by Women's Feature Service, Inter Press Service

Inter Press Service is a Third World news agency created in 1964. originally to generate more news coverage of Latin America, and gradually expanded to include all of the Third World. It works to improve flows of information among Third World countries and to focus greater attention on those generally overlooked by the mainstream media: the poor and the marginalized. The Women's Feature Service originated within Inter Press Service in the late-70s with two goals: to give a women s perspective to the reporting and to rely only on women journalists for those reports. The women's service has recently expanded, setting up three regional centers in the southern continents and a central coordination center in Rome.

The following series of articles came from Women's Feature Service correspondents in Gaborone, the capital of Botswana, between May and August 1986. They describe what Botswana's dependence on South Africa, especially as a source of employment for the country's male population, means for Batswana women.

Migrant Laborers Return to Independent Wives

Batswana men, who left their families and country to find work in South Africa's mines, arc now returning home to women who have learned to run their household alone. [Batswana is the name for the people of Botswana.)

Women in this tiny southern Africa country of less than one million people saw their marriages and homes destroyed by the migrant labor system, which attracted their partners south.

Homes broke up as the man spent much of the year away. Sometimes they formed new relationships in South Africa, and money that was intended for the wife and family left behind never arrived. But women survived, learned to take decisions and managed their household, no longer sure their husbands would return.

As a result. Botswana has one of the highest proportions of female-headed, single-parent households on the continent.

Now that the men are coining ht)me, women here say they find their return a mixed blessing.

"A lot of the social problems here can be traced back to fragmented family units as a result of the migrant labor system." said Godisang Modoki, assistant coordinator in the Ministry of Labor and Home Affairs. "Life is very hard for a woman trying to manage a family, work, maybe some family agricultural interest, all on her own."

Sylvia Mothobi. an accounts clerk with two children, saw her marriage end. when her husband returned from the mines.

"I was used lo running my own life," she said. "When my husband came home, we fought. He would say things like: how can you decide to buy that thing, or pay that bill, without asking me?"

Mothobi said her husband also started to drink heavily. "Don't know ... he treated me differently ... more rough. In the end we couldn't live together." The couple divorced.

Like many other Batswana women, Mothobi saw little of her husband when he worked in the mines. "For the first five years of my marriage, I virtually had no husband, a few weeks, then gone again," she said. The couple's two children were born while while her husband was away.

Although they parted because Mothobi found it hard to revert to the subordinate-wife role, she admits it was difficult for her husband too. After he had progressed from a casual mine laborer to a training supervisory position, her husband was forced to leave the mines because of a back injury.

"He was unhappy. He had lost his job and at that time, we didn't know if there would be compensation or if the back would be so bad, he couldn't get work," she said.

His drinking, she rationalized, was because the mine workers "all drink too much, play loud music on the radio, and play cards," because they were shut in hostels after work in the mines.

Mothobi's story is becoming typical in this semi-arid country as Batswana men gradually return from South Africa's mines.

Since 1976, the number of Batswana men working in South Africa has halved, dropping from 40,000 in 1976 — when the total population was 700,000 — to less than 20,000 today, says James Taylor, a lecturer at the University of Botswana.

Pretoria has also adopted a policy of employing cheaper labor from South Africa's tribal homelands.

"Recruitment in Botswana was reduced as a result of pressure from the South African government with the coming into being of the Bantustans [homelands],' said Peter Musi, Botswana's Vice President and Minister of Finance and Development Planning.

And, South Africa has threatened to send home thousands of migrant laborers if international sanctions are imposed.

Mothobi says that although her marriage ended, her husband's return was less stressful, because she was educated and lived in the capital Gaborone, where she could find work.

"People who have no income, no education, no experience, handle these problems worse," she said.

In her own family, Mothobi says, "the men can't adjust. They sit in the shebeens (beer halls) all day."

"And the women, well for a few years maybe she's had to do everything, grow sorghum, pay school fees, stretch a few pula (the local currency) for everything. And then the husband comes back and treats her like an idiot, telling her how to do everything, wanting money for beer and so on," Mothobi said.

"It will be good if the man stop going away," she adds, "but it won't be easy to put the families together again."

Many men also find it difficult to adjust to the slow discipline of a farming life after the vastly different lifestyle of hostels and the mines.

It also will not be easy for the men to find work.

Mine income, Taylor says, has customarily been used to shore up the increasingly uneconomic small-farming activities. If the miners return, they may not be able to afford to stay on the land, he says.

