To enter Lobatse from the south, from Mafikeng or Kanye is to experience Asian Lobatse whereas the visitor coming from the east, from South Africa and the Jubilee border gate is to see African Lobatse. Racial division was a common characteristic of old colonial towns with the railway line usually providing a convenient boundary between the whites on one side and the black or brown people on the other.
Lobatse was a little more complicated in being divided not only amongst three main racial groups but in possessing sub groups, such as the abattoir and the railway employees, who lived in their own housing localities.
Independence in 1966 may have swept away institutionalised and structured racialism but the old centre of Lobatse was shaped by those factors and the town can only be understood today in those terms.
Let’s start with white Lobatse, which prior to Independence possessed most of the standard ingredients of a fully-fledged colonial town. Today this part of the town still begins with the eucalyptus plantation which puts down an immediate marker, trees, greenery and space and comes to an end either at the Post Office or at the old Lobatse Hotel, there being no rigidly defined boundary.
The area was attractive and remains so today. It had a tarred, tree lined road, which was constructed, I was told, for the 1947 visit of King George and Queen Elizabeth and the two princesses. The trees apparently came later being planted by G.A. Germond, the British Divisional Commissioner South for the opening of the High Court in 1956. It had generous road margins and attractive colonial housing. It possessed two hotels, the Lobatse Hotel in the main street now partly demolished which dated from pre-2nd world war days and Sid Milner’s famous Cumberland Hotel which came into being just prior to Independence. It had its own hospital and surprisingly its own mental hospital.
It had its own well appointed whites only secondary school, its own airstrip, cricket ground, granaries, High Court and attached jail, its own Anglican Church, its own block of Commonwealth Development Association Offices and its own abattoir. With access to the railway - which, of course, it controlled - it was, with one or two exception, a complete town in itself. The exceptions were shops or trading stores, which were and still are, Indian owned and a garage.
It is difficult to imagine that wives of colonial officials did their shopping in Lobatse or indeed had their cars repaired there. Perhaps they all went off on shopping trips to Mafikeng and Zeerust, as indeed was the practice of many makgoa in the south of the country in the years immediately after independence.
Today the old white Lobatse is well worth studying. Many of the old bits and pieces are still very much in place but there have been many significant changes. The old whites only school died at Independence and is now a major senior secondary school. Much of Lobatse’s architectural heritage in this area has been demolished or left to rot.
Germond’s large, attractive pro-consular residence, complete with swimming pool, has been abandoned but is still recoverable. The very large one story office block of the Commonwealth Development Association is also abandoned and left high and dry and many of the old colonial houses, including one occupied by Seretse and Ruth, have been demolished.
It is a mystery why the government, which promotes tourism as a maximum priority, should allow such important elements of its history and heritage to be lost. But heritage aside, old buildings can be restored and re-utilised and in places where there is a shortage of office accommodation and housing, it is surprising that the government should prefer to let its older properties disintegrate rather than sell them off and bring in much needed new revenue.
The modest, old High Court, where the Legislative Assembly helped to usher in Independence, was superseded in 1994 by a modern architectural colossus. Unusually the older building was not demolished to make way for the new.
Of the hotels, the old Lobatse hotel, where British army officers were billeted in World War II is a gonner. It is of great importance that the Lobatse Council and the various planners who will be involved recognise the strong, very individual characteristic of Lobatse’s main street - curiously named Khama 1 St. - and ensure that this is maintained and strengthened.
The Cumberland is still mercifully un-modernised which is just as well because it occupies a special, central place in this country’s modern history.
Almost everyone who was anyone must have stayed there and all the others who didn’t, would have eaten there - it being a routine of the later 1960s to drive down the awful dirt road from Gaborone, to enjoy the Cumberland’s famed cooking and then return and drive all the way back.
Gone too, inevitably, is the old airstrip and cricket ground being replaced by the huge Lobatse Clay Works and Lobatse Tile Company. Russell England’s granaries - were there eight of them? - have also gone. When major physical features have been demolished, it is often difficult to remember where they once stood. Were those old granaries in the way of the new giant Geological Department block or of some other needed development - so that they had to go? Disregarding the usual compulsive arguments, it has to be a mistake to demolish major physical features, which contribute to the personality of a town and give it difference.
Everything is re-usable. If those eight or so granaries had been painted in eight different colours, as an attempt to bring them into public consciousness, their importance might have been better understood. And new plans drawn up for them.
Dr Sbrana’s old mental hospital is about to be replaced by a new mental hospital of a size, which is quite stunning.
A colleague, when recently viewing it through the usual corrugated iron boarding, suggested flippantly that the projected figures which had determined the size of the new facility indicated that half of the entire population would be patients and the other half would be looking after them! If the scale of this gigantic new mental hospital is anything to go by, the future is indeed bleak.
And then there is the abattoir. Without personal involvement or connection with the place, it is difficult to grasp how enormously important it is to Lobatse.
It is only recently that I found that it possessed an entire, almost invisible housing estate. For a visitor, BMC is an entrance gate, a well watered green lawn, oleanders in flower and nothing more.
Looked at from the air its size in relation to that of the rest of Lobatse would probably make everything immediately clear. But that is the point about Lobatse.
It hides so much of itself behind every available corner.
