The 1966 BDP Conference in Mochudi
Sandy Grant | Wednesday June 24, 2015 17:08
At a guess, about 300 members must have attended the 1966 conference in Mochudi which was held at the now abandoned Community Centre.
The first stage of the conference was held outside with members sitting on conventional school type benches to be welcomed by Prime Minister Seretse Khama.
This photo appears to have been taken when members, at the completion of the speech, were scrambling to take their seats inside the Centre’s small hall where the plenary sessions were held. Many wear hats and are formally dressed. There is nothing to indicate that this is a BDP conference, the red shirts and jackets are still to come, there is no red bunting, and there are no visible police, no security and no guns. This is indeed the beginning of the party. Those delegates and members who had driven to Mochudi in their Bedford and Chev trucks – only few people at that time owned cars – would probably have left them at Molefi Junior Secondary School, now Seingwaeng Primary where they would have slept, and walked across the Rovers football ground to the Community Centre. Meals were presumably prepared at the school by Mochudi ladies who were party adherents. A few members would have stayed with friends in Gaborone such as George Sim who had a farm just outside it.
As might be expected at that time, there appear to have been only few women present and even fewer ‘whites’. The women, apart from Ruth, would all have come from Mochudi whilst a prominent party member such as Jimmy Haskins, and maybe others from the north, appear not to have attended. Most of the member delegates would have been farmers who had been hit desperately hard by the long lasting and devastating drought.
A few would have been traders and the general education would have been fairly low with few being genuinely literate and fluent in both Setswana and English. Most would have been conservative and cautious in their thinking but keen, paradoxically, to take the great Independence gamble. All of them would have had personal experience of racial prejudice, in one form or another, but all, nevertheless, wanted a multi-racial state.
All of them would, in all probability, have been profoundly uneasy with the alternative brand of politics which was then being mooted - Matante’s township politics that had such appeal in Francistown and Lobatse.
It is these people, in appearance fairly ordinary people, who took that first giant stride forward.