The government has not been able to create jobs as fast as the employable population grows. Official estimates say that 76 percent of all new jobs are in urban or semi-urban areas.

Looking back when her husband first went away, Mothobi says migrant labor "was a bad system," which destroyed her marriage. "I think my marriage was destroyed when my husband went to the mines, not when he came back," she said.

"I hope the government can make more jobs so men can stay here. Maybe it would be different if things changes in South Africa, but at present over there (South Africa) it makes bad changes in our men's characters."

— by Esther Jackson
August 19, 1986

Child Maintenance, A Headache Worth Pursuing?

Getting money out of a reluctant absent father is a drama most single mothers would rather avoid.

In Bostwana, most do avoid it, especially if they were never married, for the maximum they can get is 40 pula (about US $17) a month, which will pay about one week's rent for a family of five.

"Running after a man's money gives you headaches," says Rachael Mothusi, who is raising four children on her own. "I don't like it."

"I did ask the two fathers of my children for money. They said they'll try and get some." They've been trying ever since, she adds with a rueful smile.

"Of course 40 pula is not enough," argues Athaliah Molokomme, a young law lecturer at the University of Botswana.

The "Affiliation Act," which covers the rights of children not blessed by a legal marriage, "was passed about seven years ago and the cost of living has doubled since then," she points out.

"The law still favors two-parent households. It doesn't respond to social reality. It assumes that a man is paying maintenance and that he is always the head of the household."

Nearly half of all households in Botswana are headed by women, and the 1981 census showed that 40 percent of children born that year were to single women.

If a married women is deserted by her husband there is no limit to the amount of child maintenance she can demand.

Mothusi earns 240 pula (about U.S. $180) per month teaching sewing. Despite her low wage, "I am happy teaching," she says.

To supplement her income, Mothusi lets out two rooms of her four-room council house. "I sleep with my children in the sitting room," she explains.

For years Mothusi did kitchen work, and saved money to buy a sewing machine so in the evenings she could make clothes to sell.

"The lady at the YWCA (Young Women's Christian Association) saw that I sew nicely so she asked me to come and teach sewing here," she added.

"For myself... well, I just get clothes from my sister in South Africa. She works in the kitchens there."

Mothusi did not plan to have all four children. During her first pregnancy she felt worried. "I asked myself, can I manage? But I knew I had no choice but to manage."

Despite the difficulties endured by single mothers, says Elsie Alexander of the Women's Affairs Unit of Botswana's Ministry for Home Affairs, blame should not be heaped on the men.

"My own view is that most of the problems come when the men are in the low-income status group. They might not have a job or any other source of income," she says.

At any one time a quarter to a third of Botswana's male population between the ages of 14 and 34 is absent from the country [to work in South African mines], according to Christopher Colclough and Stephen McCarthy in their paper. The Political Economy of Botswana: A Study of Growth and Distribution (1980). The migrant mine workers pass stretches of up to nine months without leave to visit their families.

The migrant system is a fundamental factor in the growing number of children born out of wedlock, said Alexander.

"There are more casual relationships these days." said Alexander. "If a relationship resulting in a pregnancy only lasted for a couple of days, where there is no strong feeling between the two people, then the man is not so likely to feel a full sense of responsibility."

Whereas, "in the past, however short the relationship, the father would give cattle to the woman and later marry her."

Today's problems have not been met with contemporary solutions, both Molokomme and Alexander argue.

"There are no effective pressure groups here," says Molokomme. "Women's groups tend to focus on knitting and child care methods. These are useful but there are other issues today. And women aren't aware of their rights..."

Molokomme, who has just written a pamphlet explaining "your legal rights" in non-technical language, says the majority of women are unaware of the correct way to pursue maintenance for their children.

Alexander and her women's affairs unit are working to head off the problem of child maintenance at its source by educating women about birth control.

"We're planning to disseminate more information on the different methods of contraception and how to use them effectively," she says.

Sexual freedom seems inexorably on the rise, with the predictable consequence — in the absence of widespread understanding of contraception — of growing numbers of female-headed households. Abortion is illegal here.

Meantime, women leaders place a high priority on improving single mothers" chances of receiving regular and adequate child maintenance. "We need to make the Affiliation Act more practical," says Alexander. "Steps should be taken to make sure the man pays up."

One solution they are looking at is legislation to force employers to deduct maintenance payments from the father's salary.

