Remembering House

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Journal of Material Culture

DOI: 10.1177/13591835070781232007; 12; 157Journal of Material Culture

Christopher MortonRemembering the House: Memory and Materiality in Northern Botswana

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REMEMBERING THE HOUSEMemory and Materiality in Northern Botswana

◆ CHRISTOPHE R MORTON

University of Oxford, UK

Abstract

Although both anthropology and archaeology have long been interested in

the relationship between the built environment and social forms, relatively

little attention has been paid to the way in which the material home is impli-

cated in processes of memory. Drawing on case studies from fieldwork in

northern Botswana, this article argues that memory, or more especially

processes of remembering, is importantly related to the spatial and temporalfluidity of the Tswana home and its inherent divisibility. The article argues

that understandings of the house as a container for memory or biography

have not sufficiently understood the way in which the materiality of the

house, as well as its spatial configurations over time, are involved with the

way in which such memories are formed and articulated. It also suggests

that, in its connectedness to memory and community, building activity is an

important material basis for cultural understandings of relatedness.

Key Words ◆ Botswana ◆ house ◆ memory ◆ relatedness

INTRODUCTION

This article concerns the dynamic relationship between the materialhome and processes of memory, or more especially remembering, among people of Ngamiland District in northern Botswana. What struck me when questioning people about the temporal layers of homesteads was

not just the way it prompted stories about the changing circumstancesof the extended household, but the way in which homestead formseemed to act as a generative model for practices of remembering. Thequestions that I address in this article then are: In what ways are Tswana

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Journal of Material Culture Vol. 12(2): 157–179

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houses involved in social processes of remembering? Is the interweavingof memories of the family and memories of the built environmentsuggestive of a deeper relationship between dwelling and social life thatanthropology needs to acknowledge?

The anthropological literature on the built environment is diverse andhas been the subject of increased interest in recent years. Whilst space prohibits a detailed survey of the literature here, such surveys do exist(e.g. Lawrence and Low, 1990; Low and Lawrence-Zúñiga, 2003) andseveral edited volumes have explored both the influence of the materialhouse on the social household (Birdwell-Pheasant and Lawrence-Zúñiga,1999), as well as the legacy of Lévi-Strauss’s notion of house-basedsocieties (sociétés-à-maison) in anthropology (Carsten and Hugh-Jones,1995). In the case of sub-Saharan African studies there is a considerable

body of literature on the interaction between social and spatial form (e.g.Richards, 1939; Buxton, 1963; Griaule, 1966; Littlejohn, 1967; Prussin,1969, 1995; Blier, 1983, 1987, 1989; Oliver, 1987; Reid et al., 1998). ForAudrey Richards (1939), Bemba houses and settlements were firmlyembedded within the kinship system as well as the domestic economyunder investigation, rather than providing a backdrop. In particular shedemonstrated how the shifting, waxing and waning of Bemba villages were intimately connected with the spatial implications of changes inkin unit formation over time, and that occupational history and genea-

logical memory in Bemba stretched back over some 20 generations (1939:110). The role of the built environment in social processes of memory was also implied by later African researchers such as Victor Turner, whonoted that ‘informants repeatedly declared to me that when they were young . . . some [Ndembu] villages were much larger than those of today.Some of them have even told me, from memory, how many houses there were in the village in which they grew up’ (1957: 40–1). More recentlythe role of the built environment as an ‘architecture’ of memory has been wonderfully explored by Bahloul (1996) whose study of memories of a

colonial house in Algeria explores the way in which ‘the house is“inhabited” by memory . . . [r]emembrance is moulded into the materialand physical structures of the domestic space’ (1996: 29).

Carsten and Hugh Jones (1995) used the notion of the house-as-metaphor in their argument for a more holistic approach to houses insocial studies. Arguing that architecture has been a neglected dimensionof social anthropology they maintain that the house can instead be seenas playing a central role in social life, not just as a backdrop to socialactivity, but as an active process within it. In particular they point out

that processes of building and maintaining houses are often closely interwoven with the temporality of household composition and ongoing need,and that thereby social and material processes should be more closelyconnected analytically. One of their arguments that is of particular

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relevance here is that ‘[i]ntimately linked both physically and conceptu-ally, the body and the house are the loci for dense webs of significationand affect and serve as basic cognitive models used to structure, thinkand experience the world’ (1995: 39). The argument that the materialhouse can be considered as a crucial generative influence on the way people mentally order and understand the world, lies at the heart of my present argument for a dynamic relationship between the materiality of the house and processes of remembering. This is more than a set of biographical relationships, such as those elucidated by Janet Hoskins(1998) in which certain objects serve as mnemonic containers for personalhistories. The idea of the house as a container of both families andmemories is ineluctable if we approach the house as essentially a spacerather than a material form. A more material focus, in which the house

interweaves processes of remembering through the activity of buildingover time, is potentially more dynamic in terms of its connectivity toongoing processes of remembering.

