In its heyday, Setswana was a language of record – it was used everywhere: in the dikgotla (traditional open courts), in the Government administration and as a medium of instruction in the schools. In one of those ironies of development, the colonial administration required its officers to have a working knowledge of Setswana before they could be posted overseas or even get promoted!
Such gestures were reversed in the period after Independence. Government has not invested in the national language, despite recognising it as the lingua franca and a vehicle of communication to the vast majority of the populace. If nothing is done to address this neglect now, the language would gradually die a natural death.
It gives me some comfort that interest in the language amongst its speakers has not waned. The Mokgósi newspaper, which was launched two-and-half-years ago, is living testimony to this commitment.
Major prizes
Started on a shoestring budget and freelance staff in 2002, Mokgósi won three major prizes six months into its launch. Its pioneering work was recently acknowledged by MISA when it awarded the writer, a founding member of the group and the paper’s project manager, the regional Press Freedom Award.
Mokgósi is owned by a consortium of 43 shareholders. They are drawn from all walks of life. They are motivated by one thing: the desire to rekindle their language with a view to ensuring that Setswana becomes part and parcel of the national development agenda. They all wish to see Setswana taking its rightful place among the polity of world languages: a modern language that is used to economically empower the population and foster participatory democracy.
Language is about knowledge. It is through language that a people expresses all that it knows about its culture, education, politics, medicine, science, philosophy, magic, plants, animals and the universe. Oral tradition is a great source of information for any society. Most of the older generation in Botswana are dying, and with them their knowledge.
It is important therefore, that the spoken word must be collected and a corpus for the language built and stored in written format. From that we can construct dictionaries and grow the technical capacity of the language. A newspaper like Mokgósi can be indispensable in facilitating such a process.
Competing
It is of course all too easy to talk about popularising a language through the media. After everything is said and done, the reality is that Mokgósi competes for readers and advertising with other titles, both national and international, that grace our newspaper stands. Where the policy environment to support a national language is non-existent like in Botswana, the task of penetrating the market becomes more onerous. That task becomes doubly difficult where the government of the day is paranoid about the emergence of a powerful indigenous press and wants to see it fail.
Traditionally, newspapers in small population economies like Botswana’s subsist on advertising. In Mokgósi’s case, advertising constitutes 98% of the paper’s revenue. During the first year, 90% of that figure was from establishment advertising alone. Since the Government decided to commercialise its free distribution Daily News earlier this year, we have seen the paper’s advertising revenue from Government plummet by as much as 40%.
Cog in a wheel
The hard reality is that a small newspaper like Mokgósi can neither compete adequately in the market with its limited circulation and low levels of capitalisation nor can it attract experienced personnel to compete with the more established titles in the short to medium term.
Failure is of course never an option. What needs to be done is to come up with a comprehensive strategy that will force the language question on the table at the national level. A national champion for the language, collaborating with but not associated to Government, needs to be set up.
Mokgósi’s role should be that of a cog in a wheel; a catalyst that facilitates change but itself remains true to its mission: a newspaper that publishes in Setswana to further press freedom.
To survive, the paper must continuously re-invent itself in terms of its brand of journalese and appearance. It will have to draw on the critical mass of its 43 shareholders to penetrate the market in a short period of time. It will have to re-write the newspaper business manual by demonstrating that it is possible to penetrate a small market of readers through subscription sales as opposed to advertising. For the strategy to succeed, each and everyone of the shareholders would have to play their share in promoting the paper’s sales in one way or the other.
Methaetsile Leepile is a director of Mokgósi and the newspaper’s project manager. Mokgósi is the first newspaper to publish in Setswana in 50 years.
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