Dikopelo ritual and performance: The embodiment of place

Abstract

Batswana (People of Botswana) traditionally celebrate the end of seasons with dikopelo musical performances. This paper discusses Bakgatla-ba-Kgafela’s dikopelo festive celebrations, an annual return of choirs to their performance grounds through the duality of home and away. The author, a performer, interrogates through participant observation in four performances from December 2015 to January 2019, the seventeen-hour performance from midnight until the following day at sunset. Her experience is conceptually framed on Van Manen’s four lifeworld existentials of lived space (grounds), lived body (performs), lived time (seventeen hours) and lived human relations (performers, family, supporters). In conclusion, she takes a reflexive position of the subjectivity of her experience in relation to her fellow performers’; the blurred boundaries of her academic/performer roles and fieldwork/post-fieldwork spaces as her dikopelo lived experience is beyond this study’s timeframe. Her reality as an ethnographer at home, is the constant negotiation of her multiple unending identities.