REMEMBERING AND HISTORY

My intention in this article is to explore the way in which differingnotions and processes of memory are an integral aspect of the buildingand rebuilding of homesteads. In particular I have chosen to focus upon

the semantic suggestiveness of remembering as ‘re-membering’ or re-collecting fragmented parts of a whole. The question of a distinctionbetween memory-as-process rather than inscription is of course addressedby Husserl (1962), who suggested that memory is immediate andredolent of temporality rather than history. His model was of a temporal‘presentness’ that encompassed both past and future – where history isnot a chain of causal antecedents, but a combination of ‘retensions’ of the past and ‘protensions’ of the future in the present, a process thatenables people to mediate temporal relationships. From this perspective

memory is a dimension of the phenomenological present; a process of present remembering rather than an experiential remnant of the pastessentially separated from the present.

There is a substantial literature on the relationship between collec-tive memory (e.g. Halbwachs, 1992), discursive memory, history andembodied memory, and space precludes a detailed discussion here. And yet the case studies that I present do make a contribution to this bodyof theoretical analysis in their suggestion of a link between the materialand social ordering of memory. Pierre Nora (1996) proposed a somewhat

antithetical relationship between memory and history, suggesting thathistory and memorial sites in the landscape are products of the uncer-tainty of memory, at least in western society. History for Nora is a highlymanipulative practice in which collective memory is transformed over

Morton: R E M E M B E R I N G T H E H O U S E




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time so that memory and memory-of-history become relatively insepa-rable. It is for these reasons that he seeks to distinguish ‘memorysocieties’ from ‘history societies’ (1996: 8), which he roughly equates with non-western and western societies respectively. Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire deals with sites of symbolic memorialization that ‘ariseout of the sense that there is no such thing as spontaneous memory’(1996: 7); for him memory is ‘multiple yet specific; collective and plural yet individual . . . rooted in the concrete: in space, gesture, image andobject’ (1996: 3), and as such practically in opposition to memory trans-formed by the practice of history. But is this a real or supposed dichotomy?Surely there is always a dynamic interchange between memorializationin the landscape, discursive history and collective memory. As Halbwachsnotes, memories are often situational and contextual, ‘recalled by me

externally, and the groups of which I am a part at any time give me themeans to reconstruct them’ (1992: 38). In my own fieldwork I was lessinterested in building up material or occupational histories of houses than with understanding the house in Lambek’s sense of a ‘clearing’ for themultiple cultural interactions that constitute historicity, or the social roleof the past in the present. In Lambek’s formulation, such ‘clearings’ are‘when and where the past is brought out into the light, where the pastexplicitly informs the present, and where the present cultivates its past’(2002: 13). By focusing upon remembering and memory-work as a social

process related to the house, I intend to extend Lambek’s insight bysuggesting a more influential role for the material world (although he givesnumerous examples that I would identify as demonstrating just this).

Although by drawing on interviews and informal exchanges withTswana informants this article deals predominantly with what might betermed discursive memory, there are numerous points of connection within the material I present with other, less discursive or embodiednotions of memory. In particular I highlight the potential for futureinvestigation of the way the material home may structure and influence

the reproduction of embodied forms of memory. On one level, Kwint forinstance has argued that ‘human memory has undergone a mutual evolu-tion with the objects that inform it; that, in other words, the relationshipbetween them is dialectical’ (Kwint, 1999: 4). For Kwint, objects ‘stimu-late remembering’ as repositories of prior experience, otherwise ‘dormant,repressed or forgotten’ (Kwint, 1999: 2). Although he is here referring toboth somatic memory and the longer term, this dialectic, I argue, is also present in the cognitive sense already noted by Carsten and Hugh-Jones,in which the material home and ways of thinking about the world come

together. But the traces of the past are not just found in our materialsurroundings, but also in our embodied skills and spatial orientations.The notion of embodied memory of course is a major component of

Bourdieu’s theory of habitus – the system of lasting transposable cultural





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dispositions that integrates past experience within the current matrix of perception and action. Habitus, he argues, acts in a non-discursive wayto shape the physical memory that guides our cultural orientation,encapsulated in the term doxa, ‘the pre-verbal taking-for-granted of the world that flows from practical sense’ (Bourdieu, 1990: 68). On the influ-ence of the material world he also states that ‘the habitus is a metaphorof the world of objects . . . [which is] a kind of book . . . from whichchildren learn to read the world . . . read with the whole body’ (Bourdieu,1990: 77). The notion of an interaction between material culture andmemory has also been explored by Küchler (1993). In her analysisMalangan art is implicated in processes of remembering and forgettingin the context of an understanding of landscape in which memory is notinscribed but constantly renegotiated. But as I have stated, the notion of

remembering is still a useful one, since it is suggestive of the social process of reforming related parts of a temporally and spatially separated whole, a process that I demonstrate here as a crucial aspect of the inter- play between the material home and the memory-work associated withit. The relationship between discursive and non-discursive memory andthe subjective texture of history is also addressed by Lambek (2002) inhis account of Sakalava spirit mediumship, in which the medium’s roleas a repository of discursive history is de-emphasized in favour of theidea of embodying the (often painful) experience of history. As Lambek

notes, the distinction between objective history and subjective memoryis thereby shown as a culturally constructed set of understandings, especi-ally when ‘the “history” relevant to them is the trauma, not the storiesabout it’ (2002: 70). Shaw (2002) comes to much the same conclusion,arguing that ‘there are other ways of remembering the past than byspeaking of it’ (2002: 2). In Shaw’s account of memory and embodimentamong the Temne of Sierra Leone, she suggests a continuum runningbetween more discursive and more embodied forms of memory, ratherthan the dichotomy that is often assumed, for instance in the classic

work of Connerton (1989) whose distinction between incorporation andinscription of memory does not allow for indigenous alternatives.

