Old Naledi

Sandy Grant | Wednesday March 22, 2017 16:01

 

It’s a bit similar to seeing a newly constructed building and remembering what was previously there.  It is extraordinarily difficult.  But let’s take a step backward and try and recreate the Old Naledi of 50 years ago.

For reasons which I have never really understood, the British Administration which planned the new capital, Gaborone, failed to grasp that large scale construction, by far the biggest that had occurred in the entire history of the Protectorate, was bound to attract hundreds of mostly unskilled migrant labourers.

This omission is all the more surprising because they were well aware that because of the lack of job opportunities here, many thousands of people were working in South Africa, not least in the mines. The construction of the new capital gave them, for the first time, an opportunity to get a job within the country and not outside it. 

It is a mystery as to why the Administration failed to anticipate that this was what would happen. My guess, and it has to be a guess, is that they were so accustomed to dealing with the dikgosi and their tribal communities that they were incapable of foreseeing anything else. Indeed they may well have mistaken stagnation for contentment.

On the other hand, they were fearful that uncontrolled slum/shanty town settlement areas could so quickly appear to soil the clean new capital. Strangely, they anticipated that if this were to happen, the movement into the capital would come from nearby, places such as Tlokweng. In the event, they did nothing about this foreseeable problem perhaps because they were so pre-occupied with creating a sanitised new capital town where everything would be orderly  and in its proper place. Dr Merriweather in particular spelt out this objective when suggesting that the new Gaborone should be more like  clean Edinburgh and less like dirty, industrial Glasgow. With that kind of thinking it may not have been too surprising that they went to great trouble to save and protect the trees which was a marvelous legacy passed on to later residents.

Crudely and probably unfairly, it might be said that they were more hooked on trees than on people. When they first realised that they had blundered by overlooking the daily paid labourer they moved swiftly to create White City.

But they did nothing about the many hundreds who came to Gaborone in the hope that they could survive on the margins.  The result was the overnight creation of a significantly large slum settlement without any form of planning, without a road system, a water supply and without the most basic forms of sanitation.

The result was that people there and around the railway station were abluting, to borrow Bishy Mmusi’s term, everywhere and anywhere. And the result of that happening was that the population of flies increased dramatically. In its early days, Old Naledi was therefore, a very grim settlement akin to Francistown’s Somerset which was perhaps even worse.