Where Are You From? Where Are You Going?: The Geographies of Tswana Kinship

Part I maps out the geographies of Tswana kinship, beginning in Chapter 1 with the Tswana gae, or home. The gae is a multiple, scattered place – stretching to include masimo (farmlands) and moraka (cattle post) – integrated by continuous movement, shifting residence, and care work that gravitates around the lelwapa (courtyard). For kin, both closeness and distance create dikgang; and while continuous movement enables balances to be struck, ‘going up and down’ produces tensions and dangers of its own. In Chapter 2, the building of new houses – a critical means of go itirela, or making-for-oneself – presents similar conundrums, requiring the mobilisation of resources among family in order to establish distance from them. When help is refused, dikgang generated are enough to stall building and self-making alike. These risks are marked in an epidemic era, where orphaned children may inherit early, and where NGO and government programmes may provide access to resources they might not otherwise have. Chapter 3 describes the spatial practices of these NGO and social work programmes, which show surprising similarities to the spatial practices of family – but also invert those spatialities and knock them out of sync, producing problematic alternatives to the gae, and new, intractable dikgang.