Death in a Church of Life: Moral Passion during Botswana’s Time of AIDS

Death in a Church of Life

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF CHRISTIANITY

Edited by Joel Robbins

1. Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter, by Webb Keane

2. A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church, by Matthew Engelke

3. Reason to Believe: Cultural Agency in Latin American Evangelicalism, by David Smilde

4. Chanting Down the New Jerusalem: Calypso, Christianity, and Capitalism in the Caribbean, by Francio Guadeloupe

5. In God’s Image: The Metaculture of Fijian Christianity, by Matt Tomlinson

6. Converting Words: Maya in the Age of the Cross, by William F. Hanks

7. City of God: Christian Citizenship in Postwar Guatemala, by Kevin O’Neill

8. Death in a Church of Life: Moral Passion during Botswana’s Time of AIDS, by Frederick Klaits

9. Eastern Christians in Anthropological Perspective, edited by Chris Hann and Hermann Goltz

Death in a Church

of Life

MORAL PASSION DURING BOTSWANA’S

TIME OF AIDS

Frederick Klaits

An online audio annex for this title is available at www.ucpress.edu/9780520259669.

Portions of Chapters 1 and 4 and the Conclusion of

this book have previously appeared in F. Klaits, "Faith

and the Intersubjectivity of Care in Botswana," Africa

Today 56:1 (2009). Reprinted by permission of Indiana

University Press.

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© 2010 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Klaits, Frederick–.

   Death in a church of life : moral passion during

Botswana’s time of AIDS / Frederick Klaits.

        p.         cm.   —   (The anthropology of

Christianity, 8)

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978–0-520–25965–2 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978–0-520–25966–9 (pbk. : alk. paper)

    1. AIDS (Disease)—Patients—Pastoral counseling

of—Botswana. 2. AIDS (Disease)—Religious aspects—

Christianity. 3. Church work with the sick—Botswana.

I. Title.

BV4460.7.K53  2010

261.8’3219697920096883—dc22              2009009151

Manufactured in the United States of America

19  18  17   16   15   14   13   12   11   10

10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1

This book is printed on Cascades Enviro 100, a 100% post

consumer waste, recycled, de-inked fiber. FSC recycled

certified and processed chlorine free. It is acid free, Ecologo

certified, and manufactured by BioGas energy.

IN MEMORY OF MMAMAIPELO (1947–2006)

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTE ON PRONUNCIATION AND ORTHOGRAPHY

INTRODUCTION:

MORAL PASSION IN SUFFERING AND FAITH

ONE / WHOSE CHILD?

TWO / GO WITH ME TO BABYLON:

THE DOMESTICATION OF INEQUALITY

THREE / CLEANSING THE SPIRIT:

THE BODILINESS OF SENTIMENT AND FAITH

FOUR / SPIRIT, FOLLOW THE VOICE!:

VOICE AND THE MAKING

OF INTERSUBJECTIVITIES

FIVE / "IT IS ALL RIGHT

AS LONG AS WE FEEL SORROW":

CARE FOR AND BY THE DYING

SIX / YOU MUST NOT LOOK BACK:

CIVILITY IN THE PLACE OF DEATH

CONCLUSION: PUTTING LOVE INTO WORDS

APPENDIX ONE

APPENDIX TWO

NOTES

REFERENCES

INDEX

ILLUSTRATIONS

MAPS

1. Map of Botswana

2. Map of Gaborone and Environs

FIGURES

1. Plan of the compound containing the Baitshepi Church, June 1993

2. Plan of the Baitshepi Church

3. Vocal Genres of Asking and Calling Names

4. Poloko’s Family

TABLE

Expenses and Contributions at a Funeral

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Over the course of the decade and a half in which this project has absorbed my energies, I have had numerous occasions to reflect on the intellectual contributions and warm support of many friends (as well as on their long-suffering patience). As Bishop MmaMaipelo told me, our voices build within one another, and it is a pleasure for me to reflect on this fact here.

I look back with great fondness at my time as a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. Those transformative years were made deeply pleasurable by a warm intellectual community. Sara Berry has helped to guide this project with incisive advice and continual encouragement from its very first incoherent beginnings. The same is true of my dissertation advisor, Gillian Feeley-Harnik, who not only combined close, thorough readings with inspiring vision but helped me through many difficult moments.

While conducting fieldwork, it was my privilege to have been a visiting scholar at the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Botswana. I would like to thank James Amanze, Obed Kealotswe, Leslie Nthoi, and Jerry Walsh for many excellent discussions and much camaraderie. I am particularly grateful to have had the opportunity to present my work at a seminar organized by the department; questions asked by students on that occasion continue to challenge me. Also in Botswana, I had the pleasure of meeting Suzette Heald, whom I would like to thank for much helpful advice on directions to pursue in fieldwork. Suzette has been a careful reader and an inspiring colleague.

