In the first two pieces of this series, we examined two things: the gap between Botswana’s remarkable legal progress and the daily realities of its LGBTIQ citizens, and the psychology that sits underneath the resistance to queer inclusion; the fear, the fragile masculinity, the religion weaponised against compassion.
But arguments, however well constructed, can keep the reader at a comfortable distance. They can make injustice feel structural. Something that happens to a category of people, rather than to a specific human being who once sat watching Mokaragana in a relative’s living room, quietly learning to make themselves smaller.
So in this piece, I want to do something different. I want to come down from the level of argument entirely and sit with the human cost; the cost that does not appear in court judgments or policy briefs. The cost that accumulates quietly, over years, in the life of a person who has spent their whole existence being told, in a hundred different ways, that who they are is too much, not enough, or simply wrong.
Because this is the part of the conversation Botswana consistently avoids. We debate the law. We debate religion. We debate culture. But we rarely stop long enough to ask: what is this actually doing to people?
We have become very sophisticated at debating queer rights. We have not yet become honest about queer loneliness.
When I was younger and still developing what I jokingly call my ‘rainbow feathers,’ life felt lighter.
I was a size 28 back then; yes, trust me, I truly was once a size 28 and much easier on the eye. Like many young queer people, I was discovering friendship, nightlife, attraction, heartbreak and the particular excitement of finding others like yourself in a world that often made you feel invisible.
And like many young people, we believed we had time.
I remember sitting with friends, watching older queer people move through social spaces quietly and often alone. Some were beautiful. Stylish. Soft-spoken. Mysterious. They carried wisdom in their silence. Yet many of them were single, aging and increasingly disappearing from the social scene year after year.
At the time, we pitied them. We would whisper among ourselves: ‘What happened to them?’ And with all the arrogance and optimism of youth, we would reassure ourselves: ‘This will never be us.’
But life has a painful way of humbling certainty.
As the years passed, many of us slowly began to realise something devastating: those older queer people were not lonely because they had failed at love. Many were lonely because society had failed them. The people we dated in our youth slowly disappeared into heterosexual marriages. Some became fathers and husbands. Some reinvented themselves publicly to survive socially. Some abandoned their queer identities completely in pursuit of safety, acceptance or family approval.
Others simply disappeared.
And every now and then, years later, we would hear whispers: ‘He passed away.’ ‘He died alone.’ ‘No one even knew he was sick.’ ‘No partner. No family nearby.’
The silence around queer loneliness in Botswana is profound. And it begins long before old age. It begins in childhood.
I often say I enjoyed the privilege of never really having to ‘come out.’ There was never some dramatic announcement. Yet even without words, society has always found ways to communicate to queer children that they must be careful.
I remember vividly driving with my grandfather through Gaborone when I was around ten years old. He was the person who introduced me to reading, politics and current affairs. From as young as eight, he would make me read newspaper articles and then discuss them with him afterwards; a discipline I am deeply grateful for to this day.
One day, I was reading a Friday newspaper which had the famous ‘Page 3.’ On that Friday they interview the late veteran broadcaster Mike Oliver, who spoke openly about being gay.
I remember the sudden shame that rushed through my body. Softly and quickly, I folded the newspaper closed before my grandfather could say anything. He had not spoken a single word. He had not condemned anyone. Yet somehow, at ten years old, I already understood that this was something dangerous to be associated with publicly.
That is how deeply social conditioning works. It does not wait for instruction. It simply settles into a child like weather.
I also remember visiting family in Kanye and watching Shanti-Lo performing flamboyantly on Mokaragana, one of Botswana’s most iconic music shows. The fact that Shanti-Lo came from Kanye itself made the discussion among the elders even louder.
‘Naare motho yoo Tumediso o dira eng?’
What exactly is that person doing?
The room filled with discomfort, ridicule and commentary. And quietly, without anyone directly addressing me, I learned another lesson: that whatever I was becoming was something society viewed with suspicion.
So I learned to perform. I learned to monitor my hand movements. I learned to lower my voice in certain spaces. I learned how to restrain softness. I learned how to study masculinity carefully enough to survive it.
These lessons were taught without my parents ever explicitly saying a word to me. And perhaps that is why many queer children become experts at silence long before they become adults. The education happens in living rooms, in combis, in church pews, in the spaces between words.
Nobody sits a queer child down and teaches them to hide. Society does it casually, collectively, and very effectively, without ever announcing that it has begun.
The psychological cost of this conditioning is not abstract. Years of monitoring yourself, editing your gestures, your voice, your reactions in real time produces measurable harm. Chronic anxiety. Depression. A body perpetually braced for threat. And in Botswana, where mental health remains deeply stigmatised and resources are critically under-resourced, most queer people carry this weight alone, without professional support and without language within their communities to even name what they are experiencing.
But I also want to be honest about something more tender than the clinical picture.
One memory still warms me deeply.
Years ago, I attended an IDAHOT event co-organised by BONELA and LEGABIBO at the Main Mall. Months later, an aunt mentioned that someone from church had apparently told my mother they had seen me at the event wearing high heels, a wig and red lipstick.