And, 'we want the amount of maintenance for unmarried mothers to be unlimited," Alexander stresses.

The first line of attack, however, is convincing the courts to enforce maintenance judgments already rendered.

"For ten years I've been going to the courts, and still the father of my children gives me money only when he likes," says middle-aged Neo Sekgoma as she stares vacantly into space after another morning spent at the court has made her late again for her cleaning job.

Sekgoma has four children, the youngest is five. The courts ordered the father to pay 30 pula per month. "Maybe he gives me 30 pula every five months," she says.

Sekgoma was brought up on a cattle farm in Molpolole, a rural area about 40 kilometers from the capital. She left school, pregnant, before gaining any qualifications.

"I used to depend on selling beef to supplement my income and provide for my children. But now the cattle are dead. The last died at the end of 1985 because of the drought," she says.

— by R. Ansah Ayisi
June 10, 1986

"Me-Nice" Also Lives in the Shadow of South Africa

Mpho is fashionably dressed in a satin shirt and tight jeans. She's looking for "a lift home." A big car, driven by an elderly white man, draws up.

There is discussion, then Mpho beckons her friend, Grace. They both get into the car, which drives off.

Mpho is 15 and Grace is 14. Both are "me-nice" ("me have no disease"), as prostitutes are know in the Botswana capital.

The diagnosis of acquired immunity deficiency syndrome (AIDS) cases in this southern African nation in March has put the spotlight on prostitution, especially their health, but it has not cut down on the number of women in the business.

"It's staggering how many very young girls I meet in Bontleng and Naledi (both slums in Gaborone) whose only source of income is the men they pick up. The youngest I know is 12, but 14 or 15 is an average age for these "me-nice'," a senior social worker told IPS.

But prostitution was not a matter of choice for Mpho, she says. "I left school in standard six (just before the final year of primary school) because I was pregnant. I had a baby girl. We call her Tebogo" (which means "thanks" in Setswana).

Mpho went to live with her widowed mother in a rural area, but found it impossible to make ends meet. Her family have no cattle — the main source of livelihood in this semi-arid nation. The little arable land they own has been rendered useless by a fifth year of drought.

Like many others, Mpho made her way to the capital city. "I thought I should come to Gaborone to find a job. Then I could send money back for the baby."

But, she added "I walked and walked around town and everywhere there was no work ... maybe some little domestic work at 40 pula (U.S. $23) a month, which is only enough to pay my rent. In fact, it's not enough now."

According to official figures, 16,000 Batswana enter the labor force yearly, while only 7,000 new jobs are created.

The government has plans to expand secondary school education, but there are few prospects for a vigorous boost in the number of jobs for graduates.

With drought hitting its main industry, beef, and falling prices for minerals, Botswana's other main export, the country has fallen on hard times. Even in the best of times, Botswana is economically dwarfed by South Africa on its southern border, importing 85 percent of all its consumer goods from its white-ruled neighbor.

The country's membership in a customs union with South Africa keeps the price of mass-produced South African imports down, which stifles local production. The customs union agreement also explicitly obligates Botswana to restrict its efforts at industrialization, further inhibiting job creation.

A further influence toward prostitution comes in the form of white South Africans who began to visit here in droves in the early 1950s, after the passage of the immorality act, to patronize black prostitutes. The habit did not die out with the repeal of the act last year, as a tour of Gaborone international hotels showed.

For Mpho, it was a disco that opened the door to this world. "I was staying with another girl and we went to a disco. We went with these men. In the morning, they gave me money. Well I didn't have any money, so that was better. " Now, she earns the equivalent of about U.S. $17 a night.

But "it's not a job to do for a long time," she insists. "1 want to learn typing and get a proper job sometime soon."

Many Batswana wish Mpho and all her colleagues would get a proper job real soon.

"The way these young girls drink and dress to expose their bodies and go with men goes against our traditions," said a 6()-year-old man. The government, he said, "should ban it, and ban the discos which are the cause of it."

But a disco manager in Francistown, Botswana's other major town, sees the situation differently. "Sure we provide a place where girls can meet their clients. But so did traditional shabeens (taverns) before us."

He said he tries to screen out the younger girls but admitted that some who operate in his establishment are under 18.

"But what can I do when they truthfully say to me But how can you say I'm too young? I already have two children." In local eyes, those are grown women."

