The BDP and Botswana's 'false decolonisation' Part 1

COMRADE MOORE | Friday March 2, 2012 00:00

Our main concern here  is that  in the process, the party tried hard to re-invent itself or  obscure the true facts about its history. This article seeks to challenge this obscurantism by briefly looking at the BDP's unpleasant past as a virtual creature of the colonial administration and the settler bourgeoisie. Politically, Botswana was in the same league as former French  and British colonies Gabon, Niger, Ivory Coast, the Gambia, Lesotho and Swaziland  that experienced what Ben Turok calls 'false decolonisation'.

In the these countries, pro-imperialist 'clients' or  black leaders replaced white colonial masters without changing the basic character of the society. Felix Houphouet-Boigny who became the first president of Ivory Coast  opposed independence for Africa and his country at the 1946 Bamako Conference of the Rassemblment Democratique Africain.

In the 1960s, historian Munger described Sir Seretse Khama as 'a friend and confidant of European officials, Afrikaners spoke warmly of him'.  In his independence speech, Khama paid glowing tribute to his colonial masters -  referring to 'the great gratitude of my people for the protection and assistance which has been given to Botswana during the long period of our dependence...it should not be that past affections and regard have been immediately erased.

We look forward to a continuing association of pleasant friendliness in which the ties of the past may in some sense be preserved'. The BDP regime believes in the myth that Botswana was not a British colony but rather a 'protectorate'. The truth of the matter is that the  declaration of a Protectorate in 1885 was mainly motivated by imperialist strategic imperatives of protecting the 'the Suez Canal to the north' from other imperialist countries in order to keep alive Britain's grand imperialist designs of colonising Africa from Cape to Cairo.

It must be borne in mind that the development of commodity relations or the  colonial destruction of the pre-capitalist mode of production and its replacement by capitalism was half-hearted and  limited and there was no large scale expropriation of the land  and consequently there was no major change in the lives of the people. This partly explains why Batswana voted for the conservative and pro-imperialist BDP led by the chief of the dominant Bangwato ethnic community.

Basically there were two main phases of capitalist penetration during the pre-independence period. From the 1840s the country witnessed the penetration of merchant capital mainly from the Cape and from the 1940s came industrial capital and the insertion of the economy into the global capitalist system via the South African regional sub-centre effectively rendering Botswana an economic satellite of its neighboring giant. The hallmarks of the colonial era in Botswana were underdevelopment and  limited commoditisation.

The material conditions in colonial Botswana did not create a large sufficiently politically conscious working class and intelligentsia - the classes that normally champion the cause of nationalism.  It was against that backdrop that the motive force for the development of nationalism in the 1960s was mainly external. The evolution of nationalism was more of a reflection of the struggle for independence in South Africa and Africa in general than a culmination of homegrown indigenous forms resistance against colonialism. Following the 1960s defiance campaigns which culminated in the Sharpeville massacres and the banning of the ANC and the PAC in apartheid South Africa, some Batswana who were active in those two organisations fled back to Botswana.

Prominent among those exiles were Phillip Matante and Motsamai Mpho who spearheaded nationalist awakening in Botswana. For instance, in 1953 Mpho was secretary of the ANC branch in Roodeport. He was charged with treason and jailed but after his release in the 1960s, he came back to Botswana. The duo founded the Bechuanaland Peoples Party (BPP) in 1960 which became the first radical pan-Africanist and more or less nationally organised party in the country.

Therefore it was the BPP, and not the BDP, which played an important progressive role during the struggle for independence. The BDP only took advantage of the BPP split in 1962 and owed much its popularity to the traditional standing of Khama as the chief of one of the dominant ethnic communities, Bangwato. Half-hearted classical colonialism left the feudal  mode of production, albeit in subordinated form, in the rural areas virtually intact hence the popularity of the BDP in the rural areas and the relative popularity of the BPP in urban areas where the workers bore the brunt of the much more heightened penetration of capitalist forms of exploitation. 

During the political campaigns, voters persistently asked the question: 'Matante ke ngwana waga mang? (whose son is Matante?) - a question designed to find out if he had any blue blood in his veins. Indeed some chiefs denied the BPP the right to campaign in some parts of the country. Be that as it may, the BPP made such  an immediate impact on the political scene that the British colonial administration was forced to bring forward by five years the 1963 constitutional review. Indeed the BPP must be credited with pushing the colonial masters to grant Botswana independence in 1966 about 10 years earlier than was originally anticipated by both the colonial administration and their  BDP hangers-on. The BPP demanded immediate independence, condemned tribalism, threatened to abolish chieftainship and  nationalise white owned land. The BPP policy of nationalisation of land was a response to the extremism of the white settler bourgeoisie who appealed to  apartheid  South Africa  and Rhodesia and demanded that their ill-acquired farms be annexed by those countries. In the context of Cold War politics the BPP's pan-Africanism was exaggerated as communism and it struck terror in the hearts of the colonial administration, the white settler bourgeoisie and the  traditional feudal petty bourgeoisie or chiefs who demonised it as 'irresponsible',  'subversive', 'dangerous' and a  'communist organisation'.

