In the midst of Botswana’s HIV epidemic, moral discourses
about the provision of care for the nation’s 100,000-plus
orphaned children encapsulate Tswana people’s most fundamental
anxieties about the effects of AIDS. This article
examines a shifting relationship between popular narratives
about the supposed shortcomings of Tswana “culture” and
widely proliferating assertions that Christian love can provide
a more successful moral paradigm for the care of orphans. As
Tswana people increasingly draw on a Christian framework to
imagine alternative approaches to caring for needy children,
they are responding to profound dislocations in the material
and demographic foundations of their society. By tracing
these moral claims and their transformation over time, this
paper illuminates the changing context of social reproduction
during Botswana’s AIDS crisis.