— by Esther Jackson
May 23, 1986

Firewood Snatched from Women's Hands

Doris Tebogo Matome remembers well what is was like when gathering firewood was just another chore. It was only five years ago.

"I would just take the children and we would walk to the outside of town and pick up wood for the whole week," she says. Things started to change in the late 1970s, after neighboring South Africa changed its labor policies and migrant workers began to return home.

"Now, all we find when we walk are twigs and little bits of sticks," said Matome, a domestic worker who says she spends 13 hours of her day on the job and just can't manage to range further afield in search of firewood.

Not that it would do her much good anyhow. For gathering firewood is no longer a chore. It has become a business that requires some capital and considerable time away from home — two things Matome, and most Batswana women, don't have.

The firewood these days is in the hands of traders who go out regularly in various kinds of vehicles to gather the wood and sell it in towns and cities.

Sixty-three percent of the firewood traders in Botswana are former migrant workers who have been sent home from jobs in South African mines, according to Donald Kgathi, a forestry expert at Botswana's National Institute of Research.

With their acquired need for a regular cash income and with savings from their work in the mines to buy bicycles, carts and donkeys, the returning Batswana mine workers find the firewood trade a natural, says Kgathi.

Town shopkeepers with motor vehicles, he adds, are the best equipped to collect firewood over wide areas, and are often the larger traders.

Under Botswana law, only dead trees may be felled or used for firewood. But according to the forestry researcher, the men often kill trees by ring-barking them or burning out their base and return later to fell the dead tree. Women desperate to fulfill what they see as their house hold duty are often guilty of felling live trees too.

Take Khumo — not her real name, as she feared retribution for her crime if her identity were known — who lives with her elderly parents in Mochudi village, some 40 kilometers northeast of Gaborone. Would she cut down a living tree for its wood?

"We aren't allowed to, the chief would punish us." she says.

But supposing she could do it and get away with it: "Of course I would," Khumo says angrily. "How else can we live?"

With the Kalahari Desert covering already over two-thirds of this southern African country — and spreading relentlessly because of frequent drought and practices like those of the firewood traders — wood gatherers must range ever-further afield.

Wood for most Batswana is the only fuel they have the means to use for cooking and for heat during the May-to-September winter when the temperatures can drop below freezing at night. Wood accounts for over 95 percent of the fuel consumption in Botswana.

Matome, because she has a job. can sometimes buy firewood from this new class of traders. But it"s not often she can afford the equivalent of U.S. $20, 15 percent of her monthly salary, for a cord of wood, she says.

"So I don't cook so much, and when I do cook, I cook fast things, like pap (maize-meal porridge) rather than (the traditional slower-cooking, whole-grain) sorghum. Or I just send the children to the shop for fat cakes," unsweetened doughnuts made with white flour and baking powder.

Others cope with the shortage by reducing the number of meals they take. "We cook once a day, at night, so the fire also makes us warm and gives us light," says Khumo.

"1 think my old parents should eat two or three times a day, but we can't afford it. with the drought we get little off the land." she said.

Ironically, even programs designed to ease rural hardships seem to involve an escalated drain on the firewood reserves. Income-generating projects, like the bakery projects which have become increasingly popular, often consume large amounts of fuel. And agricultural aid programs here, as elsewhere in Africa, are oriented toward larger-scale agriculture  which usually involves stripping large areas of well-grown forest to grow crops.

One approach that hasn't been tried is to involve women in solving the firewood problem. They are intimately involved in the use and gathering of firewood. The Forestry Association of Botswana, whose patron. External Affairs Minister Gaositwe Chiepe, is a woman, is moving in this direction.

"In Botswana, women have traditionally donated their labor collecting the firewood," says Colin Millar, the director of the association. "If we can establish village woodlots, perhaps they might also donate labor to plant and tend trees."

Gill Shepherd, a researcher on energy use in the country, says the situation argues for a central role for women, especially in something like village woodlots.

"Women tend to know about local tree species, their burning qualities and other attributes," says Shepherd, a consultant for Botswana's rural energy use survey. They can also help identify "species not liked by animals, which could be used to protect young saplings with a living fence."

But, she conceded. "Though women's contributions to successful social forestry programs are pivotal, their needs and contributions are neglected almost everywhere."

"They usually lack access to land of their own, to money, to transport..."

— by Esther Jackson
July 19, 1986

For more information, contact the Women's Feature Service, Inter Press Service, Via Panispera 207, 00184, Rome. Italy.