This chapter showcases how a traditional music group, Culture Spears, employs ICTs to promote, preserve, and sell musical culture. Their songs have messages of love affairs, adultery, diseases, and marriage. They use the World Wide Web, websites, and others gadgets such as digital camera, CD, DVD, and video to sell their products worldwide. Culture Spears’ existential goal is mainly that of entertainment and education. Being a group from rural and humble poor background, they did not have instruments when they started. They used traditional utensils to produce sound and balls to beat drums. They could not get a loan from any bank as banks discriminate in terms of economic standing, and it was difficult for them to get sponsorship to record their pieces. Their first cassette was self-recorded using a borrowed radio. The group experienced harsh teething problems but the media, especially television advertised them well and now their sales are very impressive. They have a recording studio. Current challenges include piracy, copying, and reproducing their music from computers to sell, and there seems to be no stringent copyright laws in Botswana. This negatively affects their sales. Another problem is the issue of royalties. Promoters cheat them in many respects.
In Botswana, gender is constructed in many different ways including but not limited to the names given to children, the games children play, through songs and proverbs and through messages presented in mainane (folktales). The important role that folktales play in the socialisation process of members of a society is well documented. Like in most societies, mainane play many different functions such as being didactic, moralistic, cultural records, therapeutic as well as forms of entertainment. However, this paper focuses on the gendered messages conveyed in Setswana folktales. It discusses how societal expectations of men and women can be understood from Setswana folktales. It further argues that the values transmitted in the folktales have clear ideological goals, and they encourage and perpetuate gender stereotypes between men and women. A few mainane will be analysed from a gender perspective to validate the argument of this paper.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.