First of all, let me tell you this for free; this was an absolute lie, mogolo o ne a gogile lethaku motshegare. I have never appeared in that style in my life. I have absolutely nothing against it, but I am very much a jeans and All-Stars kind of person, which ironically confuses people even more.
Apparently even my form of queerness was failing to meet expectations on all sides.
But what stayed with me was my mother’s response. I asked my aunt why my mother had never confronted me about it. And she simply said: ‘Your mother said that was nonsense and that her role was to love you in whichever way you presented yourself.’
We never spoke about that incident directly. Not once. But somehow, in that silence, there was love.
Sometimes love does not announce itself. Sometimes it simply refuses to participate in your diminishment. And that refusal is everything.
I know how rare that kind of love is. I know that for many queer people in Botswana, home is not a place of safety but a place of performance where they must maintain a version of themselves that requires constant, exhausting maintenance. Where sermons at dinner tables are not quite directed at them but are absolutely meant for them. Where they are loved conditionally, accepted as long as they remain invisible enough to be comfortable for everyone else.
And some know something worse: outright rejection. Being told to leave. Being erased from the family narrative as though they had never existed. Being removed from the family WhatsApp group which in contemporary Botswana is its own particular form of social excommunication.
When the people who are supposed to love you without conditions attach conditions, something breaks in a person. Quietly. Not always visibly. But permanently.
Years later, I relocated to Kenya for work. During that period, I was in a long-term relationship with someone who, even today, I still believe may have been the true love of my life, lets call him NM.
My family had seen him around several times, enough to know he was more than just a friend. My mother was critically ill and hospitalised during this period. One day, I received a phone call from him. He said very little before handing the phone to someone else.
It was my mother on the other end.
My family had reached out to him directly, and there he was, beside them during one of the most painful moments of our lives. My heart melted completely.
My parents and extended family loved him deeply. Quietly. Naturally. Completely. We never formally discussed our relationship, but my father would randomly call him just to check on him, or invite him over to collect seshabo at home.
That tenderness remains one of the greatest gifts my family has ever given me. And I hold it knowing that many queer people will never receive anything like it.
Legal rights give people protection. They do not give people belonging. And belonging is what human beings cannot survive without.
Which is perhaps why heartbreak within queer life can feel uniquely isolating. Because when relationships collapse, many queer people are left carrying grief in silence. Who do you turn to when society barely recognises your love to begin with? Which spaces allow queer heartbreak to exist fully and honestly? Even grief itself can feel hidden.
And this is the part of the queer experience that rarely enters our national conversation. Not the politics. Not the litigation. But the loneliness of growing up without ever seeing a queer future reflected back at you. Without seeing elderly queer couples growing old together openly. Without seeing queer families living freely. Without seeing enough evidence that permanence is even possible.
How do you dream about a future you have never witnessed? How do you visualise growing old with your partner when society has consistently told you that your love is temporary, immoral or impossible? For many queer people, survival became easier to imagine than permanence. The horizon shortened, not because of personal failure, but because nobody had ever shown them that a longer view was available.
The current marriage equality case involving two lesbian women feels emotionally significant precisely because of this. Whether people agree with same-sex marriage or not, the case has forced Botswana to confront a question queer people have quietly carried for years: do queer people deserve the right to dream about permanence too? Not just survival. Not just tolerance. Not just existing quietly at the edges of society. But love. Family. Stability. Legacy. Home.
Most queer people are not asking for anything extraordinary. They are asking for what everyone else already has; the right to love openly, age with dignity, and not disappear quietly into loneliness.
I want to be careful, as I close this piece, not to leave you with only the weight. Because that would not be the full truth, and it would not honour the people I am writing about.
The full truth is that queer people in Botswana are among the most resilient, creative and courageously alive people I have encountered across over thirteen years of this work. They have built networks of chosen family where biological family failed them. They have created spaces of laughter, culture and genuine joy in circumstances that offered very little permission to thrive. They have loved fiercely, organised tirelessly and survived conditions that would have broken many people entirely.
That resilience is real and deserves to be named.
But resilience is not a substitute for justice. The fact that queer people have survived extraordinary pressure does not make that pressure acceptable. Celebrating the survival of people who should never have been placed in survival conditions to begin with is a very particular kind of cruelty dressed as admiration.
We do not need to be celebrated for surviving. We need the conditions that make survival necessary to finally change.
As I grow older, I think often about those queer elders we once judged so carelessly in our youth. I think about how much loneliness they carried privately. How much courage it took simply to exist in a society that offered them almost no roadmap for the future. I think perhaps many of them were not failures.
Perhaps they were survivors. Perhaps they were carrying the emotional consequences of a society that denied them the possibility of ordinary love.
Today, I find myself holding onto cautious hope. Hope that younger queer people in Botswana may inherit softer realities. Hope that queer couples may one day stop having to disappear into secrecy to survive. Hope that queer children growing up right now may one day imagine futures bigger than endurance.
And if you are a queer person reading this, perhaps in private, perhaps with the particular mix of recognition and grief that comes from seeing your experience named in public: