Botswana

By: Andrew Hermann

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

Botswana

In many ways, Botswana challenges stereotypical notions about African nations. Since 1970 this former British protectorate has had one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. Spurred by the discovery of vast diamond deposits in the late 1960s, Botswana has swiftly transformed itself from an agrarian society, whose chief export was beef, into an efficiently managed, mineral-based economy. Botswana’s economic success has been instrumental in ensuring its equally remarkable political stability. Since independence in 1966, the Botswana Democratic Party has kept its majority in the National Assembly, the country’s chief legislative body, despite an open electoral process and the presence of numerous opposition parties. In recent years, however, economic disparities have sparked growing popular discontent. Botswana’s mining and cattle economy has produced an ever-widening gap between a wealthy class of ruling Tswana families and urban elites and a poor, ethnically diverse, and mostly rural population. Another serious threat is HIV/AIDS, which has reached epidemic proportions in Botswana and threatens to undermine the country’s economic and social stability.

Early History

Botswana

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Archaeological finds show a human presence dating back many thousands of years in the region now known as Botswana. The earliest inhabitants were most likely the ancestors of the San (also known as Bushmen), hunter-gatherers who today inhabit the semiarid steppes of southwestern Botswana, and the Khoikhoi, who probably originated in the north. Scholars believe that by the first century B.C.E., the Khoikhoi adopted cattle herding and gradually spread southward across the eastern savanna. Bantu speakers probably arrived in the region by the first century C.E.. They raised cattle, cultivated crops such as sorghum, and had the ability to forge iron tools. By the eighth century C.E.., the Bantu-speaking ancestors of the present-day Kgalagadi had settled in eastern Botswana.

The ancestors of the Tswana, today the dominant ethnic group of Botswana, settled in the eleventh or twelfth century on the rolling plains around the Vaal River in what is now the South African province of Transvaal. They tended livestock—mostly cattle—and grew crops such as millet and sorghum. They were seminomadic and did not privately own land but measured wealth in terms of cattle. Clan chiefs maintained their wealth and authority by collecting tribute, and in turn loaned parts of their vast royal herds to peasant farmers for milk and breeding purposes.

Tswana territory extended into parts of present-day eastern Botswana by 1800 but still lay mostly to the south. That changed in the 1820s, during the time of warfare known as the MFECANE (or difaqane). The Ndebele, fleeing Zulu aggression, invaded the Transvaal region at this time and began raiding Tswana and Sotho settlements. Many Tswana fled into the Kalahari Desert, where the inhospitable climate of sparse rainfall and extreme temperature changes deterred the Ndebele from pursuing them further. By the mid-1830s the Ndebele had themselves continued northward into what is now Zimbabwe. The refugee Tswana clans resettled in the more arable lands near the Limpopo, one of the region’s only perennial rivers.

Following the mfecane, Tswana culture coalesced around the eight most powerful clans, whose ruling families continue to dominate Botswana politics today. Bitter rivalries among many of the clans prevented them from forming a kingdom, as was the case for many other ethnic groups in southern Africa during this time. The division of the Tswana into rival chiefdoms made them especially vulnerable to incursions by European troops and missionaries, which increased in scale as the British and Afrikaners (or Boers) to the south competed to extend their colonial territories further inland.

Of the two European groups, the Boers were the more aggressive, driving the Ndebele from the region. The Boers believed that their victory gave them rightful claim to all lands formerly ruled by the Ndebele, including, in their estimation, the Tswana territories north of the Limpopo River. By the mid-1840s, Boer commando brigades had begun raiding Tswana towns in an effort to drive the clans from the region. Despite formal appeals by local missionaries, including David Livingstone, for British intervention, the Boer raids continued unchecked over the next forty years.

In 1876 two paramount chiefs, Setshele of the Kwena clan and Khama of the Ngwato, began requesting British protection from the Boers, and in 1885 they finally received it. Although Setshele and Khama had no authority over other Tswana clans and ethnic groups in the region, the British used their request as a justification for claiming the entire territory constituting modern-day Botswana as the British Protectorate of Bechuanaland. A section of Tswana territory south of the Molopo River was eventually absorbed into the Republic of South Africa.

