Daily Archives: 19 September, 2017

2008: Kedisaletse Tsobane

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(Thanks to Meaghan Good of the Charley Project for the guest post. -ed.)

On this day in 2008, 49-year-old Kedisaletse Tsobane was executed in the southern African nation of Botswana for the murder of his ten-year-old daughter, Kgotso Macfallen. He was the first person to be executed under the administration of President Ian Khama.

Tsobane approached Kgotso as she was walking to school in Francistown on the morning of January 20, 2004, and offered her a lift. She hopped into his car. Later that day, passersby found the little girl’s body in the bush. She was kneeling on the ground, hanging from a tree by an electric cable.

Arrested the next day, Tsobane quickly confessed to the crime. He pleaded guilty to murder, saying,

I killed the child in an attempt to avoid liability in order to do away with my indebtedness. I was trying to do away with maintenance arrears. I killed the child by strangling it with a rope.

He was supposed to pay 40 Botswana pula, or a little less than $4 a month, but he hadn’t parted with so much as a single thebe since Kgotso’s birth. He was deep in debt and his wife had begun to complain.

Tsobane claimed that a week before the murder, Kgotso’s mother had taunted him about the debt, telling him he had to pay support for a child that wasn’t his. He said he got drunk and high on marijuana and committed the murder impulsively. Upon these mitigating circumstances Tsobane founded his case for commuting the sentence to life in prison.

The prosecution, however, produced a death certificate for Kgotso’s mother: she’d died in 2002 and couldn’t have been teasing him like he said. And the court didn’t buy Tsobane’s plea that he was too intoxicated to realize the nature and consequences of his actions. His own statement that he’d strangled Kgotso and then hanged her from a tree to make her death look like a suicide probably didn’t help his case.

The judge that sentenced Tsobane to death remarked, “In the circumstances, it is not clear why he was driven to commit the offense.” The Botswana Court of Appeal was equally puzzled by Tsobane’s motives. He could have sold his car to alleviate his financial worries, the court noted, but

He did not do so. He had, apparently, never paid any maintenance for the deceased, so even that had nothing in reality to do with her. Why then kill her, in order to get rid of his liabilities?

Whatever his reasons, Tsobane took them with him to his grave.

On this day..