For the better part of his young life in Botswana, in southern Africa, Elder Clement M. Matswagothata was brought up by his grandmother in “a very devoted Christian home.”
She couldn’t read or write but would ask him to read scriptures out loud to her.
One day, he read 1 Samuel 3, when God called Samuel as a prophet. “My instinctive question was, ‘Does God still do the same thing?’”
He was told no, which bothered him.
“That was really when my journey of trying to find a God that speaks began,” he said.
Around 16 or 17 he heard about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and wanted to meet the missionaries — mainly because he wanted to correct them on some things he had heard about the Church.
When they met, one of the missionaries offered to pray before they started the lesson.
“I opened my eyes, and I looked around in the room because he spoke to a God that seemed very close — he seemed to know Him very well.”
After that, Elder Matswagothata wasn’t interested in arguing anymore. He wanted to know if God still spoke as He has spoken in ancient times. The missionaries said yes.
When he finished reading the Book of Mormon around two or three days later, he called the missionaries’ phone number at 3 a.m. to tell them he wanted to be baptized.
Later, Elder Matswagothata became Botswana’s first stake president, then its first Area Seventy, and now the country’s first General Authority Seventy having been sustained in April 2025 general conference.
“I have a deep-rooted testimony that God lives and speaks to us in these final days, and that we live in a day and time when prophets walk the earth,” he said.
‘Every week I’d write my testimony’
While he had decided to be baptized, his parents wanted him to wait until he was 18. Friends he introduced to the Church were baptized before him. Then, when he told his parents he wanted to serve a mission, they were hurt that he would give up a college scholarship and other plans they had for his life. They told him not to come back home.
But, he said, a wise stake president encouraged him to invite his family to his setting apart as a missionary — and to write to them regularly while serving.
“Every week I’d write my testimony, what my mission meant and experiences I was having,” he said about his time in the South Africa Capetown Mission.
His family called to tell him that his grandmother passed away and urged him to come home. He said he could not. But he told them about the Restoration and eternal families and that he knew where his grandmother was after her death.
The family never responded to his letters. But one evening, his mission president told him to expect another phone call from his family — and when he received the call, his mother told him that she and his sister had just been baptized.
“That was a tender mercy for me on my mission,” he said.
“I have a deep-rooted testimony that God lives and speaks to us in these final days, and that we live in a day and time when prophets walk the earth.”
— Elder Clement M. Matswagothata
His father — “a remarkable man, a great man” — never joined the Church and died a few years after Elder Matswagothata returned from his mission. His mother was very faithful and after retirement, served in the Johannesburg South Africa Temple.
“Our three children love going to the temple because for them it was that house that Grandma lived in,” Elder Matswagothata said. “It’s part of that legacy that we feel was built from that experience, from her serving in the temple.”
‘I’d like to marry her’
After his mission, Elder Matswagothata started working toward school and turned his thoughts toward marriage. He told a friend from his mission in South Africa, “I’d like you to introduce me to somebody from your unit — the most spiritual young lady that you know — I’d like to marry her.”
At an Africa South Area young single adult convention in 2003, he was introduced to Novelty Buthelezi.
She had joined the Church in South Africa at age 15. Her next door neighbor had joined the Church and invited her to meet the missionaries.
“I remember them teaching us about the pre-existence, and it felt like I’d heard this before. It felt so familiar,” Sister Matswagothata said. “They spoke about the prophet and the First Vision and it sounded true.”
When she met Elder Matswagothata, she was taking a mission preparation class. But he had a different plan and it included marriage — only she didn’t know it yet.
When he returned to Botswana after the YSA convention, the two would email and talk on the phone, but Sister Matswagothata never thought they were dating; he was just a friend. Then he visited her home in Pretoria, South Africa.
“He started coming more often,” she said. “He’d go to the temple, and then he’d come pass by my place.”
He asked her to come to Botswana. “I said, ‘I don’t think my mom will allow me to go to Botswana. It’s a different country,’” she said. Then his mom talked to her mom on the phone, and she went to Botswana for a visit in September 2003.