THE TSWANA LOLWAPA – A DIVISIBLE DWELLING

The ethnography discussed in this article is based upon fieldwork in thetown of Maun, the major population centre of Ngamiland District (andhistorically the tribal capital of the ruling Tswana tribe, the Batawana)during 1999–2000 (Figure 1). Maun itself was first settled by the

Batawana in 1915 and although having a troubled occupational history(see Morton, 2004) the town continues to attract migrants who directlyor indirectly benefit from its position as the main regional centre for thegrowing tourism industry within the Okavango Delta. However, many





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features of its former villageorganization remain, including thedivision of the town into wardsor dikgotla. With an occupationalhistory of approaching 100 years,many of Maun’s homesteads havebeen the site of several generationsof building activity, and althoughrecent developments such as thedemarcation and fencing of plotshave recently altered the spatialexperience of the town, manycontinuities are evident, such as

the centring of houses around acentral space, which in formertimes would have contained acattle enclosure. A recent ethno-archaeological study of the Tswanatown of Serowe by Fewster (2006)

has shown just how persistent such forms of Tswana spatial organizationhave remained throughout periods of rapid social and economic change(see also Reid et al., 1998).

Space precludes a detailed discussion here of the Tswana homesteadin the wider context of the village, such as the spaces and pathwaysbetween homesteads, the shade trees, the commercial areas, burial sites,gathering and farming areas on its periphery. These are all importantdimensions of dwelling in any settlement and are importantly linked tomemory and a sense of belonging. I have elsewhere (Morton, 2004)discussed in detail some of the broader historical contexts surroundingthe village of Maun, focusing in particular on the conflict betweenindigenous practices of settlement movement and colonial processes of

material investment and settlement sedentarization. In the present studyI focus upon the homestead itself as a locus of memory, and hope toaddress its wider implications in due course. Neither does the presentarticle address what might be termed the social process of forgetting.Indeed just what is remembered and what not, in relation to the house,could have been an equally interesting starting point for research.

The homestead form exemplified by the Tswana lolwapa (pl. malwapa)is culturally widespread in southern Africa and beyond. Often theseparate houses (mantlo) of a nuclear family are joined together by short

reed fences to form courtyards where everyday activities may take placein privacy as well as providing shade and protection from the wind(Figure 2). It may typically include the houses of parents, older childrenand other extended kin who have built with them, often in a rough circle


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FIGURE 1 Location of study area.

Gumare

Nokaneng

Tsau

Sehitwa

Toteng

Maun

OKAVANGO DELTA

OKAVANGO RIVER

THAMALAKANE RIVER

BOTETI RIVER

LAKE NGAMI

TAOGHE RIVER

KWEBEHILLS

Scale (Approx)

0 50 100km

Shorobe

Etsha

Sepupa Seronga




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the removal of the human activity of renewal, since the houses of deceased, married or migrated members are not renewed by the extendedfamily if not needed. Sometimes the sprinkling of blessed water and abrief invocation by a church minister is enough to make a deceased person’s house ‘cool’ and habitable again (see also Hardie, 1985). Amongthe Wayeyi of eastern Okavango I also noted the practice of taking aburning bunch of letlhaka reeds into the house to burn off the ‘bad air’caused by death, to make it habitable and avoid having disturbing dreamsabout the deceased, which are considered to be visitations.

Linguistic associations between the body and house are also entan-gled in the Tswana lolwapa through the metaphor of sinews or arteries(tshika), frequently used to talk of family generations. The word tshikaor losika, in the family context of generations, is properly the Tswana

word for veins or arteries and flesh (especially sinew), hence its meta- phorical use to refer to progeny or generations. Whilst collecting infor-mation on morphological changes in homesteads over time, I noted thefrequent use of this idiom in talk about the ‘generations’ of the materialhomestead as well as the family. My first impression was that thismetaphor was a figure of speech, in which material memories were beingarticulated in genealogical terms but were ultimately unconnected. I didnot initially consider that this linguistic cluster of meaning was import-ant to an understanding of the process of remembering, in which the

materiality of the home and the physicality of family were being drawntogether. Janet Hoskins, thinking through a similar issue in her ownfieldwork, concluded that whilst her role as ethnographer had played animportant part in the bringing-out of stories, this did not include the‘idiom that they were articulated in’ (Hoskins, 1998: 3). Whilst housesare, in one sense, like Hoskins’s ‘memory-boxes’ – containers for disparateelements of memory – the idiom of generations suggested somethingmore dynamically linked to a material process of remembering, theanalogy here being with individuals who are physically related through

the sinews of kinship, and remembered through the social process of building and rebuilding houses. After all, many of the dwellings that I wasdiscussing with people no longer existed, and yet were part of a rich narra-tive of previous built environments. The Tswana idiom of connectinggenerations of houses and persons through sinews may be compared toother examples of the close association between the house and its occupants. Carsten (1997: 36) for instance describes how in the building of aLangkawi (Malay) house, the ‘mother of the house’ (ibu rumah) must holdthe central post during construction, a symbolic act that recognizes the

importance of the central post as the home of the (female) house spirit.In another material sense, as a divisible whole, the lolwapa can beconsidered as both partible and distributed over space and time. Thelolwapa is partible since both families and homesteads are single entities





