The Origins of Thamaga Pottery
In the early 1970s, Fr. Julian Black, the residing priest in Thamaga, came down with hepatitis. During his recovery in South Africa, he attended a pottery class and learned to make some pots. Upon returning to Thamaga, he wanted to set up a pottery in order to create employment in the village, but realized that he didn't know enough to do it, particularly when it came to building a kiln. That's when he reached out to CUSO, looking for a volunteer who could carry out his idea. The plan was to employ 10 people. As it turned out, no traditional potters were interested in participating and we had to beg 10 people to come and get trained. Once the “potters” were turning out sale-able pots and earning some money, they all wanted a new bicycle and saved up for it. Fr. Julian and I drove to Zeerust and bought 10 shiny new blue bikes. Suddenly, there was a regular lineup of people wanting to work at the pottery. The pottery was originally set up as a cooperative. However, after the roof over the original wood fired kiln caught fire during a night firing, and no one thought to do anything about it, nor even alert me of it, I got pretty upset when I went to check on the firing progress and saw the glowing timbers on the roof. I realized that no one had anything invested in the pottery, had nothing to lose and thus felt no responsibility. During this time, heavy rains destroyed the original Botswelelo Centre (walls caved in and the roof collapsed), in which the pottery was housed. I had also come to the conclusion that, while I could teach the potters to make pots, I would never be able to teach them the sophistication to market their wares past the limited market to tourists who came through Thamaga or visited Botswanacraft. To keep 10 people employed on a long term basis required the sale of a whole lot of pots. It was a pretty depressing time all around. So what to do? I had studied the market in southern Africa and came to the conclusion that: 1) if you want to sell a lot of pots, you need to sell more than one to each person who came to buy and the answer to that was dinnerware; and 2) there was lots of European style dinnerware on the market but none with an African flavour. So off I went to Kolonyama Pottery in Lesotho, where I came up with the designs (and prototypes) that turned out to be a great success and are still being made to this day. All that was now required was to build a new pottery, a new kiln that fired with oil (wood being just too scarce and needed by the villagers for home use), buy potters' wheels to make dinnerware and funding for the whole lot. I no longer wanted the set-up to be a cooperative but wanted a Board of Directors who were made up of prominent members in the village to run it. I didn't want to have donated money for the construction, but an interest free loan that had to be paid back (so that a sense of responsibility was built in to the new enterprise). This latter part was the most difficult to accomplish as in those days interest payments were over 20% and no one was interested in making an interest free loan. After a lot of haggling, Barclay Bank finally did. So began the whole set-up of the pottery all over again. I extended my contract by a few months in order to finish the kiln and get things started but was pretty burnt out by then. Bodil Pearson took over from me and was followed by Saskia and Sietze Praamsma, all CUSO volunteers. The pottery continues to this day, now run by Batswana. And all this thanks to someone in Gaborone thinking they were sterilizing needles by holding them under running tap water, thus infecting Fr. Julian with hepatitis when he went to get his immunization shots. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Cookie When I first arrived in Botswana, it was felt that I needed intensive training in Setswana since I'd be working with people directly, none of whom spoke much English. I was sent to live full time with a Motswana family in Manyana for a month, where I got daily lessons. CUSO had trained Kesaleboga from Thamaga to teach me. I still smile when I think of Kesa telling me that she thought that the whole world would be speaking Setswana at some point. When asking her how this was to come about, her answer was that she was teaching me, I would teach the people I knew and they, in turn, would teach those they knew and so on. When you think about it, there's some logic there but unfortunately her whole scenario fell apart with me. There are three things that spring to memory from that month in Manyana: The first is that many of the people I met in the village called me Cookie. This made no sense to me – until I met the real Cookie. The home I was living in belonged to Mma Kruger, a Motswana woman who had married a Boer (long since dead). Their oldest child, Cookie, was quite fair skinned and I had an uncanny resemblance to her. Go figure. The second is the food. From my Canadian diet I was suddenly thrown into eating sour porridge in the mornings (which came close to making me gag) and meat covered in flies that I'd seen hanging from the roof above my cot in the hut I was sleeping in in the evenings. I tried eating it all, day after day, but I just plain lost my appetite. Needless to say, I grew pretty thin. The third memory is that of drinking tea without milk or sugar. I'd always drunk tea that way and had been forewarned that I would change my ways in Botswana as they had learned to drink tea the English way and it absolutely had to be with milk, even if one foolishly left out the sugar. I knew I could never do that – perhaps a bit of sugar but definitely no milk. When it came to having a cup of tea, I made it clear, really clear, that I wanted to have it black. From the looks I got, I might as well have said that I was from another planet or that my parents were plants. It became a ritual that people would come just to watch me drink my tea black, muttering to each other in amazement the whole time. I think that by the time my month in Manyana was up, pretty near everyone in the village had come by to watch me drink tea. I still drink my tea black, though no one seems to care. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Speaking Setswana An intensive month of Setswana language training and the continuous need to use the language with the potters-in-training, left me with the ability to communicate quite well on a basic level. However, I found that when I wandered around the village and encountered other people, they were much the same as I find people are everywhere: they love to do the talking and that talk is mostly about themselves. Conversations (after the preliminary “Dumelas” and “O tsogiles”) would lead to the person I met to yak away without end, while I interspersed the talk with a slow and deliberate “eh, heh?” or “eh, mm' ” or “eh, rr' ”, with a nodding of the head for emphasis. When, after one of these “conversations”, we finally reached the point of parting company, I would inevitably be told that I spoke Setswana very well. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ The Stairs After the disaster of having the original Botswelelo building collapse due to heavy rains washing down from the hillside, Fr. Julian and I decided that it would be better to build the new pottery on the raised incline beside the spot where the old building had stood. There was a path that led up to the top and, rather than meander up there between rocks, we chose to build concrete steps up the rise. As we were building the steps, making forms out of wood and filling the insides with concrete, we aroused an incredible amount of interest in the villagers. They all turned up to scratch their heads as to what we were doing. We realized that most of them had not seen stairs before. The whole village was on flat land and all the huts and homes were built on level ground, with no need for flights of stairs. When we were done, they came to walk endlessly up and down the stairs, shaking their heads and clucking “tjo, tjo, tjo” the whole time. The construction of the stairs led to a marriage proposal. An old man in battered clothing and with missing teeth offered to marry me. Obviously I'd be an asset from the way he'd seen me work. It was only natural that I should jump at the chance to have a man around. Seeing how skinny I was, who else could possibly want me? Tempting as the offer was, I graciously declined. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ The Entrepreneur We had a small gift shop as part of the Botswelelo Centre. As a result, people often came by to sell us things, mostly old wooden mortar and pestles and carved spoons. One day, a young boy of about 12 or 14 years of age, came by my home to sell me oranges. He had the whole bag with him (which contained about 20 oranges) that he had bought from one of the village shops. He wanted 10 cents for an orange. I knew a bag of oranges cost around two Rand. Hmmm. I sat him down and went through the process with him, all in the form of asking him questions:
For as long as I live, I will not forget the light that went on in his eyes. The proverbial penny had dropped. The next time I saw him some time later, he had a polaroid camera and was charging people to take photos of them.
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April 2021
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