In his report to his seniors, Resident Commissioner Fawcus stated that 'an extremist African Nationalist Party has established itself in the Northern Protectorate, and has gained a considerable following in Gammangwato and Francistown area. It is working strenuously and with some success to extend itself throughout the Protectorate'. In fact, the colonial administration was so alarmed by the BPP that in 1964, it passed a number of draconian laws against the party copied from apartheid South Africa. The law was meant to deal with 'subversion', threatened to ban parties considered 'dangerous to peace',  imposed imprisonment for 'learning to use arms' and restricted political 'assemblies'.

The apartheid regime in South Africa did not hide its hostility to the BPP by making it clear that it would not tolerate 'communist-oriented' governments in its neighbourhood in Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland. Author John Grotpeter observes that the birth of the  BDP 'was mainly a response  to the growing strength of the BPP'. In other words, the BDP was initially formed as an opposition party, meant to challenge the radical BPP.Or as Samuel  Edwards puts it, 'the BDP was opposed to the BPP extremism'. Singing from the same hymn book, the BDP and the colonial administration accused the BPP of being 'irresponsible' and 'extremist for demanding immediate independence.

In 1962, Peter Fawcus talked about internal self-government 'towards the end of the decade',  adding that, 'it would be irresponsible to seek to introduce a new formal constitution in 1963'. The founder member of the BDP, Ketumile Masire who became the second president of Botswana echoed the words of the Resident Commissioner by accusing the BPP of making 'grossly irresponsible statements. It was growing popular on the strength of its irresponsible statements'.  In their book, The Road to Independence, Peter Fawcus and Allan  Tilbury note that fearful of the radical BPP, the white colonial officer Russell England decided to urge Seretse Khama in 1962 to form a new political party and 'proposed to him that they should be joint leaders' of that party - that is Khama and England should jointly lead the BDP .

Fawcus however, advised against Russell England's idea because a party jointly led by an African and a white person was unlikely to command support among Batswana. However there was a popular view during the 1960s that the BDP was Fawcus' party.One  strategy of the colonial administration was to install in power weak chiefs who would not challenge chief Seretse Khama's claim to national leadership. The colonial administration encouraged members of the legislative councils to form a pro-imperialist party to counter the radical BPP. Khama who was a member of the Legislative and Executive Councils was the favourite of the imperialists in their strategy to stem the rising tide of the BPP politics.

The British imperialists later decorated Khama with essentially imperialist appellations. The writer Daniel Kowet observes that 'the BDP was acceptable both to the republic and the colonial government. Seretse himself was even decorated with the colonial insignia of 'Order of the British Empire.He was later also decorated with the title of 'K.B.E.' (Knight Commander of the British Empire)'. Although Idi Amin was a buffoon, he was wise enough to bestow upon himself the more sensible title 'Conqueror of the British Empire'.

When the conservative and tribally based  Bechuanaland Protectorate Federal Party was dissolved in 1962, many of its members joined the BDP. Both the Federal Party and the BDP did not demand immediate independence.Soon after its formation, the BDP talked about the so-called 'self-rule'. And while the BPP preached pan-Africanism, the BDP talked about 'multiracialism'.The Federal Party was so conservative that it opposed the principle of black majority rule and regarded immediate independence as dangerous. Its programme protected the interests of both the colonial and traditional ruling classes.

The BDP is a party that originally represented the interests of the colonial ruling classes, the white settler bourgeoisie (farmers and industrialists), traditional ruling classes or chiefs, cattle barons and the emergent petty-bourgeoisie - newspaper reporters, court clerks, teachers (20 percent of the first cabinet were teachers). Both Khama and Masire were cattle barons. The BDP was dependent upon white financial support in Britain, South Africa and Southern Rhodesia and from the white settler bourgeoisie. In Kweneng West, one Afrikaner businessman contributed funds to the BDP campaign.

The BDP was also reported to have received 5,000 British pounds from the Bechuanaland Meat Commission.KT Motsete of the BPP charged that 'the BDP received substantial amounts of money from Oxford Committee for Famine Relief and the white inhabitants of the country. This committee is funded partly by the British government'. A close scrutiny of the two constitutional conferences that gave birth to our constitution indicates that it  is the embodiment of the interests of the dominant capitalist classes, the so-called eight principal tribes and the dominant gender group.

It defines and  affirms the supremacy and sanctity of the forces of capital over those of labour. It enshrines the supremacy of the elite within the dominant eight 'principal tribes' which shaped the history of this country and tried and continue to try to subjugate other ethnic communities.  This was a constitution written and authored by the British colonial administration, the white and Asian settler colonial bourgeoisie, remnants of the traditional ruling classes or chiefs and the emergent petty bourgeoisie in the new political parties, the BDP, the BIP and the BPP.