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made up of separable social and material parts, but also since bothfamilies and homesteads gain form and identity over time through theeveryday interactions of their constituent elements. As a result of its part-ibility or divisibility, the lolwapa is distributed as an entity over spaceand time, and recollected through the process of remembering; and thefollowing case studies all in some way add texture to this idea. Thesemantic clustering of meanings around the term lolwapa is crucial here,bringing together both social and material contexts. Lolwapa can indicatethe wall or fence enclosing a courtyard at the front of a single house (orsometimes enclosing the front area of more than one house) but also isfrequently used to refer to the family itself. This homology of senses isfound in other African languages. Blier for instance notes that ‘since theBatammaliba [of Togo] employ the same word (takienta) to mean both

house and family, an implicit link is made between the two. If the houseis strong, then at least in linguistic terms so too is the family’ (Blier, 1989:339). Talking about the house and talking about the family, as Bahloul(1996) notes, often amounts to the same thing. In many of the malwapathat I encountered during fieldwork, families operated complex multi-locational strategies with frequent communication of goods and servicesbetween rural and town homesteads, as well as further afield. Althougheconomic migration has added layers of complexity, frequent movementbetween village (motse), field (masimo) and cattle-post (moraka) locations

throughout the year has a long cultural history in Botswana. My focusin this article is upon village malwapa in particular since many familiesare no longer involved in farming or cattle-keeping, or even since theyoriginate from historically non-cattle-keeping groups such as the Yeyi orMbukushu. However, as the case studies reveal, histories of migrationand the establishment of complex pathways between locations and familymembers, all attest to the inherent partibility and distribution across spaceand time of the lolwapa as both house and family.

I have organized the discussion of processes of memory according to

three key concepts: memory-in, memory-of and memory-as. These termsreflect first the way in which memory is interwoven into the fabric of dwelling, second how the home structures memories spatially andtemporally beyond itself (for instance about previous forms, but alsorelationships and events), and third how certain practices connected with the house, especially in relation to deceased occupants, involvememory-work. The case studies discussed all involve the Tswana activityof go gopola, remembering or recollecting.

MEMORY-IN

The materials, forms and tasks of dwellings are important to howmemories are formed, understood and articulated. Some of our earliest





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memories are often framed by the house of our childhood, a materialcontext that helps us locate and thereby to understand past experience.But houses not only locate the immediate experiences that take place within and around them – they are also important indexes of other placesand times. The way in which houses materialize memory I will term thememory-in dimension. This dimension of the house could be consideredas its ‘otherplaceness’ or ‘othertimeness’ – how it materially refers beyonditself. These terms coalesce some fairly straightforward observationsabout the way in which any given dwelling site interweaves materials,activities and social relations related to the wider social landscape. InNgamiland, otherplaceness for instance includes the locations wherevarious natural resources are collected to build with, as well as connec-tions to local towns where cash goods are purchased. Othertimeness

draws together observations about the way in which dwelling sites areaccretions of tasks and objects built up over time – they constantly referoutwards to other times, seasons, events. In addition, the very materialityof the home can be a repository for memories of such disparate phenom-ena as relative prosperity, poverty, interaction, isolation, employment,disease or environmental change. This quality of material surroundings was articulated by most people during my fieldwork as segopotso – theability of things to act as memorials of past events or other places.Memory-in or segopotso then is descriptive of both the way social activi-

ties become embedded in our material surroundings, in the sense of inputting memory, and of how remembrance is emergent and structuredby material culture. The most useful and illustrative way to argue forthese sets of relationships is to describe a series of case studies.

OF AXE-MARKS AND THATCHING GRASS

Batlametse and her siblings live with their mother and grandmother inan isolated spot to the east of Maun, in a homestead fenced with mopane

(Colophospermum mopane) poles. The family moved here from a villagesome distance south of Maun, but in 1992 Batlametse’s father died,leaving the family without cash or male labour support.

My father cut all the mopane for the houses in our homestead . . . he took

his axe to Saphane and returned with it on his back. He also made the roofs

and did the fencing – you can still see his axe marks in some of the wood.When he died there was nobody to cut wood for building, so we began to

wall the houses with the millet stems after the harvest each year. We took

them from our grandparents’ fields since they were closer than our own.

Some of the pole-house walls were removed and the poles used forrenewing the fence around the plot and the walls replaced with milletstems, and yet another had been walled with motlhabakolobe ( Xanthiumstrumarium) reeds and wild sage (Figure 3) since ‘one year there was





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not enough millet stems and I had to go to the river to cut plant stemsinstead’.

