Remembering House

Journal of Material Culture
http://mcu.sagepub.com
Remembering the House: Memory and Materiality in Northern Botswana

Christopher Morton
Journal of Material Culture 2007; 12; 157
DOI: 10.1177/1359183507078123
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REMEMBERING THE HOUSE

Memory and Materiality in Northern Botswana
C H R I S T O P H E R M O RT O N
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 implicated 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 temporal
fluidity 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 material

home 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 circumstances
of the extended household, but the way in which homestead form
seemed to act as a generative model for practices of remembering. The
questions that I address in this article then are: In what ways are Tswana
Journal of Material Culture Vol. 12(2): 157179
Copyright 2007 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore)
[DOI: 10.1177/1359183507078123]www.sagepublications.com
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J o u r n a l o f M AT E R I A L C U LT U R E 1 2 ( 2 )
houses involved in social processes of remembering? Is the interweaving

of memories of the family and memories of the built environment
suggestive of a deeper relationship between dwelling and social life that
anthropology needs to acknowledge?
The anthropological literature on the built environment is diverse and
has 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-Ziga, 2003) and
several edited volumes have explored both the influence of the material
house on the social household (Birdwell-Pheasant and Lawrence-Ziga,
1999), as well as the legacy of Lvi-Strausss notion of house-based
societies (socits--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). For
Audrey Richards (1939), Bemba houses and settlements were firmly
embedded within the kinship system as well as the domestic economy
under investigation, rather than providing a backdrop. In particular she
demonstrated how the shifting, waxing and waning of Bemba villages
were intimately connected with the spatial implications of changes in
kin unit formation over time, and that occupational history and genealogical 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, who
noted 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: 401). More recently
the 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 material
and physical structures of the domestic space (1996: 29).
Carsten and Hugh Jones (1995) used the notion of the house-asmetaphor in their argument for a more holistic approach to houses in
social studies. Arguing that architecture has been a neglected dimension
of social anthropology they maintain that the house can instead be seen
as playing a central role in social life, not just as a backdrop to social
activity, 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 closely
connected analytically. One of their arguments that is of particular
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Morton: R E M E M B E R I N G T H E H O U S E
relevance here is that [i]ntimately linked both physically and conceptually, the body and the house are the loci for dense webs of signification
and affect and serve as basic cognitive models used to structure, think
and experience the world (1995: 39). The argument that the material
house 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 personal
histories. The idea of the house as a container of both families and
memories is ineluctable if we approach the house as essentially a space
rather than a material form. A more material focus, in which the house
interweaves processes of remembering through the activity of building
over time, is potentially more dynamic in terms of its connectivity to
ongoing processes of remembering.
REMEMBERING AND HISTORY
My intention in this article is to explore the way in which differing

