06 Oct 2016

Just a week after the country commemorated its 50th anniversary of independence, the earliest churches to spring up the nation’s capital will be commemorating their own golden jubilee celebrations.
Roman Catholic Diocese of Gaborone will celebrate 50 years in an event scheduled for Saturday in Gaborone.
Vice President Mokgweetsi Masisi as well as local and foreign Catholic clergymen are expected to grace the event. According to the head of the diocese, Bishop Valentine Seane, the Diocese of Gaborone oversees 26 Catholic churches in the southern half of Botswana.  
The 18 other Catholic churches in northern half of Botswana are under the Vicarate of Francistown, which was established in 1998.
The Catholic Church has an 88-year existence in Botswana but was initially administered by the Diocese of Kimberly in South Africa before the Diocese of Gaborone was established on August 5, 1966.
The mother church of the diocese, the Christ the King Cathedral located at the Main Mall was officially opened in 1967, the second modern church structure to officially open in independent Botswana’s capital Gaborone after Trinity.
The late Bishop Urban Murphy, followed by Bishop emeritus Boniface Setlalekgosi and then the incumbent Bishop Seane have led the Diocese of Gaborone since its inception.
Trinity Congregational Church, a branch of the United Congregational Church of Southern Africa (UCCSA) located at the Main Mall in Gaborone, will also host a history night this evening.
The chairman of the Trinity 50th anniversary organising committee, Mr Mothusi Ramaabya says that the history night serves as a prelude to the main celebrations, which will take place at the church on November 6.
Interspersed with entertainment to be provided by the award-winning Trinity Church Choir, the evening will feature church elders and clergymen giving a historical account of modern Gaborone’s oldest church.
The Minister of Nationality, Immigration and Gender Affairs, Mr Edwin Batshu will present the keynote address.
Among the invited guests on the evening will be former president Sir Ketumile Masire, who is also a member of Trinity Church.
Mr Ramaabya notes that Trinity first church structure officially open its doors in independent Botswana’s new capital Gaborone on November 6, 1966, and was founded as a ‘unity church’ led by Rev Derek Jones of the UCCSA in partnership with Father Alan Butler of the Anglican Church.
Although the two denominations, as well as the Presbyterian, Methodist and Society of Friends (Quakers) have different theological approach to Christianity, they initially shared the Trinity infrastructure as independence-era Gaborone had been considered too small for a single denomination to use a large facility on its own.
By the 1970s, the Anglican Church built its own cathedral in Extension 10 close to Princess Marina Hospital and Trinity became a fully-fledged congregational church under the sole ambit of the UCCSA.
The UCCSA will itself commemorate its golden jubilee in October 2017, as it was founded in 1967 as a union of Southern African churches that had already been established since 1799 by the London Missionary Society (LMS), the American Board and the Congregational Union of South Africa.
It was through the LMS that Dr Robert Moffat translated the Bible into Setswana at Kuruman in South Africa’s Northern Cape, and Dr David Livingstone established Botswana’s first church at Kolobeng near present-day Kumakwane. ENDS