In the fabric of Batlametse’s lolwapa, material memories about thesocial landscape interweave with aspects of family history. Whilst theagency of the father is remembered in the axe marks on the poles, theirreuse as fence posts and replacement with millet stems in the last four years represented for Batlametse the continuing problem facing thefamily in their dwelling tasks after their father’s death. The home-stead incorporated a variety of material repositories of tasks associated

with persons or groups and, in particular, a narrative of interruption orbreakdown in the normal process of annual material renewal. In other words, such material memories often deal with obstacles and dis-engagement from dwelling as much as engagement – memories of non-involvement with dwelling may often feature as much as those of involvement. ‘We did not renew the lolwapa last year’ related another woman, Ontumetse, ‘since my mother was sick and stayed away withrelatives’. Another man, Mpho related that ‘we wanted to build a housethere for my sister but we never managed to do it and so she stayed

away until this year’. ‘My brother’s house burned down some years ago,and we did not renew it straight away’ argued one woman, Bonolo, ‘since we could not afford transport last year and this year either’. Disengage-ment from building activities that would ordinarily have taken placeare thereby also important aspects of memory-in, since breakdowns in


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FIGURE 3 Fencing a lolwapa with water reed and wild sage, Boseja ward,

Maun.




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repetitive patterns of material renewal are also evident in the materialdecay of houses.

A Mbukushu migrant from Etsha, Anderson Willy, who settled inMaun in 1982, remembered that his first house was built in the samemanner as that of his parents – using mopane sticks with clay in-filling.‘The mopane and grass were difficult to find when I built my first house’,he stated, ‘and I had to travel about 7 km on foot to find them. I thenbuilt another one, square this time since I had bought some corrugatediron roofing. I remember doing this since I had some money left overfrom my work contract and thatching grass was hard to find’. The nextbuilding was for visitors. ‘I used mud bricks for this one since Iremember discussing with neighbours how difficult it is to find mopanebranches for making walls’. After some time Anderson and his wife

moved into his visitors’ house and used his old one for storage, buildinga new shelter for visitors using mopane sticks, about which he remem-bered that ‘they were difficult to find but I had money to get transportand even buy water reeds for weaving the outside’.

For Anderson Willy, remember-ing issues surrounding the gatheringof building materials helps him tounderstand his experiences as amigrant. The house is remembered

as a series of layers which materi-ally reveal experiences of hardship,uncertain relations to place, andcultural adaptation. He remembersthe year in which he decided tofence the garden plot as the time when he was frustrated about notbeing able to return home to the western Okavango village of Etsha

at harvest time. The garden fenceevoked a strong response as amemorial (segopotso) of his self-sufficiency as a migrant a long wayfrom his home and kin. Perhaps notsurprisingly, Anderson and his wifeoccasionally had quite different processes of remembering certainelements of the house due to their

involvement in differing buildingand social activities. Many of Anderson’s wife’s memories centredon female tasks of building, and in


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FIGURE 4 Anderson Willy’s

daughter (right) outside the entrance

of a store house, Boseja ward, Maun.




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particular the memory that she first made mud bricks next to the stand- pipe since it was too far to carry bricks from the Thamalakane River. Forher, remembering the making of bricks allowed ways of thinking aboutand understanding those processes of dislocation and familiarization thatmigrants move through, and which centre around dwelling activities.The memory-in dimension of Anderson’s house allows ways of remem-bering that are ultimately bound up with present perceptions of life –chains of material meanings that are reconnected each time the past isreinterpreted in the present. For Anderson’s daughter (Figure 4) thefamily house in Maun is juxtaposed in memory with those she has stayedin when visiting Mbukushu relatives in Etsha, who build using locallyavailable materials in the area. For her, such differences in the builtenvironment between places help to establish contexts in which identi-

ties are formed over time.

FROM MR SALBYE

‘It is because there is no money for building now that I have used somany different things to build with’, related Ketisitswe. He continued:

Years ago I worked in the Johannesburg mines, nine months there, three

months here, then back again – I bought goats and donkeys with my money.

Then I stayed here with my mother and worked as a labourer at KDS Safari.Two years after my mother died my sister came and removed the usefulbuilding wood from her old house – I said to her ‘the living should take the

house of a dead person – there is no-one inside’. I myself cut my own shade-

tree down to build with since there was no money for transport.

Sitting outside his house, he points out the recycled materials he has puttogether to form a shelter (Figure 5): the black fencing ‘from Mr Salbyeat KDS which was used as a shade for plants, he gave it to me to use for whatever I wanted’; the green canvas ‘given also by Mr Salbye since it

had holes in and let in the rain’; the stitched together maize-meal sacks‘are very strong and useful, my sister stitched them together and gavethem to me for flooring’; and the shiny coated bubble-wrap used as walling ‘given to me by my son – it used to be material for a ceiling. Icovered it on the outside with some old water-reeds given to me by aneighbour’.