I was extremely fortunate, through my participation in local churches, to have made connections with Mennonite Ministries–Botswana. Mennonite missionaries in Gaborone opened their hearts, homes, and office space to Laura and me. We are particularly grateful to Rudy and Sharon Dirks, and to Erwin and Angela Rempel, for looking after us before and following the birth of our son Adam. For much hospitality, we would also like to thank Erica Thiessen, and Bryan and Teresa Born. I have had the pleasure as well of consulting with Don Rempel Boschman, Bryan Born, Rudy Dirks, and Eugene Thieszen, whose extensive experience with churches of the spirit helped orient me.

I have benefited from the advice of many readers who have generously devoted their energies to helping me come to clarity. For their thoughtful comments, I would like to thank Eytan Bercovitch, Bryan Born, Bianca Dahl, Hansjörg Dilger, Ørnulf Gulbrandsen, Angelique Haugerud, Barrie Klaits, Joseph Klaits, Constance Nathanson, Joel Robbins, Dennis Rusché, Laura Rusche, Dan Segal, Jacqueline Solway, and Pnina Werbner, as well as an anonymous reviewer for the University of California Press. Michael Herzfeld made an early suggestion regarding the issue of care that emerged as key to the entire project. I wish to thank Mieka Ritsema for providing me with materials on urban housing policies in Botswana, and Marion Carter for directing me to sources on HIV testing rates. The Thompson Writing Program at Duke University has provided a supportive and collegial environment for the final stages of revision. I would particularly like to thank my colleagues Erik Harms and Marcia Rego for their careful readings. The files contained in the online audio annex were edited and remastered at The Kitchen Studios, Inc., Carrboro, North Carolina. I would also like to thank Stan Holwitz and Caroline Knapp at the University of California Press, and the copy editor, Peter Dreyer, for the care and attention they have devoted to the manuscript.

I wish to extend very special thanks to three colleagues who have worked extensively in Botswana: Deborah Durham, Julie Livingston, and Richard Werbner. The influence of each of these extraordinary scholars on my own thinking is readily apparent throughout this book. I have had the great pleasure of carrying out sustained exchanges with Debbie Durham, especially on the subject of funerals, about which we have co-authored an article published in the Journal of Southern African Studies. Dick Werbner has been an inspiring mentor and a key interlocutor on subjects ranging from civility to housing to religious movements. Julie Livingston has been a close colleague and friend since our days spent learning Setswana together. Julie and I have been engaged in a long conversation with one another, and she has been an exemplary reader. Le ka moso!

I began studying the Setswana language in 1991, in a one-year course taught by Julie Croston and Sheila Mmusi at Boston University, and continued in Baltimore during 1994–96 with Mercy Bothojwame Conlon. All my language teachers have my deepest appreciation.

More formal thanks are due to my funders. My initial Setswana language training was funded by a Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowship from the U.S. Department of Education. I carried out preliminary research in Gaborone in 1993 with a grant from the Global Institute in Culture, Power, and History and the Department of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University. My fieldwork during 1997–98 was supported by grants from the Joint Committee on Africa of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies, with funds provided by the Rockefeller Foundation; and from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation provided a dissertation writing fellowship in 1999. I carried out this research with the kind permission of the Botswana Government, Office of the President.

Unfortunately, I cannot thank the people with whom I lived in Botswana by their actual names. Nothing one writes is commensurate with the debts one incurs during fieldwork. All the same, they will be pleased to know that I have come to understand the importance of putting love into words.

My wife, Laura Rusche, a molecular biologist, and I have shared every stage of this project, including the fieldwork. I will refrain from enumerating the qualities she has brought to bear, except one—extraordinary patience. To Laura and our sons Adam and Nathan, thanks for everything.

NOTE ON PRONUNCIATION

AND ORTHOGRAPHY

I have adapted the following rough guide to Setswana pronunciation from Suggs 2002:xvii.