notions and processes of memory are an integral aspect of the building
and rebuilding of homesteads. In particular I have chosen to focus upon
the semantic suggestiveness of remembering as re-membering or recollecting fragmented parts of a whole. The question of a distinction
between memory-as-process rather than inscription is of course addressed
by Husserl (1962), who suggested that memory is immediate and
redolent of temporality rather than history. His model was of a temporal
presentness that encompassed both past and future where history is
not a chain of causal antecedents, but a combination of retensions of
the past and protensions of the future in the present, a process that
enables 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 past
essentially separated from the present.
There is a substantial literature on the relationship between collective memory (e.g. Halbwachs, 1992), discursive memory, history and
embodied memory, and space precludes a detailed discussion here. And
yet the case studies that I present do make a contribution to this body
of theoretical analysis in their suggestion of a link between the material
and social ordering of memory. Pierre Nora (1996) proposed a somewhat
antithetical relationship between memory and history, suggesting that
history and memorial sites in the landscape are products of the uncertainty of memory, at least in western society. History for Nora is a highly
manipulative practice in which collective memory is transformed over
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time so that memory and memory-of-history become relatively inseparable. It is for these reasons that he seeks to distinguish memory
societies from history societies (1996: 8), which he roughly equates
with non-western and western societies respectively. Noras concept of
lieux de mmoire deals with sites of symbolic memorialization that arise
out 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 and
object (1996: 3), and as such practically in opposition to memory transformed by the practice of history. But is this a real or supposed dichotomy?
Surely there is always a dynamic interchange between memorialization
in the landscape, discursive history and collective memory. As Halbwachs
notes, memories are often situational and contextual, recalled by me
externally, and the groups of which I am a part at any time give me the
means to reconstruct them (1992: 38). In my own fieldwork I was less
interested in building up material or occupational histories of houses than
with understanding the house in Lambeks sense of a clearing for the
multiple cultural interactions that constitute historicity, or the social role
of the past in the present. In Lambeks formulation, such clearings are
when and where the past is brought out into the light, where the past
explicitly 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 Lambeks insight by
suggesting a more influential role for the material world (although he gives
numerous examples that I would identify as demonstrating just this).
Although by drawing on interviews and informal exchanges with
Tswana informants this article deals predominantly with what might be
termed discursive memory, there are numerous points of connection
within the material I present with other, less discursive or embodied
notions of memory. In particular I highlight the potential for future
investigation of the way the material home may structure and influence
the reproduction of embodied forms of memory. On one level, Kwint for
instance has argued that human memory has undergone a mutual evolution with the objects that inform it; that, in other words, the relationship
between them is dialectical (Kwint, 1999: 4). For Kwint, objects stimulate remembering as repositories of prior experience, otherwise dormant,
repressed or forgotten (Kwint, 1999: 2). Although he is here referring to
both 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 material
surroundings, but also in our embodied skills and spatial orientations.
The notion of embodied memory of course is a major component of
Bourdieus 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 way
to 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 influence of the material world he also states that the habitus is a metaphor
of the world of objects . . . [which is] a kind of book . . . from which
children learn to read the world . . . read with the whole body (Bourdieu,
1990: 77). The notion of an interaction between material culture and
memory has also been explored by Kchler (1993). In her analysis
Malangan art is implicated in processes of remembering and forgetting
in the context of an understanding of landscape in which memory is not
inscribed 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 interplay between the material home and the memory-work associated with
it. The relationship between discursive and non-discursive memory and
the subjective texture of history is also addressed by Lambek (2002) in
his account of Sakalava spirit mediumship, in which the mediums role
as a repository of discursive history is de-emphasized in favour of the
idea of embodying the (often painful) experience of history. As Lambek
notes, the distinction between objective history and subjective memory
is thereby shown as a culturally constructed set of understandings, especially when the history relevant to them is the trauma, not the stories
about it (2002: 70). Shaw (2002) comes to much the same conclusion,
arguing that there are other ways of remembering the past than by
speaking of it (2002: 2). In Shaws account of memory and embodiment
among the Temne of Sierra Leone, she suggests a continuum running
between more discursive and more embodied forms of memory, rather
than the dichotomy that is often assumed, for instance in the classic
work of Connerton (1989) whose distinction between incorporation and
inscription 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 the

town of Maun, the major population centre of Ngamiland District (and
historically the tribal capital of the ruling Tswana tribe, the Batawana)
during 19992000 (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 directly
or indirectly benefit from its position as the main regional centre for the
growing tourism industry within the Okavango Delta. However, many
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features of its former village

organization remain, including the
division of the town into wards
or dikgotla. With an occupational
history of approaching 100 years,
OKAVANGO DELTA
many of Mauns homesteads have
been the site of several generations
of building activity, and although
recent developments such as the
demarcation and fencing of plots
have recently altered the spatial
experience of the town, many
continuities are evident, such as
the centring of houses around a
central space, which in former
times would have contained a
cattle enclosure. A recent ethnoF I G U R E 1 Location of study area.
archaeological study of the Tswana
town of Serowe by Fewster (2006)
has shown just how persistent such forms of Tswana spatial organization
have remained throughout periods of rapid social and economic change
(see also Reid et al., 1998).
Space precludes a detailed discussion here of the Tswana homestead
in the wider context of the village, such as the spaces and pathways
between homesteads, the shade trees, the commercial areas, burial sites,
gathering and farming areas on its periphery. These are all important
dimensions of dwelling in any settlement and are importantly linked to
memory and a sense of belonging. I have elsewhere (Morton, 2004)
discussed in detail some of the broader historical contexts surrounding
the village of Maun, focusing in particular on the conflict between
indigenous practices of settlement movement and colonial processes of
material investment and settlement sedentarization. In the present study
I focus upon the homestead itself as a locus of memory, and hope to
address its wider implications in due course. Neither does the present
article 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 the
separate houses (mantlo) of a nuclear family are joined together by short
reed fences to form courtyards where everyday activities may take place
in privacy as well as providing shade and protection from the wind
(Figure 2). It may typically include the houses of parents, older children
and other extended kin who have built with them, often in a rough circle
OKAVANGO RIVER
Seronga
Sepupa
Etsha
TAOGHE RIVER
Gumare
Nokaneng
Shorobe
THAMALAKANE RIVER
Maun
BOTETI RIVER
Toteng
KWEBE
HILLS
Sehitwa
Tsau
LAKE NGAMI
Scale (Approx)
162
50
100km
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F I G U R E 2 Lolwapa including houses of daughter (left) and father (right),

