Phuthego Phuthego Molosiwa (PhD)

Public Lecture at BUAN, 05 February 2026

On 30th November 1609, Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei turned his telescope toward the moon. To date, the world sees his action as a triumph of pure science—the birth of modern astronomy.

But Galileo didn’t just see craters through a lens; he understood them

because he was trained in the art technique of using light and shadow to create depth on a flat surface.

Without the artist’s eye, he might have dismissed those shadows as mere

blemishes. Instead, he saw mountains. Galileo was a dreamer and doer in one.

Today, there is a common myth in higher education that the academy is divided into two separate islands: one for the “dreamers” in the humanities and one for the “doers” in the labs.

We have constructed boundaries and forced students to choose a side. But the universe is not compartmentalised. Galileo’s breakthrough in astronomy is simultaneously a feat of physics, a challenge for ethics, and a new chapter in the story of the human-universe relationship.

This is our starting point tonight: the realisation that the natural sciences

provide us with the “what,” but the liberal arts provide us with the “how to see.”

Today, we explore why bridging these two worlds isn’t just a luxury of that “Renaissance man,” but a necessity for the modern university.

“Bridging Worlds: The Interface Between the Natural Sciences and Liberal Arts in Higher Education” is a topic that is not only dear to me but critical in the growth of our academic institutions.

I stand before you not as a scientist, but as a historian invited into a science

university. That positionality matters. It mirrors precisely the argument I wish to make tonight: that the most pressing agricultural and environmental challenges of our time cannot be resolved by technical expertise alone. They require historical consciousness.

For this reason, I will be telling you stories. Rest assured, however, that I will limit speaking in the parables of a historian to a minimum, though not easily.

This talk is my story, too.

 It is shaped by my identity as a “marginalised other”, and as an activist scholar working from below; from the perspectives of the communities who, despite serving as the true custodians of our natural resources, are often obscured in national discourse.

My first name, Phuthego Phuthego, is a bridge between generations.

I am named after my grandfather, whose people were forced in the early 1900s to relocate from their original abode at Pepe (near Molaladau), walking over 100km to build a new home at Mogapi, a village named after their leader.

The story of my people is the story of survival, negotiation, resilience and resistance. It builds into the broader story of the Babirwa; a story which Kgosi Malema’s South African lawyer Emmanuel Gluckman in 1922 framed as: “The Tragedy of the Ababirwas.”

This followed the eviction of Malema’s people from the white settler farmer-occupied Tuli Block. Tragedy, we learn from one scholar, is a process of sharing the “capacity to suffer, when suffering offers a communality of meaning”, the corollary of which is the formulation of creative strategies

to survive.

The Babirwa history, like that of many other ethnicities in Botswana, is

inseparable from forced relocations, environmental negotiation, agricultural economies, and land policies. These are not abstract tales of the past. They are agrarian and natural resources histories inscribed in our land and in our memory, and therefore experienced in our present.

These histories remind us that landscapes are not empty spaces waiting for technical intervention. They are lived, remembered, and contested terrains.

They teach us that: Environmental adaptation is as cultural as it is ecological

They teach us that: Production systems shape social identities

They teach us that: Human–environment relations are mediated not only by science, but

by spirituality, memory, and social obligation.

My positionality as a historically underrepresented minoritised subjectivity, and as an activist scholar, has provoked my commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion and social justice.

This is the reason I am so passionate about developing an integrative diversity and inclusion-oriented curriculum to benefit people who have been historically underserved by higher education.

My job tonight is to highlight the synergy of the sciences and the liberal arts so that the sciences (and hopefully STEM careers) become more appealing to groups traditionally underrepresented, and at times actively excluded.

I am going to do so by adopting a historical lens because history is a field that strives to meet the intellectual goals of the liberal arts curriculum. It not only creates space for us to insert ourselves in faraway time and place.

It is an art form and practice that everyone, including scientists, can

use to remake the world for themselves. If our science students were taught how past events have given them the world in which they live today, they would understand that the past provides analytical tools for negotiating the now, and of course, for building sustainable futures.

The Botswana University of Agriculture and Natural Resources itself is a memorable institution with a very important place in Botswana’s academic history. From its origins as the Botswana Agricultural College (BAC) in the 1960s, it was designed to produce a particular kind of agricultural citizen—male, rural, entrepreneurial, disciplined.

The material import of the Botswana government’s gendered agricultural education policy at the time was anchored on Patrick van Rensburg’s philosophy of Education with Production, whose primary objective was to produce rural male entrepreneurs.