VOWELS

a—resembles the short o in English, as in pot

e – denotes both the high tone resembling the long a in the English late, and the low tone resembling the short e in the English met

i – resembles the long e in English, as in feel

o—resembles the long o in English, as in pole

u – resembles the long u in English, as in flute

CONSONANTS

g – resembles the ch in the Scottish loch

kg – resembles the Setswana g consonant, but has a rougher aspiration made by the preceding k sound

mm – resembles the m in English, but held for a longer duration

ng – resembles the ng in the English word thing

nn – resembles the n in English, but held for a longer duration

rr – resembles the rolled r in Spanish, but held for a longer duration

th – resembles the English t, but aspirated

tl – an explosive alveolar consonant, made by bringing the tongue against the teeth at the sides of the mouth

tlh – resembles the Setswana tl, but aspirated

tsh – resembles the English ts, as in pets, but aspirated

The following are approximate pronunciations of some words that appear commonly in the text:

Baitshepi—ba-ee-TSE-pee

Gaborone—kha-bo-RO-nay

Maipelo—ma-ee-PEH-lo

Readers familiar with Setswana will notice that in most instances I have transcribed hymns printed in the Sesotho (South Sotho) hymnbook Lifela tsa Sione according to standard Setswana rather than Sesotho orthography. For instance, I write Se mphete wena yo o rategang (Do not bypass me, beloved one) instead of Se mphete uen’a ratehang. In so doing, I have followed the example of Baitshepi members, who transcribe these hymns in this fashion themselves. On the other hand, I have conserved Sesotho orthography when it seems clear to me that church members are code-switching, for instance, when they say Ho lokile! (It is all right!) rather than the Setswana equivalent Go siame!

I use conventional anthropological shorthand for kinship relations: M = mother, F = father, S = son, D = daughter, B = brother, Z = sister, y = younger, o = older.

INTRODUCTION

Moral Passion in Suffering

and Faith

A GIRL NAMED ONE TSHUKUDU had been living well, as they say in Botswana. I had all the good things in life, she told a reporter from a local newspaper in 1998.¹ An only child, One (pronounced OH-nay) had loving parents and a caring aunt, who stayed with the family in the village of Kanye. Then in 1995, when One was ten years old, her father died, followed two months later by her mother. When I came back from school, I saw my mother in bed. I tried to wake her up but she could not answer. My aunt came over, took a look at her before we took her to the hospital where she was certified dead. After a few months, it became clear that the love that my aunt once had for me was dead. She scolded me at every opportunity. Whatever was demanded at school, no one was there to help me. So when she told me to quit school and look for a job, I had no choice. One’s aunt’s love for her had likely diminished because the aunt had children of her own to support and resented the drain on her resources. One began a period of moving from one house to another, looking for a job and a roof over her head. She worked as a housemaid for uncertain wages, surviving on handouts from her employers. When she tried to return to her aunt, she showed no signs of ever knowing me. She said I should go and try somewhere else. She stressed that I could not stay in the house because she wanted to rent it.

While working in the village of Molepolole in a job for which she received less than her promised wages, One visited the Family of God Church and related her story to Pastor Keolopile Keipegetse. The pastor made an agreement with One’s aunt that he would take the girl and bring her to the church’s house where the church could take care of her. One is quoted as saying, I am once again living a happy life, thanks to the moral and material support the church is giving me.

Not all orphans in Botswana have suffered from a lack of love, as the experiences of a girl named Keletso suggest. On the day her mother was buried in December 1997, when Keletso was eleven years old, some of her father’s kinswomen who attend a local church tied a blue string around her neck to show that her parent had passed away. Some say that the string—along with other measures such as cutting the hair, and smearing the legs and arms with Vaseline—helps a bereaved person give up, so that she will not think too much about the death of her parent. If you do not give up, you may begin to speak with your heart, a dangerous and sometimes fatal condition of depression. In addition, your sorrows may lead you to wonder who is responsible for causing the death of your parent, child, or other kin, and cease to love that person. When a teenage child goes about smiling at the funeral of a parent, older adults may comment approvingly, She’s given up, since she is showing that she is not thinking too much. Although Keletso is an orphan, her circumstances were not as difficult as One’s because she was able to retain the love of her immediate kin and to remain at home with them.

