A Dream Bigger Than Ourselves: Botswana And The Modern World
Correspondent | Monday July 4, 2016 16:21
The story of contemporary Botswana is poignantly dramatic and touching. But only to those who care to look carefully and deeper into the nature of this story as singular human experience.
Fifty years have gone by, registering an anal of history rich enough to permit rigorous assessment of this experience. Have we done enough to add substance to the ideal of independence, to the concept of self-rule, to the ideology of nationhood, to the advent of republican values-freedom, justice, equality, human dignity? Have we lived to the expectations of a generation that watched, terrified, as Britain withdrew and a new curtain opened announcing to a stunned world the birth of a new nation? Botswana? Where the hell is that? For a good 80 years we had been the butt of bad jokes in the British Foreign Office where the mandarins of imperial bliss referred to us as “the dirty desert rat.”
That this wretched rat had been brought to their attention by three dishevelled and trembling chiefs fearful of Boer, and possibly German, aggression did not help matters. The English hated the Boers. They loved India where careers and wealth always awaited all and sundry. They feared the Zulus, who had inflicted unmitigated humiliation on them at Isandlwana. Nobody really knew what to do with Africa and the Africans during the premierships of Disraeli and Gladstone. I don’t know if Batswana know the humiliations these three men suffered in the turbulent London of the 1880s. Thanks to missionary help, the immortal memory of David Livingstone in public imagination and a vociferous liberal newspaper campaign they got their wish. Botswana owes Livingstone a lot of gratitude.
If, that is, you don’t regret we aren’t today a part of prosperous South Africa.
Oh, we were really poor. Even at birth we looked like a haggard child, bursting in the world as any new born but already old, scarred, tattered, almost exhausted, a terrible picture of stubborn resolve...some will even say imprudence. And yes, people did laugh! A great deal. Many feared for our future. It really wouldn’t do harm to read a little bit of your national history. We looked astonishingly vulnerable, foolish even. It’s a fascinating story. Sad as well. Independence, eh? What a load of nonsense! Haw…! Haw…haw!
Reading about our wretched plight in the Records Office as a young man, I actually broke down and cried. It was a horrible experience-not at all different from a sudden exposure to the nudity of a highly beloved parent. Fifty years ago Botswana was the picture of desolation, a wild scamp tottering into the world stage to be born a nation.
Today the “dirty desert rat” is an important detail of African history. And it’s only fair to ask: how have we acquitted ourselves? And that flag, the symbol of what we are, does it still carry the same significance in our hearts and national consciousness? I fear not.
I grant we live in a world of monstrous political transfigurations. But our politics is not that bad. The greatest trouble is economics and our moral character as a nation. Human strength derives from three things: intellect, religion and morality. Same applies to the strength of a country. We are doing badly in these indices. We have a terribly bad national character. Our national spirit is wanting in far too many dimensions. Our moral compass…I don’t really think I ought to bother with that. It’s one of those things about which every sensible observer simply throws their hands in the air and murmur: statistics speak for themselves; though we know statistics has no language, and they can be used to justify anything.
The way things are going now we must prepare for a future less mellifluous and more uncertain. We must prepare for more pronounced molestation by several things. First, our unbridled passions and excesses. Second, the malice of nature. Three, the caprice of national politics. Do we have strength enough to negotiate the endless perils of postcolonial modernity? Drought and famine are quite capable of annihilating the foundation of a nation. And climate change and ecological blight are real enough. Floods can be more menacing than some acts of genocide. You cannot seek reparations anywhere for violent acts of nature. And we are a desert country. International trade is unfavourable and hostile to sensible negotiation.
Teedzani Thapelo
Ends…edited for length