As expatriate British teacher Sheila Bagnall argued in her 2001 memoirs about Swaneng Hill School, the citadel of Education with Production, “Swaneng Hill School was very much a man’s World.”

This ideal of institutional masculinity carried over to the BAC despite the

presence of females in this institution. Speaking at the 1969 graduation ceremony of the BAC, Vice President of Botswana and Minister of Development Planning, Q K J Masire, spoke passionately of how ‘the purpose of this assembly is to launch young men into their careers in agriculture.”

In the symbolic words of an April 1972 Kutlwano editorial, Rural

The enterprise was the backbone of Botswana, as well as the source of the nation’s basic philosophy and traditions.’

In 1970, President Seretse Khama declared in a policy statement that Botswana is “a nation of farmers.” This was therefore not rhetoric. It was

a historical project that shaped curriculum, policy priorities, and rural identities.

To teach agriculture today without reflecting on its history is to treat BUAN as if it emerged fully formed in 2015—rather than as an institution embedded in Botswana’s political, social, and agrarian past.

It is akin to what Nigerian creative writer, Chimamanda Adichie, calls,

The Danger of a Single Story. A single story is not necessarily wrong. It is inadequate.

Adichie reminds me of Seretse Khama’s immortal quote at the Gaborone Campus of the University of Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland, on 15 May 1970, in which he sent the nation a poignant reminder of its historical roots, saying:

It should now be our intention to try to retrieve what we can of our past. We should write

our own history books to prove that we did have a past, and that it was a past that was just

as worth writing and learning about as any other. We must do this for the simple reason

that a nation without a past is a lost nation, and a people without a past is a people without

a soul.

Seretse Khama’s insistence that a nation without knowledge of its past is a nation without a soul was an appeal to scholars to counter the dominant narratives that misrepresent our production systems as creations of the colonial enterprise.

BUAN’s mandate to advance agriculture and natural resources knowledge is therefore incomplete without grounding in the historical contexts—social, political, ecological, and cultural—that shape Botswana’s agrarian and natural resources landscape.

Our topic, “Bridging Worlds: The Interface Between the Natural Sciences and Liberal Arts in Higher Education”, packs in one sentence many critical issues that are not only topical but germane in today’s academic world.

It is a stark indictment of an academic landscape paralysed by imagined disciplinary boundaries, or the silos, and therefore telling a single story. This shouldn’t be the case in a world where solving complex problems requires transdisciplinary minds.

But for all this to hold true, there also needs to be investments in the University as a citadel of learning; investments that do not only

allow students to exploit their natural talents but to expand the frontiers of Knowledge.

We should learn from Albert Einstein’s teaching that “religion, the arts and the sciences are branches from the same tree.” This holistic worldview, which views all human knowledge and inquiry as fundamentally connected, holds that a broad and interwoven education is essential for preparing citizens for life, work, and civic responsibilities.

Finally, as MP Unity Dow recently admonished her colleagues with “Thanyang”, the Ministry of Basic Education is prioritising the incorporation of the Arts into its national STEM strategy.

This ideal is a long-overdue reckoning with the inescapable reality that an

assault on the liberal arts leads only to the perdition of our graduates.

Let me pause here and give examples of liberal arts courses that could fit into the BUAN curriculum, the integration of which would not be an addition at the margins.

But a return to wholeness (a re boeleng ko marakanelong, as Kwelagobe once controversially cautioned his BDP at the funeral of former President Masire): Well, the BDP didn’t, and we all know the outcome.

A course on Botswana’s agrarian history would explore the socio-ecological forces that shaped rural livelihoods and agricultural change over the long span of historical time and space.

In my work about the 19th-century Babirwa, I show how they historically used their indigenous herding systems, including their spiritual connections to their land, to prosper in a hostile terrain of disease, droughts and predators.

During their journey from Pepe, my grandfather would reminisce about how they navigated landscapes of predators, of danger. But they survived because they commanded the toolbox to negotiate such a seemingly perilous landscape.

He would passionately talk of how the women who got possessed by

the lionised spirit of Magwasha became so powerful that they transcended unmediated nature, roaring like lions to assert their territoriality. Thus, the possessed became the possessors of the wilderness.

My people’s deployment of their indigenous spiritualities helped them to navigate environmental extremes while keeping their livestock safe. Their story is a more-than-human history that speaks to an agricultural community’s coexistence with a multispecies world and thus unsettles the dominant narratives of the ontological differences between the liberal arts and the natural sciences.

