Khumisho Moguerane, Morafe: Person, Family and Nation in Colonial Bechuanaland, 1880s-1950s

Khumisho Moguerane, Morafe: Person, Family and Nation in Colonial Bechuanaland, 1880s-1950s (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2024), 469 pp, ISBN 978-1-4314-3277-6 Morafe: Person, Family and Nation in Colonial Bechuanaland, 1880s-1950s is a story of people living along the Molopo River and what we now know as the Botswana-South Africa border, but at a time when racial, political and national identities were much less fixed than they would come to be in the latter 20th century. Moguerane offers a biography of a family - the Molemas - which includes not just those biologically related but also those who the Molemas incorporated into their household as kin, such as Sol Plaatje. In Tribing and Untribing the Archive (2016), Mbongiseni Buthelezi argues that given the problematic history of terms like tribe, 'we need new names too' for the political formations that people in southern Africa are ascribed to.1 In Morafe, Moguerane painstakingly parses the Molemas' archive to give us new names for several concepts at the heart of South African political histories, presents and futures. She argues that the Molemas played a significant role in making and remaking categories and practices around personhood, family and nation in southern Africa between 1880 and 1950.