Our heritage

SANDY GRANT | Friday April 20, 2012 00:00

The first was that the police have again changed their uniforms and the other, more recently, that a tourism consultancy report on Southern Africa has apparently concluded that, for tourists, this country is the least friendly, or, should you so wish, the most unfriendly. 

Before irate readers reach for their pens or their coshes, it needs to be understood that the conclusion is not that this country is the least friendly in southern Africa - it is that it has been found that the people who most tourists routinely meet are not particularly friendly and these people we will assume are  immigration officers, the police, hotel  and safari lodge receptionists, shop sales ladies, waiters, taxi drivers, fuel station attendants and so on.  It may be that some of us do share the experiences of those tourists but that is another matter, because no one sought our opinion. The other story, about the adoption of new uniforms by the police did come as a bit of a surprise to me.  I have an impression, obviously erroneous, that the police time, what seems  to be their frequent changes of clothing, to coincide with the latest economic crisis. It beats me to understand what could possibly have justified the latest change, including the switch to unappealing  base ball hats, save that it must have resulted from yet another expensive consultancy report.

 Certainly, there were too many police in the past, male and female, who somehow ended up with uniforms which were a size or two too small for them - but this would have involved factors other than the choice of uniform.  But then who can know how these weighty matters are determined? In the upshot, it is not the uniform which determines how people behave.

Give the police new uniforms and they will still be the police as we have always known them, for good or bad; and the same for all those supposedly unfriendly others who foreign tourists normally meet.  In other words, it's always the person who matters, not the uniform which clothes that person. With that idea in mind, I want to switch the negative to the positive and offer this photo which I have long cherished. It is almost a very good photo - and it does come close to being one.  Unfortunately the police have long been touchy about being photographed which means that they are rarely shown either at their best or their worst.  In this instance, if you can make it out, it shows a policeman in his now antiquated uniform, engaged in conversation with a very young girl. The relationship between the two, shown in this photo, has always appealed to me - the young girl has total trust in the policeman and can confidently talk to him. He gently responds, bending forward towards her. And contact between them is made.  It is extraordinarily difficult to find an image which somehow summates the Botswana ideal - and it may be this is the nearest I can come to it.