Gaborone after Independence

Sandy Grant | Wednesday September 21, 2016 17:47

Nor has it been asked if subsequent developments served to validate the 1963 plan or perhaps to demonstrate how erroneous had been the assumptions on which it had been based. At first sight, the government’s decision to buy Broadhurst A farm and then in 1971 to commission a new Gaborone plan suggested that many of the original assumptions about the new town had indeed proved to be wrong. A mere eight year gap between one plan and another might confirm this point of view.

Clearly the new Gaborone grew much quicker than had been anticipated with the government itself recognising very early the need to acquire Broadhurst A.  The new plan was essentially residential, principally to embrace the newly obtained  farm area. But it is still not clear to me what triggered this new growth bearing in mind that this was neither industrially nor commercially related.

Why was there this unanticipated demand for new, largely high and medium cost housing? Who, in other words, were these first time home owners, the civil servants who no longer wanted to rent, and the first of the business people to open shops – not least members of the Asian community who had been amongst the first to invest in the new capital. A survey of those who first purchased plots and built homes in that early period would be exceptionally interesting.  The division in the 1963 plan between the more affluent Gaborone to the north and the impoverished Gaborone to the south has long intrigued me.

The north got the hospital, the secondary school and English medium primary school and the low density housing, whilst the south got commerce and industry, such as it was, the police station, belatedly the White City, the Community Centre, the churches, the supposedly high density housing and the squatters.

 As there is a need to describe the nature of the expansion northwards so there is a similar need to more clearly pin down the elements that comprised the largely unplanned development to the south. Included in the latter would have to be the mis-named African Mall, the commercial developments along the Lobatse road and the squatters at Old Naledi.  Who were these first residents, the better off and the low or zero income poor – all pioneers in their own way. In retrospect it might said that the British Administration in

Mahikeng failed to foresee the expansion both to the north and to the south. The 1971 plan, however, uses a number of telling phrases which throw additional light on the assumptions underpinning that earlier plan– for instance, ‘the attraction to town life’, and ‘an unpredictable rate of growth of population’. Even today, Teedzani Thapelo can argue that the essence of Botswana is its village life.

This, the British understood and got right. They were not so perceptive, however, in understanding how sheer need would force somany from those villages to the new town.