British Bechuanaland

Although the British claimed humanitarian goals for asserting control over the Tswana, they had purely territorial aims as well. An early goal of the British Empire in Africa was to establish an inland trade route that would link the Cape Colony of South Africa with Britain’s territories north of the equator. Although Bechuanaland had little material value in terms of known natural resources or arable land, its flat, dry terrain was ideally suited to the construction of wagon roads and railroads. Moreover, the British feared an alliance between the then independent Boer states of Transvaal and Orange Free State to the east and German-controlled South-West Africa (present-day Namibia) to the west on the Atlantic coast. By seizing Bechuanaland, which lay between these two rival groups, the British secured their expansion into the interior.

Economic development of Bechuanaland during the colonial period was, therefore, almost entirely limited to transportation. In 1897 workers completed a railroad across eastern Bechuanaland linking mining sites in the interior of what is now Zimbabwe to ports along the southern coast. The director of both the mining and railway projects was Cecil John Rhodes, whose British South Africa Company briefly held broad administrative powers over much of the Bechuanaland Protectorate. As South Africa’s mining industry expanded, migrant workers from Bechuanaland traveled to South African gold and diamond mines, where they lived in guarded, segregated dormitories and earned a fraction of their white counterparts’ wages. Cattle-owning Tswana took advantage of the new rail link to ship cattle for slaughter in the growing cities of South Africa, or even for export to Great Britain.

In 1910 Great Britain unified all its colonies in southern Africa in the Union of South Africa. A proviso in the union charter called for eventual incorporation of all British protectorates, including Bechuanaland. Tswana leaders, who had been allowed to keep many of their political powers in a British system of colonial administration known as indirect rule, successfully prevented this from taking place. However, they could not prevent the British from establishing economic conditions that guaranteed Botswana’s dependency on South Africa well into the postcolonial period. The British never installed an infrastructure linking the region to seaports in any country but South Africa. Botswana thus remained heavily dependent on South Africa both for its imports and for what was then its sole export, beef. Economic underdevelopment further guaranteed that, as drought and soil erosion prevented residents from maintaining even subsistence levels of agriculture, Botswana’s adult male population would continue to provide a pool of inexpensive labor for South Africa’s mines.

Despite these developments, relations between Bechuanaland and the British remained cordial. Many clans, particularly the Ngwato, adopted Christianity, and it was not unusual for clan chiefs and other elites to travel to Great Britain to attend university. One such attendee, the Ngwato heir-apparent Seretse Khama, created a furor in 1948 by marrying a white Englishwoman, Ruth Williams. That same year South Africa officially instituted its doctrine of Apartheid, and the combination of events threatened to totally disrupt relations between the two countries. To appease South African whites, the British barred Khama from returning home to Bechuanaland. Only after he promised to renounce the Ngwato chieftancy did they allow Khama to return in 1956.

Khama considered the loss of the chieftancy a small price to pay. One of the things he had learned from his European schooling was that traditional Tswana political structures were doomed to extinction. Instead, Khama and his allies formed a European-style political party—the Bechuanaland (later Botswana) Democratic Party, or BDP—and campaigned on a nationalist platform to replace the British colonial government with an indigenous one set up along similar lines as a first step toward independence. Self-government came at first in 1961 in the form of a legislative council equally divided between black and white members, despite blacks outnumbering whites in Bechuanaland by a factor of 100. A more egalitarian system of universal adult suffrage swept the BDP into power in 1965, with Khama the prime minister of Bechuanaland. When the country achieved independence on September 30 1966, Khama became president of the newly formed Republic of Botswana.

Independent Botswana

At the time of independence, Botswana was one of the poorest countries on earth. Its prospects appeared limited and its dependency on neighboring South Africa assured, with cattle grazing and subsistence farming as its only economic activities. In addition, over four-fifths of its area was covered by the wastelands of the Kalahari Desert and, farther north, by the vast, economically useless Makgadikgadi Salt Pans and Okavango Swamp.

