But to challenge this general understanding, I ask you to go back with me to the new 'nation', the new country, which came into being at the end of September 1966; a new 'nation', which had previously had no capital town or city - a conglomeration of Tswana tribes - nations if you prefer - with their tribal/national capitals together with their varied subject peoples. Not a federation of Tswana people but an area of land defined geographically by the Protectorate, which brought some within its borders and left others out. Not a country, in normally understood terms, and certainly not a nation, merely a grouping of tribal nations with common attributes, lineage, histories, language and cultures, each with their own capitals; all to achieve independence and supposedly be blended together, as never before, as a newly confirmed state. How exactly was this to happen?
As far as I can discover, a sense of nationhood started to emerge only very late - my starting point is the 1960 stopover of the British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, in Francistown when he was en route to Cape Town and his seminal Winds of Change speech. On that Wenela Airstrip, the representatives of the two recognised communities in this country, Russell England, speaking for the 'whites' and Bathoen for the 'blacks', were together in their conviction that this country was able to determine its own future. But how was this to happen? The giddy rush to Independence which, from the blast off of the gun to the finishing tape, took a mere five years, meant that a new nation had to be somehow fashioned from the semi-autonomous, unfederated tribal national states, which were to be its base components. How could this possibly be achieved?
