The State and the Social. Ørnulf Gulbrandsen
and, in addition, accelerated very substantially inequality of wealth, the postcolonial leadership managed at an early stage to win hegemony and to capture the population into its dependency.
All this will, hopefully, bring out that the development of a strong postcolonial state might beneficially be seen as a matter of conjunctures of conditions that, at different historical stages, have been particular to this case, in accordance with Sahlins’ (2000: 472) notion that ‘[t]he very ways in which societies change have their own authenticity, so that global modernity is often reproduced as local diversity’. Botswana, then, is, as all other African countries, special – yet in ways that are comparatively recognisable if we pursue the approaches indicated in this section that help to come to terms with how the larger social context becomes significant for state formation.
Overview
The larger social context for state formation in Botswana is, I repeat, indigenous symbolism and institutions of authority, particularly in the large-scale structures of the Tswana merafe. These are conditions which have their genealogies that go back to the colonial and precolonial past. Although I insist that my argument is not of a primordial kind, it is important to comprehend how these structures, conceived as conditions for postcolonial state formation, have evolved historically. I am particularly concerned with the potentialities vested in the Tswana merafe; for example at once giving rise to a persistent dominant class underpinning the postcolonial ruling group and representing major repressive structures in relation to vast groups of ‘minorities’.
In order to trace these genealogies of power I start in precolonial times (Chapter 1) in an effort to explain how the once small state formations at the edge of the Kalahari, now known as Tswana merafe, developed in strength and expanded in scale since the late eighteenth century. I aim to show how external communities were captured into their hierarchical order in which they became subjects to forces of assimilation in ways that transformed the power structures radiating from the royal centre. I shall argue that the imperial forces propelled these transformations, including linking up with intercontinental trade, the operation of evangelizing missionaries and subjection to British colonial power. This also means that the dominant Tswana merafe of present Botswana were not ‘imposed’ from outside or ‘created’ by the colonial power (Abbink 2005: 187), although the British overlordship had considerable impact upon their transformations during colonial times.
This is, in particular, an argument about empowerment of the ruling group of the Tswana merafe selected by the British at the establishment of Bechuanaland Protectorate (1885), enhancing their capacity to capture and keep subject communities under their domination. In Chapter 2 I pursue the issue by examining Tswana rulers’ growing autocracy that also became a challenge to the British, as the dikgosi were increasingly perceived as a force ambiguously related to the colonial state, at times exterior to it. Yet the dikgosi prevailed to a significant extent, indicating, amongst other things, how dependent the British remained on their administration of the respective ‘native reserves’, their collection of tax and their extensive networks of power for the exercise of social control. These networks of power, radiating from the Tswana royal centres, are of significance to the present study because they were readily transferred from the colonial to the postcolonial context where, as we shall see in Chapters 4, 5 and 6, they proved highly instrumental to the development of the nation-state in Botswana during the formative and consolidating decades. The second part of Chapter 2 focuses upon the creation of an embryo to the ruling group of the independent state in this country. I explain their conflicting relationship to the dikgosi and their co-operation with the British for the establishment of Botswana's Constitution and a highly peaceful process of decolonization.
The historical development of a ruling group and – as I explain in Chapter 3 – the formation of a dominant class is a major condition for the rapid rise of a strong, modern state in this country. I pursue this issue in Chapter 3 by invoking Bayart's (1993: 160) point that many postcolonial African states are weak and failing because of the absence of a persistent, dominant class. I shall explain that in Botswana, by contrast, people of power and wealth – across the ruling communities of the dominant Tswana merafe – modern vs. traditional orientation and urban vs. rural residence cohered into a dominant class underpinning the ruling group of the postcolonial state from the outset. This involved the formation that Sebudubudu (2009) has named a ‘grand coalition’ which prevented the development of an exteriority of what Deleuze and Guattari speak of as ‘war-machines’ with great potentialities of generating destabilizing rhizomic forces. I shall explain that livestock production, Botswana's highly privileged access to the European beef market and the development of the mining industry gave rise to a powerful state-centred political economy that progressively drew an increasingly diversified class of people into a privileged dependency of a progressively strong state. That is a dominant class which – despite all their conflicts and rivalries – had in common a major interest in a strong state and sustainable government.
The progressive capture of people privileged by governmental policies and programmes into the orbit of the state does, however, not help to explain the ways in which all the rank and file sections have become subjects to the postcolonial state. In Chapters 4–7 I address this issue from different angles. The overarching theme is the various ways in which the state has captured indigenous institutions of authority into its structures and become highly instrumental to control and manage the population and draw people into the process of state formation. In Chapter 4 I am centrally concerned with, first, the relationship between the state and the Tswana merafe, explaining how the dikgosi were co-opted into the state where they on the whole have been working as loyal civil servants, but not without notable exceptions. I examine two major cases of challenges to the state that perfectly illuminate, on the one hand, popular continued attachment to the symbolic wealth and sociopolitical order of the merafe vested in the bogosi and, on the other, the prevailing rhizomic potentials vested in the Tswana merafe in relation to the state. In the second major part of Chapter 4 I explain the significance of the dominant, everyday activity vested in these hierarchies of authority – administration of justice – and how it contributes to their reproduction under postcolonial circumstances. This examination helps to come to terms with Nyamnjoh's (2003: 247) suggestion about ‘chieftaincy’ in Botswana as ‘a dynamic institution, constantly reinventing itself to accommodate and be accommodated by new exigencies…[that] has proved phenomenal in its ability to seek conviviality between competing and often conflicting influences’.
I am centrally concerned with the observation that during the formative and consolidating decades, which are, I repeat, of major concern in this volume, the population was to a great extent kept in the fold without much of state policing and exercise of violence. As I explain in Chapter 5, this fitted perfectly well a state government which sought legitimacy in the population at large by attempting to build popular identification with a nation-state by envisaging a prosperous future of developmental modernity by invoking indigenous symbolism of authority – a symbolism merged with all the virtues of Western modernity. I shall explain how the state leadership attempted to win hegemony in relation to all the rank-and-file sections of the population by featuring as custodian of the common good by means of massive programmes of social infrastructures and services. That is, programmes of Western ‘welfarism’ which are expressed in a major, national discourse of development. To this discourse belongs also all the