Evading Household Indebtedness Through Participation in group
solidarity coping strategies in Contemporary Botswana
Abstract:
Contemporary urban and rural life in Botswana is marked by the pervasiveness of
death. This has been exacerbated by the AIDS pandemic. Among other things,
death exposes and concretizes stark realities of vulnerability to forms
of poverty. Challenged by multiple distressful living conditions, Batswana turn to a
range of cooperative endurance strategies.
This
paper focuses on identifying and analyzing group solidarity coping strategies in
the context of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and structural social inequalities in
Botswana. Ethnographic methods were
used to gather data for this paper in Gaborone, the capital city of Botswana and
Ramotswa, a village in the Southeast District. Cultural analysis of ethnographic
data suggests that women constitute the majority in these groups and a profile
of the groups include burial societies, community based “whistle blowers”
and kin-oriented groupings, impromptu relief task groups, “people’s
banks,” and consumer or savings-cum credit associations. Although
multi-purpose in nature, these groups help members to have direct and
predictable access to emergency financial relief that helps them to forestall or
evade immediate household indebtedness especially due to escalating costs of
funerals. The groups have re-distributional features associated with
procurement, management and authority to dispense resources from those who are
not in need to those who are. Group solidarity is built on contemporary
re-invention of long standing Tswana principles of reciprocity and botho
(civility).