Gweghiri, Shorobe Molapo.
or arc facing onto a central space, something that Oliver (1987: 130) has
previously noted.
A lolwapa might well include a sleeping house (ntlo ya borobalo), house
for storage of goods, foodstuffs and so on (ntlo ya dilwana), sleeping
house for young children (ntlo ya bananyana), a cooking (fire) shelter (ntlo
ya boapeelo/moleelo), a house for visitors to sleep (ntlo ya baeti), as well
as smaller structures for domestic animals, such as hens (ntlo ya dikoko).
Each structure within the homestead is properly considered to be part
of the lolwapa, which can change in composition over time, as children
grow and build their own houses, as older relatives die, or as relatives
come to stay. Increasingly, concrete structures are built by those involved
in the cash economy, or to rent out to economic migrants. Depending
upon available resources, most houses are made from alluvial mud bricks,
water reeds (letlhaka, Phragmites australis, P. mauritanus), or even grasses
and other plants. Letlhaka water reeds are a common form of fencing in
Ngamiland, but have become increasingly costly due to scarcity.
If a house is not strong and collapses, people in Ngamiland speak of
it as having died, ntlo e sule. The need for frequent renewal of the house
is an aspect of the shifting generational relevance of the family home,
since houses die in the same manner as their occupants. The notion of
the death of a house does not have any particular ritual or religious
significance, but is rather used to express material decay and abandonment, since the word sule is normally used to refer to the death of
animals rather than people, who are mostly talked of as being thlokofetse
or late. The death of the house relates perceptions of material decay to
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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 extended
family if not needed. Sometimes the sprinkling of blessed water and a
brief invocation by a church minister is enough to make a deceased
persons house cool and habitable again (see also Hardie, 1985). Among
the Wayeyi of eastern Okavango I also noted the practice of taking a
burning bunch of letlhaka reeds into the house to burn off the bad air
caused by death, to make it habitable and avoid having disturbing dreams
about the deceased, which are considered to be visitations.
Linguistic associations between the body and house are also entangled in the Tswana lolwapa through the metaphor of sinews or arteries
(tshika), frequently used to talk of family generations. The word tshika
or losika, in the family context of generations, is properly the Tswana
word for veins or arteries and flesh (especially sinew), hence its metaphorical use to refer to progeny or generations. Whilst collecting information on morphological changes in homesteads over time, I noted the
frequent use of this idiom in talk about the generations of the material
homestead as well as the family. My first impression was that this
metaphor was a figure of speech, in which material memories were being
articulated in genealogical terms but were ultimately unconnected. I did
not initially consider that this linguistic cluster of meaning was important to an understanding of the process of remembering, in which the
materiality of the home and the physicality of family were being drawn
together. Janet Hoskins, thinking through a similar issue in her own
fieldwork, concluded that whilst her role as ethnographer had played an
important part in the bringing-out of stories, this did not include the
idiom that they were articulated in (Hoskins, 1998: 3). Whilst houses
are, in one sense, like Hoskinss memory-boxes containers for disparate
elements of memory the idiom of generations suggested something
more dynamically linked to a material process of remembering, the
analogy 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 was
discussing with people no longer existed, and yet were part of a rich narrative of previous built environments. The Tswana idiom of connecting
generations of houses and persons through sinews may be compared to
other examples of the close association between the house and its occupants. Carsten (1997: 36) for instance describes how in the building of a
Langkawi (Malay) house, the mother of the house (ibu rumah) must hold
the 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 be
considered as both partible and distributed over space and time. The
lolwapa 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 both
families and homesteads gain form and identity over time through the
everyday interactions of their constituent elements. As a result of its partibility or divisibility, the lolwapa is distributed as an entity over space
and time, and recollected through the process of remembering; and the
following case studies all in some way add texture to this idea. The
semantic clustering of meanings around the term lolwapa is crucial here,
bringing together both social and material contexts. Lolwapa can indicate
the wall or fence enclosing a courtyard at the front of a single house (or
sometimes enclosing the front area of more than one house) but also is
frequently used to refer to the family itself. This homology of senses is
found in other African languages. Blier for instance notes that since the
Batammaliba [of Togo] employ the same word (takienta) to mean both
house and family, an implicit link is made between the two. If the house
is 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 malwapa
that I encountered during fieldwork, families operated complex multilocational strategies with frequent communication of goods and services
between rural and town homesteads, as well as further afield. Although
economic migration has added layers of complexity, frequent movement
between village (motse), field (masimo) and cattle-post (moraka) locations
throughout the year has a long cultural history in Botswana. My focus
in this article is upon village malwapa in particular since many families
are no longer involved in farming or cattle-keeping, or even since they
originate from historically non-cattle-keeping groups such as the Yeyi or
Mbukushu. However, as the case studies reveal, histories of migration
and the establishment of complex pathways between locations and family
members, all attest to the inherent partibility and distribution across space
and 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 terms
reflect first the way in which memory is interwoven into the fabric of
dwelling, second how the home structures memories spatially and
temporally beyond itself (for instance about previous forms, but also
relationships and events), and third how certain practices connected
with the house, especially in relation to deceased occupants, involve
memory-work. The case studies discussed all involve the Tswana activity
of go gopola, remembering or recollecting.
MEMORY-IN
The materials, forms and tasks of dwellings are important to how

