University of Botswana History Department

A Nation without a past is a lost nation
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In brief: Sir Seretse Khama did not say, as is often stated, that "A nation without a culture is a lost nation". What he actually said was "a nation without a past is a lost nation, and a people without a past is a people without a soul" - referring specifically to the need to recover and write African history.(1)

Sir Seretse Khama, Botswana's first President, made a call in 1970 for Africans to discover and write their own history, thus overcoming the racist insistence that the past of Africa was a worthless blank, waiting for Europeans. A key passage was "a nation without a past is a lost nation, and a people without a past is a people without a soul." Botswana's historians and archaeologists, and other scholars who study the past, have always held these words in great honour as a statement of their objectives.

However, these words are frequently misquoted. In particular, the quotation has been hi-jacked by a more general process noted by Prof. Neil Parsons in a 2006 article, (2) by which interest in history has shifted to emphasis on "culture". Prof. Parsons writes:

As in other African countries, the idea of regaining our history was immensely popular in Botswana during the 1960s and 1970s, but has declined and been replaced by rhetoric about culture and heritage.(3)

Comparing a 1925 Setswana dictionary and a 1993 one, he shows how dingwao has shifted sense from "histories" to "cultures".(4) He continues:

Hence President Seretse Khama's famous statement of 1970, "We should write our own history books ... because ... a nation without a past is a lost nation, and a people without a past is a people without a soul", is today conventionally rendered in official pronouncements without any reference to history as "A nation without a culture is a nation without a soul".(5)

Such a declaration recently appeared on screen, on BTV.

There would be no problem in using such a declaration as a statement inspired by Sir Seretse Khama, or to regard the phraseology as proverbial though originating in his speech. But what is remarkable is that this altered form is described as being what Sir Seretse Khama said, which it is not. This transformation is an interesting example of how oral tradition can modify what is transmitted according to the changing assumptions of society.

Of course, none of this means that the promotion of culture is not important too. It would be intersting to see if Seretse Khama raised the issue of preserving culture in some other speech.

The text:

We were taught, sometimes in a very positive way, to despise ourselves and our ways of life. We were made to believe that we had no past to speak of, no history to boast of. The past, so far as we were concerned, was just a blank and nothing more. Only the present mattered and we had very little control over it. It seemed we were in for a definite period of foreign tutelage, without any hope of our ever again becoming our own masters. The end result of all this was that our self-pride and our self-confidence were badly undermined.

It should now be our intention to try to retrieve what we can of our past. We should write our own history books to prove that we did have a past, and that it was a past that was just as worth writing and learning about as any other. We must do this for the simple reason that a nation without a past is a lost nation, and a people without a past is a people without a soul.

(Sir Seretse Khama, speech of Chancellor at University of Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland graduation ceremony, 15 May 1970; Botswana Daily News, 19 May 1970, supplement.(6))

Notes:

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Last updated 31 May 2008. [PAGE ENDS]