This book describes efforts made by members of a healing church based in a high-density urban neighborhood of Gaborone, the capital of the Republic of Botswana, to sustain love in the context of the widespread illness and death brought about by the catastrophic AIDS pandemic. I do not know whether One’s parents and Keletso’s mother died of AIDS. It is clear, however, that AIDS caused tremendous numbers of deaths in Botswana during the late 1990s. UNAIDS estimates that out of a total national population of 1.6 million, about 24,000 adults and children died of HIV/AIDS in the single year 1999, while 35.8 percent of all persons between the ages of 15 and 50 were infected with HIV.² The introduction of government programs in 2002 to make antiretroviral medications available to all adults has altered the implications of receiving an HIV-positive diagnosis, but has unfortunately not put an end to the large-scale mortality associated with the disease. For many people in Botswana, the wide range of problems that AIDS poses—how to provide for the sick and for survivors, how to treat the ill, how to conduct sexual relations, how to understand and speak about the nature and causes of disease, how to mourn the dead—are problems of love. As far as One was concerned, for instance, her sufferings stemmed not only from the deaths of her parents but from the fact that the love her aunt had once had for her was dead. In tying the blue string around Keletso’s neck, her elder relatives gave her love by showing that they continued to regard her as their child. In both cases, members of local churches saw it as their duty to ensure that love would be sustained. One of my aims in this study is to understand how Christian religious commitments to love in contemporary Botswana shape the ways in which people care for one another at a time of widespread sickness and death. I begin, therefore, with an account of the meanings and usages of love and related concepts in the Setswana language. (Setswana is the majority language in Botswana, and also denotes Tswana culture or tradition. Batswana are the majority ethnic group in Botswana. The term Batswana is also commonly used in reference to all citizens of Botswana regardless of ethnicity.)

LOVE AND JEALOUSY, CARE AND SCORN

In Setswana usage, love (lerato) is action and sentiment directed toward enhancing the well-being of other people. A loving person has compassion and patience (bopelotelele, literally, long-heartedness), bearing with the faults of others so that they too will feel love (go utlwa lerato) for one another. Many Batswana speak of God (Modimo) and of Jesus as sources of love, whether or not they are in the habit of attending a church. I once asked a woman who attended church intermittently what she thought God was. She replied, If I ask you for money and you give it to me out of love, you are God. Describing a very similar concept of love (orusuvero) among the Herero ethnic minority in Botswana, Deborah Durham points out that love and related sentiments operate across bodily space; they work in the heart of one person and in the bodies of others (2002:159, typo corrected). For example, when people are sick, they depend on the love of caregivers, who hear their complaints with patience, devote scarce resources to them, and say prayers for their recovery. Prayers and hymns communicate love from the bodies of the well to the bodies of the ill, who say that the loving sentiments in other people’s hearts (dipelo) cool them down (go fodisa) while they are lying wrapped in blankets that dry them out (mo diphateng tse di tšhesang)—a conventional Setswana phrase describing the position and posture of the sick. Love is something people do as well as feel, since it involves communicating what is in one’s own heart and body to those of others.

Care (tlhokomelo) is closely linked to love but is more focused on material provision. Sending a portion of one’s cash wages to other family members and giving them gifts are acts of care. A young woman spending the day at home with her infant daughter insisted to me, I’m not taking care of my baby. It’s my mother who is taking care of both of us, because she is working for a wage. Dependents may care for the well-being of their providers as well, through various forms of work. I’m taking care of my older brother’s car, said a school-age girl scrubbing the new vehicle of a cousin (MMyZS) on whom she was dependent.³ She spoke of him as her older brother, rather than in terms of the more distant relation of parallel cousin, in light of having taken notice of his needs, and acting and feeling so as to provide for him with her caring labor.

While care is an act of provision, it is often discussed in relation to feeling, and vice versa. Relatives often comment on one another’s care by speaking about their feelings as well as their deeds. For instance, a middle-aged woman who depends on the earnings of her husband told me that it is possible to care for people without loving them, and to love them without caring for them. "If someone gives you money to buy food, but does so in a contemptuous way, you will be cared for but not loved. On the other hand, you can give people love [go fa batho lerato] in many ways other than giving them money. Another woman whose unpredictable income derives from selling second-hand clothes told me, My brother has compassion on [go tlhomogela pelo, literally, plucks out his heart for] me and my children," meaning that he cares for her by giving her cash. This person spoke of care as a matter of compassionate feeling as much as of material provision.

Scorn (go sotla), the opposite of care, is likewise both an act and a manner of feeling. Scorn connotes contempt, as in common English usage, and also refusal to recognize legitimate needs. The complaint We are being scorned! (Re a sotlega!) is a very common one. A father may rebuke a child for not bringing food he has asked for by telling her I am being scorned, shaming the child by implying that she is refusing (go gana) her parent’s requests rather than obeying or hearing (go utlwa) them. Hospital staff are often said to scorn their patients when they speak rudely and impatiently to them, refusing to acknowledge their wishes. In general terms, talk about being scorned personalizes relations that contribute to material want and physical illness. Scorn injures the body. One of the most frequently used Setswana terms for suffering, tshotlego, literally means being scorned, so that a common way of saying we are poor is we are being scorned. When complaining about someone’s scorn, people are apt to say, He does not know God.

