The State and the Social. Ørnulf Gulbrandsen
BPP C.4588, Stanley to Robinson, 13 Apr. 1885, quoted in Ramsay 1998: 68.
13. The Times, 28 July 1909, quoted in Ramsay 1998: 91.
14. Morton et al. (1989: 105) relate that ‘Proclamation 9 of 1899 established fi ve reserves: Bangwakerse, Bakwena, Bakgatla, Mmangwato, and Batawana. Three others were later created Bamalete (1909), Tati (1911) and Batawana (1933).’
15. For a comprehensive account of the features summarized in this section, see Schapera 1952.
16. The prefi x ‘Ma’(kgalagadi) – in contrast to Ba(ngwato) – is degrading and was by Botswana's independence made unlawful.
17. The kgosana who was sent by Kgosi Bathoen II to the place claimed to me in 1977 that he had repeatedly been victim of occult attacks by women of the X community.
18. Schapera and Merwe (1945: 9–10) have classifi ed this group as ‘emancipated Kgalagadi’ which distinguishes them from those living under the direct authority of a Mongwaketse authority ‘to whose immediate ancestors they were formerly attached as serfs’. On the other hand, their lack of recognition by the Bangwaketse make them distinct indeed from those communities amongst the Bangwaketse who are also categorized as the ‘Kgalagadi’ but thoroughly assimilated and accepted as full-fleshed Bangwaketse to the extent that some of them have established conjugal relationships with the royal family.
19. It is not like this everywhere, however. For example, communities located in the north-western Botswana at the Tswapong hills within the territory over which the kgosi of the Bangwato claims supremacy identify themselves as Batswapong and hence distinct from the Bangwato. Intriguingly the Batswapong are – just like people of Tswana royal towns – of mixed origin, or as Motzafi -Haller (2002: 110) asserts, they have ‘never been a uniform group with distinct historically rooted ethnic boundaries’. Wherever I have travelled in Botswana a similar statement might have been appropriate, but there are considerable differences in respect of people's willingness to identify themselves as distinct from the dominant community. This feature refl ects issues of domination, assimilation and stigmatization which I shall address in Chapter 5.
20. An important condition for sociocultural integration during this period and later was the Mwali cult (see Werbner 1989: 245ff).
21. They were allegedly under pressure from an Ndebele ruler who ‘sent his impis to collect cattle, grain and other items’ from the Kalanga living in this region. When gold was discovered in 1867, the British brought the territory under the control of a private company (the Tati Company), which divided the land up for European settlers and also marginalized and exploited the Kalanga in other ways (see Mgadla 1987: 134ff.).
22. According to the 1946 census, of the total population of 100,987, the Kalanga numbered 22,777 (c. 23 per cent) and, note, the distinctively Ngwato 17.850 (c. 18 per cent) (Schapera 1952: 65, see also p. v).
23. Some of these groups tried to evade the orbit of the dominant Tswana by escaping to the fringe of the reserve or even beyond. This was particularly the case amongst the Bakwena, whose central power was eakened as a consequence of a long-term dynastic dispute (see Chapter 2). This is illuminated by what was reported in ‘law-less’ Bakgalagadi community in the extreme western part of Kweneng (see Makgala 2010). Yet this tendency of evading the colonial state and the dominant Tswana merafe represented no potentiality of rhizomic forces and, on the whole, it represented only a marginal problem from the point of view of their point of view
24. BPP C.4588, Stanley to Robinson, 13 Apr. 1885, quoted in Ramsay 1998: 68.
25. A mogakolodi might or might not be a kgosana, vice versa.
26. The British opened up for further appeal to their district commissioner, stationed in each of the royal towns, but this option was very rarely used.
Chapter 2
TSWANA CONSOLIDATION WITHIN
THE COLONIAL STATE
Development of a Postcolonial State Embryo
In view of the ways in which the British established supremacy as a rather distant power, it is not surprising that the peoples of the Bechuanaland Protectorate did not develop any strong notion of colonial power as repressive. Of course, the imposition of tax and levies and other requirements were received negatively. Yet many of my old friends and acquaintances on labour migration to South Africa (which was very substantial for almost a hundred years, until the mid-1980s1) recalled a strong contrast between the protectorate and the increasingly repressive, racist regime of South Africa. This difference finds one of its most important expressions in the fact that while peoples of the surrounding states had to engage in violent freedom fights to get rid of the respective racist regimes, the peoples of the protectorate received independence long before the others in a highly smooth and nonviolent way. The colonial state faded out in 1966 as nonviolently as it had captured the population into its structures of domination some eighty years earlier.
This disparity illuminates that, as John Comaroff (2002: 126) reminds us, there is nothing like the colonial state in Africa: ‘colonial regimes contrasted widely’. He argues that instead of conceiving such regimes in terms of ‘generic properties’, we should envisage ‘an ensemble of generative processes’ (2002: 124). Such a processual approach will help to identify, with a much higher degree of specificity, the diversity of colonial regimes. Within the present limits I shall pursue this approach from the point of view that the colonial state in the Bechuanaland Protectorate was not reducible to the British Administration, although it relied, as we have seen, on some dominant coercive powers under its command. Rather, the colonial state should be seen as an assemblage of interrelated regimes in which the officially recognized dikgosi held a key position.
As shown in the preceding chapter, each of the merafe might be seen as a hierarchy of regimes, centred in the respective lekgotla, with the royal office at its apex. The royal office was in turn subject to the British Administration. However, the latter depended on the chain of command vested in the hierarchies of authority within the merafe. At the same time the former depended on the administration should their authority ever be seriously challenged. In what follows I shall first pursue the argument initiated in the preceding chapter: that on the whole this situation had the effect of strengthening the structures of authority relations and domination within each of the merafe recognized by the British. In fact I shall identify significant processes that worked to amalgamate the power structures of the merafe – structures that proved, as we shall see in the following chapter, also to be very sustainable under the conditions of the modern, postcolonial state of Botswana.
However, this is not to say that consent and harmony prevailed throughout the eighty years of the protectorate's existence. In this chapter I shall explain how conflicts and tensions evolved both between the dikgosi and the British and between the dikgosi and their subjects. These conflicts and tensions developed greatly under the impact of Western modernity and raise a major conundrum: under these circumstances, how could a quite unified group of people emerge, often at odds with the dikgosi, which was capable of negotiating decolonization and establishing firm political control over the postcolonial state? Furthermore, I want to answer this question: how could such a group, strong adherents of Western liberalism, the market economy and electoral democracy, succeed in curtailing the powers of the (mostly resistant) rulers of the Tswana merafe and incorporating them into the structures of the postcolonial state, far more tightly and powerfully than the British had ever attempted to do?
Colonial State Transformations: Conflicts and Mutual Dependency between the Dikgosi and the Colonial Power
It is true that with the establishment of British overlordship the rulers of the Northern Tswana merafe lost their absolute sovereignty, since some limitations were placed on their judicial and legislative powers. Nevertheless,