The village of Pella in Moses Kotane municipality in North West is close to my heart. Pella ea Matlhako, 50km from Rustenburg, is a place of firsts. In 1985 during the Census of the Population, Mr Mosome, a schoolteacher in Pella, lost an eye from a scuffle at a shebeen.
I was drawn into the case because it occurred while he was a census taker. Enumerators do a house-to-house count that includes shebeens. As an organisation we were friends of the court (amicus curiae).
For six months, we had to pick up Mosome and drive to Madikwe magistrate’s court where the hearing was in session. Mosome lost the case against the perpetrator, but sadly the accused also lost his job in the Rustenburg mines as an awaiting-trial prisoner whose bail was denied until the hearing, and the verdict was acquittal but into joblessness ― the subject of this column. I had to start the journey of compensating Mosome’s lost eye on duty.
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BopStats issued a cheque of R6,000 as compensation, almost a year and a half of my salary. This is how I was initiated into Pella. But the fire was yet to come.
I triggered it. In 1993 I was so excited about the breakthrough ideas we had achieved in the Bophuthatswana Census of 1991 ― the second census of the homeland. I had paid special attention to Pella ea Matlhako perhaps because of the intimate texture I had with it ― Moses Kotane’s home where the ANC 114th anniversary celebrations are held this weekend.
At Garona Building in Mmabatho, where BopStats was housed, we had taken advantage of the nascent graphic interface the Statistical Analysis Software (SAS) had developed. On the basis of that, we pinpointed the population distribution and its attributes by place name. Pella had several names: Kgosing, Monneng, Tshwaedi, Lediga, Ramasoko, Rasetlang, Motlhabeng, Ramolokwane, Ramomene, Maphusumaneng, Lengeneng, Lekubung and Bashabaerata.
The name that landed me in trouble was Bashabaerata. When you google Bashabaerata you will come across the following: “Basha ba e rata [the youth like it] was a section name in the village, though its official recognition caused some local contention among elders.” The local contention was stirred by me through subplace mapping of population attributes that confirmed that actually Bashabaerata was predominantly youthful. The presentation of the census results to the community and the place name opened a sore case of hidden conflict in the village where elders saw Bashabaerata as a rebellious part of the village.
One question that killed my presentation: “Young man, what is that place? Who named it and how come the government recognises this name?” That was the end of what I had prepared to reveal the beauty of youthfulness and data and the engagement at a village level for planning. Yet there was no offence in talking about Monneng ― “where a man is”.
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