The antithesis of love is lefufa, a term that Setswana speakers usually render in English as jealousy. Jealousy connotes not only envy of other people’s possessions, but a predisposition to resent slights on the part of those who should show care and love. It makes people resentful, selfish, and yellow-hearted (pelotshetla), rather than long-hearted and patient with others, or white-hearted (pelotshweu) and kind. Because the consequences are extremely disruptive, the propensity to jealousy is felt to be a great evil. Jealous people are well known to kill others through witchcraft (boloi). Furthermore, jealousy tends to be self-reinforcing. I’ve seen that jealous people don’t live well, one church leader told me, because their demands and resentments drive others physically away, so that they live with few people to care for them and consequently become poor. In their more cynical moods, people may quote the proverb Jealousy is cooked together with the voice; when the voice emerges, jealousy remains behind. That is, once jealous words are spoken, the speaker remains jealous; there is no way, people say dismissively, to take jealousy out of a person. Jealousy is an ever-present threat to both bodies and relationships.

"Jealousy brings dikgaba on a person" is a common saying. The term dikgaba often refers specifically to illnesses, usually of small children, brought on by the sorrow or anger of an elder or ancestor (Schapera 1934; Lambek and Solway 2001). The implication of the saying is that a jealous person acts in ways that cause pain to others, thereby angering her ancestors, who deny her protection against misfortunes and may permit the death of her child. I found that people also sometimes held comparatively young parents responsible for the sicknesses and deaths of children by dikgaba. Usually those who attributed an illness to dikgaba would blame parents for feeling resentment. For instance, a woman might attribute her spouse’s death to her mother-in-law’s anger over the man’s unwillingness to support his parent with his wages. Alternatively, parents may be blamed for feeling shame; for example, a mother might say that her infant’s illness was caused by the embarrassment her spouse felt over not giving the mother and baby food or diapers. Dikgaba indexes a complex field of blame, shame, and justifiable or unjustifiable wrath, all of which are likely consequences of jealousy.

A key point about these sentiments is their relationality. A person’s care, love, scorn, and jealousy all influence the physical well-being of others by communicating the quality of his or her heart (pelo). Thus, care and love enhance people’s potential over the long term, while scorn and jealousy curtail it. Love and care for others ideally enable them to prosper, bear and beget children, build houses, grow fat, overcome illness, and accumulate wealth. Scorn and jealousy, on the other hand, reduce people to material want, make them sick, diminish their capacity to provide for their children, and eventually kill them.

Furthermore, one’s sentiments are not entirely one’s own; they are shaped by those of others, and influence them in turn. Thus, the love given (go fiwa) by a person may evoke love on the part of those who receive (go amogela), see (go bona), or hear or feel (go utlwa) it. This vocabulary—of giving and receiving, of making visible and audible, and of purposeful hearing—underscores the performative nature of these sentiments. A person is said to have love (go na le lerato) because of what he or she does in order to enhance the well-being of others—giving, building, feeding, dressing, washing, nursing. By the same token, such actions are evaluated in terms of what they indicate about the love or jealousy in the hearts of those who perform them. When speaking about the importance of prayer, hymn singing, and other forms of religious commitment, church members in Botswana commonly insist that faith (tumelo) in God helps to foster love in oneself and in other people. Regardless of their religious commitment, Batswana routinely confront questions of who has loved, cared for, scorned, or been jealous of whom in determining how to provide for family members with acute or debilitating illnesses, how to look after survivors, and how to mourn the dead.

In the remainder of this introduction, I consider why suffering and care tend to be conceived in such personalized, as distinct from normalized, terms within the popular imagination in Botswana today, and why guiding one’s own and others’ sentiments and conduct toward love may be understood as a matter of urgency, indeed as a ground of religious faith. According to T. O. Beidelman, conceiving how the ways one’s life and society have led to what one is is an act of moral imagination, which may contribute to a kind of empathy or sympathy built up under the assumption that others are of like mind and experience, or alternatively to a self-poisoning of the mind that makes others seem monstrous, evil, [or] alien (1993 [1986]: 9). Following Beidelman, I suggest that moral passion may be construed as the efforts people make to shape their own and others’ moral imaginations; in other words, as the work they devote to molding one another’s sense of decency, danger, culpability, interdependence, estrangement, fear, or love.⁴