memories are formed, understood and articulated. Some of our earliest
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memories are often framed by the house of our childhood, a material

context 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 places
and times. The way in which houses materialize memory I will term the
memory-in dimension. This dimension of the house could be considered
as its otherplaceness or othertimeness how it materially refers beyond
itself. These terms coalesce some fairly straightforward observations
about the way in which any given dwelling site interweaves materials,
activities and social relations related to the wider social landscape. In
Ngamiland, otherplaceness for instance includes the locations where
various natural resources are collected to build with, as well as connections to local towns where cash goods are purchased. Othertimeness
draws together observations about the way in which dwelling sites are
accretions of tasks and objects built up over time they constantly refer
outwards to other times, seasons, events. In addition, the very materiality
of the home can be a repository for memories of such disparate phenomena 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 the
ability of things to act as memorials of past events or other places.
Memory-in or segopotso then is descriptive of both the way social activities become embedded in our material surroundings, in the sense of
inputting memory, and of how remembrance is emergent and structured
by material culture. The most useful and illustrative way to argue for
these 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 in
an isolated spot to the east of Maun, in a homestead fenced with mopane
(Colophospermum mopane) poles. The family moved here from a village
some distance south of Maun, but in 1992 Batlametses 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 for
renewing the fence around the plot and the walls replaced with millet
stems, and yet another had been walled with motlhabakolobe (Xanthium
strumarium) reeds and wild sage (Figure 3) since one year there was
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FIGURE 3
Fencing a lolwapa with water reed and wild sage, Boseja ward,
Maun.
not enough millet stems and I had to go to the river to cut plant stems
instead.
In the fabric of Batlametses lolwapa, material memories about the
social landscape interweave with aspects of family history. Whilst the
agency of the father is remembered in the axe marks on the poles, their
reuse as fence posts and replacement with millet stems in the last four
years represented for Batlametse the continuing problem facing the
family in their dwelling tasks after their fathers death. The homestead incorporated a variety of material repositories of tasks associated
with persons or groups and, in particular, a narrative of interruption or
breakdown in the normal process of annual material renewal. In other
words, such material memories often deal with obstacles and disengagement 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 with
relatives. Another man, Mpho related that we wanted to build a house
there for my sister but we never managed to do it and so she stayed
away until this year. My brothers 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. Disengagement from building activities that would ordinarily have taken place
are thereby also important aspects of memory-in, since breakdowns in
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repetitive patterns of material renewal are also evident in the material

