The drama of de-orphaning: Botswana’s old orphans and the rewriting of kinship relations

Abstract

Botswana has the world’s highest rate of orphans, primarily as a result of HIV and AIDS. National response policies include a range of material resources given to relatives caring for parentless children. The insertion of financial incentive into kinship obligations has transformed younger orphans into valuable assets, leading some relatives (at least allegedly) to compete for the “right” to house them, and causing moral ambivalence among the public. Yet as orphans reach legal adulthood, the cessation of social services and poor opportunities for wage labour alter relations with relatives in unexpected ways. In this article, I explore how the ranks of meaningful kin appear to both swell and shrink around youth ageing out of their “orphan” status. Based on four years of ethnographic fieldwork in Botswana between 2003 and 2013, these case studies expose significant labour expended among families in policing categories of personhood like greedy relatives, needy orphans, and economically stagnant youth. I show how kinship relations become affectively populated through moral discourses – and how these discourses in turn provide pathways for new forms of claims-making, even for the supplanting of “verifiable” kin by less “traditionally” legitimate forms of relatedness – ultimately reshaping the very practice of kinship in rural Botswana.