In June 1993, following my first year of graduate school in anthropology, I arrived for a short period of research in Old Naledi, a community of about 30,000 people that began during the 1960s as a squatter settlement on the outskirts of Gaborone. I intended to explore marriage practices in the context of government housing policies aimed at defining legitimate access to resources among kin. At a certain point, I fell in with a young woman who was going to visit a friend staying in a compound where a hand-painted metal sign placed above the hedge and wire fence lining the yard read Baitshepi Apostolic Church (not its actual name).⁵ At the time, I was feeling lonely and frustrated by conducting interviews at random, and I wanted to find a place where I could be more of a participant. I therefore returned the next day and asked the bishop, MmaMaipelo,⁶ for a room in her compound where I could stay for a few weeks. Fortunately, there was a vacant room. In return, I purchased food at a local supermarket for church members living in the yard. Over the course of brief return visits in 1995, 2000, 2005, 2006, and an extended period of research during 1997–98 (twenty-five months in total), church leaders have welcomed me and my wife, Laura Rusche, with great enthusiasm to their services, and graciously put up with my impertinent questions while I struggled to understand in Setswana what they were teaching me about the word of God. They welcomed me to make audio recordings of their services, and often played copies of these recordings for themselves. However, I was never allowed to take photographs or make videos of services, because they were troubled by the thought of my standing behind a camera while others prayed. Realizing moreover that I was writing about the stigmatizing disease of AIDS, they have asked me to preserve their privacy by refraining from publishing photographs of members and from using their real names or the real name of the church. Over the years, I have sent Baitshepi leaders what I have written about their church, and have benefited from their advice—mainly, that I should say as much as possible about love. After I sent them the dissertation (2002) upon which this book is based, they let me know, in the nicest possible way, that I should say more about God as well.

This book explores the moral terrain of love, jealousy, care, and scorn from the specific vantage point of close involvement with a senior woman, MmaMaipelo, who aimed to extend maternal love to members of her church so that they would give love in turn. This approach has set Baitshepi apart from churches in which more stress is placed on protection against occult attack and the dangers of pollution (see R. Werbner 2008). Yet Baitshepi shares with other churches of the spirit (dikereke tsa semoya) an appeal based on bringing participants’ sentiments to bear on one another’s bodies in ways that enhance well-being. Many people, especially women, attend multiple churches over the course of their lives in efforts to find healing. Beyond healing bodily ailments, churches provide essential support networks for the poor in times of emergency, for instance through burial assistance. Church leaders receive gifts from better-off followers and give material support to those in need on an informal basis. Churches may also provide followers with places to stay when they have disagreements with their relatives, as in One Tshukudu’s case. More broadly, people speak of prayer as an important way of helping one another, since verbal requests made to Jesus place church members under divine shelter (pabalelo) and enable them to receive blessings (ditshegofatso). Finally, church leaders preside at all funerals, which demand that everyone connected to the deceased show love in a public forum. Church leaders’ actions and speech at funerals, and their efforts to treat the bereaved, may thus affect the sentiments of a wide range of people.

Members of Baitshepi see providing love as the core of their mission of healing and moral renewal. They build up (go agela) one another’s love principally by means of their voices, relying on prayers—words of love—to heal their afflictions. Thus, Bishop MmaMaipelo first preached to me about God by telling me of the power of the voice. The act of preaching the word of God, MmaMaipelo told me, physically attracts people whose love makes them willing to hear it. For many Baitshepi members, hearing the word is a matter of becoming spiritual children of MmaMaipelo, whom they call their spiritual parent. Baitshepi leaders commonly contrast such spiritual kinship to fleshly relations, epitomized by unreliable kin who have scorned them in times of suffering. Thus, hearing the word of God gives rise to sentiments of love and care and to new forms of relatedness. Drawing followers from multiple places of origin in the Tswana-dominated southeastern part of the country, and in a few instances from further afield, Baitshepi brings together persons who would otherwise be strangers in the multi-ethnic city of Gaborone.

During one of my first visits with MmaMaipelo, I was challenged to produce a difficult Bible passage for her to explain. I chose John 18:37–38: Jesus answered . . . ‘Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice.’ Pilate said to him, ‘What is truth?’ ⁷ I confess that I read this passage aloud with some smugness, for with my bourgeois-academic, agnostic Jewish background, I had always considered Pilate’s question unanswerable.

MmaMaipelo exclaimed, "The truth, Kagiso!⁸ The truth is love!"

The immediate lesson I drew from this exchange was that I could not hope to hear the voices of others if I made no attempt to love, but instead maintained an attitude of flippancy or sanctimoniousness made possible by my own privilege. Hence I made an effort, with uncertain success, to allow myself to be converted to Apostolic Christianity. I took an active part in church services and other activities, was given a church uniform, and eventually found that I was able to sing and preach in the spirit. (Dancing, however, was always beyond me.) For their part, Baitshepi leaders soon became aware of my secular humanism (although they did not have a term for it) and realized that I did not, and perhaps could not, fully share their convictions. Yet instead of expelling Laura and me from the church, they continued to welcome us despite our differences.

