Part V explores how Batswana manage interdependencies and distinctions between kinship and politics on local, national, and transnational levels. It takes in three major events: in Chapter 13, a family party; in Chapter 14, a homecoming celebration for the first age regiment to be initiated in a generation; and in Chapter 15, an opening event held by a respected national NGO. Chapter 13 argues that family celebrations are catalysts for conflict, performing familial success and distinguishing home from village by demonstrating an ability to manage dikgang. In Chapter 14, families prove pivotal to regenerating the morafe (tribal polity), and initiation proves pivotal in re-embedding Tswana law in families – equipping them to better engage dikgang. NGO, government, and donor performances of success also rely on the performance of kinship; in Chapter 15’s opening ceremony, idioms and ideals of kinship legitimise the work of government and civil society agencies, establishing their precedence over the families they serve. But their everyday work is also permeated – even generated – by unmarked, conflicting kinship dynamics. In their interventions, these agencies unsettle both the interdependencies and distinctions Batswana customarily make between kinship and politics; and, in doing so, they may create more profound challenges than the AIDS epidemic.

Part I maps out the geographies of Tswana kinship, beginning in Chapter 1 with the Tswana gae, or home. The gae is a multiple, scattered place – stretching to include masimo (farmlands) and moraka (cattle post) – integrated by continuous movement, shifting residence, and care work that gravitates around the lelwapa (courtyard). For kin, both closeness and distance create dikgang; and while continuous movement enables balances to be struck, ‘going up and down’ produces tensions and dangers of its own. In Chapter 2, the building of new houses – a critical means of go itirela, or making-for-oneself – presents similar conundrums, requiring the mobilisation of resources among family in order to establish distance from them. When help is refused, dikgang generated are enough to stall building and self-making alike. These risks are marked in an epidemic era, where orphaned children may inherit early, and where NGO and government programmes may provide access to resources they might not otherwise have. Chapter 3 describes the spatial practices of these NGO and social work programmes, which show surprising similarities to the spatial practices of family – but also invert those spatialities and knock them out of sync, producing problematic alternatives to the gae, and new, intractable dikgang.

Bogwe gabobole. Relationship-in-law does not decay.

Part II explores the economies of care among kin. Chapter 4 explores the Tswana understanding of care as a combination of sentiment, material provision, and work that affects the physical and social well-being of others – and as a key resource in the contribution economies of kinship. But the things, work, and sentiment of care can be disarticulated and are subject to competing claims by family, partners, and friends, with implications for self-making projects. Chapter 5 examines the tensions that arise between these obligations to contribute care – especially among siblings – and the uncertainty about whether people will contribute what they ought, to whom, and for how long, which make contributions of care a volatile source of dikgang. Care, in these terms, is perpetually subject to crisis; the dominant public health frameworks that cast AIDS as a ‘crisis of care’ overlook the ways in which the Tswana family routinely faces, copes with, and even regenerates itself through such crises. Chapter 6 concludes with a consideration of how NGO and government interventions aim to provide care in the form of food baskets and feeding programmes – but dissociate these from specific people and relationships, inadvertently creating new crises by doing so.

Phokoje wa morago dintsa diammona.

Dilo makwati di kwatabolotswa mo go ba bangwe.

Go nna le lewapa go monate

Kgotla ke agiwa ka losika.

‘And … she’s pregnant.’ Lesedi and I sat in shock for a few moments. It had taken some time to eke this information out of her; she had refused to tell me anything on the phone, other than that her cousin Tumi was in hospital.1 She had called home, asking to use the Legaes’ postal address to access a good hospital that would be less crowded than those in the city, but she would explain no further. Gradually, as we sat on the long benches lining the small courtyard of the maternity ward, the story emerged.

This essay argues that contemporary Caribbean women exploit the malleability of life writing as a genre in a variety of ways that recognize the precariousness of life-making and self-making in the post-plantation Caribbean. While each of the writers discussed here critically refashions life-narrative for their own distinct purposes, they frequently share an interest in filtering personal life experiences through familiar familial and regional histories to emphasize the imbrication of the personal and political. Narrating life-stories is presented in these texts as inextricably linked to the difficult cultural politics of self-making that is so powerfully evidenced from The History of Mary Prince through to the present. While life-writing remains haunted by the region’s violent history, Caribbean women writers continue to excavate that history in order to record, affirm, rescue, restore, and celebrate self and life-making possibilities, however fragmented, precarious, or itinerant.

Recent free will denialism (FWD) tends to be optimistic, claiming that not only will the rejection of the belief in free will and moral responsibility not make matters dreadful but that we are indeed better off without them. I address the denialist claim that FWD has the philosophical resources to effectively safeguard human rights and respect for persons in the context of punishment, even without belief in free will, moral responsibility, and desert. I raise seven reasons for doubt concerning the ability of FWD to maintain deontological constraints. Together they present a strong case for doubting the optimism of FWD.

The retributive system is motivated by powerful strike-back desire (actually a general desire to pass the pain along) combined with nonconscious belief in a just world. To preserve belief in a just world, we must suppose that most people are receiving their just deserts, and that requires belief in moral responsibility. Neoliberal societies are deeply dedicated to individual moral responsibility, resulting in harsh judgments and gross inequity. The systems approach offers a promising path away from moral responsibility and toward a more just and equitable society.