He no longer worked at the safari company, having started to makebricks for the Village Development Committee, but memories of hisformer job and colleagues are woven into the fabric of the dwelling. The

memories demonstrate an evident pride in his former relations to certainindividuals and to the meaning he ascribed to the gifting of unwantedmaterials. In particular some of the materials represented evidence of abond of friendship between himself and Mr Salbye (a local businessman),





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embodying values in ways unexpected by the donor. Such materials canbecome enhanced in the way they mediate such relations over time ascircumstances change – for Ketisitswe they had increased in importancedue to the severing of his social connections to work through redundancy.In this instance of gifting and reuse of old materials, memory-in is adimension of the house in which personal identity is being constantlyre-established through remembering and materializing meaningful socialrelationships.

MEMORY-OF AND GENEALOGICAL MEMORY

The idea of the ‘othertimeness’ of a homestead site suggests a relation-ship between present material surroundings and past ones – that is theyhave a memory-of dimension. Buildings, whilst obviously being indexesof current occupational activity, also often retain a ‘genealogical’ dimen-sion, in which both the activities of past occupants and previous formsof the building itself are materially linked in memory. The Tswanametaphor of losika, the sinews of kinship between persons and houses,

is suggestive of a genealogical model of memory and remembering.Genealogical memory can be conceived of as the recollecting, bringingto mind, of extended kin relations or ancestors, both being important inunderstandings of social identity as well as more practical considerations


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FIGURE 5 Ketisitswe outside his house made from reused materials, Wenela

ward, Maun.




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of property and access to resources. It is also a matter of the embodied past – persons and things are in a sense embodiments of memory asexpressed in the idioms of sinews stretching or arteries flowing betweengenerations. This is implied in the ritual importance of elders since theyare considered as both genealogically and physically closer to ancestorsthan younger people. They are physically closer since the sinews betweenelders and ancestors are considered shorter, and since their relative proximity to death is equated with proximity to the ancestral world. OneYeyi elder near Shorobe, Kgoto Modua, related that ancestors were dis- pleased with the neglect of those closest to them (that is, elders), andsometimes punished younger relatives through dikgaba, illnesses causedby ancestral displeasure.

Long occupational histories of houses are more associated with the

industrialized world than with Africa, where houses are sometimesassumed to be ephemeral both in material and memory. However, manyhomesteads that I documented had originally been built some 40 to 50 years ago and constantly renewed since, with often complex occupational histories, as well as material connections to previous or distanthomes. Some of the walls of these houses were so thick from replaster-ing that the occupants no longer used wooden roof supports but restedthe roof directly on the thickened walls. A particular case study, centredupon the house of a young woman called Emang, is particularly illus-

trative (Figure 6). Emang lived in one of the oldest houses in her uncle’slolwapa, and directly in front of it was a well-established mulberry tree,

under which we sat talking.She had come to live in thehouse after the death of hermaternal relation SepopeloMorutsi, who had inher-ited it from her brother,Ditlhapi, when he left for

another ward in Maun. Hein turn had inherited thehouse from Mma Boloni, acousin of his mother’s andthe founder of the house,after she had moved toanother ward, and it wasshe who planted the Mul-berry tree.

Emang could tell thateach occupant had care-fully tended the Mulberrytree over the years, just as


171

FIGURE 6 Occupational history of Mma

Boloni’s house.

Mma Boloni (founder of house, planter of mulberry tree)

Moved to Boseja ward, gave house to:

Dithlapi Morutsi (son of Mma Boloni’s maternal cousin)

Moved to Sedia ward, gave house to:

Died, family gave house to:

Sepopelo Morutsi (his younger sister)

Emang (maternal relative of Sepopelo)




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they had given due attention to renewing the house itself. She pointed tohow former occupants had pollarded the tree to provide good shadecanopy as well as fruits. ‘Each occupant of the house (monni wa ntlo)’ shesaid, ‘was a relative (masika) even though they were not born in thelolwapa. Because they were relatives both the house and the tree grewover the years. Most of the houses in Maun are thin, relatives do not stayin them but go away and give them to others’. Emang observed that there was a tendency for the walls of older houses to gain thickness over the years through renewed plastering, which she compared to the growth of the tree through the constant tending of its owners over the years. Thegrowth of both tree and house are united in meaning as similarly arisingout of the dwelling practices of kin relations. Indeed, she implies that itis only kin that really dwell in this way, since such growth is seen as

arising from the way generations grow over time. The dwelling of non-kin groups does not give rise to such forms she argues, but only to ‘thin’houses (mantlo a masesane) with no genealogy and no social or material‘thickness’ in the present. Social and material perceptions of the lolwapacan be closely bound together – houses and even husbanded aspects of nature are closely associated not only with the dwelling activities of persons, but also with the types of relationships between persons bothin the present and over time. For Emang, remembering the occupants of the house involves both dimensions of memory-in (the visible agency of

relatives in the pollarded tree, the thickened walls of the house) andmemory-of (the material link to absent or deceased relatives, places andso on) brought together as part of remembering the house.