decay of houses.
A Mbukushu migrant from Etsha, Anderson Willy, who settled in
Maun in 1982, remembered that his first house was built in the same
manner 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 then
built another one, square this time since I had bought some corrugated
iron roofing. I remember doing this since I had some money left over
from my work contract and thatching grass was hard to find. The next
building was for visitors. I used mud bricks for this one since I
remember discussing with neighbours how difficult it is to find mopane
branches for making walls. After some time Anderson and his wife
moved into his visitors house and used his old one for storage, building
a new shelter for visitors using mopane sticks, about which he remembered that they were difficult to find but I had money to get transport
and even buy water reeds for weaving the outside.
For Anderson Willy, remembering issues surrounding the gathering
of building materials helps him to
understand his experiences as a
migrant. The house is remembered
as a series of layers which materially reveal experiences of hardship,
uncertain relations to place, and
cultural adaptation. He remembers
the year in which he decided to
fence the garden plot as the time
when he was frustrated about not
being able to return home to the
western Okavango village of Etsha
at harvest time. The garden fence
evoked a strong response as a
memorial (segopotso) of his selfsufficiency as a migrant a long way
from his home and kin. Perhaps not
surprisingly, Anderson and his wife
occasionally had quite different
processes of remembering certain
elements of the house due to their
involvement in differing building
and social activities. Many of F I G U R E 4 Anderson Willys
Andersons wifes memories centred daughter (right) outside the entrance
on female tasks of building, and in of a store house, Boseja ward, Maun.
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particular the memory that she first made mud bricks next to the standpipe since it was too far to carry bricks from the Thamalakane River. For
her, remembering the making of bricks allowed ways of thinking about
and understanding those processes of dislocation and familiarization that
migrants move through, and which centre around dwelling activities.
The memory-in dimension of Andersons house allows ways of remembering that are ultimately bound up with present perceptions of life
chains of material meanings that are reconnected each time the past is
reinterpreted in the present. For Andersons daughter (Figure 4) the
family house in Maun is juxtaposed in memory with those she has stayed
in when visiting Mbukushu relatives in Etsha, who build using locally
available materials in the area. For her, such differences in the built
environment between places help to establish contexts in which identities are formed over time.
FROM MR SALBYE
It is because there is no money for building now that I have used so

many 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 useful
building 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 shadetree down to build with since there was no money for transport.
Sitting outside his house, he points out the recycled materials he has put
together to form a shelter (Figure 5): the black fencing from Mr Salbye
at 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 gave
them 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. I
covered it on the outside with some old water-reeds given to me by a
neighbour.
He no longer worked at the safari company, having started to make
bricks for the Village Development Committee, but memories of his
former job and colleagues are woven into the fabric of the dwelling. The
memories demonstrate an evident pride in his former relations to certain
individuals and to the meaning he ascribed to the gifting of unwanted
materials. In particular some of the materials represented evidence of a
bond of friendship between himself and Mr Salbye (a local businessman),
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F I G U R E 5 Ketisitswe outside his house made from reused materials, Wenela