A critical inquiry course on Indigenous Worldviews and Environmental Knowledge would examine the historical relationship between our biodiverse environments and cultural heritage.

Talking of cultural heritage, my people are rainmakers. Today at the

foothills of Matale in Mogapi (a scenic place I grew up proudly calling Masimo, where organic fertiliser flows downhill into our cultivated fields, and where, during the dry season our livestock feed on hilltops) lie, adjacent to the remains of my grandfather’s cattle kraal, the burial sites of my ancestors, including Mogapi himself, a renowned rainmaker who was sought after by all communities.

This sacred space doubles as a rainmaking site, where every year the community congregates to propitiate the rainmaking spirits. The Moremi

Hill in Tswapong is another sacred socio-ecological cultural heritage site.

It is at this site where the people of Mapulane have historically performed the annual ritual of dikomana, in which the intercessors perform rainmaking rites that mediate between the forces of the wilderness and settled, humanised spaces.

These ritualised performances in Mogapi and Moremi not only bring rain, land fertility and community prosperity. They help the communities to establish claims to the land that is inhabited by their ancestors.

The material import of laying claim to the land of the ancestors is indigenous conservation deployed to subvert the received neoliberal conservationist policies that commoditise our natural resources and sometimes destroy

them.

Indigenous knowledge systems are not timeless folklore. They are accumulated historical practices. Rainmaking rituals, seed selection, herding systems, and conservation ethics as archives of environmental experience are science seen through a historical lens. To teach science without history is to strip it of meaning.

Let me be clear: integrating the liberal arts with the sciences is not about diluting science. It is about strengthening it. The liberal arts help scientists to understand that people have historically thrived in community by maintaining three sets of relationships – namely, individuals’ relations with each other, community relationships with the environment, and community relationships with the spirit world.

As extension workers and policy makers, graduates from BUAN can therefore only begin to understand the motivations of rural communities, be it farmers, hunters, or riparian peoples, if they pay close attention to the interpersonal, spiritual, and environmental relationships these communities built, sustained, and abandoned over time to thrive in their contemporary worlds.

Such a historical perspective of sustainable development would enable innovations that are not just scientifically sound but also culturally appropriate and historically resilient.

Colleagues, Extension fails when the extension worker becomes the sage on the stage, when they treat rural communities as blank slates. Extension thrives when the extension worker is the guide on the side; when their work becomes a collaborative project with rural communities; when the extension worker commands the ability to negotiate their insider/outsider positionality, rather than the monopoly of knowledge.

Collaboration with the rural communities is an imperative because these communities are, in historian Stephen Fierman’s colourful terminology, Peasant Intellectuals.

I call them decolonial intellectuals. After all, the organic knowledge they possess deconstructs universal truths received from the West.

For these reasons, Extension workers need to be socio-culturally and historically grounded so that they understand why, for instance, Botswana

communities value cattle beyond economics; why they distrust certain policies

interventions; and why resistance is sometimes a rational survival strategy.

Engaging with the historical narratives of traditional land use and the impacts of government policies on various communities would deepen the academy’s empathy and prepare it to address complex issues of equity and justice in the professional lives of faculty and students, thus transforming them into more holistic agents of change.

Research that ignores historical context risks reinventing the wheel or proposing solutions that clash with deeply ingrained practices and historical grievances.

In my 2014 project, in which I explored the coalescence of environmental shocks and the devastating reality of rinderpest – a highly contagious and deadly cattle disease that ravaged the southern African region in the late 19th century – I show how African communities constructed the white plaque theory that the colonial government weaponised disease to impoverish them.

This conspiracy theory was a response to the Stamping Out Policy, an

eradicationist veterinary policy that disproportionately targeted African cattle in the commons.

To resist this policy, African farmers secretly moved their cattle to save them

from the wrath of the white man’s gun. Fast forward to post-independence Botswana, and our veterinary policy has leaned heavily on this colonial template.

The response from the local farmers who keep cattle in the commons has remained unchanged: Take your cattle and run! Instead of being localised, the pathogens metastasise like cancerous cells, and science somersaults to blame the victim.

These patterns repeat because veterinary history is ignored. But Science advances faster when it learns from its own past.

To an old man who has visceral memories of what happens when his cattle are eradicated together with disease, the principles of cattle ownership are sacred.

