Our Heritage (Sandy Grant) Gaborone and Rhodes

| Wednesday September 3, 2014 15:52

 

Could today’s Gaborone have come into existence without Rhodes’s Kimberley? Is Rhodes in any way relevant to Gaborone today?.  Without Rhodes, could there be a today’s Debswana? Or the diamond mines at Orapa, Jwaneng, and Letlhakane?  Or beneficiation?  Questions which are easy to pose but difficult for a non-diamond, non specialist to answer. It would be fascinating if Professor Roman Grynberg would give it a try? For the rest of us, it seems that Rhodes has left no obvious footprint here other than the railway line.  But what a truly monumental footprint that is! Without the egregious, dynamic, ambitious, and yet grimly unappealing, awful Rhodes there would probably be no Zimbabwe today, certainly in its present form, nor would there be the railway. If the line had not been pushed through in 1896 it is possible that it would never have been constructed – because of the First World War, then the worldwide recession of the 1930s, and then the Second World War.

Might Independence have been achieved but with no railway line? And in that case, how would Gaborone have been put together, given that road transport was still in its infancy. But then were it not for Rhodes there would probably have been no Protectorate and, as with Zimbabwe, the form of this country would undoubtedly be very different.

Gaborone, however, does have one other slight connection with Rhodes and that is the old building, now used as an Herbarium, which was acquired a few years ago by the National Museum.  There is an unsupported popular belief that this building was once used as some sort of a guest house and that plans for the Jameson Raid were hatched there.

How should we react if it is accepted that there is likely to be some element of truth in such claims? After all, the failure of this absurd Raid brought about an immediate end to Rhodes attempts to acquire this country.

And led to the eventual success of that famous visit to the U.K. So perhaps, a memorial of some sort would be appropriate – ‘it was here that the first steps might have been taken which led directly to the ruin of Mr C.J. Rhodes and thus the emergence of Botswana in its present form’? Or might it be more sensible to leave matters as they are?

To allow Mr Rhodes to remain in obscurity and breath a huge sigh of relief that he failed to do in this country what he did in South Africa and Zimbabwe.