Susan Harding shows that her own fieldwork in a fundamental Baptist community in rural Virginia brought her close to conversion because she made a point of listening with an open mind to stories about conversion. She suggests that anything that makes you more likely to listen, including the work of ethnography, is . . . what makes you susceptible to conversion. You do not believe in the sense of public declarations, but you gradually come to respond to, and interpret, and act in the world as if you were a believer (Harding 2000:57–58). Something akin to Harding’s experience happened to me. Over the course of my involvement in Baitshepi, I became aware that my acts of asking, giving, listening, and preaching had involved me in relations of care, love, and spiritual kinship with the church network, and that these relations crucially shaped the academic project in which I was engaged.

MmaMaipelo and other Baitshepi leaders very much wanted me to believe in God and to agree with their teachings about the spirit (dithuto tsa semoya), but I think that my love was, and remains, even more important to them. Why do you think you came to Botswana? MmaMaipelo asked me early in our acquaintance. Because people here loved you and called you here before they even knew you. Perhaps she was right, in the sense that what I did during my fieldwork may not have been entirely of my own choosing. Church members perceived my eagerness to spend time with them not only as an indication of my love for them but as reflecting how their own love had so influenced my sentiments and actions as to make me into a spiritual child of the church. Given that for Baitshepi members, love has implied visiting MmaMaipelo regularly and devoting much time to church, my ethnographic pursuits of uncritical listening and prolonged hanging out were very much akin to their own acts of love.

In other words, my love consisted of what I did as much as of what I felt. For this reason, it is possible to consider love as method, in the sense that my actions and sentiments shaped my views on what constituted the objects of my study. Specifically, the Baitshepi Church came to be a primary lens through which I saw issues of care and faith, simply by virtue of the fact that I spent so much of my time there. As a result, my approach is more contextual than properly comparative or historical, and the thematic trajectory of this book is driven more by love than by AIDS. My aim is not to argue that Baitshepi’s arrangements are necessarily typical. In some respects, its arrangements are not typical even of other churches of the spirit in the area, for instance in its leaders’ opposition to divination. Rather, my principal aim is to specify the particularity of Baitshepi Church members’ own methods of loving, so as to grasp the broader processes and practices whereby love has become a subject of moral passion in contemporary Botswana.

My experiences in Baitshepi often provided a point of departure for my efforts to understand broader phenomena. The questions I asked within and outside of church contexts were often driven by concerns that MmaMaipelo had raised with me and by my observations of various church members’ involvement in caring for one another. For instance, I visited and conducted interviews with members of about ten other Apostolic churches on divination, healing, spiritual kinship, and song, topics whose importance had been suggested to me by Baitshepi members—although as a member of Baitshepi myself, I was an outsider to these churches and could not establish an equivalent footing of familiarity. I became acquainted as well with a senior woman herbalist in the peri-urban village of Tlokweng who had no connection to Baitshepi, and with the ways in which she and members of her extended family confronted problems of sickness and death. These encounters helped me to understand the particularity of Baitshepi members’ approaches.

I was acquainted with MmaMaipelo’s neighbors in Old Naledi, and with her relatives living in the city or elsewhere in southeastern Botswana. These are people with long-standing relationships, friendly, neutral, or hostile, toward MmaMaipelo and her church. I attended far too many funerals. In addition, I carried out a more formal survey in Old Naledi of about twenty-five compounds located near Baitshepi. The survey focused on the names and ages of residents, their marital status, living arrangements in particular yards, sources of income, payment of school expenses, church affiliations, memberships in burial societies, and experiences with illness and death. I designed this survey on the basis of concerns raised by Baitshepi members over who loves and cares for whom, and through what means. In particular, certain explicit church teachings involving the body as a house for the spirit encouraged me to pursue my original research interests in housing and care.

Finally, I involved myself intermittently with a number of nongovernmental organizations devoted to AIDS prevention and care. These included an organization, sponsored at the outset by Mennonite Ministries and subsequently by the Methodist Church, that trains members of local churches to work as HIV/AIDS counselors in medical clinics. My conversations with members of this and other organizations helped me to understand how shifts in the nature of the epidemic, in particular those brought about by the introduction of antiretroviral medications, have shaped the predicaments of people with HIV/AIDS. In turn, my involvement with these organizations helped me grasp the particularity of MmaMaipelo’s approach to AIDS prevention and care. There were few orphan care centers operating in the country during the period of my extended fieldwork in 1997–98, although there was a great expansion soon afterward. The forthcoming work of Bianca Dahl will explore how staff and children negotiate understandings of kinship within orphan care centers in Botswana.

