Shekgalagadi of the Tjhauba: A documentation of culture and subsistence in the Okavango

Language	Shekgalagadi
Depositor	Rebecca Everson
Affiliation	University of Rochester
Location	Botswana
Collection ID	0734
Grant ID	SG0739
Funding Body	ELDP
Collection Status	Collection online
Landing Page Handle	http://hdl.handle.net/2196/68419df5-3ca5-4de0-96b2-fcabd9ed26c2

 

Summary of the collection

This collection is a result of a documentation of Tjhauba subsistence strategies, culture, and language, funded by an ELDP Small Grant for the period from June 2023 to June 2024. The project is a collaborative effort between a linguist and a Tjhauba community member, Kamogelo Mokgosi, who is involved in planning topics for recording as well as the transcription and translation of the data. The data in this collection encompasses a wide variety of speech events and genres, such as autobiographical interviews, procedural texts, and conversations between native speakers. Some of the data collected are elicitations to support Rebecca’s Master’s thesis on noun agreement and tone.

 

Group represented

The community represented in this collection are the Tjhauba of Nxamasere, Xhauga, and Shakawe. The language documented here is a variety of Shekgalagadi (ISO xkv), a Sotho-Tswana Bantu language (Guthrie code S311). It is estimated that the Tjhauba separated from other Shekgalagadi-speaking peoples two hundred years ago and migrated to a place called Ditjhauba in the ecologically unique Okavango Delta region of Botswana (Fleisch and Möhlig 2002, Lukusa and Monaka 2008). Today, their lifestyles rely heavily on the ecosystem of the Okavango – they fish for subsistence, gather water lily fruits to eat from the rivers, and rear cattle on the fertile lands. With increasing global temperatures, threats to the ecological system also threaten Tjhauba livelihood and subsistence. The language ecology is also unique in this region, with Bantu and Khoe languages in contact. Due to contact with ||Ani, ||Gana, Shiyeyi, and Thimbukushu, this variety of Shekgalagadi has a small click inventory and many loanwords relating to the environment (Gunnink 2022, Monaka 2013).

 

Language information

Tjhauba (also: Shetjhauba, Bantu S311) is spoken in northwestern Botswana in the Ngamiland District in the Okavango Delta area, namely in Ncamasere, Xhauga and Samochima (Monaka 2017, Gunnink 2022). Tjhauba is traditionally treated as a variety of Kgalagadi (ISO xkv, also: Shekgalagadi, Shekgalagari), though speakers of this variety report that other varieties are almost unintelligible. After Kgalagadi peoples were scattered by warfare around 1800, Tjhauba speakers separated from other Kgalagadi communities and migrated to an environment that is ecologically distinct from their savannah homeland (Lukusa and Monaka 2008). Monaka (p.c.) wrote, “the retention of Proto-forms, both lexical items and sounds (e.g. the retroflex plosive), is indicative of this ancient separation.” Tjhauba now displays approximately 80% lexical variation from Kgalagadi, making it nearly incomprehensible to speakers of other Kgalagadi varieties (Monaka 2017). These differences are especially highlighted in vocabulary relating to the environment. Estimates for speaker numbers of the Tjhauba variety range from 1000 to 2500 (Gunnink 2022, per. comm. Magogo Mokgosi and Kamogelo Mokgosi).

 

Special characteristics

This collection is the product of a collaborative effort between a linguist, Rebecca Everson, and a Tjhauba community member, Kamogelo Blade Mokgosi. Together, Rebecca and Kamogelo planned topics for documentation in the beginning of the project. After some time in the field, other community members started proposing new topics or events. This engagement in the project enabled this corpus to cover a wider variety of topics of value to community members, such as jewelry-making with seeds, foraging for water lily bulbs in the Okavango, and weaving with plastic to help reduce waste in the environment. This also allows the resulting dictionary to include a larger variety of words.

 

Collection contents

This corpus contains over 32 hours of video recordings of events relating to subsistence and culture in Tjhauba villages collected from June to August 2023. 2 hours of video have been transcribed in Shekgalagadi orthography and translated to English, and 1 hour has been annotated in FLEx. The corpus also contains 550 photos of plants, animals, and objects available in the environment. The primary academic output of this project is an English-Setswana-Shetjhauba dictionary with over 700 entries. There will also be orthographic transcriptions, translations, and annotations of a portion of the data.

Topics covered in recordings include:

• Subsistence strategies such as fishing, basket-weaving, wood carving, axe-making, jewelry-making, cattle-rearing, and foraging in the river.
• Cultural events such as the ngwale puberty ritual, traditional instruments and songs, and telling fairytales around a fire.
• Discussions about surviving off of the land and how people are integrated with nature.
• Wordlist elicitations from the SIL comparative African wordlist, local field guides, and photos taken during the project.
• Ethnographic and community history interviews.

 

Collection history

This project is financed by an ELDP Small Grant (SG0739), awarded to Rebecca Everson for the period from June 2023 to June 2024. Rebecca was in the field from June to August 2023, working closely with Kamogelo to create recordings and transcribe, translate, and annotate them. They will continue to work together virtually until the final deposit in June 2024.

 

Other Information

Transcriptions: Transcriptions will primarily be done in Shekgalagadi orthography in order to be readable and usable by Tjhauba community members. The conventions used while transcribing will be determined by Kamogelo, who writes Shekgalagadi. Transcriptions will secondarily be done in IPA by Rebecca.

 

References

Fleisch, Axel & W.J.G. Möhlig. 2002. The Kavango Peoples in the Past. Local Historiographies from Northern Namibia. Köln: Köppe.

Gunnink, Hilde. 2022. A grammar sketch of the Shetjhauba variety of Shekgalagadi. In Studies in African Linguistics Vol. 51 No. 1. 29-55.

Lukusa, Stephen T.M. & Kemmonye C. Monaka. 2008. Shekgalagari grammar: A descriptive analysis of the language and its vocabulary. Cape Town: CASAS.

Monaka, K.C. 2013. A sociolinguistic study of Shekgalagari: issues of survival in the shadow of Setswana. Nawa: journal of language and communication 7(2). 42-53.

Monaka, K.C. 2017. Shekgalagari Language of Botswana. In T. Kamusella and F. Ndhlovu (eds.), The Social and Political History of Southern Africa’s Languages, Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2017, 223-244.

 

Acknowledgement and citation

This project is possible because of support from the University of Rochester, the University of Botswana, ELDP, and most importantly, the Tjhauba community. Thank you to Professor Kemmonye Monaka and Professor Anderson Chebanne at the University of Botswana for their support in the early stages of research and project planning. Thank you to Professor Budzani Gabanamotse-Mogara for her help in obtaining a research permit and facilitating the ongoing research relationship between the project members and the University of Botswana. Thank you to my advisor, Professor Nadine Grimm, for her constant advice and support. Thank you to ELDP for funding this project and training me prior to entering the field. Thank you to Kamogelo Blade Mokgosi for being a passionate project promoter and supporter within the community and making all of this work possible. Finally, thank you to the many Tjhauba participants who contributed their ideas and passion to the project.

To refer to any data from the collection, please cite as follows:
Everson, Rebecca. 2023. Shekgalagadi of the Tjhauba: A documentation of culture and subsistence in the Okavango. Endangered Languages Archive. Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/2196/9022770b-448b-44c2-8179-7a4925f110b7. Accessed on [insert date here].