MEMORY-AS

Remembering as memory-work is frequently engaged with when thereis a death in the homestead. In this instance memory-work takes on thequality of memory-as, the way in which remembering is transformed into

an activity connected with treating the distributed agency of the deceased.In Botswana, the indexes of a deceased person, such as his house, clothesand other possessions, are usually ritually treated after death to take awaya disordered connection with death. Sometimes this just involves care-fully washing the home and clothes, but can often take more elaborateritual forms mentioned earlier. The central concern is the showing of respect ( go supatota) to the deceased through objects connected withthem. One woman, Mma Sefo, told me:

It is important that the deceased’s house (ntlo ya moswi) is occupied after

death, not to be left to fall down. We wash the house and the clothes to coolthem down ( gore ene tsididi). We cleanse the illness (lwetse) from the house

before others enter it, since a house will still contain the spirit (sedimo) of

the deceased.





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The house is conceived of as having a material ‘memory’ of its occupant,both in the sense of ritual uncleanness due to physical connection withthe deceased, as well as by being a continued home for the deceased’sspirit, which may trouble future occupants by causing bad dreams.Dreaming of the deceased is often considered a form of visitation thatmay not augur well for the family, and ritual cleansing is, in part,conceived of as preventing dreams and other troubled memories. ‘Amonth or so after the cleansing of the house’, continued Mma Sefo, ‘wecan begin to renew the house again, and someone can go inside and livethere, it shows disrespect to not continue to occupy that house’. Another woman, Mma Voya, related that ‘after the funeral we washed all theclothes of my husband and gave them to our relatives to wear, so thatthey will remember him. We also replaced the reed walls of the house,

which was enough to cool it down’. Mma Ndozi stated that ‘the house isritually treated after a death, especially the floor which is renewed, water is splashed on the walls as well as the children. As I am a church-goer I used blessed water. We splashed the children to stop them havingbad dreams ( go emisa ditoro tse di maswe)’.

Houses are involved in memory not just through close physical associ-ation with deceased persons but also through sense-memory, especiallythat of smell which is particularly closely linked to emotional remem-brance of the deceased, and in particular the influence that such smells

may have upon the living. One Mbukushu woman, Diwane, stated thatthe splashing of water is used to ritually remove the ‘smell’ of thedeceased, since this smell and the memories it would bring about mightmake the children have bad dreams throughout their lives. Strongmemories and dreams of the deceased are considered by some to beanalogous to spirit possession, which is thought of as being caused byancestral displeasure that may cause sickness (kgaba). In both cases thememory of the house is closely associated with its odour, which needsto be ritually removed with water, smoke, or the renewal of its materials.

Memory-as then can be a dimension of building activity, ritual cleansing,distributing clothes and other objects, of dreams, of smell and othermaterial and sensual connections to a person by the group. The processesof reorganization and readjustment in which social groups engage aftera death are practices of memory-work, in which remembrance is some-thing in which people participate socially. Houses both ‘contain’ poten-tially disruptive odour-memories and yet also represent the socialobligations of memory, since neglect is a conspicuous dishonouring of memory and renewal is an actively respectful aspect of memory-work.





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BUILDING AND RELATEDNESS

I want to return to the notion of the homestead as an entity that is distrib-uted through space and time. The lolwapa not only contains a conden-sation of values surrounding the dwelling relations of kin, it is materiallyinvolved in the way kin relations are interconnected through memory.Whereas I have focused in this article upon investigating the lolwapa asa discrete, almost hermetic entity, homesteads are also, of course, impor-tantly interrelated within locales, neighbourhoods and communities, andit is appropriate here to mention that building practices are not justmaterial processes but also social activities, especially linked to sensesof community. In particular, where you build is not merely a pragmaticdecision, but is likely to be a social one. The Tswana village was histori-

cally organized into areas or wards in which agnates built together andshared a common cattle kraal. There were also wards granted to incorporated minority groups. Although this approach to village organizationended with government control over land allocation after independence,in most older villages, neighbours are still often closely related kin whohave inherited homesteads established by ancestors a number of years previously. In this way, talking about building in Setswana is still closelyconnected with talking about social relations.

Anthropologists are increasingly questioning the categories and

assumptions upon which anthropological theories of relatedness andkinship are based (e.g. Carsten, 2000), and arguing for an enhanced rolein analysis for everyday and material practices. The Setswana term forneighbours, baagisanyi expresses both ‘those that build together’, sinceit includes the verb to build ( go aga), but also ‘establishing harmoniousrelations’ ( go agisanya). Another common term is baagelani from the verbagelana, the reciprocal case of the verb agelela, which means to fence orsurround something. In the reciprocal case this verb suggests that thoseenjoined in such mutual activities have already established close social

bonds. ‘To be neighbours’, one woman stated, ‘is to be seen and visitedfrequently by those you are living with. My neighbour did not ask ‘whyare you moving here?’ as he knew we wanted to become neighbours,since it is natural for people to help each other in everyday life. He gaveus this place to build our homes and an area to plant our crops.’