ward, Maun.
embodying values in ways unexpected by the donor. Such materials can

become enhanced in the way they mediate such relations over time as
circumstances change for Ketisitswe they had increased in importance
due to the severing of his social connections to work through redundancy.
In this instance of gifting and reuse of old materials, memory-in is a
dimension of the house in which personal identity is being constantly
re-established through remembering and materializing meaningful social
relationships.
MEMORY-OF AND GENEALOGICAL MEMORY
The idea of the othertimeness of a homestead site suggests a relationship between present material surroundings and past ones that is they
have a memory-of dimension. Buildings, whilst obviously being indexes
of current occupational activity, also often retain a genealogical dimension, in which both the activities of past occupants and previous forms
of the building itself are materially linked in memory. The Tswana
metaphor 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, bringing
to mind, of extended kin relations or ancestors, both being important in
understandings of social identity as well as more practical considerations
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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 as
expressed in the idioms of sinews stretching or arteries flowing between
generations. This is implied in the ritual importance of elders since they
are considered as both genealogically and physically closer to ancestors
than younger people. They are physically closer since the sinews between
elders and ancestors are considered shorter, and since their relative
proximity to death is equated with proximity to the ancestral world. One
Yeyi elder near Shorobe, Kgoto Modua, related that ancestors were displeased with the neglect of those closest to them (that is, elders), and
sometimes punished younger relatives through dikgaba, illnesses caused
by ancestral displeasure.
Long occupational histories of houses are more associated with the
industrialized world than with Africa, where houses are sometimes
assumed to be ephemeral both in material and memory. However, many
homesteads 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 distant
homes. Some of the walls of these houses were so thick from replastering that the occupants no longer used wooden roof supports but rested
the roof directly on the thickened walls. A particular case study, centred
upon the house of a young woman called Emang, is particularly illustrative (Figure 6). Emang lived in one of the oldest houses in her uncles
lolwapa, and directly in front of it was a well-established mulberry tree,
under which we sat talking.
She had come to live in the
F I G U R E 6 Occupational history of Mma
Bolonis house.
house after the death of her
maternal relation Sepopelo
Morutsi, who had inherited it from her brother,
Ditlhapi, when he left for
another ward in Maun. He
in turn had inherited the
house from Mma Boloni, a
cousin of his mothers and
the founder of the house,
Mma Boloni (founder of house, planter of mulberry tree)
after she had moved to
Moved to Boseja ward, gave house to:
another ward, and it was
Dithlapi Morutsi (son of Mma Bolonis maternal cousin)
she who planted the MulMoved to Sedia ward, gave house to:
berry tree.
Sepopelo Morutsi (his younger sister)
Emang could tell that
Died, family gave house to:
each occupant had carefully tended the Mulberry
Emang (maternal relative of Sepopelo)
tree over the years, just as
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they had given due attention to renewing the house itself. She pointed to
how former occupants had pollarded the tree to provide good shade
canopy as well as fruits. Each occupant of the house (monni wa ntlo) she
said, was a relative (masika) even though they were not born in the
lolwapa. Because they were relatives both the house and the tree grew
over the years. Most of the houses in Maun are thin, relatives do not stay
in 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. The
growth of both tree and house are united in meaning as similarly arising
out of the dwelling practices of kin relations. Indeed, she implies that it
is 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 nonkin 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 lolwapa
can 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 both
in 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) and
memory-of (the material link to absent or deceased relatives, places and
so on) brought together as part of remembering the house.
MEMORY-AS
Remembering as memory-work is frequently engaged with when there

