The State and the Social. Ørnulf Gulbrandsen
for many conversations with the doyen of Tswana ethnography, the late Professor Isaac Schapera, conversations that contributed much to my comprehension of the historical developments of the Tswana kingdoms and the colonial encounter. He also placed many of his field notes at my disposal which I have read with great benefit. Richard Werbner has for a long time been a challenging and thought-provoking discussion partner; he has also commented upon many drafts for which I am also grateful. Similarly, Isaac Mazonde, Jacqueline Solway and Jo Helle-Valle have been most inspiring companion researchers on Botswana.
The Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen, has, for all these years, provided me with a highly stimulating intellectual environment. My colleagues and friends Jan-Petter Blom, the late Georg Henriksen, Olaf Smedal and Harald Tambs-Lyche have been important discussion partners at different stages. Bjørn Enge Bertelsen has recurrently commented in great detail upon my drafts for which I am most grateful.
During different phases of my research on Botswana there are a number of colleagues who over the years have been helpful, including Kirsten Alnœs, Alan Barnard, Fredrik Barth, Paul Baxter, Wim van Binsbergen, Maurice Bloch, Ottar Brox, Jean Comaroff, Deborah Durham, Harri Englund, Vibeke Erichsen, Jean-Claude Galay, Treasa Galvin, the late Alfred Gell, Kenneth Good, the late Reidar Grønhaug, Suzette Heald, Robert Hitchcock, Edvard Hviding, Gunnar Håland, Jan Isaksen, Anita Jacobson-Widding, Judith Kapferer, Frederick Klaits, Adam Kuper, Andrew Lattas, Anh Nga Longva, Christian John Makgala, Leif Manger, Monageng Mogalakwe, Peter Molutsi, Henrietta Moore, the late Leonard Ngcongco, Lydia Nyati-Ramahobo, Neil Parsons, Pauline Peters, John Peel, Jeff Ramsay, Simon Roberts, Mathew Schoffeleers, Axel Sommerfelt, Gloria Somolekae, Frode Storaas, Balefi Tsie, and Pnina Werbner.
Drafts of several chapters of this volume have been presented at anthropological seminars at the Universities of Bergen, Edinburgh, Manchester, Oxford, Uppsala and the London School of Economics, in addition to a number of conference sessions. I am grateful to the participants for all the useful comments and critiques rendered me.
I thank Bjørn Brataas, Lucy Carolan, and Jigger Wise for providing me with editorial assistance and Kjell Helge Sjøstrøm for helping me with maps. It has been a pleasure to work with Marion Berghahn and her staff in order to get a book out of my writings. I am also grateful for all the financial support I received from the Norwegian Research Council and the University of Bergen.
Finally, I want express special thanks to my dear Elsa for commenting unstintingly on my many drafts and for being a constant source of encouragement and inspiration. I am pleased to dedicate this book to her.
Bergen, November 2011
Ørnulf Gulbrandsen
INTRODUCTION
Botswana has often been portrayed as an oasis of peace and harmony, admired for its continuous parliamentarian democracy, esteemed for the sustainable strength of its postcolonial state and widely recognized for its tremendous economic growth. One might assume that these developments have come about due to Western ideas and practices of government, with their strong emphasis on electoral democracy and a well-functioning state bureaucracy having successfully replaced the premodern structures of power. It is my contention, however, that the postcolonial state of Botswana is best comprehended as a unique, complex formation arising dialectically from the intersection of Western ideas and practices with indigenous structures of power. On the one hand, I argue that symbolic conceptions and hierarchies of authority rooted in indigenous polities have, to a significant extent, been integral to the contemporary political processes of state formation in postcolonial Botswana. On the other hand, I shall explain how global forces have been decisive for state formation in the country, in postcolonial as well as precolonial times.
Let me say at once that my argument is not primordial, nor do I claim that contemporary Botswana is simply the invention of colonial and post-colonial modernism. There are significant continuities from the past into the present that I want to explain by examining the transformation of state processes in precolonial and colonial times with reference to a globally determined, shifting historical context. But the postcolonial significance of these continuities is the result of modern forces acting on and through sociopolitical symbols and institutions that have lengthy lineages, which are, I reiterate, both historical and in a constant state of change.
There is vast literature by political economists1, political scientists and sociologists2 on Botswana that has contributed much to our comprehension of the development of an efficient, modern state government, a sustainable parliamentarian democracy and a forceful state-centred, diamond-driven political economy. In general, this literature presents a political economy that furnishes the state treasury with tremendous resources – financing very extensive state ‘development’ policies, programmes and projects that have also been massively supported, technically and financially, by international ‘development’ agencies. These scholars do, however, not agree on how successful Botswana's development has been, especially in view of escalating income differences, leaving a substantial section of the population persistently below the official poverty threshold (Taylor 2005: 46f.). Further, the celebration of Botswana's parliamentarian democracy has been questioned, particularly with reference to all the powers concentrated in the Office of the President and the Botswana Democratic Party ruling ever since independence in 19663. Nevertheless, virtually all of the literature acknowledges the successful establishment of a strong state with a forceful ruling group and an efficient government apparatus.
And so do I. However, my approach to the question of how this has come about is different. In my view, the main conditions for the formation of a strong postcolonial state in Botswana cannot be found by means of government-centred approaches, notwithstanding their significance for understanding how the political economy has evolved and governmental institutions are constructed and operate. Major conditions for Botswana's relative success in establishing a strong state with a sustainable government – seen in relation to many other African countries – have to be discovered by examining how it has progressively situated itself in the larger social context. I shall do so without restricting myself to local issues of ‘state effects’4 since I am centrally concerned how the post-colonial state has grounded itself in the larger social context, encompassing the ‘local’.5
In this pursuit, I am centrally concerned with how it could be that people of power and wealth across ‘tribal’ boundaries joined together with other significant elites in a highly sustainable grand coalition underpinning the ruling group that took firm control over the state at Botswana's independence in 1966. Seen in a wider African context of competing elites generating weak states with notoriously unstable governments, this is a critical question. And there is no obvious answer to it, when taking into account the considerable potential of mobilisation amongst some of Botswana's indigenous polities. At the time of independence the vast majority of the country's population was embraced by seven Tswana kingdoms (merafe, singl. morafe), including vast ethnic ‘minorities’. Their ruling groups, and above all, the supreme royal authority known as kgosi (pl. dikgosi) had been strongly empowered under the British wing. What have been the conditions for these and other dominant elites' shared ambition in developing a modern nation-state, despite all their difference and conflicts? And how did they continue to prevail in the context of the merafe under post-colonial circumstances?
These are key questions because the dominant elites ensured, on the one hand, that indigenous institutions of jurisprudence – and thus extensive structures of social control – were, from the outset, made quite integral to the post-colonial state's administration justice. On the other hand, these elites constituted a major agency of transformation by which the conjunction of Eurocentric ideas and institutions, indigenous authority structures and distinctive global forces related to international beef and diamond trade conditioned a rapid development of a modern state. I am addressing this issue from the perspective that state formations everywhere are representing a unique assemblage of power, determined by local, regional and global conditions, by contemporary and historical trajectories.
Afro-pessimistic,