In this sense remembering is also about reconnecting, reassembling parts of the wider social group (in Ngamiland often matrilineal relations)distributed over space and time – a process intimately connected withthe material adaptiveness of the homestead. But as Bahloul (1996) has

also shown, the process of remembering the house is as much aboutseparating out social relations as it is about reassembling them again –making sense of one’s place in the social world. Building houses withinthe homestead is integral to this process of dividing and reassembling,





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of building separate houses and social identities for growing children who are entering the social world as individuals, thereby materially andsocially becoming detached elements or sub-units within the homesteadand household. One way of considering the indigenous appropriatenessof such an understanding is through the semantic cluster of meaningsattached to the Setwana verb go nna, which Matumo translates as ‘to sitdown, stay, dwell, live, occupy, inhabit, be’ as well as the first person pronoun ‘I’ or ‘me’ (Matumo, 1993: 287). Perhaps the most interestingaspect of go nna is the way dwelling and being are both identified withself; that self is defined by a notion of being that is also inherently aboutdwelling. Within go nna a semantic cluster unfolds that evokes the sensethat places are an integral dimension of the social world. But as I havediscussed, it is go aga – ‘to build’ – that gives Setswana some of its most

important and materially centred notions of dwelling, from go agêlêlana– ‘to become neighbours, share joys and sorrows’ – to go agana – ‘to propone another up, spiritually, materially’ (Matumo, 1993: 2).

But having established the connection between genealogical andhouse generations, just what constitutes the sinews of a new building‘generation’ (tshika) as part of memory? In one case, the home of a woman called Regine, the transition in memory between homesteadgenerations was made when the first daughter replaced the originalhouse. ‘The first generation all fell down (wile), they were all replaced

with new houses . . . you see, the first house was dead (e sule)’. Thesecond generation was understood to begin when houses began to bereplaced rather than renewed, since renewal as I have already discussedis strongly connected with life and continuing need, whereas materialabandonment of a house frequently connotes death. For some groups inNgamiland, such as the Herero or Mbanderu, the death of a householdhead initiates an abandonment of the homestead due to its association with death, a practice found elsewhere in Africa, such as Kenya. Invillages such as Maun, abandonment does not take place, and the

destruction or ‘death’ of a house is an expression of the transition of ahouse from renewal and everyday social interaction to that of memory.Sometimes understandings of a new generation can be more subtle, andbased upon perceptions of the material integrity of a house. In one home-stead, that of Koi Motlalepula, a second generation began when threehouses had their mud-brick walls gradually replaced with a mixture of mud and drinks cans. This sort of complete replacement seems to beunderstood as materially generational in a way that renewal is not, sincerebuilding is brought about by a more significant shift in household

composition than renewal by a single occupant. What is particularlyinteresting from Regine’s account of generation (tshika) is the metaphorof the ‘death’ of a house by its abandonment and subsequent rebuildingby a daughter as a threshold over which both the material homestead and





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CONCLUSION

I have argued in this article for a new perspective upon the material homeand its relationship to memory, through a series of case studies from

northern Botswana. In doing so I have stressed the way in which social processes of remembering and the materiality of the house are intimatelyinterconnected over time. As material entities that are fluid both spatiallyand temporally, houses have particular connections with the way peoplelocate memories, activate them, and make them meaningful as part of life. Closely associated with the social groups that build and live withinthem, houses extend their ‘sinews’ across kin relationships and throughtime. As Carsten notes in relation to Langkawi building practices, ‘the physical mobility of houses are thus related to stages in the developmental

cycle of the domestic group’ (1997: 38), a process in which memory-workis actively engaged in structuring and making sense of, the past in the present. The case study of the Tswana lolwapa demonstrates that thedivisible dwelling site, materially adapting in response to need over time,although responsive to change, also acts as a means by which the past isunderstood and remembered. As Bahloul notes in her study of colonialAlgeria, ‘[m]emory transforms the house into the symbolic miniature of the Algerian social world. The remembered house is a sort of “centre of the world”’ (1996: 30). I have argued in this article that there is a great

deal of potential in further anthropological attention to the way in whichmemory processes and memory-work are involved with the builtenvironment. Following recent critical work on what constitutes notionsof relatedness in any given cultural context, the ethnography discussedhere suggests an important role for building practice in both establishing,consolidating and remembering aspects of social relatedness over time.

Acknowledgements

The fieldwork on which this article is based was carried out in Ngamiland during

1999–2000 with the assistance of an ESRC research studentship, and attachmentas a Research Fellow in the Department of Sociology, University of Botswana. Iam extremely grateful to Onalenna Selolwane and Suzette Heald for facilitatingthe research, and I am especially thankful to Marty McFarlane for her supportin Ngamiland. All research was carried out in close consultation with KgosiTawana II, ward headmen and elders in Maun. I wish to thank our neighboursin Newtown and Wenela wards, my research assistant Boitlhoko Garebakwenaand his family, and my friend Mpho Bojosi for inviting my wife and me into hishousehold. I am grateful to the two anonymous reviewers of this article for theirinsightful comments and constructive suggestions. All photographs are by theauthor. Appropriately for an article on memory, it is dedicated to the person who

introduced me to Africa, Frieda McFarlane (1972–2004).





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◆ CHRISTOPHER MORTON is Head of Photograph and Manuscript Collec-

tions and Career Development Fellow at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of

Oxford. His recent publications include ‘Fixity and Fluidity: Chiefly Authority

and Settlement Movement in Colonial Botswana’, History and Anthropology 15(4)

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the field photography of E.E. Evans-Pritchard in southern Sudan. Address: PittRivers Museum, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3PP, UK. [email: christopher.

[email protected]]


Remembering House

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