is a death in the homestead. In this instance memory-work takes on the
quality 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, clothes
and other possessions, are usually ritually treated after death to take away
a disordered connection with death. Sometimes this just involves carefully washing the home and clothes, but can often take more elaborate
ritual forms mentioned earlier. The central concern is the showing of
respect (go supatota) to the deceased through objects connected with
them. One woman, Mma Sefo, told me:
It is important that the deceaseds house (ntlo ya moswi) is occupied after
death, not to be left to fall down. We wash the house and the clothes to cool
them 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 with
the deceased, as well as by being a continued home for the deceaseds
spirit, which may trouble future occupants by causing bad dreams.
Dreaming of the deceased is often considered a form of visitation that
may not augur well for the family, and ritual cleansing is, in part,
conceived of as preventing dreams and other troubled memories. A
month or so after the cleansing of the house, continued Mma Sefo, we
can begin to renew the house again, and someone can go inside and live
there, it shows disrespect to not continue to occupy that house. Another
woman, Mma Voya, related that after the funeral we washed all the
clothes of my husband and gave them to our relatives to wear, so that
they 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 is
ritually 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 churchgoer I used blessed water. We splashed the children to stop them having
bad dreams (go emisa ditoro tse di maswe).
Houses are involved in memory not just through close physical association with deceased persons but also through sense-memory, especially
that of smell which is particularly closely linked to emotional remembrance of the deceased, and in particular the influence that such smells
may have upon the living. One Mbukushu woman, Diwane, stated that
the splashing of water is used to ritually remove the smell of the
deceased, since this smell and the memories it would bring about might
make the children have bad dreams throughout their lives. Strong
memories and dreams of the deceased are considered by some to be
analogous to spirit possession, which is thought of as being caused by
ancestral displeasure that may cause sickness (kgaba). In both cases the
memory of the house is closely associated with its odour, which needs
to 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 other
material and sensual connections to a person by the group. The processes
of reorganization and readjustment in which social groups engage after
a death are practices of memory-work, in which remembrance is something in which people participate socially. Houses both contain potentially disruptive odour-memories and yet also represent the social
obligations 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 distributed through space and time. The lolwapa not only contains a condensation of values surrounding the dwelling relations of kin, it is materially
involved in the way kin relations are interconnected through memory.
Whereas I have focused in this article upon investigating the lolwapa as
a discrete, almost hermetic entity, homesteads are also, of course, importantly interrelated within locales, neighbourhoods and communities, and
it is appropriate here to mention that building practices are not just
material processes but also social activities, especially linked to senses
of community. In particular, where you build is not merely a pragmatic
decision, but is likely to be a social one. The Tswana village was historically organized into areas or wards in which agnates built together and
shared a common cattle kraal. There were also wards granted to incorporated minority groups. Although this approach to village organization
ended with government control over land allocation after independence,
in most older villages, neighbours are still often closely related kin who
have inherited homesteads established by ancestors a number of years
previously. In this way, talking about building in Setswana is still closely
connected with talking about social relations.
Anthropologists are increasingly questioning the categories and
assumptions upon which anthropological theories of relatedness and
kinship are based (e.g. Carsten, 2000), and arguing for an enhanced role
in analysis for everyday and material practices. The Setswana term for
neighbours, baagisanyi expresses both those that build together, since
it includes the verb to build (go aga), but also establishing harmonious
relations (go agisanya). Another common term is baagelani from the verb
agelana, the reciprocal case of the verb agelela, which means to fence or
surround something. In the reciprocal case this verb suggests that those
enjoined in such mutual activities have already established close social
bonds. To be neighbours, one woman stated, is to be seen and visited
frequently by those you are living with. My neighbour did not ask why
are 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 gave
us 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 with
the material adaptiveness of the homestead. But as Bahloul (1996) has
also shown, the process of remembering the house is as much about
separating out social relations as it is about reassembling them again
making sense of ones place in the social world. Building houses within
the 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 and
socially becoming detached elements or sub-units within the homestead
and household. One way of considering the indigenous appropriateness
of such an understanding is through the semantic cluster of meanings
attached to the Setwana verb go nna, which Matumo translates as to sit
down, stay, dwell, live, occupy, inhabit, be as well as the first person
pronoun I or me (Matumo, 1993: 287). Perhaps the most interesting
aspect of go nna is the way dwelling and being are both identified with
self; that self is defined by a notion of being that is also inherently about
dwelling. Within go nna a semantic cluster unfolds that evokes the sense
that places are an integral dimension of the social world. But as I have
discussed, it is go aga to build that gives Setswana some of its most
important and materially centred notions of dwelling, from go agllana
to become neighbours, share joys and sorrows to go agana to prop
one another up, spiritually, materially (Matumo, 1993: 2).
But having established the connection between genealogical and
house 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 homestead
generations was made when the first daughter replaced the original
house. The first generation all fell down (wile), they were all replaced
with new houses . . . you see, the first house was dead (e sule). The
second generation was understood to begin when houses began to be
replaced rather than renewed, since renewal as I have already discussed
is strongly connected with life and continuing need, whereas material
abandonment of a house frequently connotes death. For some groups in
Ngamiland, such as the Herero or Mbanderu, the death of a household
head initiates an abandonment of the homestead due to its association
with death, a practice found elsewhere in Africa, such as Kenya. In
villages such as Maun, abandonment does not take place, and the
destruction or death of a house is an expression of the transition of a
house from renewal and everyday social interaction to that of memory.
Sometimes understandings of a new generation can be more subtle, and
based upon perceptions of the material integrity of a house. In one homestead, that of Koi Motlalepula, a second generation began when three
houses had their mud-brick walls gradually replaced with a mixture of
mud and drinks cans. This sort of complete replacement seems to be
understood as materially generational in a way that renewal is not, since
