The State and the Social. Ørnulf Gulbrandsen
href="#u94ad99d1-7e5c-577f-a948-57f0664b3583">Chapter 3, and I discuss the relationship between the two orientations – collective virtues of the common good versus ideals of liberal individualism – in a class-formation perspective.
Moreover, the all-encompassing character of the ‘discourse of development’ also means that agents of the state attempt, I shall explain, to capture minorities into a process that is presented as ‘national’, with no relevance to ethnic or ‘tribal’ affiliation. In the second main part of Chapter 5 I go beyond 1990 because it is only during more recent times that minorities, despite state efforts to appear ethnicity neutral, have protested against Tswana domination and being treated as secondary citizens. I shall explain how these protests have been met by the state and discuss the ongoing transformations of majority-minority relations, including questioning the rhizomic potentials vested in the ‘minorities’ which in sum possibly outnumber the dominant Tswana.
In Chapter 6 I pursue this issue further in an effort to explain how the indigenous authority structures, especially the discursive fields of its councils known as lekgotla (singl. kgotla), facilitate agents of state's exercise of the discourse of development in the pursuit of establishing legitimacy in relation to all the rank-and-file sections of the population by making all the modern interventions familiar. With a major focus on the formative and consolidating decades, I explain how the state leadership has attempted to win hegemony by co-opting indigenous ideals of government by ‘consulting with people’, i.e. introducing ‘democratic’ practices through which opposition parties have been excluded to a great extent. These antipolitics practices are exercised by cabinet ministers and members of Parliament who, with great frequency, engage with local communities all over the country in intimate interaction within the context of the kgotla.
State methods to capture the population into the process of modern state formation is pursued further in Chapter 7 by focusing upon the ways in which the state intervenes in the population, especially with all its ‘development’ and welfare programmes. To the state leadership, these interventions have amounted to a major force for establishing hegemony by capturing the population into extensive bureaucratic practices that continuously work on their subjectivities. These are state practices that I shall consider as a matter of governmentalization of the state (Foucault 1978): a conception helpful to understand the peaceful and tacit, yet penetrating, ways ‘power relations have been progressively governmentalized, that is to say, elaborated, rationalized, and centralized in the form of, or under the auspices of, state institutions’ (Foucault 1982: 224). I shall discuss how and to what extent these processes have been working upon people's subjectivities to the effect of creating subjects ever more conforming with and dependent on state policies and programmes.
The state's work on people's subjectivities involves the rise of aspirations, which has, I shall argue, been nourishing the progressive conflicts between a minority of people who have risen to power and wealth and all the rank-and-file sections of the population amongst whom a substantial part has remained below the official poverty datum line. I shall address this development as an important aspect of the state-centred political economy by examining popular reactions to what they perceive as political leaders’ abuse of power. These are reactions to what are perceived as rhizomic forces destructive to the idealized order of the state, finding their most profound expression in a discursive practice based upon people's imagination of political leaders’ exercise of occult practices. Such an imagination of dangerous and damaging practices at the heart of the postcolonial state seems to resemble Mbembe's notion of the postcolony as ‘an intimate tyranny’ (1992: 22, italics original), which links the ruler with the ruled in ways that undermine both of them through the ‘mutual zombification of both the dominant and those they apparently dominate…[meaning] that each robbed the other of their vitality and this has left them both impotent’ (1992: 4). But the resemblance is only apparent because, as we shall see, reactions in Botswana to perceived hidden abuses of power are of a different kind. However violent, they are patently a matter of moral condemnation of secretive practices motivated by individual greed: they are, in this conception, deterritorializing, exterior to the order of the state and hence with war-machine properties. Their opacity trans-gresses the indigenous ideal of political transparency and hence is experienced by people as detrimental to the common good. In what I shall describe as an evolving subaltern discourse, these rhizomic forces are seen as emanating from the very epitome of a modern state – state bureaucracy and representational democracy.
Geographic and Demographic Features in Brief
With a total area of 570,000 km2, Botswana is about the same size as France, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands combined. This vast plateau at the centre of Southern Africa lies at a mean altitude of 1,000 metres above sea level. Approximately two-thirds of its surface area is comprised of the semiarid Kalahari Desert, the sandy soil of which supports a low, savannah-type vegetation. The rainfall, on an average less than 450 mm annually, is vulnerable to high evapo-transpiration rates.
The factors historically most determinant for people's settlement patterns have been the fertility of the soil, rainfall, and availability of water. Thus, more than three-quarters of Botswana's population – which numbered only some 2.15 million in 201014 – live in the east in the drainage basin area of the Limpopo, which comprises less than 10 per cent of the country's land area. Here reasonably fertile soils and higher rainfall (annual averages 450–550 mm) permit arable agriculture. With underground water technology, commercial livestock production has expanded far beyond these limits, especially since the 1970s.
As already indicated, cattle have been the major asset – economically, politically and symbolically – since precolonial times and before the diamond era. Although crucial for postcolonial state formation before the state treasury became sourced by revenues from diamond mining, livestock production – like diamond mining – is highly labour intensive. While cattle have, in addition, always been highly unequally distributed, a very limited part of the population has made a living entirely from livestock production. This feature has become ever more pronounced in postcolonial times (Gulbrandsen 1996a: Ch. 10).
Since the late nineteenth century, vast numbers of men have ensured the survival of vast parts of the families in the country through circular labour migration, predominantly to the South African mines (Schapera 1947a; Gulbrandsen 1996a). This employment pattern was drastically curtailed in the beginning of the 1980s with a substantial reduction in recruitment of foreign labourers. About the same time, however, the development of urban areas in Botswana accelerated, involving a building boom that recruited many of those who had previously gone to South Africa. Especially the capital of Gaborone, which was established from scratch at independence, entered a process of momentous growth, propelled by the substantial enlargement of governmental institutions and the rapid expansion of the private sector of the economy from the late 1980s onwards. Nevertheless, unemployment rates have persistently remained high (see Siphambe 2003: 481).
However massive, this demographic trend did not depopulate rural areas because Botswana had, at the same time, a high population growth rate. Moreover, and highly significant for central arguments in this volume, the capital is surrounded by five of the seven Tswana royal towns (see below) and a number of large villages, mostly within an hour's drive or less from the capital. Many people employed in urban centres have thus continued to live within the context of family and descent groups or at least kept in close touch with rural family households. The royal towns which have, from precolonial times, been – in an African context – exceptionally large with thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people (Gulbrand-sen 2007), also have growth momentum as district governmental centres, service and trading centres and by some minor industries.
Map 1 displays the administrative division of the Bechuanaland Protectorate as implemented by the British upon colonization in 1885. In the eastern and northwestern part of the country, the divisions are named ‘native reserves’, dominated by the eight Tswana kingdoms which, as already suggested, the British officially recognized and whose