During an eight-week 2011 public-sector strike in Botswana, workers “gathered daily beneath” a giant marula tree on the Gaborone Secondary School grounds for all-day assemblies of prayers, hymns, sermons and speeches; these gatherings became the strike’s spiritual and organisational centre, with participants singing, praying, cutting and carrying green branches on forays beyond the grounds, and treating the tree and strike site as a sacralised locus of dignity and solidarity. Christian faith and “political prayers” were woven into trade-union practice—prayers beseeching divine justice, calls for the president to act, and revival-style meetings that mobilised broad sections of civil society—while confrontations with police (including tear gas) and high-level negotiations underlined the strike’s political weight.