Sekoboto

Recently when I was preparing for yet another scholarship application, I was reminded of a story my mother shared with me a little over a decade ago. At that time, she was working predominately with TB patients.

The story goes as follows: When an elderly man was asked why he had stopped taking his TB medication i.e. defaulted, he responded with a chuckle. A chuckle filled with a touch of sorrow, gentility and genuineness, all fused together by a healthy dose of amusement to remove any traces of malice. Then he went on to say: “ngoanaka, u botsa hobane u sa tsebe sekoboto“!

Pretty much, that was the sum total of the man’s response. Unfortunately for me, when I heard the story, I failed to realise how profound a response it was. I laughed for I found the re-enactment of the chuckle really funny. And, to a small degree, because (as a Mosotho child) I have been raised to believe that laughter is greater than death itself, “lefu-leholo ke lits’eho“. This said, the bottomline is: I failed to move beyond laughter by failing to engage in any substantive manner with the vocalised part of his response, which translates to: “my child, you ask because you don’t know what sekoboto is!”

Now, allow me to redeem myself by explaining first what sekoboto is and then what I believe the elderly man was saying. Sekoboto, in a nutshell, refers to famine,”tlala ea boja-likata”. But there is slightly more to this famine; assuming of course, that famine was something ordinary. Sekoboto refers to an extreme kind of famine that corrodes the body and the soul with intensity that cannot be described fully in words.

So, notwithstanding the implication that words may not be adequate to express what the elderly man said, I shall nevertheless make an effort to unpack his statement. In my opinion, I think this is what he was trying to communicate:

A stomach that knows not sekoboto, laments on having “meal X” yet again; for it understands not the panic of not knowing where the next meal is coming from. It laments because choice is not a word that exist only in theory: choice is a right embedded in its existence. And indeed, while that choice may be limited, it is not as dire as having to choose between aggravated pain of starvation and a speedy escape from starvation granted by death!1

Personally, I haven’t experienced the sekoboto that the elderly man was referring to. But, I certainly do relate. For this, I thank some of the questions that have been included in my scholarship application(s), particularly those that required me to articulate the invisible barriers as a black woman in science, with an urban middle-class background.2 For many of these questions, I truly felt like providing a loaded response akin to the one the elderly man gave; but of course lacking the wisdom that comes with age, I couldn’t!

  1. TB medication increases appetite and if you already struggle with what to eat on a daily basis this becomes an aggravation. Not just any kind of aggravation: a painful one that may ultimately cause you to rethink what quality of life means!
  2. This possibly explains why I haven’t been successful with my applications :-(. Perhaps, I couldn’t explain that middle-class can simply translate to not being in a sekoboto situation, where sleeping on an empty stomach for days is a norm. Or may be I couldn’t (adequately) explain that subordination of women from “committed parties” is the same, be it you are an urban or rural dweller, black or white, in science or humanities, etc. Who knows?