Voices of Kagisong
Vernon Gibberd reviews a story of Quaker witness in Botswana
There is something totally serene about the colour photo of Kagisong on the cover of Voices of Kagisong: History of a Refugee Programme in Botswana. There are some trees coming into fresh spring leaf; sundry dogs; a few 200-litre oil drums to remind us of the transience of piped water supplies in Botswana villages; a distant white bakkie, the workhorse of any African development project – but no people, no black and white (for there were white refugees) smiling faces. But that is the story told in this new book: the refugees have all gone, mostly to new homes. This is mission accomplished.
In Voices of Kagisong, Shelagh Willet and, in chapter three, John Schmid tell us, often through the words of the refugees and project staff themselves, how an extraordinary facility came into being in the capital city of Botswana – this island of tranquillity in a sea of political and economic turmoil.
From growing up on a farm in the 1930s in the Transvaal to being a subject for questioning by the Special Branch over her voluntary work with night schools for black workers at Wits University, where she graduated as a librarian, Shelagh Willet was set for an interesting life. She joined the Religious Society of Friends and started the Lesotho Worship Group (now Lesotho Monthly Meeting) while she was assistant librarian at the university there. She then moved to Botswana in 1971 as librarian to the new University of Botswana. There she coalesced the odd Quaker initiatives of the previous few years into the Botswana Monthly Meeting and started, with her indefatigable housekeeper, Emily Muba, her ‘open house’, which quickly filled with refugees from the turmoil then enveloping the neighbouring states. This grew into the Kagisong of the book: Shelagh became a full-time Quaker Peace and Service (QPS) worker and, with QPS and EU funding, started the refugee centre.
Shelagh’s modesty in telling the story in Voices of Kagisong compelled her to omit (at least) two things. First, she was officially recognised by the new South African Government as possibly qualifying for a ‘Special Pension’ in recognition of her service to The Struggle, only to have the possibility withdrawn because she hadn’t provided sufficient evidence of full-time service to her ‘political organisation for five years prior to 2-2-90’. That was Shelagh – she had no room for politics at Kagisong, or anywhere else. Second, Shelagh not only kept an ‘open house’, but also an open hand. ‘Ask and it shall be given you’ (Matthew 7:7) suggests that God is the Giver and so excuses us. Not so Shelagh; she gave whatever she had. Literally.
The very word ‘refugee’ brings up visions of dusty (or muddy) fields full of rows of tents, and endless queues for food, water and medical attention, all managed by a – sometimes necessarily – impersonal, unsympathetic management. This was not the case at Kagisong. Those big impersonal structures are bad at treating people as individuals, and individual refugees can have extraordinarily divergent needs, as Voices of Kagisong tells us. Medical, skill and language tests and interviews for resettlement; literacy, language and vocational training courses to prepare for eventual resettlement; medical problems; family and addiction problems leading to the occasional run-in with the law and sometimes imprisonment… and more. Almost always these needs have to be met in the capital – exactly where these tent cities are not sited – and it is there that new refugees invariably gravitate, further widening the interface and perhaps increasing the friction at it between the local populace and the incomers – something not easily provided by the big refugee bureaucracies. It was here that Kagisong provided the Safe House. This book tells that story. Shelagh, with her Quaker-driven values of simplicity and compassion, made sure it was not just safe, but welcoming, even at 2am.
Voices of Kagisong reads well and its presentation and binding suggest that it will not fall into a heap of loose pages after a third reading, as many such books do. The editing input from Chris and Roy Love makes for a smooth read, with only one quibble for a pedant: the referencing system for footnotes and endnotes wasn’t quite sorted. Voices of Kagisong is a clear, detailed, unemotional and well-referenced narrative, which does real justice to a story that is important for Quakers, refugees and the Botswana government alike.
Voices of Kagisong: History of a Refugee Programme in Botswana by Shelagh Willet. Bay Publishing,. ISBN: 9789991291468. It is available from the Quaker Centre Bookshop for £9 or direct from the publisher in Botswana by emailing baybooks@orangemail.co.bw.
