The drama of de-orphaning: Botswana’s old orphans and the rewriting of kinship relations

Abstract

Botswana has the world’s highest rate of orphans, primarily as a result of HIV and AIDS. National response policies include a range of material resources given to relatives caring for parentless children. The insertion of financial incentive into kinship obligations has transformed younger orphans into valuable assets, leading some relatives (at least allegedly) to compete for the “right” to house them, and causing moral ambivalence among the public. Yet as orphans reach legal adulthood, the cessation of social services and poor opportunities for wage labour alter relations with relatives in unexpected ways. In this article, I explore how the ranks of meaningful kin appear to both swell and shrink around youth ageing out of their “orphan” status. Based on four years of ethnographic fieldwork in Botswana between 2003 and 2013, these case studies expose significant labour expended among families in policing categories of personhood like greedy relatives, needy orphans, and economically stagnant youth. I show how kinship relations become affectively populated through moral discourses – and how these discourses in turn provide pathways for new forms of claims-making, even for the supplanting of “verifiable” kin by less “traditionally” legitimate forms of relatedness – ultimately reshaping the very practice of kinship in rural Botswana.

Keywords:

• Botswana
• foreign aid
• kinship
• orphans
• social services
• youth

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Ellen Block, Lenore Manderson, and three anonymous reviewers for Social Dynamics for their helpful comments on earlier iterations of this work.

Notes

1. All names have been changed to protect privacy.

2. The claim that Bothlale’s grandmother could not have cared for her and her siblings was at once unusual (grandmothers take on a significant burden for orphan-care; see Block 2014), and not atypical, particularly in contexts where maternal aunts who don’t live with the grandmother wish to take orphans in. In this case, my sense is that Bothlale’s relatives were concerned about her grandmother’s capacity to care, a concern the older woman may have shared.

3. Of course, relatives fighting for the right to provide custody for orphans is not a universal scenario; many family members fight to avoid this considerable responsibility. In some cases village chiefs and elders have to intervene to force particular kin to take in orphans – a duty encoded into tribal law.

4. The terminology I commonly encountered in Botswana to describe “orphans” in everyday speech was diorphans, a Setswana appropriation of the English word, which draws on ideas of abandonment and isolation commonly associated with Western depictions of orphans. The two Setswana words that also translate as “orphans” – masiela, or children who have lost one parent, and dikhutsana, children who lost both parents and have been abandoned by all other kin – are used less and less often (Dahl 2009), and have to an extent taken on the valence of the English word “orphans” through the impact of humanitarian aid organisations.

5. Given the cultural pressure in favour of kin-based caregiving, it is extremely rare for orphans to be cared for by non-kin (Tshitswana 2003). I have been unable to find convincing statistics on the percentage of child-headed households in Botswana; while such households attract much media coverage, my ethnographic research indicated they were uncommon.

6. Orphans who are still enrolled in secondary school on their 18th birthday generally continue to receive social services support through the completion of school. Technically, older orphans who are unable to support themselves become eligible to receive rations for “destitutes,” which are smaller in monetary value than the orphan rations. Despite the large numbers applying for the destitute rations, most of the orphaned youth I knew did not receive them; the decision to allocate is left to the discretion of social workers. A final note: although the official national statistics indicate that only about a third of families housing orphans actually receive food rations, it was evident in the rural environments where I worked that this proportion was much higher.

7. The distinction between “real” and “step” children may not have been explicitly made in this case. If a man in Botswana has legally married a woman and paid bridewealth for her, then any children she already had with other men outside of marriage are transferred into the new husband’s lineage and become his children. What I don’t know conclusively was whether Lesedi’s stepfather had actually paid bridewealth. Given his poverty and the way the family talked about him, I strongly suspect he had simply established a co-residence with Lesedi’s mother.

8. I explore the specific roles NGOs play in this process at length elsewhere (Dahl 2009, 2014, 2015), but here I focus more concertedly on altered kin relations.