When farmers flee with their livestock, that is not cowardice. Nor is it irresponsibility. Flight falls within the broader context of what anthropologist James Scott, in his work on peasant politics and everyday forms of resistance, calls “Weapons of the Weak.”

Flight is an alternative form of power invented and weaponised by the downtrodden to subvert the institutionalised power of the state.

Driven by commercial impulses, however, we ignore the historical, cultural, spiritual and sentimental value attached to cattle so highly

cherished by local farmers.

Once the state “decides” that the cattle population has declined, we fly across the Atlantic Ocean, buying and flying exotic breeds on First Class seats; a move that not only poses an existential threat to our indigenous breeds, but

amplifies inequalities in cattle ownership.

We haven’t learned from the way imported non-reusable hybrid seeds have almost upended our indigenous seeds. Neither have we learned from historical land policies, such as the 1930s Privatisation of the Commons and the 1975 Tribal Grazing Land Policy, both of which degraded communal grazing land (Gare bake waitse).

If you ever thought it was unfathomable that Botswana is a paradox: a nation of farmers that cannot feed itself, I hope I have provoked your comprehension.

Covered mostly by desert environment and predisposed to climate variability, Botswana finds itself at the forefront of climate change. This is the time for science to go back to the crossroads, to bring its history into its present.

It is time the science university produced socio-culturally and historically grounded science graduates. Graduates who are aware of historical phenomena, such as the phased out 2 thebe coin called Lemang Dijo, which

was symbolic of science intersecting with the deeply rooted cultural ethic of Ipelegeng.

Graduates with knowledge that, for around three decades up to the 1990s, stood at the interface of history, tradition and science, a Seed Multiplication Unit resident here at Sebele to produce indigenous reusable seeds suitable for rainfed dryland farming.

And who understand that the historical veneration of cattle as Modimo o nko e metsi, is spirituality transcending animal science to underscore the hallowed and holistic life-sustaining status of indigenous cattle breeds; their immense historical and ongoing value in material, social, and cultural reproduction of communities.]

Director of Ceremonies, before I conclude, I wish to make a proposal – one that may be considered somewhat revisionist. Let us remember Taaibos Rabasotho of Barolong farms, who, on Independence Day in 1971, President Seretse Khama awarded a Certificate of Honour in recognition of his long and faithful service to Botswana and its rural development.

I propose that the Botswana University of Agriculture and Natural Resources establish an interdisciplinary centre named in his honour.

Rabosotho, as I write in my 2024 article about the fear of the urban space and the valorisation of rural enterprise, epitomised the ideal masculine rural citizen of the postcolonial Botswana.

His life’s narrative mirrored that of Botswana, a poor country that had

just emerged from colonial rule. A former migrant worker at the mines in South Africa, who returned home to start a successful agricultural enterprise, Rabasotho was the archetypal male who embodied Botswana’s quintessential spirit of the rural work ethic, the core value of the curriculum of the Botswana Agricultural College.

He is therefore worthy of immortality.

The proposed centre would serve as a bridge between the natural sciences and the liberal arts, promoting interdisciplinary education and research designed to confront complex global challenges through holistic approaches.

By leveraging specialised laboratories, collaborative networks, and community engagement, it would foster real-world solutions through integrated teaching and inquiry. You may be wondering how a historian can utilise a laboratory.

In today’s world, the concept of the laboratory must extend beyond beakers and microscopes to become a dynamic space of communication, cooperation, and creative exchange.

A Hive of curiosity and exploration that generates new pathways and unexpected solutions. I’m confident in the success of an interdisciplinary centre because I am a product of one.

I developed my transdisciplinary research skills at the Interdisciplinary Centre for the Study of Global Change at the University of Minnesota in the USA, where I got my PhD.

In closing, Botswana’s first President once reminded us that a nation without a past is a nation without a soul. The same applies to institutions and disciplines. To teach science without history is to train technically competent graduates who may lack the capacity to listen, interpret, adapt and be empathetic.

To integrate the liberal arts is to produce scientists who understand that land, livestock, water, wildlife, and people exist in relationships forged over time. The liberal arts give science humility, an ethical campus and cultural insight.

Science gives the liberal arts relevance in a world that thrives through

scientific innovation. At BUAN, and by extension across our academic landscapes, science and art belong together.

Director of Ceremonies, colleagues, science is temporal. But when grounded in historical memory, it becomes sustainable. I thank you for your warm reception. And look forward to the conversations that follow.