Ngwana e o sa leleng o swela tharing.

Part IV focuses on children and their circulation. Chapters 10 and 11 describe how children in Botswana are frequently sent – or send themselves – to be looked after by extended family, and occasionally non-relatives. Rather than a means of binding families together, this practice differentiates and distances kin, asserting limits on kinship. The circulation of children experimentally extends the practices of movement, economies of care and contribution, and the kin-forming recognition of relationships discussed in the previous sections. As such, it attracts the dikgang connected to all three – the management of which tends to reproduce relationships of closeness or distance among kin, rather than reworking them. Informal child circulation stands in stark contrast to government initiatives in formal fostering (Chapter 12), which promote relationships of mutual care and love among non-kin – seeking to produce alternative families for children, and permanent fixes to the dikgang that affect them. But formal fostering collapses the boundaries among and between families that child circulation would otherwise reinforce; removes kin from their roles in negotiating their children’s dikgang; and draws non-kin into dikgang from which they would ordinarily be excluded. Interventions seeking to strengthen families through fostering thus disrupt and displace them.

Bosa iphuteng metlhala lotshosa diletseng.

Bana ba tshipa tshwaraganang fa lo kgaogana loso lwamogotlha.

Much of the contemporary literature on children identifies the parent–child relationship as central to the functioning of society. Furthermore, this relationship is seen as largely unidirectional. That is, the parent has manifold obligations to his/her child, while the child has few, if any, to his/her parent. However, as we review literature on children in other societies, a very different picture emerges. For example, West African “Ijo perceive of inheritance as flowing from sons to fathers as readily as the reverse” (Hollos and Leis 1989: 29). This contrast is captured in the two “value pyramids” labeled gerontocracy and neontocracy (Figure 1) in the first chapter.