About the Author
Unity Dow was Botswana's first female High Court Judge and has been a prominent human-rights activist in that country. With law degrees from the University of Botswana, the University of Swaziland and the University of Edinburgh, Dow has had an illustrious career in the legal fraternity.
In 1992 she won a landmark case in Botswana that allowed the children of women by foreign nationals born in Botswana to be considered citizens of Botswana. Before this, nationality only descended from the father. She was one of three judges who ruled on the now internationally acclaimed Kgalagadi court decision, concerning the rights of the San to return to their ancestral lands (you can read "Maru" by Bessie Head as a great intro into the racial discrimination and marginalization of the San people in Botswana).
Dow has also done work in other African countries: in 2005, she was a member of a UN mission to Sierra Leone to review domestic application of international women's human rights norms; in 2007 she was a member of a special mission at the invitation of the Rwandan Government
and UN special court for Rwanda (the purpose of this mission was to review the Rwandan Judiciaries preparedness to take over the
hearing of the 1994 genocide cases); Dow was also sworn in as Justice of the Interim Independent Constitutional Dispute Resolution Court of Kenya
by the Kenyan President to serve in implementing the new constitution in
Kenya.
Dow has been a visiting professor of law at Columbia University in New York, Washington and Lee University in Lexington and Cincinnati University in Ohio. She has also been awarded numerous awards for her human-rights activism including the Légion d'honneur de France by then French president Nicholas Sarkozy, the William Brennan Human Rights Award by Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, the Vanguard Women Leadership Award, and honorary degrees from universities around the world.
She is currently serving as Botswana's Minister of Education and Skills Development.
I don't know how she finds the time, but she has published five books already, each of which deals with the struggle between Western and traditional life as well as issues of gender and poverty in Botswana.
The Screaming of the Innocent (Botswana):
There is a television
interview that Toni Morrison once gave where she was asked whether she could/would ever write a novel that was not centered around race. In her response, she mentions that Leo Tolstoy, James Joyce and Émile Zola wrote about race all the time and how a question about the centrality of race in their works would never be seen as a legitimate literary question. And yet, there she was being faced with that very question.
I saw this video clip a number of years ago, but part of her response that has stayed with me is the following:
"I've spent my entire writing life trying to make sure that the white gaze was not the dominant one in any of my books. And the people who helped me most arrive at that type of language were African writers: Chinua Achebe, Bessie Head. Those writers who could assume the centrality of their race because they were Africans. They didn't explain anything to white people. Those questions were incomprehensible to them. Those questions that I would have as an minority living in an all white country like the United States."
The idea that African writers don't "explain anything to white people" in their writing has never resonated more with me than when I read this book. Set in 1999 in Botswana, "The Screaming of the Innocent" is about the cold case of a ritual murder that took place back in 1994 in a small village in the Okavango Delta. A young woman, Amatle, who has been deployed to the local clinic finds crucial evidence stowed away in the clinic storeroom. This evidence disappeared out of police custody five years before and its resurfacing leads the local villagers to force the police to reopen the case.
I live in South Africa and Botswana is one of our neighbouring countries. The people of Botswana are called Batswana and they speak Setswana. This happens to be my home language and it forms a big part of my cultural identity, and as such, Tswana people in South Africa also call ourselves Batswana. My upbringing, the values with which I was raised and the beliefs of my people have never felt more validated than they did while reading this book. I think this is because the Botswana and the Tswana culture and customs that Dow describes, while in a different country and so far removed from my own lived experience, they are so familiar and I knew exactly what she was talking about: she didn't have to explain anything to me.
In one of the chapters in the book, one of the villagers suggests that they kill the two hostages that they have taken to get the police and the government to co-operate with them. "Your conscious will not allow you to sleep," another villager cautions. This reminded me of something my mother once said. She was telling me about something that someone did to her (I cannot remember what exactly) and I jokingly mentioned killing this person and she turned to me and said the same thing: "Do you not want me to sleep at night?"
Véronique Tadjo is a poet, novelist, essayist and an artist. What she tends to do in her writing is fuse different genres and styles to challenge the borders between different literary forms. She refers to her literary works as 'texts' or, more correctly, in French 'récits', which are pieces of writing whose genre is not defined.