Botswana’s economic salvation came just one year later, in a spectacular form: the discovery of diamonds in the Makgadikgadi Salt Pans near the town of Orapa. De Beers Consolidated Mines of South Africa had been exploring the interior of Botswana for deposits since 1955, but the Orapa site provided the first evidence that such mineral resources existed. By 1971 the Orapa mine was in production, with the Botswanan government receiving 70 percent of the revenues, and efforts had begun in earnest, fueled by international investment, to uncover further diamond sites. The largest of these, at Jwaneng in the Kalahari, opened in 1982. Botswana became the world’s largest source of gem-quality diamonds.

Botswanan Diamonds.  Workers inspect rough diamond cuts from workstations in Gaborone, Botswana. The Diamond Trading Company, which opened in Botswana in late 2008, further increased the nation's strength in the diamond trade.

(Themba Hadebe/AP Images)

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The search for diamonds also led to the discovery of other mineral resources in Botswana. Chief among these turned out to be copper-nickel matte, coal, and soda ash. All told, the mining industry in Botswana accounts for more than half the country’s GDP and 89 percent of its export revenues. Price fluctuations in the minerals market have not threatened Botswana’s phenomenal economic growth, which has averaged 11 percent annually since independence and has not fallen below 4 percent since 1970. This stability derives largely from a series of National Development Plans put forth by the Botswana Democratic Party to cap excessive growth and preserve a substantial foreign exchange reserve.

Despite Botswana’s economic prosperity, it remained dependent on South Africa for many of its imports and its overseas exports, nearly all of which still passed through South African ports. Khama and his successor, Dr. Quett Masire, therefore maintained a position of diplomatic neutrality toward the apartheid regime and other unstable, white minority–ruled states in the region, such as Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe) and South-West Africa. Instead, Botswana helped organize the Southern African Development Community (SADC) to coordinate economic cooperation among the “frontline” states—the majority-ruled states of southern Africa bordering states under white minority domination. A 1979 conference of the frontline states in Botswana’s capital, Gaborone, initiated a framework for cooperation that formed the basis for the Lusaka Declaration of 1980 on economic cooperation. A 1992 treaty formalized the structures of the SADC.

From independence until the late 1990s, the BDP remained Botswana’s ruling political party. The numerous opposition parties, most notably the Marxist Botswana National Front, had little impact on BDP dominance. This was due partly to continued economic prosperity and partly to demography—the Ngwato, the largest of the Tswana clans and accounting for roughly a third of Botswana’s population, dominated the BDP. Various indirect political restrictions in an otherwise democratic society, however, also helped to maintain the BDP’s hold on power. For example, the BDP controlled Botswana’s only daily newspaper, and its authority to grant mining and cattle-grazing rights gave party leaders and their allies near-total control of Botswana’s economy. The BDP was strongest in rural areas, where much of the population was dependent on the chiefly classes and the wealthy cattle owners who dominated the party. Opposition to the BDP government centered mainly in the rapidly growing cities, where the educated middle class sought to break the BDP elite’s monopoly on power, and where large numbers of impoverished migrants from the countryside faced persistent unemployment. However, the retirement of President Masire, the orderly succession of his vice president, Festus Mogae, to the presidency in 1998, and Mogae’s reelection to a five-year term by the National Assembly in 1999 appeared to extend the BDP’s firm grip on power.

Despite the continued existence of severe economic inequality and high unemployment, Botswana remained one of postcolonial Africa’s few models for multiparty democracy and sustained economic growth during the late 1990s. Recent shifts toward privatization of Botswana’s industrial and mining sectors have shown few signs of endangering the country’s economic climate. Indeed, South Africa’s transition to majority rule has created new economic opportunities for Botswana. South Africa’s admission to the SADC in 1994 opened up the possibility of expanded trade and economic cooperation with Botswana’s economically powerful southern neighbor.

The specter of AIDS, however, has cast a shadow over Botswana’s economic prospects. As of 2003, nearly 40 percent of all Botswanans were infected with the HIV virus—a staggeringly large figure. The government has pursued an aggressive strategy of funding for AIDS treatment and prevention, but many worry that the effort may have come too late. Working in Botswana’s favor, however, is its mineral wealth that provides a relatively high standard of living for average Botswanans, who are far more likely than most Africans afflicted by HIV/AIDS to be able to afford the treatment they need.

See also Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome in Africa: An Interpretation; Colonial rule; Minerals and Mining in Africa.

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