A Dream Bigger Than Ourselves: Botswana And The Modern World

The story of contemporary Botswana is poignantly dramatic and touching. But only to those who care to look carefully and deeper into the nature of this story as singular human experience.

Fifty years have gone by, registering an anal of history rich enough to permit rigorous assessment of this experience. Have we done enough to add substance to the ideal of independence, to the concept of self-rule, to the ideology of nationhood, to the advent of republican values-freedom, justice, equality, human dignity? Have we lived to the expectations of a generation that watched, terrified, as Britain withdrew and a new curtain opened announcing to a stunned world the birth of a new nation? Botswana? Where the hell is that? For a good 80 years we had been the butt of bad jokes in the British Foreign Office where the mandarins of imperial bliss referred to us as “the dirty desert rat.”