Although they possess forms of hierarchy and exclusion, churches of the spirit like Baitshepi are decidedly not what João Biehl calls zones of social abandonment, where voice can no longer become action (2005:11). On the contrary, these churches’ practices consist largely of efforts to make people’s voices act upon the sentiments and bodies of others. Church members do not necessarily gauge the success of such efforts in terms of health outcomes, for even death does not always signify the failure of love. From the perspective of those committed to fostering love by means of the praying voice, it would seem to pose a false political choice to insist that the only alternative to indifference about other people’s suffering consists of putting into words pain, outrage, or estrangement. Rather than deeming church members’ efforts to put love into words as evidence of a blunted moral consciousness within a culture of inequality (Nguyen and Peschard 2003:463), I argue that such efforts are rooted in a broader politics of care in Botswana. Social inequalities in Botswana have been experienced mainly in terms of their impact on gendered and intergenerational relationships within domestic spaces, and as a result, the healing of such relationships has emerged as a locally compelling political concern.

ROADMAPS TO DECENCY

Baitshepi Church members have cultivated a language and a practice of articulating love at times of sickness and death, and they have coached me—and more important, of course, one another—to regard such speech and action as imperative. As have many other Batswana, these church members have in recent years faced enormous difficulties in caring for the ill, for survivors, and for the bereaved. Even before the advent of AIDS in Botswana, experiences of caregiving within families and churches focused people’s attention on the impact of their sentiments on one another’s well-being. For Batswana, the issue of whether particular people love, scorn, care for, or are jealous of each other has long been at issue during tasks of providing for the sick, the elderly, and the disabled—to a greater extent, often, than have the specific health outcomes by which epidemiological trends are assessed in humanitarian discourses. Many scholars and activists, as well as caregivers in other societies, have understood moral speech and action in relation to AIDS as consisting of making claims to equitable health care by telling critical truths about the impact of inequalities on people’s bodies. Yet members of churches of the spirit in Botswana have not tended to feel the same kinds of imperatives to engage in critical truth telling. Here I wish to explain the appeal of a discourse within which it may be deemed more socially necessary, at times of suffering and death, to put love into words than to put pain into words.

What counts as morally acceptable speech and action in relation to AIDS? Critical epidemiology, Dr. Jim Yong Kim told the journalist Tracy Kidder (2003:244), provides a road map to decency by defining morally appropriate ways of speaking and writing about the causes of infectious disease, as well as morally appropriate action. Expanding and reframing humanitarian agendas, Paul Farmer (1999) makes the point that infectious disease epidemics have sources in social inequalities, and that doctors, policymakers, and others in a position to alter the conditions under which people remain healthy or get sick must rectify the consequences of those inequalities. Valuing all human lives equally, in moral and conceptual as well as financial terms, is a precondition for providing decent medical care and public health infrastructure to the world’s poor (Kim et al., eds., 2000). In the absence of a redistributive ethos and, most important, pragmatic commitments to care, public health and other humanitarian efforts are likely to be dominated by much more exclusionary and instrumentalist notions of entitlement and of decent behavior.

For instance, the privileges enjoyed by sanitary citizens may be regarded as consequences of their decent willingness to maintain their own health, so that the deaths of unsanitary subjects in cholera and other epidemics may be attributed to the backwardness of their culture rather than to social inequalities (Briggs with Mantini-Briggs 2003). Within neoliberal conceptions of the social contract, those deemed incapable of making decently productive contributions to the marketplace may be relegated to the category Biehl (2005) terms ex-human. Writing of conditions in a Brazilian asylum, Biehl argues that socially abandoned people’s efforts to constitute their lives vis-à-vis institutions meant to confirm and advance humanness were deemed good for nothing . . . their supposed inhumanness played an important role in justifying abandonment (2005:52). Along with aid workers in Médècins sans frontières, Peter Redfield (2005) worries that medical humanitarian efforts may have the unintended consequence of keeping standards of decency in the treatment of war refugees at the level necessary for sustaining bare life (Agamben 1998). But at this moment, Redfield asks in light of the anti-humanitarian ideologies in global ascendancy today, what else can we do? (2005:347).

Much depends, of course, on who is meant by we. That is to say, researchers, health workers, and activists concerned with AIDS prevention and care are increasingly recognizing how people affected by the epidemic have their own roadmaps to decency that shape how they speak about the sources of affliction, do or do not try to protect one another from disease, care