Xenophobia among Batswana must go now
Correspondent | Friday March 20, 2015 12:51
I was reminded of this several months ago when a young Motswana professional male now in a major institution leadership role much younger than I who had just come back from a lengthy trip to America angrily told me to leave his office when I differed with him about something while at the same time almost yelling, “you are new here.” At the same time he loves everything American which is why per chance he overspent his time in MY country.
It made no difference to him that in yelling at me and ordering me out of his office that he was breaking a sacred Tswana norm regarding respecting your elders. Instead all he saw is that I was a foreigner and a black one at that which certainly exemplified his xenophobic behaviour much more than if I had white skin and blonde or sandy hair and of course the blue eyes. Of course, he would have calmed down and even smiled if I told him I would sponsor his next trip to the States so his wife or/and girlfriend and he could go on another spending spree with their American Express card(s).
Most peoples around the world tend to be xenophobic since it is a usual way for in-groups to protect and to preserve their cultural ways of life and identities. Even in the United States. While the young man who kicked me out of his office was in my country I am sure he would have been offended if not a bit hurt if he realised what many Americans really thought about him since he was a foreigner and an African at that. Yes, too many Americans still think that in terms of caricature Africans are thieves, live in trees, and are more or less a “developing people” who live in the same country called Africa.
Their niceness towards Africans such as the young professional Batswana so arrogant in his own country and probably so humble acting in my country, was more out of paternalistic attitudes hidden behind those broad smiles we Americans are known for.
And please do not get me wrong, it is not only white Americans who smile at Africans paternalistically in our home towns, cities, and rural hinterlands but black Americans as well. Within my own family when I invited several of my otherwise highly educated relatives to come over to see me in Botswana, they snickered or started telling me about all the public health problems I was prone to encounter. Some just shook their heads when they heard that John once again was going to live a spell in Africa (my fourth time). What is wrong with him?
I even know some black Americans who pride themselves in being Afrocentric in their life philosophies, dress, and the names they give their kids who are more xenophobic against Africans than whites.
This anti-African sentiment among black Americans including the Afro-centric ones especially those who have never been to Africa except per chance the Dakar Hyatt has increased over the years with the competitive mobility of second and third generation children and grandchildren of African immigrants (symbolised by the rise of Kenyan American President Barak Obama).
In other words as a slight digression, keep in mind that the African immigrant population over the past 20 or so years has made up at least 20% of the American black population coming into stiff competition with the traditional largely historically slave derived and freed black population.
And so yes, like in the United States and as I illustrated in providing a personal case study and as I have heard from other foreigners, xenophobia also exists here in Botswana and there are boatloads of examples.
What is so ironic is that the xenophobia in Botswana one observes today is a relatively recent societal occurrence. It is a rather strange outcome of the adaptation of western cultural prejudice against different kinds of people such as the stranger.
It certainly was not there in the historical cases of Tswana chiefs who provided the global thinking leadership which laid the groundwork for the development of a modern Botswana democracy rooted in an interesting synthesis of traditional and western cultural roots. Global awareness, being globally daring is an indigenous value in Batswana governance which has long culturally diverse indigenous roots much more deeper than when European missionaries began to record the extraordinary character of Batswana cultures in the 1860s. For instance, what made Chief Khama III, a convert to London Missionary Society brand of Christianity around age 30 in 1860, such an extraordinary global leader well before his time were generations of his indigenous ancestors who shaped him long before he was baptised and educated by the missionaries.
Read deeply and analyse extensively the abundant primary sources such as missionary journals, European and African newspapers, European, African, and even Asian autobiographies and oral histories, and analyse the immense stacks of colonial records housed in Europe and in Africa to reconstruct the lives of Khama III and his peer chiefs of other peoples during the course of their adulthoods in the 1870s through the 1920s and don’t forget the sources documenting the lives of their wives and their daughters as well as their sons.
When you do such in-depth sociologically-informed historical research, what you will find is an incredibly astute, globally aware consciousness generation of indigenous leaders who as a matter of speaking knew what time it was when it came to navigating in the midst of the European scramble for African land and natural resources.
It was this global consciousness, which allowed Batswana leaders to so skillfully negotiate with the British Crown and colonial authorities to preserve their sovereignties in the face of virtually constant threats from Germans in the west, Boers to the east and to the south and from Cecil Rhodes and other British elites with imperialism designs.
The few published studies which reconstruct events in Batswana indigenous sovereign history such as about Kgosi Khama III and his two Batswana chief peers who made their way to London in 1895 to plead their case for protection from efforts to further disenfranchise them in the European scramble for African territory and natural resources, clearly document a generation of indigenous leadership not only literate but also profoundly astute when it came to understanding, mastering, and navigating the global colonial powers of their time and even the times of their descendants as they passed down cultural values of global awareness and global negotiation skills to later generations.
This makes the complex multilinguistic and multicultural Batswana story of the journey from Protectorate status to nationhood the most unique on the African continent, and one of two cases worldwide, the other one being Thailand, namely of indigenous leaders preserving their sovereignty in the midst of the zenith and declining years of global European imperialism through their extraordinary diplomacy skills and tenacity to preserve their cultural heritage and to keep their natural resources well beyond the knowledge and reach of imperialism powers attempting to subjugate them and exploit them and their natural resources.
PROFESSOR JOHN H. STANFIELD, II*
*John H. Stanfield II is President of the Africans-Americas-Exchanges-Partnerships and former Interim Distinguished Professor and Founding Director of the Mogae International Development and Governance Research Institute