allAfrica.com: Botswana: The Basarwa Family Fighting For the Right to Citizenship (Page 1 of 2)

They have no nationality. Both the Botswana and the Namibian governments deny them citizenship; and for Maveo Mokove family of Ngarange Village in the Okavango District, that is a matter of life and death.

Mokove, his wife and children have lived a life of wandering between the two countries and this has left them destitute, their children denied education and with no national identity.

They have been deported from this country several times only to return because the Namibian government also repudiates them as its nationals.

But they have no qualms with the Namibian government, insisting they are Batswana; and the villagers agree.

The disputed nationality has not only left psychological trails, hunger and desperation but a bleak future for their children and grand children who are being denied education.

In 2004, Mokove's children - Ben, Patrick, Mary and Kasanga Eshevo - were removed from Ngarange Primary School by law enforcement authorities while doing standard seven, six and four, respectively. Mokove's youngest daughter Naledi, 8, and her seven-year-old cousin, Ida, have also been denied admission to the school.

When The Voice arrived at the Mokove residency in Ngarange last Saturday, we found his wife cracking the nuts of a Mongongo tree for lunch. Besides this, she said, "we survive on wild vegetables, fruits and herbs, at times begging for mealie-meal from neighbours after they have received a ration of their destitute packages from the council."

Mokove, who is a traditional doctor, was away from home but The Voice later managed to speak with him through the mobile phone.

Mokove told how, after being dumped at Omega in Namibia in 2004, they discovered that there was no longer an army barracks but a village. "People in the village did not know us so was the village chief who plainly told us in front of the immigration officers that he had no land to allocate to Batswana. We loitered around without shelter," he said.

Homeless and hungry, the Mokoves found no other way but to barter their clothes and property for food. But they were soon without, and the hunger pangs returned.

"One day we were called at a scene to find Ben being untied from a tree after hanging himself. He was still alive. When we later asked him why he had done that he told us that there was a lot of suffering in Namibia; he wanted to return to Botswana and go back to school. Both my wife and I cried."

Then a few days later, their daughter disappeared.

"We followed her tracks, and she had crossed over to Botswana where she arrived and joined his uncle's family," said Mokove, speaking through an interpreter, as the family knows no other language but the Sesarwa (San) dilect spoken in the area.

Despite the Botswana government's insistence that the Mokoves are not Batswana, village chief Tshosa Tshego, Councillor Mbathira Ngundura and most elderly Hambukushu and Basarwa of Ngarange insist otherwise. They even confirm knowledge of Mokove's birthplace, Tobera, a cattle post in the Okavango district.

His wife, elders insist, is a daughter of a Mosarwa woman who migrated to Namibia during the Boer regime. Then she was married to a man called Okahare, who has since passed on. She had a son with her late husband, whom she relocated to Namibia with and where she was employed as a maid in the apartheid army barracks.

Kgosi Tshego and other elders confirmed Mokove was born to the late Mosarwa man named Mokove Ngavangava. They pointed his ruins at a place called Mahahe, approximately three kilometers between Kauxwi and Ngarange villages.

Tshego said he first met Mokove in their youth in the 1950s.

He revealed that the young Mokove then joined the migration of Basarwa to Namibia.

"We later heard that Mokove had been employed as an army driver and was stationed at Omega barracks where he met his present wife and bore children with her."

In Namibia, he had first met and married a local woman who later died leaving him with some children. "When he met his second and present wife, the woman accepted a parental role to Mokove's children and the family joined as one. That is why when we were repatriated back to Botswana after the independence of Namibia, Mokove came back with all his brood including those from his former wife," said a village elder.

But, according to Botswana laws, if Mokove's marriage was not a civil one, the children inherit their mother's citizenship. The law clashes with the Sesarwa custom. In Sesarwa and Hambukushu cultures, Kgosi Tshosa explained, children belong to their fathers and inherit their names with or without marital bonds.

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