraternals organize prayers for rain, interdenominational services during national days and also talk to government on behalf of the churches on national issues, e.g. abortion’, Amanze, Ecumenism in Botswana, pp. 345–6.

²⁸ On Moremi’s oracle, Komana , Secrets (or Drums), Kgotla ya Sedimo, the Court of the Divinity (or the Ghost), see R. Werbner, ‘Safe Passage for Well-Being: Substances, Sacrifice and Oracle Supplicants’, Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, 29, 3 (2009), pp. 46–68. At some funerals, the lights are turned off, the diesel generator stopped, and, in the stillness, the oracle is consulted about the cause of the death. Only if the relatives ask for the oracle do the Komana adepts communicate with the oracle at a funeral. In 2017, at the funeral of a very old, senior, long-serving adept, not only was there no communication with the oracle but in the funeral and on the programme no mention was made of the adept’s participation in the Komana. Fellow adepts were given no roles at all in the funeral. According to the wishes of his family, he was buried with a Christian funeral. Preachers who acknowledged that he remained outside any church praised him as a good man who deserved his Christian funeral – it was not for them or anyone else to judge him, for only God can be the judge.

²⁹ On Damascus church and the funeral of its archbishop, see Werbner, Burying Hallelujah.

³⁰ The VDC chairperson and the chief can be outspoken in their criticism. For example, at a funeral in Moremi village in 2001, the chairperson castigated the deceased young man’s stepfather. He looked as if he was on trial, a friend of mine said. The chairperson complained bitterly and at length that the stepfather had taken no share in the funeral preparations and had ill-treated her in her efforts to get him to bear his full share of the work and expenses of the funeral. The village chief followed and condemned the stepfather even more strongly. How could the son properly bear the stepfather’s name on the grave canopy? In life the stepfather had been willing to accept support and gifts from the son, but in death had denied him as his son, and had not even married the son’s mother. The chief, too, angrily rebuked the stepfather for his rude dismissal of the chief’s own appeals for funeral support. A cousin of the deceased told me that she had herself confronted the stepfather, and ‘hammered’ him at the funeral for not taking responsibility for his son. She said that she had to speak up to make the truth of her cousin’s life known: ‘when else could I have the truth of his life told, if not at his funeral?’

³¹ These appendices reproduce two funeral programmes, but omit the names of persons serving in funeral roles.