There, he proposed to her. She asked whether he has prayed about this decision and whether he had spoken to his parents and his leaders about it and he responded that he had done so.
She then asked, “Why does it sound like everybody knows except for me?”
After returning to her home and praying about it herself, she gave him her answer. They were married in the Johannesburg temple at the end of February 2004.
“People asked me, ‘How did you know you wanted to marry her?’” Elder Matswagothata said. “I said, ‘The things we talked about all made sense.’ I felt comfortable discussing a lot of things with her. We had normal and natural conversations, and it just felt and sounded right.”
‘The Lord was tutoring us’
When the couple was newly married, all Church members in Botswana were part of the Roodeport South Africa Stake. Stake leaders would travel five hours to Botswana.
Within a few years of their marriage, Elder Matswagothata was called as the bishop of the Gaborone West YSA Ward in Botswana. The Matswagothatas were studying in school just like the young single adults in their care. He was working toward a Bachelor of Philosophy in marketing management.
“That was one of the most tender moments of our service in the kingdom,” he said.
The young people “were so good, so self-reliant,” Sister Matswagothata said. “They did everything by themselves.”
The Church grew, and everyone wanted to be a part of the work toward getting a stake, Elder Matswagothata said. In November 2012, Elder Dale G. Renlund, then a General Authority Seventy serving in the area presidency, called Elder Matswagothata to be the first stake president in the country when the Gaborone Botswana Stake was formed.
Elder Matswagothata was 32 at the time.
“The Lord was tutoring us and teaching us and helping us to learn His ways. It was very, very special,” he said.
Six years after being called as stake president, Elder Matswagothata was called to be an Area Seventy in the Africa South Area.
“And that is when our lives were turned upside down again,” he said.
Sister Matswagothata served in callings that mirrored the growth of their three daughters — serving in the Young Women organization, as well as the seminary program as a teacher, and then back to the Relief Society when the oldest graduated high school. “My children never have a break from me,” she said with a laugh.
At the time of his call to be a General Authority Seventy, their oldest daughter was nearing the end of her full-time mission in the Missouri St. Louis Mission and has since returned.
The Church in Botswana
The Saints in Botswana are faithful people who love the Lord, Elder Matswagothata said. Many attend the Johannesburg temple more regularly than what he would have thought possible.
“It means putting resources together, taking a bus, finding themselves patron housing and actually going there and serving. And I think those kinds of sacrifices are just amazing,” he said.
Like with his own daughters, the Church in the country is starting to span generations — which is a huge blessing, he said.
“The Church is part of who they are. It’s not some extension of their lives. Therefore it makes it easier for them to serve because they’ve got a better understanding of what it means to be a covenant people.”
He sometimes wants to push Latter-day Saints to do better and never take the gospel for granted.
“I’ve seen how it’s changed my own family. And when you see that, you desire that for everyone else. This cannot be something that sits in one family; it must reside throughout. That’s where the goodness of the gospel is felt,” he said.
About Elder Clement M. Matswagothata
Family: Clement Mosiame Matswagothata was born Jan. 8, 1980, in Middlepits, Botswana, to Bojotilhe J. Matswagothata and Rachel M. April. He married Novelty Busisiwe Buthelezi of Pretoria, South Africa, on Feb. 28, 2004, in the Johannesburg South Africa Temple. They have three children and were living in Gaborone, Botswana, at the time of his call to the Seventy.
Education: Bachelor of Philosophy honors in marketing management from IMM Graduate School of Marketing.
Employment: Worked in the automotive industry since 2004 with various car brands. He has held several leadership positions for Barloworld Motor.
Church service: At the time he was called as a General Authority Seventy, was a temple ordinance worker in the Johannesburg South Africa Temple and an area self-reliance specialist; has served as an Area Seventy in the Africa South Area, stake president, high councilor, bishop, bishopric counselor and full-time missionary in the South Africa Capetown Mission.