rebuilding is brought about by a more significant shift in household
composition than renewal by a single occupant. What is particularly
interesting from Regines account of generation (tshika) is the metaphor
of the death of a house by its abandonment and subsequent rebuilding
by a daughter as a threshold over which both the material homestead and
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the social household passed into a new phase. This act of replacement
precipitated further regeneration within the homestead (by the other
daughters as well as Regine), which was understood as lasting until the
present time. In other words, material regeneration and notions of generational movement through time are closely related. However, unlike
Evans-Pritchards (1940: 1048) notion of structural time in which the
passage of time is an illusion held by ego as s/he moves through the social
structure, the temporality of the household is grounded in the materiality of place. Although Regines account strongly suggests that her memory
of generation was a material one, what lies behind this process is a
significant alteration in the balance of social activities in the homestead.
Going back to Regines memory of the homestead over time, the process
of regeneration began with her eldest daughters building of two new
square houses, both of which involved cash investment in concrete (one
for plastering, the other for bricks). This represented the first building
activity within the plot that Regine had not instigated as a mother, since
the first daughter had financed her houses from selling sorghum beer.
With the daughter now involving herself in household activities independently of Regine, building for herself and her own children, a significant shift in the way social and material relations were interrelated within
the homestead had occurred. I am hesitant to describe this process as one
of individuation within the homestead, but it does seem to represent a
complex shift in the way sub-units relate to each other as an entity.
The perception of a new generation of houses within Regines homestead can be understood as the interweaving within memory of the way
in which social and material transitions are negotiated especially that
of dependent daughters shifting from collective activities to relatively
independent relations within the same home over time. In one sense this
set of transitions is characterized by Regines daughters growing up
attaining a manner of financial and social independence that is reflected
in their building activities. In another sense the memory metaphor of the
death of the generation of houses that Regine built for her children
stands for her own personal transition from material provider to that of
a sub-unit within the homestead. The metaphor of generation thereby
brings together perceptions that are often moving dynamically along
separable trajectories, with older household members and younger ones
shifting in their social activities and status. Such shifts in life-course are
often mediated by the houses people inhabit, a process discussed by
Levine and Levine (1991). In this way, homestead and family biographies
within the lolwapa are bound together as part of a mutually interpretative relationship.
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CONCLUSION
I have argued in this article for a new perspective upon the material home
and 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 intimately
interconnected over time. As material entities that are fluid both spatially
and temporally, houses have particular connections with the way people
locate memories, activate them, and make them meaningful as part of
life. Closely associated with the social groups that build and live within
them, houses extend their sinews across kin relationships and through
time. 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-work
is actively engaged in structuring and making sense of, the past in the
present. The case study of the Tswana lolwapa demonstrates that the
divisible dwelling site, materially adapting in response to need over time,
although responsive to change, also acts as a means by which the past is
understood and remembered. As Bahloul notes in her study of colonial
Algeria, [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 which
memory processes and memory-work are involved with the built
environment. Following recent critical work on what constitutes notions
of relatedness in any given cultural context, the ethnography discussed
here 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
19992000 with the assistance of an ESRC research studentship, and attachment
as a Research Fellow in the Department of Sociology, University of Botswana. I
am extremely grateful to Onalenna Selolwane and Suzette Heald for facilitating
the research, and I am especially thankful to Marty McFarlane for her support
in Ngamiland. All research was carried out in close consultation with Kgosi
Tawana II, ward headmen and elders in Maun. I wish to thank our neighbours
in Newtown and Wenela wards, my research assistant Boitlhoko Garebakwena
and his family, and my friend Mpho Bojosi for inviting my wife and me into his
household. I am grateful to the two anonymous reviewers of this article for their
insightful comments and constructive suggestions. All photographs are by the
author. Appropriately for an article on memory, it is dedicated to the person who
introduced me to Africa, Frieda McFarlane (19722004).
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Journal of Material Culture

Remembering the House: Memory and Materiality in Northern Botswana

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REMEMBERING THE HOUSE

This article concerns the dynamic relationship between the material

houses involved in social processes of remembering? Is the interweaving

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My intention in this article is to explore the way in which differing

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dispositions that integrates past experience within the current matrix of

The ethnography discussed in this article is based upon fieldwork in the

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features of its former village

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F I G U R E 2 Lolwapa including houses of daughter (left) and father (right),

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the removal of the human activity of renewal, since the houses of

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The materials, forms and tasks of dwellings are important to how

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memories are often framed by the house of our childhood, a material

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repetitive patterns of material renewal are also evident in the material

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It is because there is no money for building now that I have used so

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F I G U R E 5 Ketisitswe outside his house made from reused materials, Wenela

embodying values in ways unexpected by the donor. Such materials can

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of property and access to resources. It is also a matter of the embodied

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Remembering as memory-work is frequently engaged with when there

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The house is conceived of as having a material memory of its occupant,

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BUILDING AND RELATEDNESS

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of building separate houses and social identities for growing children

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Downloaded from http://mcu.sagepub.com by Graciela Mara Tedesco on October 8, 2008

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