Evading Household Indebtedness Through Participation in Group Solidarity Coping Strategies in Contemporary Botswana

Contemporary urban and rural life in Botswana is marked by the pervasiveness of death. This has been exacerbated by the AIDS pandemic. Among other things, death exposes and concretizes stark realities of vulnerability to forms of poverty. Challenged by multiple distressful living conditions, Batswana turn to a range of cooperative endurance strategies. This paper focuses on identifying and analyzing group solidarity coping strategies in the context of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and structural social inequalities in Botswana. Ethnographic methods were used to gather data for this paper in Gaborone, the capital city of Botswana and Ramotswa, a village in the Southeast District. Cultural analysis of ethnographic data suggests that women constitute the majority in these groups and a profile of the groups include burial societies, community based Òwhistle blowersÓ and kin-oriented groupings, impromptu relief task groups, "peopleÕs banks," and consumer or savings-cum credit associations. Although multi-purpose in nature, these groups help members to have direct and predictable access to emergency financial relief that helps them to forestall or evade immediate household indebtedness especially due to escalating costs of funerals. The groups have re-distributional features associated with procurement, management and authority to dispense resources from those who are not in need to those who are. Group solidarity is built on contemporary re-invention of long standing Tswana principles of reciprocity and botho (civility).